Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) on Tuesday again tried to put New Mexico in line for a piece of the high-assay low-enriched uranium market the Department of Energy is trying to spark with a promised sole-source contract award to Centrus Corp.
The DOE Office of Nuclear Energy in January announced it planned to award Bethedsa, Md.-based Centrus a sole-source contract worth up to $115 million to revive a uranium enrichment centrifuge design based on the company’s AC-100 technology: the same design the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is eyeing as a potential future source of highly enriched uranium.
Heinrich has previously groused that DOE did not consider Urenco Group’s Eunice, N.M., uranium enrichment facility as a potential source of the 19.75-percent enriched uranium fuel product known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which the new Centrus plant would produce in unspecified quantity.
In a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (NRC), Heinrich asked a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioner whether Urenco USA “should be considered as a potential near-term options to provide HALEU for future advanced reactors?”
“Yeah, [for[ the commercial market, certainly that Urenco facility would be appropriate,” responded Jeffrey Merrifield, now a partner in the Pillsbury law firm in Washington, D.C. He added that the facility would not be suitable for future production of defense-usable highly enriched uranium.
The Energy Department did not reply to a request for comment Tuesday about whether it had yet awarded Centrus the sole-source contract. The award was to have a two-year base period with a one-year option.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has questioned DOE’s decision to fund the Centrus demo with a sole-source contract from the Office of Nuclear Energy, rather than from a competitively awarded National Nuclear Security Administration contract. Barrasso, whose home state is a major source of domestic uranium, has also slammed the contract as an undeserved bailout for Centrus.
Right around the time Centrus’ option would come up on the envisioned DOE Nuclear Energy contract, the agency’s semiautonomous NNSA is due to finish a three-year review of enrichment technologies for future defense needs — the first of which is production of low-enriched uranium to produce tritium for U.S. nuclear weapons from the early 2040s onward.
The planned Centrus HALEU cascade of 16 centrifuges would be built at DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio: the Cold War-era uranium enrichment plant that until recently hosted Centrus’ now-decommissioned American Centrifuge Plant.
American Centrifuge was an ACP-100-style demonstration that contained some non-U.S. parts and so was unsuitable for large-scale refining of defense-usable uranium.
