A 'robust' new fuel supply for nuclear power plants is emerging

PIKETON, Ohio — A group of U.S. engineers and technicians sat down one day in 2001 to figure out where the nation’s future nuclear power plant fuel was going to come from. Their decision was to leap backward 30 years and re-engineer an idea perfected during the Cold War and then abandoned here in 1985.

The technology — an ultra-high-speed, 40-foot-high centrifuge that can produce enriched uranium — was hunted down in government archives. At first, it was an adventure in industrial archaeology. “All the drawings and the specs were in a vault at [the National Laboratory] at Oak Ridge [Tenn.],” explained Daniel W. Rogers, who became general manager of the resurrected program. “We spent a year looking at them.”

The ‘American centrifuge’ is fast, but it’s in a race

But now the first prototypes of that centrifuge, called the “American centrifuge,” are up and running. A new generation of engineers hover over their computers, making the refinements needed to produce an estimated 11,500 of the machines by 2012 to form what engineers call a “cascade,” or a plant that produces enriched uranium.

Rebuilt with super high-strength carbon fiber components and fashioned by computers and robotics not even imagined in 1985, the machine is the U.S.-built centerpiece for a high stakes, five-way race to see who will dominate the globe’s nuclear fuel business.

New York Times