Uranium enrichment firm Urenco has announced it will expand its New Mexico plant – the only operating commercial enrichment operation in North America – by 15%. New cascades at the plant at Eunice, N.M., are scheduled to go into operation by 2025.
The British-German-Dutch consortium said, “New commitments from US customers for non-Russian fuel underpin this investment, which will provide an additional capacity of around 700 tonnes of SWU [separative work units,the standard quantitative enrichment measurement–ED] per year, a 15 percent increase at UUSA, with the first new cascades online in 2025.” The plant currently produces about 4,900 tons of SWU per year.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2015 approved Urenco’s expansion plans. World Nuclear News noted that Louisiana Energy Services, the Urenco subsidiary which operates the plant for Urenco, says it plans to add “three new separation building modules and associated support facilities, in a phased approach over the next several years. Doing so would allow Urenco USA’s total enrichment production capacity to rise from 3.7 million SWU to as much as 10 million SWU.”
Urenco also operates enrichment operations at Capenhurst in the UK, Almelo in the Netherlands and Gronau in Germany.” The company was a pioneer in using centrifuges to separate fuel-grade U235 isotope from the more abundant U238. According to the World Nuclear Organization, natural uranium contains 0.7% U235 and 99.3% is mostly the non-fissile U238 isotope, which does not contribute directly to the fission process (though it does so indirectly by the formation of fissile isotopes of plutonium)
Urenco, headquartered in Stoke Poges, England, is owned one third by the UK government, one third by the Dutch government, and the final third equally by two major German utilities, E.ON and RWE. Urenco’s total production is about 18.6 million annual SWU. Russia’s Rosatom is the largest producer at 27.7 million SWU/year, with Paris-based Orano (neé Areva) producing 7.5 million SWU and China’s CNNC at 6.3 million.
According to the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, “In 2022, the U.S.-origin SWU share was 27%, and the foreign-origin SWU accounted for the remaining 73%. Foreign-origin SWU included 24% from Russia, 12% from Germany, 11% from the United Kingdom, and 9% from the Netherlands.”
The U.S. invented uranium enrichment in the 1940s through the Manhattan Project to get fissile uranium for atomic bombs. The military project, and later the civilian Atomic Energy Commission used gaseous diffusion cascades to separate the lighter U235 from U238, requiring large, expensive technology that used enormous amounts of electricity. The U.S. essentially held a worldwide monopoly on enrichment. The U.S. Department of Energy, which took over the nuclear weapons program when the AEC met its demise, inherited the gaseous diffusion plants and continued to operate them until 1997.
In the meantime, unfettered by a legacy technology, the rest of the world developed a new, far more efficient and modular enrichment technology, gas centrifuges, which spin out the heavier U238. That technology is now the only method used to enrich uranium. But the federal government tried and failed to develop its own centrifuge enrichment. In 1997, DOE spun off its ancient cascades to a newly-formed company, USEC, now named Centrus Energy after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. Maryland-based Centrus provides nuclear fuel. It no longer enriches uranium but buys enrichment services. Centrus has a $150 million DOE contract to try to develop centrifuge technology to produce “high assay, low-enriched uranium” (HALEU) for advanced reactor designs, which it hopes to operate this year.
The Biden administration has ambitious plans to subsidize new, domestic uranium capacity to support both conventional reactor fuel and for HALEU, According to Reuters, the Inflation Reduction Act earmarks $700 million for development of HALEU capacity and invoked the 1950s-era Defense Production Act to spur the development. The White House then followed up by asking “Congress for another $1.5 billion in a temporary government funding bill to boost domestic supply of low enriched uranium and HALEU.”
Comparing the Urenco announcement and the administration’s plans, Henry Sokolski, founder and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington-based think tank, told The Quad Report, “The contrast between Urenco’s uranium enrichment production expansion at its New Mexico plant, financed with firm demand contracts at no cost to the American taxpayer, and the billions of taxpayer dollars our Energy Department and Congress want to spend building new capacity without such contracts is nothing less than the difference between national nuclear socialism and free market capitalism.
–Kennedy Maize