FUEL & FUEL CYCLE | ENRICHMENT
Managing Urenco’s centrifuges
Urenco’s Capenhurst enrichment site has over half a century of experience of operating centrifuges. It has seen big improvements in efficiency and new work is examining how to manage their ‘end of life’ sustainably.
IT IS MORE THAN HALF a century since uranium enrichment by centrifuge began at the UK’s Capenhurst site, replacing space- and energy-hungry gaseous diffusion technology. The thousands of centrifuges at Capenhurst – and Urenco’s other enrichment sites, Almelo in the Netherlands, Gronau in Germany and Eunice, New Mexico in the USA – have been quietly and consistently enriching uranium over the decades. But that consistency does not mean there has been no development of the technology, or discussion of the latter half of its life.
Advancing centrifuge performance Mike Peers is Chief Nuclear Officer at Urenco Capenhurst. He says that over the years “Most of the advancements are down to the centrifuge designs improving over time. As the design of centrifuges has matured, we get a lot more productivity per centrifuge than we did from the centrifuges we started to use more than 50 years ago”. Mostly this is down to the design of the centrifuges,
which are made by Enrichment Technology Company (ETC) – a joint venture between Urenco and Orano, a French conglomerate – and bought by Urenco.
Peers says, “Performance is influenced by the size of
the centrifuge: length, radius, and how fast it spins.“ He adds, “We get significantly more performance from a centrifuge than we did 50 years ago simply because they have got much bigger and faster. As a consequence they have also got more efficient and you get more enrichment for a given electricity consumption. The progression has been both revolution [change of design] and evolution, as engineers have been able to iterate the design over time to squeeze the last bit of performance out of it.”
Behind the change has been significant changes in
materials technology, stronger materials and quality control in the manufacturing process, because “anything that is spinning is under stress”. Peers can’t talk about the detail of that, but he says the outcome has been “probably an order of magnitude improvement over time”. The centrifuges’ lifetime is also much longer than
expected. When the first ones were installed, Peers says, “we were rolling them out with the expectation of 10 years life. But the oldest machines at the Capenhurst site started operations in 1982 and we shut them down in 2016.”
Above: Urenco’s Capenhurst enrichment site has been operating centrifuges to enrich uranium for over half a century Source: NDA
16 | July 2025 |
www.neimagazine.com
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