Made in Oak Ridge, Built for America | Centrus ships off first new centrifuge of its multibillion-dollar expansion
On Oct. 29, nuclear leaders gathered to celebrate Centrus’ first centrifuge shipment from Oak Ridge, calling the region the “Mount Olympus of nuclear” and more proof that “America’s nuclear renaissance runs through Tennessee.”
Driving up to the security checkpoint on Centrifuge Way in Oak Ridge, you always get the feeling that something big is happening. But on Thursday afternoon, something big really did happen.
Hundreds of employees, nuclear business executives and elected officials gathered at Centrus Energy’s Oak Ridge manufacturing plant to mark the completion and shipment of the company’s first centrifuge manufactured in Oak Ridge to their Ohio enrichment facility.
“This may sound like a simple shipment from one facility to another, but it represents something much larger,” said Amir Vexler, president and CEO of Centrus. “It connects American manufacturing in Tennessee and American uranium enrichment in Ohio. It moves us from preparation into execution, and it demonstrates that Centrus has assembled the specialized people, capability and domestic supply chain to build this technology at scale.”
What that scale looks like
Centrus’ road to this milestone was quick. The company restarted centrifuge manufacturing in Oak Ridge in December 2025, and a month later announced a $560 million investment to turn the plant into an operation capable of producing thousands of advanced centrifuges. That expansion is expected to create nearly 430 new jobs, and the hiring is well underway.
“We’ve made a fourfold increase in our numbers here at this plant in the last 22 months. Fourfold increase,” said Oak Ridge Site Director Dennis Yates.
But building that many centrifuges takes more than people. It also takes parts. Centrus has ordered tens of thousands of parts from American suppliers, and this month it acquired Westerman Holdings, to further bring this ability in-house. After all, having an all-domestic supply chain is what truly sets the company apart and allows them to serve both commercial and national security needs.
The team also delivered early. Senior Vice President of Field Operations, Patrick Brown credited the workforce with getting the first centrifuge out “two months early, on budget, with zero safety incidents.”
Next, the new centrifuges will be grouped into cascades in Ohio, with the first new enrichment capacity expected online in 2029. Dr. Josh Jarrell, deputy assistant secretary for the nuclear fuel cycle in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy said that this is critical as they work toward quadrupling nuclear energy by 2050.
A startup spirit, decades in the making
Going from a restart to a first shipment in less than a year, and beating your own deadline doing it, takes a particular kind of energy: startup energy. For all the sophistication of the technology and the historic scale of the announcement, Centrus moves like a startup despite their deep roots tracing back to 1998.
Restarting centrifuge manufacturing in 2025 was, in a sense, a company deciding to try their hand at innovation and entrepreneurship yet again. Speaker after speaker reflected on this.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of employees in here that have been here for a long time, through periods where we did not really have much to do, and they stuck with it,” Vexler said. “We continued investing with the little money we had in maintaining the skill set, and in the end, it all paid off.”
Yates expanded on this. “Some of our employees have been here for several years. Some of you for less than a week, but all of you have contributed to the accomplishment of this milestone, and you should be rightly proud to celebrate.”
There’s plenty more to manufacture
And like a startup as well, the work is never finished. While Brown expressed how important it is to pause and reflect on the wins, there’s not much time to sit still.
“We have one centrifuge behind us. We have thousands and thousands ahead of us,” he said. “Anyone who’s been to the Piketon facility, you see the thousands of poles in the ground. We’re going to fill one today. We have 11,519 to go.”
So after the crowd watched the first centrifuge pull away, it was time to get right back to work. For a team that remembers the years when there wasn’t much to do or this moment seemed too fetched, being busy is a welcome feeling.
As Congressman Chuck Fleischmann put it: “Think about this: 16 years ago, we were not spinning centrifuges that were American-made. Today, we are doing that.”
Keep up with Centrus’ progress on LinkedIn.
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