Centrus Ships First Domestically Built Centrifuge to Its Ohio Enrichment Plant

Centrus Energy has shipped the first centrifuge manufactured at its restarted Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant to Piketon, Ohio, the company said on Oct. 29, 2026. The machine will undergo final assembly at Piketon as part of a multibillion-dollar expansion of US uranium enrichment capacity, and the shipment arrived ahead of the company’s own year-end target, according to the announcement.

First Oak Ridge-built machine heads to Piketon

Centrus Energy Corp. (NYSE: LEU) said the centrifuge is the first of a new generation of machines built domestically at its Oak Ridge manufacturing site since the company restarted centrifuge production there in December 2025. Once in Ohio, the units will be assembled into cascades — the linked strings of centrifuges that progressively raise the concentration of fissile uranium-235 in uranium hexafluoride gas.

Centrus said its centrifuge design carries more than four million machine-hours of operating history and described Oak Ridge as the only advanced centrifuge manufacturing plant now operating in the United States with technology it considers fully licensed and de-risked — a characterization from the company itself rather than an independent assessment.

A fast-tracked manufacturing restart

The shipment follows a rapid buildout of the Oak Ridge supply chain. Centrus announced in January 2026 that it would invest $560 million to convert its Oak Ridge Technology and Manufacturing Center into a high-rate plant capable of producing thousands of centrifuges, and in early October 2026 it completed the acquisition of Westerman Holdings, a supplier of centrifuge casings and other major components, to diversify its manufacturing base.

Oak Ridge Mayor Warren Gooch said the investment is tied to nearly 430 new jobs in the city, while Tennessee’s Nuclear Energy Fund — administered by the state’s Department of Economic and Community Development — has helped underwrite the Oak Ridge buildout, state officials have said. “Tennessee has the legacy, expertise, and skilled workforce to lead” in rebuilding domestic enrichment manufacturing, Governor Bill Lee said. Centrus CEO Amir Vexler framed the milestone in similar terms, saying the company aims to “re-establish this country’s rightful position in the global enrichment market.”

Why the next generation of reactors needs HALEU

The Piketon cascade that will receive the new machines has been producing high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) since late 2023 under a Department of Energy contract originally awarded in 2019. HALEU is enriched to between 5% and 20% uranium-235, compared with roughly 3% to 5% for the low-enriched uranium that fuels most of today’s commercial reactors, according to the World Nuclear Association.

That higher concentration lets advanced reactor and small modular reactor (SMR) designs run smaller cores and refuel less often, and most advanced designs now in development — including the majority of concepts in the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program — are expected to run on it. The department has said no domestic commercial supplier currently produces HALEU at scale, a gap the Ohio expansion is intended to help close. Centrus’s existing Ohio cascade is only one piece of that effort: in a fixed-price task order signed on June 30, 2026 and announced July 1, Centrus’s American Centrifuge Operating subsidiary agreed to a $900 million DOE contract, paid through performance milestones, to move HALEU production at Piketon to commercial scale, with department options worth up to a further $170 million, Power Magazine and the company’s own disclosures show.

Washington’s push to cut reliance on Russian enrichment

The buildout comes as the United States works to reduce its dependence on Russian enrichment services. Rosatom holds roughly 40% to 44% of global uranium enrichment capacity, depending on the estimate, and Russian suppliers provided about 26% of the enrichment services US nuclear utilities purchased in 2025, according to Energy Information Administration data cited by Foreign Policy. Washington has banned imports of Russian low-enriched uranium, with licensed waivers currently allowing some purchases to continue until a full ban takes effect on Jan. 1, 2028 — a deadline that has added urgency to domestic projects like Centrus’s.

Centrus is not alone in that buildout. General Matter has filed the first US application in decades for an NRC license to build a new uranium enrichment plant, at Paducah, Kentucky, while Westinghouse has announced a $1 billion investment in a new US nuclear fuel plant in South Carolina — part of a broader wave of federally backed investment in the domestic nuclear fuel supply chain.

What comes next for Piketon

Centrus has not disclosed a specific production-capacity figure, in tonnes or separative work units, for the expanded Ohio cascades, and the company says the first new enrichment capacity from the expansion is expected online in 2029. Until then, the Oak Ridge plant will keep shipping centrifuges to Piketon for assembly, with the expansion intended to supply both low-enriched uranium for the existing reactor fleet and HALEU for the next generation of advanced reactors, as well as enrichment for national-security needs, according to the company.

Sources

• Centrus Energy Corp., “Centrus Begins Shipping Centrifuges to Ohio to Support Major Expansion of Uranium Enrichment Capacity,” press release, Oct. 29, 2026 — shipment date, Oak Ridge/Piketon details, investment figures, jobs figure, quotes. centrusenergy.com
• Centrus Energy Corp., Form 8-K exhibit, US Securities and Exchange Commission, Oct. 29, 2026 — primary filing confirming the press release. sec.gov
• Interesting Engineering, “US sends first home-built centrifuge for advanced nuclear reactors,” Oct. 30, 2026 — independent trade-press corroboration of the shipment and technical background on enrichment levels. interestingengineering.com
• World Nuclear Association, “High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU)” — enrichment-level definitions and reactor-design context. world-nuclear.org
• Foreign Policy, “Nuclear Energy Is the Kremlin’s Latest Leverage Over Washington,” citing US Energy Information Administration data — Russian share of US enrichment purchases and global Rosatom capacity share. foreignpolicy.com
• Power Magazine, “Centrus Signs $900M DOE Contract, Pivots Sole U.S. HALEU Cascade to Commercial Operation,” July 2026 — DOE task-order value and structure. powermag.com

Illustrative image. Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission from US, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — source