The cheap Russian LEU that USEC marketed under Megatons to Megawatts undercut its own American Centrifuge project and contributed to USEC's 2014 bankruptcy and rebrand as Centrus

nonproliferationnuclear-historycommodity-economicsenergy-policynuclear-power

USEC Inc. served as the US executive agent selling the downblended Russian LEU from the Megatons to Megawatts agreement into the American market. Per the World Nuclear Association, the same cheap material undercut the economics of USEC's own domestic enrichment venture, the American Centrifuge project; combined with that project's cost overruns, this contributed to USEC's 2014 Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reorganization as Centrus Energy. [unverified — Tier-2 causal attribution; the bankruptcy's cause is not grounded in a verbatim primary (SEC/bankruptcy filings, GAO) here; routed to question-verify-usec-2014-bankruptcy-russian-leu-primary]

The dependency the deal created is being unwound in the 2020s: a 2024 US law banned Russian LEU imports (with waivers through 2028), and Centrus now holds Department of Energy contracts framed as an effort to "restore America's ability to enrich uranium," including HALEU production. A nonproliferation windfall that supplied about a third of US reactor fuel thus also hollowed out the domestic enrichment industry it flowed through — and that industry is now being rebuilt just as restarts like the Crane Clean Energy Center push US reactor-fuel demand back up.

Correction history.

• 2026-09-03 — question-verify-usec-2014-bankruptcy-russian-leu-primary was answered by a direct read of USEC's own FY2013 Form 10-K (Tier 1). The primary complicates rather than confirms this note's framing: USEC's own account names a maturing $530M convertible-note obligation, not Russian LEU competition, as the Chapter 11 filing's stated cause (claim-usec-2014-chapter11-filed-to-refinance-convertible-notes); attributes the American Centrifuge Plant's non-viability primarily to a global post-Fukushima LEU/SWU oversupply rather than specifically to the Megatons-to-Megawatts material USEC itself imported (claim-usec-10k-attributes-acp-nonviability-to-post-fukushima-oversupply); and separately documents a $1.1 billion cost write-off independent of LEU pricing ("this project's cost overruns" above is corroborated on primary evidence, claim-usec-acp-1-1-billion-writeoff-2012-2-5-billion-cumulative-spend). The mismatched wikilink to entity-amazon-technologies-inc (an unrelated Amazon patent-assignee page) has also been fixed. This note's Tier-2 causal attribution is nuanced, not refuted or confirmed — kept at seedling per the still-open comparative-weight question. Found by the 2026-09-03 promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-03-did-cheap-megatons-to-megawatts-russian-leu-actually.md.