How a Fluorination Plant Idled in 2017 Booked Six Years Forward
Solstice's Metropolis Works, the only uranium hexafluoride plant in the United States, stopped producing in 2017 and restarted in mid-2023. Wednesday's filings put the order book on that one plant at $2.6 billion, roughly four fifths of the whole company's undelivered contract value on nine percent of its sales.
In 2017 the only plant in the United States that turns yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride stopped making it. Its owner called the halt temporary, blamed roughly five years of global oversupply, and cut the plant's rated output to 7,000 tU a year.
It sat that way until July 2023.
On Wednesday the company that now owns it, Solstice Advanced Materials, filed a third quarter putting the order book on that single plant at $2.6 billion.
"What does a sole-source fluorination plant look like when the queue in front of it is longer than the plant's own restart history?"
Nine Percent of the Sales, Four Fifths of the Book
Solstice spun out of Honeywell on 30 October 2025 and reports two segments.
Refrigerants and Applied Solutions holds the low-GWP refrigerants, the blowing agents, the healthcare packaging, and a line the company renamed this year from Alternative Energy Services to, plainly, Nuclear. Electronic and Specialty Materials holds the sputtering targets, the HF etchants, the electronic polymers.
Nuclear did $297m of net sales in the nine months to September, against $245m a year earlier. That is 9.3% of the company's $3,185m.
Now look at what the company has sold and not yet delivered. Remaining performance obligations at 30 September stood at approximately $3.3bn, and the nuclear backlog alone is $2.6bn of it (chart below). Subtracting one approximation from another is a bit crude, so read the residual as a shape: everything else Solstice sells carries something near $0.7bn of undelivered contract value.
Two different companies live on those two bars.
On the income statement Solstice is a refrigerants and electronic materials house with a small nuclear line attached. On the order book it is a uranium conversion business with a refrigerants business attached.
The 10-Q adds the timing split: 29% of the company's remaining obligations are expected to be satisfied inside a year and 71% beyond it. Nuclear is most of what sits past the one-year line.
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