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Most of the buildings required for the commercial plant were constructed in Piketon during the 1980s by DOE. These existing structures include a centrifuge assembly building, a uranium feed and withdrawal facility, and two enrichment production buildings.
USEC began renovating and building the American Centrifuge Plant following receipt of a construction and operating license from the NRC in April 2007. Fluor Corporation has managed the engineering, procurement and construction management activities.
In August 2009, USEC began a demobilization of the American Centrifuge project due to a delay in the Department of Energy’s review of the company’s application for a loan guarantee from to help finance the completion of the plant. It is expected to take six months or more for USEC to address financial and technical concerns about its application. Construction work on the plant infrastructure and finalizing the balance-of-plant design ceased in August. The plant design work, which is about 80 percent complete, would be resumed following a decision to remobilize the project. Machine part manufacturing efforts have also been affected.
Construction of the American Centrifuge Plant was expected to result in more than 800 construction jobs and more than 2,000 indirect jobs in the local community at its peak.
When completed, the plant would employ more than 400 workers at full production and would support more than 1,000 indirect jobs in the community.
Construction of the American Centrifuge Plant includes various systems including electric, telecommunications, HVAC and water distribution. Service modules provide utilities to the centrifuge machines and the piping that enables UF6 gas to flow throughout the enrichment production facility. Process systems will integrate and support the centrifuge machines and cascades. A distributed control system will monitor and control the enrichment processing equipment.
Contractors have prepared the floor of the production buildings for machine mounts to support the centrifuges. The feed and withdrawal facility where uranium is introduced into plant systems and low enriched uranium is withdrawn will undergo substantial renovation when construction resumes. A new boiler that will provide heat to the ACP was installed along with associated hot water piping. The first service modules, which support the operation of approximately 20 centrifuges each, were delivered by Teledyne Brown Engineering in the first half of 2009.
USEC is reviewing the American Centrifuge project budget and schedule in light of its continued lack of project funding and the decision in early 2009 to slow project spending and the decision in July 2009 to begin a demobilization of the project. USEC expects that the cost of the project and the schedule will be adversely affected by these events but is not in a position to update the project cost or schedule at this time. The project budget established in 2008 was $3.5 billion, which included amounts spent, but did not include financing costs or financial assurance related to decommissioning obligations.