Centrus files first results
Centrus Energy has announced its first quarterly results since emerging from the restructuring of USEC last year, which interim president and CEO John Castellano said was "a year of transition."
Having been formed from a restructured USEC, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in early 2014, business remains very tough for Centrus, which supplies uranium enrichment services to nuclear power utilities around the world but which does not have a functioning enrichment plant of its own.
The veteran Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant was retired last May and handed back to the US Department of Energy (DOE) in October, but its supposed successor, the American Centrifuge, remains to get off the ground.
A technology demonstration project to prove the American Centrifuge is ongoing under a Cooperative Agreement with the DOE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For this, Centrus acts as a contractor to Oak Ridge, performing "research, development and demonstration" at a slight loss. In the three months to the end of 2014 the work was worth $21.8 million on which Centrus made a loss of $0.7 mllion.
In the meantime, Centrus supplies its enrichment customers using services purchased in Russia, now under a contract signed in June 2013. A change in contract terms, as well as different delivery timings, contributed to reduce the cost of this from around $757 million in 2013 to $165 million in 2014. However, a larger contributor to the saving stems from a reduction in deliveries from 8 million separative work units (SWU) in 2013, to 3 million SWU in 2014. Centrus expects to supply 2 million SWU in 2015.
The cost of restructuring was $426.9 million, which is allocated to USEC's side of the balance sheet.
Overall, the newly-formed Centrus recorded a loss of $18.5 million in the three months to the end of December 2014. Its predecessor USEC recorded a loss of $22.8 million for the previous nine months of 2014.
Researched and written
by World Nuclear News
