The Tennessee Valley Authority extended a contract for defense uranium processing with BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services, the company announced Wednesday.
Under the two year, $122-million extension, Nuclear Fuel Services, Erwin, Tenn., will continue converting highly enriched uranium into low-enriched uranium for use in National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nuclear weapons programs until June 2027.
The NNSA uses the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 and Unit 2 civilian nuclear power reactors to produce the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium for nuclear weapons. The agency says it needs domestic uranium for this purpose and has been providing some from its own private stock of surplus.
Nuclear Fuel Services is the only U.S. commercial facility licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to work with highly enriched uranium.
The NNSA in 2023 announced it had restarted a competition to build a new domestic uranium enrichment facility that could produce low- and highly enriched uranium for defense programs from scratch.
The competition to build the new facility had for years been a two-horse race between Centrus Energy Corp. and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
