Like death and taxes, the federal regulatory process continues amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by Centrus Energy’s submission of a license application to enrich a 19.75% enriched uranium fuel.
The review should be finished by June 2, 2021, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). That is almost a year sooner than the deadline the Department of Energy set for Centrus to get the license modification to make what is known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).
The Bethesda, Md.-based company is building a new 16-machine cascade based on its AC100M technology at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio. DOE wants HALEU fuel to help pilot next-generation nuclear reactors and requires Centrus to get a license to produce the material by March 1, 2022, according to the contract the agency gave the company in 2019.
In a press release Tuesday, Centrus announced the federal nuclear regulator had accepted the license application for review. The technical review will run about $740,000 for some 2,650 staff hours, according to the commission’s acceptance letter to Centrus. It will address both environmental and safety issues.
“I can’t say at this time if site visits will be necessary,” an NRC spokesperson said Thursday.
The company’s $115 million, 80-20 cost-share deal has two years of firm funding, a one-year option, and 14 milestones. Filing the application with the NRC is not one of the milestones, but getting approval to increase the allowed enrichment levels at Portsmouth — where Centrus is already licensed to enrich uranium up to 10% of the fissile uranium-235 isotope — is.
Most of the work in the first year or so of Centrus’ contract involves procuring subassemblies for the 16 centrifuges and delivering them by Dec. 15, 2020, to Portsmouth’s Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plant: the building that once housed the company’s now-canceled American Centrifuge Project. By Nov. 1, the company must re-establish a suitable security program for the site, which now again will contain fissile material and enrichment equipment. Centrus had not yet submitted its security plan to NRC, according to the commission’s Tuesday letter.
The previous major milestone on the contract was to re-establish the AC100 supply chain. The company ticked that one off in April, well ahead of the June 1 deadline.
Centrus’ new cascade would produce uranium suitable only for peaceful uses, but the rigs could be modified to produce unobligated HALEU suitable for use in nuclear weapons programs, the company has said.
The AC100 technology is one of two that DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration is considering using for a next-generation domestic enrichment facility needed in the 2040s to generate low-enriched uranium to produce tritium that boosts the explosive power of nuclear weapons.
Centrus’ technology is, according to National Nuclear Security Administration, by far the more mature of the two. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is developing the other system, sometimes called “small centrifuge.” Keeping the pressure on Centrus, the NNSA decided to delay its analysis of alternatives, essentially, the choice between the two technologies to late 2020. Last year at this time, NNSA thought it would make the choice in December 2019.
