BWX Technologies has finished a uranium conversion contract for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency confirmed this week.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy weapons agency awarded the roughly $30-million contract in 2011 and extended it through June 30, 2019, at no cost. The NNSA wanted BWX Technologies to hold on to some converted uranium at the company’s Lynchburg, Va., fuel fabrication facility until the agency could pick it up.
The NNSA apparently has done so. “The contract was completed [and] expired on June 30, 2019,” an agency spokesperson said by email.
Under the pact, BWX Technologies had to purify 2 metric tons of uranium and “convert the uranium into a form meeting the chemical specifications of the contract,” according to the text of a notice for the no-cost extension the NNSA tacked onto the agreement in December.
BWX Technologies, the only commercial company in the U.S. licensed to process highly enriched uranium, has lately been flexing its muscles in the weapon-grade uranium space.
In June, the NNSA announced it wanted to negotiate a new highly enriched uranium purification and conversion contract with a BWXT subsidiary, Nuclear Fuel Services of Erwin, Tenn. The work under that contract would be similar to the one just completed, although the NNSA has declined to comment on the possible scale of the operation.
Last year, meanwhile, the NNSA gave BWXT a roughly $500-million, five-year contract to downblend some 20 metric tons of highly enriched uranium into fuel for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 1 nuclear reactor, which helps produce tritium for U.S. nuclear weapons.
