January 2021 came and went without an announcement from the National Nuclear Security Administration about the technology it prefers to use to build the next U.S. uranium enrichment facility.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy Nuclear weapon-weapon steward has a choice between the AC100 technology developed by Centrus Energy Corp. of Rockville, Md., and a smaller technology developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — a choice that it recently delayed to January from December because of COVID-19.
A National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) spokesperson in Washington declined Monday to provide an updated timetable for the agency’s analysis of alternatives between the two technologies.
The NNSA once planned to make its choice as early as 2019, but the Oak Ridge option lagged so far behind Centrus’ offering technologically that the NNSA decided to give the public option a one-year grace period to catch up.
Whichever technology the NNSA picks will eventually power the first purely domestic uranium enrichment facility in the U.S. since the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky closed in 2013.
The NNSA needs a new domestic source of enriched uranium by the 2040s, when its current supply will run out. The agency initially will require low-enriched uranium to help produce tritium in the Tennessee Valley authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors. Watts Bar Unit 2 will produce tritium for the first time after it reactivates from a refueling outage that started in October.
