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USEC Inc. (NYSE:USU), a global energy company, is a leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants
Through its subsidiary, the United States Enrichment Corporation, USEC operates the only uranium enrichment facility in the United States: a gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Kentucky.
Production of enriched uranium is a key step in producing nuclear fuel used by nuclear power plants worldwide to generate electricity.
USEC’s facility in Piketon, Ohio, is hosting the Company’s American Centrifuge Demonstration Facility and construction has begun on the future American Centrifuge Plant. American Centrifuge is USEC’s next-generation uranium enrichment technology. It is based on U.S. centrifuge technology, a proven, workable technology developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) from 1960 through the mid-1980s.
USEC is operating the Demonstration Facility for the purposes of demonstrating and evaluating the Company’s enhancements to U.S. centrifuge technology and centrifuge performance in a cascade configuration. The Lead Cascade test program began operating in the Demonstration Facility in August 2007. USEC employees in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are involved in the design, development, manufacturing and testing of centrifuge machines.
USEC is the U.S. government’s executive agent for the Megatons to Megawatts program, a 20-year, $8 billion, commercially funded nuclear nonproliferation initiative of the U.S. and Russian governments. This unique program is recycling 500 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium taken from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads (the equivalent of 20,000 warheads) into low enriched uranium used by USEC’s customers to generate electricity.
Uranium enrichment for commercial nuclear reactors began in the 1960s, when the U.S. government shifted some of its enrichment capacity from military to civilian use.
In the early 1990s, USEC was created as a government corporation in order to restructure the government’s uranium enrichment operation and prepare it for sale to the private sector. USEC’s privatization was completed on July 28, 1998.
USEC’s subsidiary NAC International is a leading provider of transportation and storage systems for used nuclear fuel and energy consulting services.
As an investor-owned company, USEC continues a 30-year tradition of reliability: all customer shipments have been made on time and within specification.