Project IKE, Oak Ridge

Project IKE, Oak Ridge is a enrichment facility operated by Orano in United States. It has a capacity of 7,500 tSWU/yr as of 2032, about 11% of world enrichment capacity.

Orano's planned US centrifuge plant, part of the DOE programme to rebuild domestic capacity after the 2024 ban on Russian imports. Its environmental impact statement went to the NRC in February 2026 and the licence application was accepted for an accelerated twelve-month review that May. Construction is put at about five billion dollars. At full size it would match Georges Besse II, which would roughly double Western enrichment outside Urenco, and it is eight years from the award to the first gram.

At the market indicator. 7,500 tSWU/yr of nameplate capacity, valued at US$ 200.00 per SWU spot, comes to roughly US$ 1.50 billion a year, or US$ 1.37 billion at the long-term indicator. Treat both as scale, not revenue: most volume moves under contracts signed years earlier at prices neither figure reflects, and nothing here is netted against the cost of producing it. The indicators, and forty years of history behind them, are on fuel market prices.