The centerpiece of a federal neutron research complex in Maryland will use highly enriched uranium fuel until at least 2030, according to a recent regulatory filing.
That’s because the Department of Energy and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration have yet to develop a fuel the National Bureau of Standards Reactor (NBSR) can use, according to Thomas Newton, deputy director chief of reactor operations and engineering at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Neutron Research.
The agency has “not developed and qualified a replacement LEU [low-enriched uranium] fuel acceptable to the Commission, and funds for such a conversion are not available,” Newton wrote in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, dated March 28 and posted online Friday. “An updated LEU fuel development schedule released by NNSA proposes to convert the NBSR no earlier than 2030.”
Under federal law, non-power reactors such as the NBSR may use highly enriched uranium fuel only if there is no suitable low-enriched uranium fuel available. Highly enriched uranium is considered a proliferation risk and the U.S. government generally attempts to limit the use of that material to defense nuclear programs.
Among the 20 megawatt NBSR reactor’s “major research areas,” according to a 2004 NRC safety analysis report, include “materials science, non-destructive evaluation, chemistry, biology, trace analysis, neutron standards and dosimetry, nuclear physics, and quantum metrology.” The reactor is located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Gaithersburg, Md., campus.
The NBSR shut down in February 2021 after a partially melted fuel rod spread contamination through the reactor research facility, lightly contaminating some people inside the building. The reactor restarted in 2023.
In 2023, NRC’s inspector general the commission had been lax in its oversight of non-power reactors, sometimes failing to observe the defueling and refueling of these facilities. The report called attention both to the facility at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a shuttled commercial imaging reactor in California.
