Changing requirements and the COVID-19 pandemic mean the National Nuclear Security Administration will wait until fiscal year 2023 to begin producing high-purity depleted uranium metal for nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapon steward previously wanted to get its depleted uranium tetrafluoride (DUF4) conversion line up and running in the 2022 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2022.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to start installing the DUF4 line by December 2021. The line will take depleted uranium hexafluoride left over from Cold War era uranium refining and turn it into material suitable for use in modern nuclear weapons.
The NNSA line will run alongside waste disposal operations at the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion facility at Portsmouth. The environmental office is disposing of most of the enrichment byproduct as waste; the NNSA planned to process some 250 metric tons of the material annually for weapons programs.
“The schedule has been adjusted due to a change in NNSA’s requirements, requiring changes to the design,” an NNSA spokesperson from agency headquarters in Washington wrote in an email Friday. “Design and long-lead procurements are underway but have experienced some delays due to COVID-19.”
The NNSA’s Material Recycle and Recovery program is responsible for the DUF4 work, funding for which passes through the Environmental Management office contract held by the Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services. That team is converting about 750,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride for the cleanup office.
The Office of Environmental Management halted depleted uranium hexafluoride operations in March 2020 and had yet to announce their restart at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
NNSA previously planned to finish its DUF4 work in fiscal year 2036, when Portsmouth’s share of the depleted uranium hexafluoride work was supposed to wrap up.
The end of the NNSA DUF 4 program “is expected to align with the conclusion” of the DOE cleanup work — but when that might be was unclear at deadline Friday.
