Senate appropriators could slow the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan to award a uranium purification-and-conversion contract to BWX Technologies, according to a report accompanying the upper chamber’s fiscal 2020 energy and water spending bill.
The planned contract is the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch’s way of ensuring it has enough uranium to complete scheduled nuclear weapons life-extension programs in the next decade. Senators, however, worry this plan “may not be the most efficient” way of doing that, according to a detailed report appended to a 2020 spending bill approved last week by the Senate Appropriations Committee.
So, before awarding any contract to BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services, lawmakers want the NNSA “to complete an independent technical review of all options prior to commencing any work to convert uranium oxide to metal.”
Even if the full Senate approves that language — partisan fights in the upper chamber prevented lawmakers from starting debate on the bill this week — it would still have to survive conference negotiations with the House. The lower chamber in June, without attaching strings, signed off on the NNSA’s requested uranium sustainment budget of almost $95 million for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. The Senate bill also matches the request.
Legislative report language is not legally binding. However, agencies that flout report directives may wind up on the hot seat when it comes time to visit with their appropriations committees for the next budget cycle.
The NNSA’s planned Nuclear Fuel Services contract is still a ways off. While the agency announced its intention to negotiate the sole-source deal in June, it will not actually need the company’s services until 2023.
That is around the time the NNSA plans to shut down existing uranium purification systems in Building 9212 at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Bechtel National is building the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at Y-12 to replace the World War II-era Building 9212. Nuclear Fuel Services would be a supplemental stopgap between the shuttering of 9212 and the switching on of UPF, which would then handle purification and conversion for the remainder of the 30-year nuclear arsenal modernization and maintenance cycle started in 2016 by the Barack Obama administration.
Consolidated Nuclear Security manages Y-12 through September 2021, after the NNSA in 2018 picked up a two-year option on the company’s contract. The Bechtel-led incumbent took over Y-12 in 2014, and the NNSA holds options that would stretch the contract through Sept. 30, 2024.
The NNSA uses highly enriched uranium for the secondary stages of nuclear weapons, which are refurbished at Y-12. BWX Technologies, then called Babcock & Wilcox, managed Y-12 prior to Consolidated Nuclear Security.
