The National Nuclear Security Administration still has not awarded Nuclear Fuel Services a contract to purify uranium for nuclear weapons programs, but the City of Oak Ridge this week repeated its opposition to the move, which it continued to paint as a job-killer for the region.
“The logistics and costs that would be required to provide safe and secure mobile transfers of the weapons-related materials to/from an off-site facility would result in unnecessary risks to our community and region, and would be extremely costly to our taxpayers,” Oak Ridge Mayor Warren Gooch said in a city press release this week. “The proposed contract is the result of an unsolicited proposal and would result in significant economic loss to the greater Oak Ridge/Knoxville region.”
Gooch and the city have opposed the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) decision to move the work out of the Y-12 National Security Complex since the semi-autonomous Department of Energy branch announced its intention to do so in 2019. Nuclear Fuel Services, a BWX Technologies subsidiary in Erwin, Tenn., would get the work.
The NNSA planned to finalize the award to Nuclear Fuel Services in early December, but that had not happened by deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
“NNSA has not yet awarded a contract to [Nuclear Fuel Services,]” an agency spokesperson in Washington wrote in an email on Thursday.
The NNSA spokesperson declined to provide a timeline for the award. A spokesperson for the city of Oak Ridge likewise said the NNSA had not shared a timeline with local officials.
The NNSA confirmed that Nuclear Fuel Services’ proposal was unsolicited but the agency is allowed to accept overtures from industry, provided it complies with the Federal Acquisition Regulation and guidelines from the DOE — which the NNSA says it did.
The NNSA envisions a two-phase agreement with Nuclear Fuel Services, the first of which would involve “design and demonstration of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) purification and conversion capabilities,” Margeau Valteau, of NNSA’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs in Washington, told Oak Ridge City Manager Mark Watson around Thanksgiving.
Phase 2 of the promised Nuclear Fuel Services contract, subject to a passing grade in Phase 1, would involve actually processing uranium for use in nuclear-weapon secondary stages starting around 2023, when the NNSA plans to take Y-12’s in-house purification equipment in Building 9212. The agency is building the Uranium Processing Facility to replace Building 9212, including swapping the aging legacy building’s wet chemistry systems for still-in-development electrorefining technology. The new facility should be built by 2025.
Meanwhile, Congress has twice proved willing to help buy the city of Oak Ridge some time — or, alternatively, to throw up some speed bumps for NNSA to navigate as it raced to get the uranium purification contract finalized with Nuclear Fuel Services.
In a 2020 federal budget bill signed in late 2019, the Senate told the NNSA to complete a technical review of uranium purification technology before green-lighting a new approach. The agency subsequently contracted with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the study, which later found the proposal to offload the work to Nuclear Fuel Services “credible, reasonable, and [had] low technical risk,” Valteau told Watson in last year’s letter.
The NNSA last year said that “Y-12 will not see a reduction in work scope, or in employment” once the agency brings Nuclear Fuel Services onboard.
The agency also said this week that it was “compiling the information to address Congress’s request for a ‘business case analysis,’” the second congressionally mandated study of future uranium purification. Lawmakers passed that requirement in the 2021 omnibus spending bill signed into law in December.
