Consolidated Nuclear Security has received the go-ahead to install a piece of hardware at the Y-12 National Security Complex that will one day help the National Nuclear Security Administration end uranium processing in the World War II-era Building 9212 and transfer the work to the planned Uranium Processing Facility.
In a report published on June 14, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said the Department of Energy agency authorized the contractor last month to install the first planned direct chip melt bottom load furnace in Building 9215 at the Tennessee complex. The furnace will collects chips, or excess pieces of uranium created in converting the fissionable material into shapes required for nuclear weapons and reactors.
Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) currently processes chips created in Building 9215 by bringing them into 9212 and reshaping them into briquettes for storage elsewhere. Direct melt will replace that process, reclaiming chips left over from uranium processing by melting them in planned furnaces in Building 9215.
Until the furnaces are ready to go, CNS will continue making briquettes in Building 9212, according to the DNFSB. That process will have to cease before the National Nuclear Security Administration can retire the building and bring the Uranium Processing Facility online. The agency expects the replacement facility to be built by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion.
Consolidated Nuclear Security planned to install the first direct chip melt bottom load furnace at Building 9215 in October, but “issues related to throughput, vendor quality assurance, and radiological contamination led to the project being paused,” according to a DNFSB report from December.
To fix those issues, according to the DNFSB, the NNSA required a tweak to the furnace design so it would include “an integrated glovebox system and chip compaction capability.”
Adding the glove-box and chip compaction prevented possible airborne contamination that would have required furnace operators to wear respiratory protection, the DNFSB said.
Consolidated Nuclear Security is to install the last of the melt furnaces in 2024, the final year on the final option of the company’s contract to manage Y-12 and its affiliated production site, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Funding for the chip melters is book kept in the Process Technology Development line of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget for Advanced Manufacturing Development: part of the Weapons Activities appropriation that funds active nuclear weapon programs.
The White House sought about $70 million for the account for the 2020 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The request has not gone over well in Congress so far. The House Appropriations Committee recommended keeping the Process Technology Development line flat from the current budget at just over $30 million.
Neither the National Nuclear Security Administration’s 2020 budget request nor the bill report from the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee specified exactly how much money the agency wanted, or would receive from the House for direct melt furnaces.
Consolidated Nuclear Security did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
