PIKETON, Ohio — The first new centrifuge built for Centrus Energy’s multibillion-dollar expansion of uranium enrichment capacity in Ohio has been completed in Tennessee and is on its way to Piketon, the company announced Thursday, Oct. 29, in a release distributed by PR Newswire — a milestone Centrus said arrived ahead of its previously announced year-end target.
Centrifuges manufactured at the company’s Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant will be shipped to the Piketon site in Pike County for final assembly and grouped into cascades, with the manufacturing rate growing over time, according to the release. The first new enrichment capacity is expected to come online in Ohio in 2029.
“Completing the first new centrifuge for our expansion and standing up a one-of-a-kind supply chain are significant moments for our team and this country,” Amir Vexler, president and chief executive officer of Centrus, said in the company’s PR Newswire release. “These milestones demonstrate our ability to translate our investment into tangible progress and position us to re-establish this country’s rightful position in the global enrichment market.”
The expansion is intended to produce low-enriched uranium for the existing commercial reactor fleet, high-assay low-enriched uranium — HALEU — for next-generation reactors, and enriched uranium for national security needs, the company said. Centrus said its existing cascade in Ohio, which includes components manufactured in 2019, has been reliably producing HALEU since late 2023.
Centrus restarted centrifuge manufacturing in Oak Ridge in December 2025 and announced in January 2026 a $560 million investment to expand and modernize its Tennessee Technology and Manufacturing Center into a high-rate plant capable of supporting production of thousands of advanced centrifuges, according to the release. Earlier this month the company completed its acquisition of Westerman Holdings, a key supplier of centrifuge casings and other major components, to further secure that supply chain.
The company said its Oak Ridge facility is the only advanced centrifuge manufacturing plant in the United States with proven, de-risked technology — its machines have logged more than four million machine-hours of successful operation — and that all other centrifuge technologies in commercial operation today are manufactured exclusively overseas. Centrus said it relies on an exclusively domestic supply chain, which allows its centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for both commercial and national security applications.
For Piketon and Pike County, the shipment is the most tangible sign yet that the long-discussed expansion is moving from announcements to hardware: finished machines arriving for final assembly at a site that has anchored the region’s economy through decades of federal energy work. What happens next, on the company’s own timeline, is a steady ramp in shipments and assembly as manufacturing throughput grows, toward the first new enrichment capacity in Ohio in 2029.