U.S. Centrifuge Work Revived in Updated Form

By Dan Charles
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, April 23, 2007

PIKETON, Ohio -- Inside an enormous structure here, shielded by heavy security, a U.S. company is hard at work constructing tall, slender, uranium-enriching centrifuges designed to obtain uranium-235 for nuclear fuel -- the very technology that is provoking a standoff between the United States and Iran.

USEC Inc., which took over the government's uranium enrichment operations in 1993, is building the centrifuges at the Portsmouth Reservation, a Department of Energy property near Piketon. Within five years, if USEC can come up with the money, the building will hold 11,500 centrifuges and sell enriched uranium to nuclear plants around the world.

USEC's machines are technical marvels, much larger than those of Iran or other nations in the international centrifuge club, which includes Russia, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Pakistan and Brazil.

The most remarkable aspect of USEC's American Centrifuge project, though, is its resurrection from the dead.

The basic design originated more than two decades ago at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In the early 1980s, the DOE constructed an enormous centrifuge enrichment plant at the Portsmouth Reservation. But before it went into operation, the nuclear industry ran aground, and projected demand for nuclear fuel fell precipitously. In 1985, with 1,300 centrifuges already installed, the government canceled the program.

The building near Piketon became a mausoleum of secret technology. For more than 20 years, its centrifuges stood idle in silent rows.

"We had the feeling that someday those buildings would be like Stonehenge," said Houston G. Wood III, a professor at the University of Virginia who worked on the project. "People would come and wonder, 'What were they thinking?' "

The United States continued to produce enriched uranium at older plants that use another technology, called gaseous diffusion. These plants were privatized along with USEC in the late 1990s. Gaseous diffusion, however, is inefficient. The one plant that USEC still operates, at Paducah, Ky., consumes huge amounts of electricity, and USEC wants to replace it.

In 1999, the company elected to pursue centrifuges. It began searching for experts in the technology, many of them still working at Oak Ridge.

"Frankly, I don't think we would have resurrected this, had that not been the case," said Dean Waters, a leader of the centrifuge program before it was cancelled. He now works for USEC. Waters, like others, was about to retire when company officials called.

Waters helped retrieve old technical reports, computer programs and centrifuge-related equipment from a vault at Oak Ridge.

"It's like reliving your youth," he said. "You almost have to pinch yourself; how can I be doing this again?"

The mothballed facility at Piketon is coming back to life. USEC ripped out the 1980s-era centrifuges and hauled them off to the DOE's Nevada Test Site, where they were buried in a landfill for secret garbage.

A new generation of centrifuges, more advanced than their predecessors, is arriving. The first few loom like tall white ghosts in the dimly lit centrifuge hall.

Inside each one is a hollow cylinder called a rotor, more than 40 feet high and about two feet in diameter. The cylinder is made of tightly woven carbon fiber. It sits, perfectly balanced, on a needle and spins like a tall and slender top.

Its speed, like many other things about it, is secret. Outside experts, however, say the velocity of the cylinder's wall probably exceeds 1,000 mph, well above the speed of sound.

When uranium, in the form of uranium hexafluoride gas, is fed into the cylinder, centrifugal forces push it outward against the spinning wall. Heavier atoms of uranium-238, which make up more than 99 percent of uranium as it is mined from the Earth, push outward with greater force, separating themselves from the lighter uranium-235.

Within a few months, USEC plans to have as many as 240 centrifuges at the plant spinning at full speed and linked in a small "cascade." This trial is supposed to persuade investors to help finance a full-scale plant, which USEC estimates will cost $2.3 billion.

There is plenty of demand at the moment for enriched uranium, and prices have been rising. But USEC faces direct competition from a German-British-Dutch consortium called Urenco. Urenco operates centrifuge enrichment plants in Europe that are widely considered the most efficient in the world, and it is building a plant near the town of Eunice, in southeastern New Mexico.

Some observers, such as Julian Steyn, president of the consulting company Energy Resources International, think USEC's unproven centrifuges will have difficulty competing with Urenco's.

USEC officials, however, emphasize the size and power of their machines, which are designed to enrich uranium four times as fast as Urenco's most advanced centrifuges. The American Centrifuge design is like a Mercedes, said one USEC official, compared with the Volkswagen of its competitor's "little, short machines."

USEC officials navigate a delicate path between promotion and secrecy. Reporters touring the facility are prohibited from taking pictures, carrying cellphones, or even taking notes with pen and paper. Any foreigner who wishes to visit the facility has to pass a DOE security review, which takes several months.

The tight security is traceable to the colorful history of centrifuge technology and its status as a poster child for nuclear proliferation.

It was invented, in its modern form, in a Soviet camp for captured German and Austrian scientists immediately after World War II. The Soviets released the leading engineer of the team, Austrian Gernot Zippe, in 1956, and Zippe shared his secrets first with U.S. officials, then with the Europeans who founded Urenco.

"I saw that the West was far behind what we did in Russia, and I decided that it would be wrong to leave this to the Russians," Zippe said in 1992.

He settled near Munich, but the technology kept traveling. A Pakistani employee at one of Urenco's contractors, Abdul Qadeer Khan, carried centrifuge designs back to his homeland in the 1970s and rose to fame as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. According to Western investigators, Pakistan then provided technology to other nuclear aspirants, including Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Waters, who took on the job of improving the original Zippe centrifuge when he started working at Oak Ridge in the 1960s, said USEC's technology is less likely to be disseminated: "Not many people would even attempt to tackle the kind of machine that we're building."