By the end of 2019, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to identify the best ways to secure low-enriched uranium for U.S. nuclear-weapon programs over the next 20 years, the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency wrote in response to a Government Accountability Office report published last week.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will complete an analysis of alternatives for ensuring a domestic stream of low-enriched uranium from which to separate the gas tritium by the end of next year, Steven Erhart, acting NNSA administrator at the time, wrote in a Jan. 26 letter appended to a Feb. 16 GAO report.
That might mean building a new uranium enrichment facility, or it might not, according to the letter dated only days after the departure of former NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz.
Furthermore, Erhart wrote, the cost of a new enrichment facility might or might not be anywhere near the ballparks the agency established in early brainstorming sessions reviewed by the GAO for the report titled “NNSA Should Clarify Long-Term Uranium Enrichment Mission Needs and Improve Technology Cost Estimates.”
Tritium gas enhances the explosive power of nuclear warheads. The NNSA separates the gas from irradiated rods in a facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. However, the last U.S. enrichment plant, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, shut down in 2013, tightening supplies of the radioactive metal. The NNSA may only use U.S. uranium for its weapons.
Now, the agency is essentially choosing between two options for future enrichment: a large centrifuge that could cost $7.5 billion to $14 billion, and a small centrifuge that could cost $3.8 billion to $8.3 billion, the GAO said, citing NNSA documents.
The larger centrifuge would be roughly 40 feet tall and based on the AC100 technology that Centrus Energy — formerly the quasi-public United States Enrichment Corp. that ran Paducah — is developing under contract to the Department of Energy at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
That contract continues technology development related to the large-scale uranium enrichment demonstration Centrus was working on at the American Centrifuge Project until 2016. The Department of Energy canceled the demo, located at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, and the company is now preparing to tear down the enrichment infrastructure there.
Centrus continues some AC100 technology-development under a pact with Oak Ridge lab prime UT-Battelle. The latest $16-million extension on the deal runs through September.
Also at Oak Ridge, the NNSA is funding “an experiment to develop a centrifuge design that it anticipates will be smaller (from 6 to 14 feet tall), simpler, and potentially less expensive to build and maintain than the large centrifuge,” the GAO said in the Feb. 16 report, citing an unidentified NNSA document. It could take from seven to 11 years to get the experimental technology ready to deploy, GAO wrote, citing the NNSA. That timeline doesn’t account for developing and building the working centrifuge, or even the competition to select a contractor for that work.
