The National Nuclear Security Administration this week laid groundwork to start competition on a contract for trucking tritium for nuclear weapons to the Savannah River Site from nuclear power plants in Tennessee.
At the very least, the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency may need someone to make two trips over two years to carry eight tritium producing burnable absorber rods per haul to Savannah River’s Tritium Extraction Facility for evaluation, according to a statement of work bundled with request for information the agency released Wednesday.
At the most, the agency may want a contractor to haul thousands of rods between the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) two Watts Bar reactors near Spring City, Tenn. and Savannah River near Aiken, S.C., over a two-year period that will coincide with the mass refurbishment of two of the six active nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and possibly overlap with the refurbishment of a third.
All active U.S. nuclear weapons require a supply of tritium, which decays relatively rapidly and must be replenished regularly for as long as the country wants its nuclear weapons to maintain their specified destructive power. The radioactive hydrogen increases the energetic output of modern thermonuclear weapons.
Currently, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) relies on nuclear storage and transport specialists NAC International, Norcross, Ga., to haul tritium between Watts Bar and Savannah River under a contract that started in 2018, was scheduled to run through May 2023 and was worth more than $7 million.
TVA’s Watts Bar reactors irradiate lithium-bearing tritium producing burnable absorber rods, designed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington and manufactured by Westinghouse in South Carolina, while producing electricity for most of Tennessee and a smattering of other states.
The Savannah River Site harvests hydrogen gas from the rods and pipes it into reservoirs for nuclear weapons.
In an arrangement similar to the existing one with NAC, whoever eventually wins the business to transport the tritium-bearing rods will, during shipments, lease specialized transport casks and trailers to the NNSA, according to agency’s request for information.
In 2018, Holtec International of Campden, N.J., beat out a pair of competitors to design specialized transportation equipment, including casks and trailers, that the NNSA wanted to haul tritium producing burnable absorber rods during the production campaign now ramping up at the TVA reactors.
In January, to accommodate the NNSA’s weapons-modernization schedule, the Tennessee Valley Authority said it planned to seek a license amendment from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to sharply increase the amount of tritium producing burnable absorber rods irradiated per generation cycle to 2,500 a run. The increased loading would begin in the fall of 2024 at Unit 1 and in the spring of 2025 at Unit 2.
Watts Bar Unit 1 has produced tritium for NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs since 2003, while Watts Bar Unit 2 started irradiating rods in 2020.
The NNSA is preparing to refurbish the Navy’s W88 warhead and the Air Force’s B61 gravity bomb. The agency produced the first production unit of the W88 Alt-370, as the latest version is called, in July and the B61-12, as that refurbished weapon is called, in November. Mass production of the new versions was scheduled to run through fiscal year 2026, which ends Oct. 1, 2025.
After those two weapons, the W80 air-launched cruise missile warhead was due next for a refurb. NNSA, in its fiscal year 2021 stockpile stewardship and management plan, estimated that the first production unit for the new version, dubbed W80-4, would arrive in fiscal year 2025.
