Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff recommended granting a 40-year license extension to Westinghouse Government Services’ Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in South Carolina, which among other things manufactures the rods used to restock the tritium reservoirs of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The recommendation was part of a draft environmental impact statement published Friday.
The 40-year extension would kick in on the date the NRC approves the extension. Currently, the Columbia-area facility’s license to manufacture low-enriched uranium fuel assemblies for is set to expire in September 2027. NRC last renewed the facility’s license in 2007 for 20 years.
The NRC can approve the 40-year license extension only after the commission publishes a final environmental impact statement — something the commission will not do until it takes public comments on Friday’s draft.
NRC started work on the environmental impact statement for the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in 2020 after a 2018 uranium leak at the facility prevented the commission from fast-tracking a license extension via a finding of no significant impact. Westinghouse first asked for the 40-year extension in 2014.
Following the 2018 leak, the 40-year license extension NRC has preliminarily recommended would come with a couple new conditions. First, Westinghouse would have to ping the federal and state governments whenever groundwater contaminants at the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility exceed legal levels. Second, the company must eventually let NRC review the facility’s environmental monitoring and sampling programs.
Besides the commercial market, Westinghouse has also supplied the government with low-enriched uranium from the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility. The plant has down blended government-owned highly-enriched uranium that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) needs to produce tritium for nuclear weapons using civilian-operated commercial nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile, NNSA also holds options on a contract with Westinghouse that call for the company to manufacture tritium producing burnable absorber rods at the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility into the 2040s.
