The National Nuclear Security Administration last week solicited bids for a one-year study about a pilot plant to test defense uranium-enrichment technology developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Bids are due April 15, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wrote in a procurement notice posted online March 15 for the firm-fixed-price NNSA Domestic Uranium Enrichment Pilot Plant Study contract.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) is one of two domestic uranium enrichment options, along with Centrus Energy Corp.’s AC-100M, that the NNSA had been considering as the foundation for its next defense-enrichment plant, which would be the first in the U.S. since the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant shut down in 2013.
DOE wants to start enriching new defense-useable uranium by 2030 or so. In the meantime, Oak Ridge “is planning to demonstrate the DUECE technology in an engineering-scale cascade testbed at a facility located on their campus in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” the NNSA wrote in a statement of work appended to the solicitation.
Testing on the second of two planned DUECE demonstration cascades should finish in the 2029 fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30, 2029, according to a requirements report for DUECE dated January 2024 and posted online with the study solicitation.
Oak Ridge’s technology, less developed than Centrus’, has to be “tested in a pilot plant to demonstrate centrifuge reliability, production-scale cascade operations, production-rate centrifuge manufacturing, and other supporting systems,” the NNSA said in the statement of work.
NNSA estimates it has enough highly enriched uranium to meet naval propulsion into the 2050s and enough low-enriched uranium to meet national defense needs into the 2040s.
After that, the agency will need more low-enriched uranium to help produce tritium for nuclear weapons at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 and Unit 2 civilian power reactors in Tennessee.
Next, the NNSA will need more highly enriched uranium to make fuel rods for the Navy’s nuclear-powered warships and submarines.
The trilateral AUKUS agreement, under which the United Kingdom and the U.S. are helping Australia acquire nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines, has also “accelerated the need for [highly enriched uranium] for both U.S. and Australian naval propulsion needs,” according to the DUECE requirements report.
The NNSA has been careful to keep two horses in its domestic uranium enrichment race, not rushing to make a choice between the two while the slower-to-develop Oak Ridge DUECE technology caught up with Centrus’ AC100M technology.
Centrus has benefitted from a big contract from another part of DOE to produce high assay low-enriched uranium at the Portsmouth Plant near Piketon, Ohio. That potentially decade-spanning deal will give Centrus a chance to pilot AC100M technology that might one day be adapted for defense use.
The Centrus machines in Piketon now contain some foreign-made parts that carry what are known as peaceful use obligations, meaning that uranium refined with machines that contain these parts cannot be used for defense purposes, under a series of international agreements.
