The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Uranium Processing Facility will start up in August 2025, almost a year later than once anticipated but with months of margin to spare to reach full operational capability by the long-promised date of December 2025.
That’s according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s DNFSB latest Oak Ridge site report.
In the second week of August, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Production Office “approved the the fourth quarter fiscal year 2021 startup notification report, which changed the projected startup dates of the Uranium Processing Facility [from] (Oct. 2024 to Aug. 2025),” reads the report.
The adjustment, DNFSB wrote, was “within the schedule contingency” for the Uranium Processing Facility: the next-generation factory for nuclear-weapon secondary stages at the Y-12 National Security Complex that the NNSA will rely on for decades worth of nuclear-weapons manufacturing.
August 2025 is also within the window that the NNSA told the Government Accountability Office in 2020 that the Uranium Processing Facility would receive its startup authorization — the point in the facility’s development where it graduates from manufacturing practice secondary stages with “non hazardous surrogate material” to making a proof-of-concept secondary stage with weapons grade uranium.
The Uranium Processing Facility’s next big, formal project management milestone is Critical Decision 4, which marks the moment the factory is ready to begin mass production of secondaries, also called canned subassemblies. That’s long been on the slate for December 2025, by which point the NNSA plans to have spent no more than $6.5 billion on the plant.
Y-12 site prime Consolidated Nuclear Security will stay on the job at Y-12 to finish building the Uranium Processing Facility and get it ready for mass production, even though a new management and operations contractor — one yet to be determined at deadline — is slated to replace the Bechtel-led incumbent as soon as November. Y-12 and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, are managed under a single NNSA contract.
