By Timothy Gardner and Benjamin Mallet
WASHINGTON/PARIS (Reuters) – France’s state-owned nuclear fuel company Orano has chosen Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as a preferred site for building a multibillion-dollar U.S. uranium enrichment plant, Tennessee and Orano officials said on Wednesday.
The move comes months after President Joe Biden’s administration signed legislation aimed at eventually ending dependence on Russia, the world’s largest supplier of enriched uranium. The law imposed a ban on imports of Russian enriched uranium and freed up to $2.7 billion in U.S. financing for domestic uranium projects.
Jean-Luc Palayer, CEO and president of Orano USA, said the company was preparing the next required steps for the plant, including securing U.S. federal support, customer commitments and obtaining a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license and approval of the board of Orano.
“But today we celebrate this important milestone toward bringing a new enrichment facility online to help meet our nation’s need for an increased, secure domestic supply of nuclear fuel,” Palayer said. Orano USA is based in Bethesda, Maryland.
The plant would create more than 300 jobs in Tennessee, officials said. The project is also supported by the Nuclear Energy Fund of Tennessee, which has about $60 million.
Officials did not say exactly how much the plant would cost to build.
REDUCING THE RISK OF A POSSIBLE CESSATION OF RUSSIAN SUPPLY
The company had made advanced plans in the late 2000s to build an enrichment plant worth about $2 billion in Idaho, but was forced to abandon it after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster prompted some countries to close reactors or suspend projects .
Orano said last year it would invest in increasing production capacity at its uranium enrichment plant in southern France, largely to meet demand from its U.S. customers. The expansion would help reduce the risk of a possible cessation of supplies from Russia’s Rosatom, which supplies about 30% of Western enriched uranium, according to Orano.
Orano mines raw uranium in Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger. The enrichment plant in France accounts for 12% of global capacity.
Rosatom accounts for 43%, while the European group Urenco accounts for 31%.
Other companies that could help build America’s uranium supply are Centrus energy (NYSE:) which late last year launched a plant in Ohio to produce highly assayed, low-enriched uranium fuel (HALEU) needed for some next-generation reactors, Urenco and Global Laser Enrichment, LLC.
In July, the United States granted some waivers from the ban on Russian imports “to ensure that there are no disruptions in the operation of U.S. reactors as a result of the ban,” the Energy Department said at the time. But the waivers end in 2028, at which point the United States is expected to obtain enriched uranium from sources other than Russia.
