Right in time for Christmas, the National Nuclear Security Administration put Nuclear Fuel Services under contract to produce uranium metal for nuclear weapons programs, according to a procurement note published Monday.
The agency’s announcement Monday moves Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS), a BWX Technologies subsidiary in Erwin, Tenn., into new work on the sole-source contract the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced for the company in 2021.
The company remains in the first phase of the contract, which runs from March 1, 2021 through February 29, 2024, is worth about $57.5 million and covers license, proof of concept, and design of purification and conversion services, a NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email on Wednesday.
The contract initially required NFS to show it could convert uranium oxide to uranium metal: work that the NNSA had handled at its Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The agency did not reveal the terms of the contract modification announced Monday and an agency spokesperson in Washington reached Tuesday did not immediately comment about the terms.
There was some advance notice of Monday’s announcement. The NNSA in May said it would award NFS the contract late this calendar year to ensure that uranium conversion and purification continues while the agency upgrades its in-house equipment at Y-12.
The NNSA planned in 2023 to replace Y-12’s old wet-chemistry conversion and purification equipment with a more modern electrorefining process. After the switchover, the agency has said, Y-12 will briefly be without a means of converting uranium oxide to uranium metal. The electrorefining process requires a metal feedstock, so the NNSA needs NFS to convert federal stockpiles of uranium oxide to uranium metal.
The NNSA is replacing much of the legacy uranium-handling equipment at Y-12 as the agency builds its next-generation Uranium Processing Facility. Conversion and purification is wrapped up with those upgrades and, like the Uranium Processing Facility itself, has been delayed because of supply chain and labor problems.
In October, the NNSA acknowledged the Uranium Processing Facility might not be finished until 2027: two years later than the agency had said it would construct the replacement for the aging Building 9212. In June, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said that the NNSA planned to delay other Y-12 uranium upgrades, including electrorefining, which would slide six months to the right.
