Nuclear reactor maker BWX Technologies, Lynchburg, Va., this week pulled in a potentially $100-plus million contract to process unusable, government-owned material into uranium reactor fuel.
The new contract with the National Nuclear Security Administration, with $47 million of guaranteed money and worth $116.5 million with options, will allow the company, which builds nuclear propulsion systems for U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers and fabricates uranium fuel for the Navy, to hire at least 20 new employees, BWX Technologies (BWXT) announced Thursday.
Under the contract, BWXT will take “thousands of kilograms” of unusable, government-owned scrap material containing enriched uranium and, over the next five years, use it to produce more than two tons of high assay low enriched uranium, also known as HALEU, which can be used as fuel to demonstrate advanced nuclear reactors, the company said.
“One of BWXT’s key roles in moving the nuclear industry forward is leveraging its specialty materials capabilities to support domestic HALEU needs for the next generation of nuclear reactors,” BWXT Nuclear Operations Group President Sharon Smoot said in a statement.
The scrap material, provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration, has been collected from a number of different sources, primarily the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, BWXT said.
DOE is trying to lock down several sources of HALEU to help commercialize reactor designs that require the energy dense fuel. Aside from tapping the national security stockpile, the agency is also funding a new enrichment cascade to produce the material at its Portsmouth site near Piketon, Ohio.
The cascade was built by Centrus Corp., Bethesda, Md., currently the only company in the U.S. with a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to refine HALEU.
In early February, the company completed construction and initial testing of a cascade of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, which it built under a cost-share contract with the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
To begin earning money from a follow-on DOE contract to operate the cascade, Centrus must produce a test batch of HALEU by year’s end for the agency’s approval. The deal to operate the 16-machine HALEU cascade at the agency’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, is worth up to $1 billion over 10 years, with options.
