The Tennessee Valley Authority was in the process of securing approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to increase production of tritium for nuclear weapons in one of the company’s reactors by November 2024, according to its latest annual earnings report.
That date, disclosed in the authority’s latest 10-k filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, narrows the timeline the government-owned corporation provided earlier this year, when it disclosed that it was in the process of applying for license amendment to increase the tritium output of Watts Bar Unit 1 by roughly the beginning of fiscal year 2025 to meet sharply rising demand from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for the radioactive hydrogen isotope.
Watts Bar Unit 1 has made tritium since 2003 and, after the planned license amendment, would be allowed to produce the gas by irradiating up to 2,500 tritium producing burnable absorber rods during its every 18-month power generating cycle. That’s almost 1,000 more than the reactor has recently irradiated per cycle.
Tritium, which makes modern thermonuclear weapons more destructive, decays over time and must be produced constantly to keep the U.S. arsenal at its designed destructive power.
Watts Bar Unit 2 also produces tritium. The reactor began irradiating tritium rods in late 2020 but has so far produced less tritium than the NNSA hoped. Part of the issue was the reactor’s failing steam generators, which the Tennessee Valley Authority replaced in July.
With four major warhead refurbishments and one new build on the slate for the 2020s, the NNSA wants the reactors to produce a combined 2,800 grams of tritium annually beginning in the government’s 2025 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, 2024. That’s more than double what the agency once thought it would need for this round of weapons modernization.
