Local officials with the City of Oak Ridge slammed the National Nuclear Security Administration’s decision to shift some national security work to BWX Technologies Subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services, Erwin, Tenn., from the Y-12 National Security Complex.
The semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons agency informed the city of the move in an email the day before Thanksgiving, according to a city press release dated Nov. 25, the day before Thanksgiving.
“To announce loss of mission and jobs at the Y-12 National Security Complex in the middle of a pandemic and the day before the Thanksgiving Holiday is highly inappropriate and insensitive to the skilled workers who will be losing their jobs as a result of relocating this work to Erwin, Tennessee,” Oak Ridge Mayor Warren Gooch said. “We are asking our congressional leadership to oppose this move.”
The city did provide details about the contract awarded to Nuclear Fuel Services, but Mark Watson, the Oak Ridge city manager, characterized it as a “demonstration contract.”
For more than a year now, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has planned to award Nuclear Fuel Services a sole-source contract to purify uranium metal for nuclear weapons programs. The NNSA wanted the commercial operator, located some 125 miles by road from Y-12, to step in some time around 2023. Y-12 currently handles some of that work in Building 9212.
With the NNSA preparing to refurbish four nuclear weapons one after the other beginning this decade, the U.S. Senate in 2019 told the agency to use any means possible to avoid running out of purified uranium in the middle of the modernization regimen. Specifically, the Senate Appropriations Committee said the NNSA should be “including leveraging qualified industrial partners, to … maintain a consistent supply of purified uranium metal and other strategic materials.”
BWX Technologies owns the only two fuel-fabrication plants licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to process highly enriched uranium. The company’s other HEU-capable facility is in Lynchburg, Va.
