Three uranium processing systems for nuclear weapons at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., will be delayed for six months or more, a federal nuclear safety agency reported last week.
Y-12’s electrorefining and direct chip melt front-loading furnace projects each will be delayed six months, according to a recent report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNSFB), while the Building 9212 calciner project will be delayed by 13 months.
Consolidated Nuclear Security, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) management and operations contractor for Y-12, disclosed the delays to the board in a quarterly report, according to a DNFSB site inspectors’ dispatch from Oak Ridge covering the week ended May 13.
The three systems in DNFSB’s report are separate from but contribute to the greater Uranium Processing Facility that Consolidated Nuclear Security is building to replace Y-12 Building 9212 as NNSA’s manufacturing hub for nuclear-weapon secondary stages.
NNSA, about a week after the period covered in DNFSB’s report about the ancillary uranium systems, publicly acknowledged that the Uranium Processing Facility itself would be delayed by eight months, to August 2026 or so.
The roughly $107-million calcincer was supposed to be ready by September 2023 to turn low-enriched uranium liquid into a solid form suitable for storage. That project is especially troubled, DNFSB said.
“A recent project performance self-assessment team noted that the calciner project has experienced a ‘pattern of deterioration in the Project Organization’ and noted multiple instances of staff turnover in managing the calciner project,” DNFSB wrote in its May 13 Oak Ridge site report.
Meanwhile, prior to the delay disclosed last month to the DNFSB, the roughly $100-million electrorefining project was supposed to finish in time to begin radioactive operations in early 2023, Consolidated Nuclear Security said. Electrorefining will replace a wet-chemistry process in Building 9212 as NNSA’s means of recovering and purifying uranium metal found in weapons-manufacturing byproducts at Y-12.
As for the $22-million direct chip melt front loading furnace, a stopgap to buy more time to install new bottom-loading furnaces later this decade, it was supposed to be ready by June 30, only a few weeks from now.
The furnace will melt down uranium chips left over from weapons manufacturing elsewhere at Y-12, diverting the material back into the manufacturing stream and preventing it from going to waste.
Designing and installing new furnaces has proved technically challenging, sending Consolidated Nuclear security back to the drawing board once already and dashing hopes of getting the equipment installed by 2018.
