Members are Congress are keeping the pressure on the Department of Energy to explain why it gave Centrus Energy Corp. a sole-source contract to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel using a brand new, domestic-built cascade.
Senators pressed now-Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette for details during the latter’s confirmation process, which wrapped up successfully last week after Brouillette was sworn in as the 15th head of the Department of Energy.
Following the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s nomination hearing on Nov. 14, members submitted follow-up questions to Brouillette, who at the time was deputy secretary of energy.
Committee Ranking Member Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said the Energy Department had not submitted information including the uranium production schedule and funding amounts under the Centrus contract.
“Will you please provide the Committee with a breakdown of activities, cost, timeline and any additional documentation that the Department of Energy used to justify its rationale for selecting Centrus,” he wrote. “And if any of the information is business sensitive or involves classified information will you make that available in the appropriate secure setting?”
Brouillette promised he would explain, “[t]o the extent legally permissible,” why DOE awarded Centrus a roughly $115 million sole-source, 80-20 cost-share contract for the company to build a 16-machine cascade of AC100-M centrifuges at DOE’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio.
In his own set of written questions to Brouillette, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Undersecretary of Energy Mark Menezes failed in a March message to address questions the lawmaker posed earlier in the year to DOE about the contract.
“I asked if DOD required only U.S.-origin nuclear technology for electricity procurement or civilian energy use at DOD installations,” Barrasso wrote. “I also asked if the ‘U.S.-origin’ requirement for nuclear technology extended to the entirely of the nuclear fuel supply chain.”
In his response, Brouillette wrote that deals “currently in place with foreign suppliers of uranium limit its use for certain defense activities, including use for naval reactors and weapons programs, making the material produced from these sources ‘obligated’ for peaceful uses.
“Utilizing “unobligated” uranium to power defense installations would obviate applicable foreign supplier restrictions on supplied fuel,” Brouillette added. “In such cases, ‘unobligated’ uranium requires U.S.-produced uranium, meaning uranium that is mined and milled in the United States or extracted in the United States, via in situ extraction.”
The Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy finalized Centrus’ contract in early November, but the Bethesda, Md., nuclear fuel supplier started work on the project under an undefinitized contract on May 21. The agency announced its intent to award the sole-source deal in January.
About a week after DOE finalized Centrus’ deal, the House Science, Space, and Technology investigations and oversight subcommittee started its own bipartisan probe into Centrus’ contract, which calls for the company headed by former Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman to produce 600 kilograms of high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel by June 1, 2020. The fuel, which would include about 20% uranium-235, could help with DOE research on advanced nuclear reactors, which the agency wants to help commercialize.
The House Science subcommittee wanted DOE to answer a long list of questions by Dec. 3. A subcommittee spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday about whether DOE met the deadline.
Centrus’ AC100 technology is one of two enrichment technologies the National Nuclear Security Administration is considering for a next-generation domestic enrichment cascade that could serve defense needs. The semi-autonomous DOE agency will need a new source of defense-usable uranium in the 2040s to help produce tritium for nuclear weapons. The agency plans to choose between the two before the end of 2019.
