Two members of Congress from Missouri are calling on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to hold an open hearing on a license application for export of weapon-grade uranium to Europe.
The Department of Energy on July 31 filed an application for export of nearly 4.8 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to the Institute for Radioelements (IRE) in Belgium for use in production of molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) and other medical isotopes.
Sen. Roy Blunt and Rep. Ann Wagner (both R-Mo.) on Sept. 27 wrote a letter to NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki on behalf of Curium, a London-based nuclear medicine company that has its U.S. headquarters in St. Louis. The letter was posted Tuesday to the agency’s online documents database.
“Based on our constituent’s assertion that IRE’s application for nearly 5 kilograms of HEU for Mo-99 and [iodine-131] production is unwarranted and, if granted, unnecessarily circumvents the intent of the statutory license ban and goes against the directives of Congress, we are hopeful the Commission will grant a public, oral hearing,” the lawmakers stated.
The letter addresses issues Curium and other medical isotope providers and nuclear nonproliferation advocates have raised in requesting to intervene in the export license proceeding: that shipping highly enriched uranium (HEU) to Europe presents an unnecessary nuclear proliferation risk and disadvantages companies that have made the costly conversion to using low-enriched uranium for production.
They focused on the 2012 American Medical Isotopes Production Act (AMIPA), which set a January 2020 end date on HEU exports for isotope manufacturing unless the secretaries of energy and health and human services determine the material is still needed for that purpose.
“To date, domestic market place participants like Curium who have duly complied with conversion requirements or implemented non-uranium processes face a twenty percent production efficiency loss from the associated cost of production,” according to Blunt and Wagner.
In brief letters on Monday, NRC Secretary to the Commission Annette Vietti-Cook told Blunt and Wagner that it “would be inappropriate” for Svinicki to respond to their letter while the commission considers the contested license application.
The lawmakers’ offices this week did not respond to queries on whether they are still pursuing the matter.
The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wants to ship the uranium enriched to 93.35% at its Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The material would be used for production of targets at a facility in France and for target irradiation at research reactors in Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The Institute for Radioelements would extract molybdenum-99 and iodine-131 from the targets at its production plant in Belgium.
Curium in September petitioned the NRC to intervene and a hearing in the export license proceeding, as did U.S. isotope manufacturer NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes, the nongovernmental Nuclear Threat Initiative, and University of Texas Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project founding coordinator Alan Kuperman.
In its filing, Curium said it and three other organizations provide 98 percent of global production of Mo-99, which decays into another isotope, technetium-99m, that is used across the world in medical imaging. The other entities are the Institute for Radioelements, NTP Radioisotopes SOC of South Africa, and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO). Of those, only IRE has not converted to use of low-enriched uranium for production, though it is in the process of doing that.
“[O]ne of AMIPA’s major policy pillars was an effort to thwart any associated nuclear security threats stemming from the exportation of HEU,” Blunt and Wagner wrote in their letter to Svinicki. “However, because HEU is a dangerous, highly fissile material that can be used to build a nuclear weapon or improvised nuclear device, the issuance of a new export license will continue to foster a nuclear threat during its transportation.”
The NRC could approve none, some, or all of the petitioners to intervene in the licensing review, through which they would argue their cases in an adjudicatory hearing on the application. There is no set timeline for decisions by the agency, but it could be a period of months.
From 2014 to 2018, the Institute for Radioelements was approved to receive 32.9 kilograms of U.S. highly enriched uranium for isotope production. It represented six of the 10 approved export licenses in that period, which in total were for 54.2 kilograms of weapon-usable uranium. This is expected to be IRE’s last such export request.
The company has pushed back against the concerns raised in the petitions for intervention. In his own Sept. 26 letter to Svinicki, IRE CEO Erich Kollegger said the company’s conversion to proliferation-resistant LEU for isotope production proved more challenging than anticipated but should be complete by the end of 2020 for Mo-99 output. He emphasized the “very high Security standards” of all the companies in the HEU supply chain.
