The South Carolina factory that serves as one of the pillars of U.S. nuclear weapons maintenance received a 40-year license extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency said Monday.
The Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility, whose main business is making uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power reactors, was cleared to operate through Sept. 12, 2062. The license does not cover the manufacture of tritium producing burnable absorber rods for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission telegraphed its approval of the license extension in July, when the agency released an environmental impact statement that assessed the effects of 40 more years of fuel fabrication in the Westinghouse-operated facility near the South Carolina capital.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission embarked on the environmental impact statement in 2018 after a uranium leak at the site prevented the commission from fast-tracking a license extension by declaring that 40 more years of operations would have no significant environmental impact on the region. Westinghouse Government Services first asked the commission for a license extension in 2014.
Commission staff, in the July environmental impact statement, recommended a license extension on condition that Westinghouse alert federal and state government officials whenever groundwater contaminants at the facility exceed legal limits, and that the commission itself be allowed to review the facility’s environmental monitoring schema.
The Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility makes tritium producing burnable absorber rods for the NNSA. These rods are the only new sources of the radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium, which all modern thermonuclear weapons use to create more efficient, and therefore more destructive, nuclear explosions.
Tritium decays relatively rapidly, meaning that the NNSA needs a constant source of the material to keep U.S. nuclear weapons at their design destructive power. NNSA’s contract with Westinghouse, awarded in 2000, includes options for the company to manufacture tritium producing burnable absorber rods at the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility through 2044.
Rods produced at the Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility are irradiated at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 1 and Unit 2 reactors in Tennessee. These reactors produce electricity for the surrounding region, even when irradiating the rods. NNSA harvests the tritium from the irradiated rods at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., where it is packed into reservoirs for installation into nuclear weapons.
