It might be possible to produce low-enriched uranium domestically by 2023, including material suitable for nuclear-weapon programs, the Department of Energy said this week in a long-awaited report about restarting end-to-end nuclear fuel production in the United States.
Broadly, the plan provides what Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette framed as a “road map” for rebooting a domestic nuclear-fuel market that has gone mostly dormant. The Energy Department’s plan involves creating a U.S. uranium reserve, then using the new reserve to jump-start domestic uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment.
As the Donald Trump administration has often framed its initiatives to bolster domestic industry and manufacturing, Brouillette said aiding the civilian nuclear power industry would be a boon for national security, including for programs managed by the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
“U.S. national security truly is integrated with the health of the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” Brouillette said Thursday on a conference call with reporters. “The U.S. needs a strong civil nuclear industry to ensure our national security.”
The report is the product of a White House-led working group that includes DOE and other agencies. The group began its work earlier this year when the State Department found that reliance on foreign uranium was a national security threat. The document includes work done by the U.S. Nuclear Fuel Working Group created in 2017 to review national nuclear energy policy. The older group has yet to produce a report of its own.
Brouillette said the road map released Thursday, if fully funded and followed, would not negatively affect the NNSA’s plans to replenish the defense-uranium stockpile in the 2040s to ensure a supply of tritium for nuclear weapons.
The energy secretary added that all-domestic enrichment technology, such as the cascade Centrus Energy Corp. is developing at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, will be critical to the agency’s efforts to ensure an adequate supply of defense-usable uranium.
Brouillette also repeated longstanding agency reasoning: that the uranium mined, refined, and enriched in the U.S. is the only kind suitable for U.S. nuclear weapons. Uranium acquired from foreign markets, or which was converted or enriched with technology from other countries could carry peaceful use restrictions. Such restrictions are intended to prevent unintentional nuclear-arms proliferation by a country that wants to export nuclear-power technology or materials.
DOE’s new road map “doesn’t impact the NNSA,” and “it isn’t robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Brouillette said. The plan, if followed, “enhances” the NNSA’s mission, Brouillette said.
The Energy Department officially unveiled the idea for a uranium reserve earlier this year, requesting $150 million for the plan in the 2021 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. That will cover mostly early planning efforts involving perhaps the equivalent of half a dozen full-time employees, according to DOE’s 2021 budget request.
The agency said then it would contract two domestic uranium mines to start filling up the reserve in 2021, and issue a contract to convert yellowcake from the mines into uranium hexafluoride suitable for enrichment. On Thursday, Brouillette said the agency was still deciding where the reserve itself would be located.
Honeywell’s Metropolis Works facility in Metropolis, Ill., is the only U.S.-owned commercial conversion plant, and it is idle. There has been no domestic enrichment plant, ever since Centrus — then U.S. Enrichment Corp. — shut down the one at DOE’s Paducah Site in Kentucky in 2013. Centrus has since imported Russian uranium, earning it ire from powerful lawmakers including Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), whose state includes uranium mines. The U.K.-owned URENCO enrichment plant in New Mexico is still operational.
The NNSA ultimately will foot the bill for the next domestic enrichment capability, for which either Centrus or DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will supply the technology. The agency plans to choose between the two technologies by Dec. 31, about a year later than it previously said it would. Earlier this year, an NNSA official said the Oak Ridge technology needs more time to develop before facing off against Centrus.
Centrus, led by former Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman, is getting a leg up in the NNSA competition from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which is funding the company’s 16-machine demonstration cascade under an 80-20 cost share contract worth up to $115 million over three years. The deal has two years of firm funding and is intended to produced a 19.75% uranium-235 fuel called high-assay low-enriched uranium for pilot reactor projects.
Congress must approve the Energy Department’s proposed uranium reserve, which would subsume the existing American Assured Fuel Supply. That hoard, created in 2011, held about six reactor reloads’ worth of low-enriched uranium as of 2019, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute industry group. The new reserve would hold almost another 30 reactor loads’ worth of low-enriched fuel: about what the Nuclear Energy Institute recommended the Trump administration add to the reserve.
The report released Thursday estimates that, if Congress approves the 2021 budget request as proposed, the U.S. could be on its way to enriching uranium “possibly in the 2023 timeframe.” The report says 25% of that output would be unobligated — that is, suitable for use in the NNSA’s tritium programs. The agency relies on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 reactor to produce tritium, with Unit 2 to begin production late this year. Tritium boosts the yield of nuclear weapons. The radioactive hydrogen isotope naturally decays over a few years and must be replaced periodically
The Nuclear Energy Institute last year estimated it would take about 53 metric tons of low-enriched uranium a year to meet defense needs.
Elsewhere in the report, DOE said it planned to stop the policy of bartering uranium to pay for legacy nuclear-weapon cleanup at the Portsmouth Site. Cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has long preferred such an arrangement, which is dependent on Congress’ willingness to appropriate enough funding for DOE to pay its enrichment-cleanup bills in Ohio without having to dip into uranium reserves that the contractor then has to flip on the open market.
