Company: LEU
Filing Date: 2025-05-08
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001065059-25-000024
Chunk: 130

Company: CENTRUS ENERGY CORP
Filing Date: 2025-05-08
Form: 10-Q
Item: Item 8
Chunk 130
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 the WNA, as of March 2025, there were 66 reactors under construction worldwide, approximately one-half of which are in China. The United States, with over 90 operating reactors, remains the world’s largest market for nuclear fuel. The nuclear industry in the United States, Japan, and Europe faces headwinds as well as opportunities. In the United States, the industry has been under pressure from the expansion of subsidized renewable energy as well as relatively low-cost natural gas resources in recent years, although natural gas prices in the U.S. electricity sector tripled between 2020 and 2022 according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (“EIA”). Eight U.S. reactors have prematurely shut down in the past ten years, and others could shut down in the next few years. At the same time, construction was completed and commercial operations began in the second quarter of 2024 on one large reactor and two formerly shutdown reactors have plans to restart. In 2023, the DOE released a report outlining a pathway to deployment of approximately 200 gigawatts of additional capacity by 2050, which would triple the nuclear energy capacity in the United States.

The IEA projects that global nuclear energy generation will grow substantially in the next three decades. In the IEA’s 2024 World Energy Outlook, nuclear generation is forecasted to grow by 18% by 2030 and 47% by 2040 under the “Stated Policies” scenario. In the “Net Zero Emissions by 2050” scenario, nuclear generation would grow by 41% by 2030 and more than double by 2040. 

As a consequence of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, over 60 reactors in Japan and Germany were taken offline, and other countries curtailed or slowed their construction of new reactors or accelerated the retirement of existing plants. In Japan, 14 reactors have restarted and an additional 11 reactors are in the process of restart approval. Due to the war in Ukraine, the EU is encouraging its member countries to reconsider the planned early retirement of existing plants in order to reduce reliance on Russian gas imports.

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In October 2020, the DOC reached an agreement with the Russian Federation on an extension of the RSA, a trade agreement that allows for Russian-origin nuclear fuel to be exported to the United States in limited quantities. The two parties agreed to extend the agreement through 2040 and to set aside a significant portion of the quota for Centrus’