President of the American company ConverDyn, Malcolm Critchley, presented to Energoatom the capabilities of the modernized conversion plant Honeywell, which produces uranium hexafluoride from yellow cake and will start operation next year.

According to Energoatom, President Petro Kotin suggested at the yesterday's online meeting that his American colleagues “work on the possibility for further cooperation in the field of nuclear material supply for nuclear fuel manufacturing, and other areas of cooperation”.

In 2015, representatives of ConverDyn discussed with the management of the Nuclear Fuel DC the potential of joint build-up of production capacities in Ukraine to manufacture the uranium hexafluoride. ConverDyn was interested in cooperation with Ukrainian enterprises to provide uranium conversion services for the needs of Ukraine's nuclear power industry.

ConverDyn is a general partnership between the US multinational firms General Atomics and Honeywell Metropolis Works that provides uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) conversion and related services to utilities operating nuclear power plants in North America, Europe and Asia. ConverDyn is the sole marketing agent of UF₆ produced at the Honeywell's plant in Illinois.

But in 2017, the Honeywell plant was shut down due to an excess of uranium hexafluoride on the global market. Since then, the plant has been modernized. In 2020, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) extended the license to operate the plant for 40 years until March 2060. The reopening of the plant is scheduled for 2023. Before the modernization, the nominal capacity of the plant was 15,000 tU of uranium hexafluoride per year, which is approximately 20% of the world's production capacity.

The Honeywell Metropolis Works uses a unique technology and process by which it converts yellow cake into gaseous uranium hexafluoride. Other Western conversion plants, owned by Areva and Cameco, use a process that requires two different facilities: one to convert yellow cake into uranium tetrafluoride or uranium trioxide, and the other to convert it into uranium hexafluoride. However, Honeywell, part of ConverDyn, has developed a dry fluorine fugacity conversion process that allows complete conversion of yellow cake to UF₆ in a single facility, and delivers higher UF₆ purity levels of 99.99% or higher.