The National Nuclear Security Administration picked up Westinghouse Government Service’s next 10-year option to manufacture tritium producing burnable absorber rods at a South Carolina factory.
The rods are the source of tritium for U.S. nuclear weapons. Westinghouse has a sole-source contract to produce tritium producing burnable absorber rods, which the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory designed. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has not disclosed the value of the contract, which the agency awarded in 2000. With options, the deal would run for 44 years.
The latest option, exercised in September, runs from October 2024 through September 2034, according to a procurement note the NNSA posted online Wednesday.
Once produced at Westinghouse’s Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility outside of Columbia, S.C., the rods are trucked to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors where the government-owned corporation irradiates them during power-generation cycles.
The rods then make a return trip to South Carolina where personnel at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., harvest the tritium produced in the reactors and siphon it off into reservoirs that can be installed in nuclear weapons.
Tritium, which improves the yield of modern thermonuclear weapons, decays relatively rapidly, meaning the NNSA must always produce more to maintain the arsenal’s designed destructive power.
In September, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility to operate for another 40 years. The commission licenses the parts of the facility that are not used for the NNSA tritium contract.
