Nuclear Fuel Services, of Erwin, Tenn., will downblend 20.2 metric tons of uranium needed to produce tritium for U.S. nuclear warheads under a roughly seven-year National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) contract worth $505 million, parent company BWX Technologies announced Friday.
The NNSA needs to turn some of its stock of highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium to make tritium using the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Watts Bar Unit 1 reactor in Rhea County, Tenn., from 2019 to 2025. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency will insert special tritium-producing rods into the reactor during normal electricity-producing runs, then take rods to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to extract the tritium.
In the 2019 NNSA budget bill signed into law last week, Congress provided $85 million for uranium downblending in the agency’s tritium sustainment account. That was part of an overall $15 billion NNSA appropriation for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
Tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope, greatly increases the yield of thermonuclear weapons, but it decays at a rate of roughly 5.5 percent per year and must be replaced often. The United States no longer produces its own uranium and uranium purchased on the spot market generally cannot be used for military purposes. For that reason, the NNSA must use its own stockpile of highly enriched uranium to fuel reactors used to produce tritium.
In August, the NNSA and TVA announced a new interagency agreement, good through 2040, to continue providing the federally owned authority with low-enriched uranium that makes it possible to produce tritium for nuclear weapons.
To date, Nuclear Fuel Services has processed 70 metric tons of highly enriched uranium for the NNSA, according to BWXT. The latest deal is the largest such downblending contract received by NFS.
The NNSA is set by 2019 to choose between two options for future production of uranium for U.S. defense programs: a large centrifuge that could cost $7.5 billion to $14 billion, and a small centrifuge that could cost $3.8 billion to $8.3 billion, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in February. Without a new domestic enrichment capability, the NNSA believes it could run out of usable uranium by 2027.
