The South Carolina plant that puts together the rods that help the National Nuclear Security Administration top off the tritium reservoirs of U.S. nuclear weapons cleared an environmental hurdle last week that sets the facility up to operate for another 40 years.
The extension, recommended July 29 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would more than cover even the lengthy, long-term contract the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) gave Westinghouse Government Services in 2000 to make tritium producing burnable absorber rods (TPBAR) at the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility near Columbia, S.C.
The rods are irradiated in a pair of Tennessee Valley Authority reactors to produce the radioactive hydrogen isotope required to keep U.S. nuclear weapons at their design destructive power levels.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s renewal recommendation was part of a Final Environmental Impact Statement published last week. The document makes official a preliminary recommendation the NRC published about one year ago, in 2021.
Westinghouse has sought a 40-year extension since 2014. The commission wound up putting the plant through an environmental impact statement after a 2018 uranium leak, one of a number of environmental issues at the facility. That prevented fast-tracking the license-extension via a finding of no significant impact.
Westinghouse Government Services’ TPBAR fabrication contract with the NNSA would, if the agency exercises all of its options, run for 44 years. The agency awarded the deal in 2000. After a four-year startup period, the contract’s 10-year base kicked in. The deal has three 10-year options after the base and Westinghouse is currently producing TPBARs under option number four, which runs from 2014 to 2024, an NNSA spokesperson said Friday.
The spokesperson declined to provide the financial terms of the decades-spanning contract with Westinghouse Government Services, which at the time of the award was doing business as WesDyne International.
Westinghouse cranks out about 1,500 TPBARs annually at the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility, which also provides uranium fuel for commercial power plants and has converted some of the NNSA’s stock of highly enriched uranium down to low-enriched uranium.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not regulate the manufacture of tritium producing burnable absorber rods at the Columbia facility. The process does not require the use of radioactive materials.
TPBAR are irradiated at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors and are then shipped back to South Carolina for tritium harvesting by DOE contractors at the agency’s Savannah River Site. The tritium gets transferred to reservoirs that are installed in nuclear weapons. Modern thermonuclear weapons use tritium to increase the efficiency of nuclear explosions.
