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 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recommended a 40-year renewal for the operating license at Westinghouse Government Services’ Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in the Columbia, S.C., area in a final environmental impact statement published Friday.
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. NRC wound up putting the plant through an environmental impact statement after a 2018 uranium leak, one of a number of environmental issues at the plant, prevented fast-tracking the license-extension via a finding of no significant impact.
The Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility provides uranium fuel for commercial power plants and has also converted some of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) stock of highly enriched uranium down to low-enriched uranium.
The NRC 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. The rods are irradiated at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Barr Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors.
That process produces tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope that is then shipped back to South Carolina’s Savannah River Site to be harvested and transferred to reservoirs that are installed in nuclear weapons. Modern thermonuclear weapons use tritium to increase the efficiency of nuclear explosions, assuring that aging weapons still possess the destructive power for which they were designed.
Westinghouse has a sole-source contract to produce tritium producing burnable absorber rods for the NNSA. In 2017, as part of its Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan for 2018, the NNSA said it extending the contract, originally awarded to Wesdyne, for nine years.
