The National Nuclear Security Administration will postpone by months its decision about which of two technologies will power the next U.S. defense-uranium enrichment facility.
“NNSA recently notified Congress that it intends to complete its Analysis of Alternatives for supply of unobligated enriched uranium by mid-to-late FY2020,” an agency spokesperson wrote in a Thursday email, responding to queries from Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
With a quarter of the government’s 2020 fiscal year already gone, that puts off until at least March the decision between Centrus Energy Corp.’s privately developed AC100 technology and a publicly funded alternative developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
It was around this time of year in 2016 that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) formally declared it would begin the acquisition process for a new domestic enrichment capability. The agency told the Government Accountability Office in August 2017 that it would by December 2019 choose between the Centrus and Oak Ridge enrichment technologies.
The NNSA hewed to that timeline all through 2018 and most of 2019, before informing Congress there would be a delay.
Centrus is getting a boost in perfecting an all-domestic enrichment cascade of its AC-100 technology under an 80/20 cost-share contract awarded by DOE’s Nuclear Energy Oak Ridge Site Office. The three-year deal is worth about $115 million, including a one-year option. AC-100 is also known as the “large centrifuge” technology that is competing with the Oak Ridge-developed “small centrifuge” in the ongoing NNSA evaluation.
The NNSA’s need to acquire more uranium became less dire in 2018, when the agency awarded BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services, of Erwin, Tenn., a contract worth more than $500 million to downblend more than 20 metric tons of the NNSA’s stock of highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium suitable for producing tritium in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar reactors. With that deal, the NNSA expects to run out of low-enriched uranium for tritium production in the 2040s, rather than the late 2020s.
Tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope, is required for thermonuclear weapons to achieve the destructive yield prescribed by their designers.
