Centrifuge Enrichment: Benefits and Risks

There are three government-owned uranium enrichment plants in the United States: at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; near Paducah, Kentucky; and near Portsmouth, Ohio. These uranium enrichment plants use gaseous diffusion to enrich the uranium, a technology the government has successfully used for 30 years. Because the capacity of the three plants is fully committed, in 1976 Congress authorized construction of an add-on to the Portsmouth diffusion plant. However, in 1977, the President announced that, instead of the add-on, the Department of Energy would build an equivalent-sized plant using a technology called gas centrifuge.