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For more than 50 years, the U.S. enrichment industry has relied on the gaseous diffusion process for uranium enrichment. USEC uses this first generation enrichment technology at its Paducah, Kentucky plant.
Between the 1960s and 1985, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) developed a new uranium enrichment technology to ultimately replace gaseous diffusion: a gas centrifuge machine with a long rotor and a high rotational speed. Development and deployment of gas centrifuge designs in the United States and other countries in the prevailing decades have proven the reliability and performance attributes of centrifuge technology for uranium enrichment.
Since 2001, USEC has been working to deploy its advanced design based on U.S. centrifuge technology. USEC believes that the centrifuge machine that will be deployed in the American Centrifuge Plant will have an output several factors greater than the next best competitor’s machine and will be the most advanced uranium enrichment machine in the world. USEC licenses this technology from DOE.
The gas centrifuge process has three characteristics that make it economically attractive for uranium enrichment:
With centrifuge technology, gaseous uranium hexafluoride (UF6) is fed into a rotor that spins at high speed inside an evacuated casing. Centrifugal force causes the heavier U238 molecules to move closer to the wall of the rotor, producing partial separation of the U235 and U238 isotopes. The UF6 feed material is introduced near the middle of the rotor, and enriched and depleted streams are removed near the ends. Since the desired enrichment level cannot be achieved in one centrifuge, several machines must be connected in series and parallel in what is called a "cascade". A centrifuge enrichment plant is made up of multiple cascades.
The first production machines used in the American Centrifuge Plant will be the AC100 series.
Concurrent with the Lead Cascade testing operations, USEC is working to finalize the development and design of the AC100 series centrifuges that will be manufactured by our strategic suppliers.
The initial design for the AC100 machines was finalized on March 31, and 75 percent of the drawings have been released to USEC’s strategic suppliers to begin manufacturing components. Additional component validation testing will be completed and the remaining drawings released to the strategic suppliers by June 30. The AC100 machine is designed to produce 350 SWU per year.
The strategic suppliers will now begin manufacturing parts for the 40 to 50 AC100 machines that will be installed in the next operating cascade in Piketon, which is expected to be operational in the spring of 2009. In addition, improved AC100 components and design features will be incrementally introduced into the current cascade throughout 2008.
The final design for the first series of AC100 machines that will be produced in large quantities for the American Centrifuge Plant will reflect improvements resulting from this integrated testing.
USEC expects to continue its research and development efforts as the first phase of the plant is built and will incorporate improvements at specific planned points as the initial capacity of the American Centrifuge Plant is built out to its 3.8 million SWU production capacity.
New analytic capability and computer-aided manufacturing methods provide an opportunity to develop more productive and less costly machines as we seek to enhance our capability in centrifuge technology and develop a new series of machines.