Just over six years after the last U.S.-built uranium enrichment centrifuge closed down, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is poised to take a milestone step: choosing a technology to power the next domestic, defense-uranium-enrichment cascade.
It’s a major, if preliminary, step toward a world in which the United States no longer relies on the current combination of stockpiled uranium and cannibalization of dismantled weapons for the special nuclear materials needed to preserve the destructive power of its nuclear arsenal.
As of mid-November, domestic uranium enrichment was a two-horse race. Centrus Energy Corp., which as the pre-bankruptcy U.S. Enrichment Corp. actually shut down that final domestic cascade in Paducah, Ky., in May 2013, is headed down the stretch with its AC100 technology, opposite a smaller-scale option developed in-house at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Earlier this year, the NNSA had anticipated selecting one of the technologies by the end of 2019. The agency this week did not respond to a query regarding its schedule.
But, sticking with racetrack metaphors, the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency is deliberately running domestic uranium enrichment on a heavy track. So things will, by design, plod just a little.
For example, there might be a time lag between the NNSA selecting its preferred technology — officially, completing an analysis of alternatives — and announcing its decision. It might take until the release of the fiscal 2021 budget request, notionally in February, to get even preliminary details about the agency’s choice.
It could take four more years after that, until fiscal 2024, before the NNSA advances the domestic uranium enrichment program to the Critical Decision 1 (CD-1) milestone: loosely speaking, the point in DOE project management at which the agency roughs out a cost estimate. At CD-1, that estimate is merely a range, not one number.
The NNSA has a slough of infrastructure projects jamming up its pipe and so has had to explore creative ways of delaying its need for domestically enriched uranium until 2041. In round numbers, that would be five times longer than weapons-complex watchers will have waited from the shuttering of the last defense-uranium cascade in 2013 to the NNSA announcement that will sketch the broad outline of that cascade’s successor.
This new domestic cascade would not be the only enrichment apparatus on U.S. soil. The European-owned URENCO consortium operates a commercial cascade in New Mexico, as Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) happily reminded the public during a hearing earlier this year. However, the new system would be the only one in the country fit for national defense needs.
As much as anything else, the task before the NNSA — and industry representatives that wind up with a ticket for this ride — is to pull together a national network of made-in-the-U.S.A. suppliers that can be counted on to, A: exist, and B: deliver on time the components needed to produce enriched uranium that is unencumbered by international peaceful use restrictions attached to product separated by machines made from foreign parts.
Centrus is going to get some practice with all that, very soon.
The company, which only just got done dismantling the not-entirely U.S.-sourced AC100-heritage American Centrifuge Project at DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio, is now officially under contract with the department’s Office of Nuclear Energy to build a 16-machine AC100-M cascade using only domestic parts. The cascade is intended to generate 600 kilograms of high assay low-enriched uranium fuel by June 2022.
The company will construct the facility where the American Centrifuge Demonstration once stood at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio. Paying the way is an an 80-20, firm-fixed-price, cost-sharing arrangement with a two-year base and a one-year option. The government will pay about $115 million, including the option. Centrus is on the hook for about $30 million.
There is always some friction in Congress about how much help Centrus should receive with its enrichment technology. Last week, leaders of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee openly pressured the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy to provide documents, including communications with Centrus, explaining the agency’s decision to fund the AC100-M cascade on a sole-source basis.
In 2018, Senate appropriators wanted to throttle NNSA funding for Centrus out of concern that it was short-changing the in-house option at Oak Ridge. The Senate Appropriations Committee’s acrimony, at least, appears to have faded.
The Senate agreed to drop language from its version of the fiscal 2019 appropriations package that fretted “that the Department lacks a credible plan to obtain adequate data on small centrifuge operations to complete the Analysis of Alternatives for uranium enrichment as scheduled,” and would have limited NNSA aid to Centrus to no more than $5 million.
Instead, lawmakers directed the NNSA only “to ensure that there is a credible plan to complete adequate research, development, and demonstration prior to making a decision on domestic uranium enrichment.”
In their 2020 budget bills, neither the House nor the Senate called out Centrus or Oak Ridge by name in the next-generation centrifuge race.
All told, the NNSA has requested $140 million for its domestic uranium enrichment budget in fiscal 2020: well over double the 2019 budget of $50 million. The program will cost about $750 million over five years, from 2020 to 2025, the agency forecast in its 2020 budget request.
That’s not even the meaty part of the cost curve, either.
According to (very) preliminary estimates the NNSA shared with the Government Accountability Office in 2018, a new domestic enrichment cascade made with Centrus’ AC100 technology would cost between $7.5 billion and $14 billion, while a cascade using the Oak Ridge technology could cost $3.8 billion to $8.3 billion.
You might take those numbers with a few grains of salt, or even with the entire shaker. Issued as they were so many years before the NNSA plans to build the new cascade, the Government Accountability Office warned that the figures “are not reliable.”
Maybe they are not — if you are a member of Congress attempting to appropriate funding during the final stages of a project’s design cycle, or its construction boom years. Yet even this rough order of magnitude, lifted straight off the napkin, gives a sense of scale.
The sense one gets from that scale is that the project simply won’t fit in the budget, yet. Major, major infrastructure improvements stand in its way, including the Uranium Processing Facility under construction at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the two-state plutonium-pit production complex the NNSA wants to build at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The Uranium Processing Facility is supposed to cost $6.5 billion to finish in 2025. The plutonium complex would clock in even higher than that. Roughly, the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility — converting the partially built Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a pit plant — could cost between $2 billion and $7.5 billion, according the analysis of alternatives NNSA completed for the project in 2018. Upgrading Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 facility could add millions or billions more.
It’s far from certain that the NNSA will finish its new plutonium complex as quickly as it hopes, but the agency has proposed starting pit production at Los Alamos in 2024 and at Savannah River in 2030. In between? A lot of construction, a lot of engineering development, a lot of expenses.
How the NNSA decided to prioritize between the Uranium Processing Facility, Plutonium Sustainment, and new enrichment infrastructure is no mystery.
The agency last year put BWX Technologies’ Nuclear Fuel Services subsidiary, of Erwin, Tenn., under contract to downblend some of the NNSA’s stock of highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium. The contract is worth more than $500 million and calls for BWX Technologies to downblend more than 20 tons of uranium into 2025.
The low-enriched uranium, not weapon-grade, would be provided to the Tennessee Valley Authority to irradiate tritium-producing burnable absorber rods the NNSA uses to extract radioactive tritium gas that boosts the power of almost every warhead and bomb in the U.S. arsenal. Without the commercial downblending arrangement, the NNSA would have run out of uranium in 2025, smack in the middle of the planned build-out of the agency’s special nuclear materials infrastructure.
The Senate, meanwhile, has renewed calls for the NNSA to consider whether the special relationship between the U.S. and the United Kingdom could provide even an even bigger bumper for the domestic uranium enrichment program.
Though it is not much closer to final passage than it had been all summer, the Senate’s version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would if signed require the secretary of energy by Feb. 15, 2020, to tell Congress whether the United States is allowed to produce tritium using low-enriched uranium it obtains from the United Kingdom.
It might be possible, lawmakers said, under the 1958 Agreement for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes between the U.S. and the U.K.
The U.S. State Department, which also has to sign off on such a procurement, has already said the U.S. is allowed to procure unobligated U.K. uranium for tritium production.
