ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has delayed its choice about whether to use government or commercially developed uranium enrichment technology for defense needs by nearly a year, in part, because the federal option is not yet mature enough to compete, an agency official said here Wednesday.
“That’s one of the reasons, not the only, but one of the reasons,” Michael Thompson, NNSA assistant deputy administrator for major modernization programs, said in a question-and-answer session at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
Late last year, the semiautonomous Energy Department branch told Congress it was delaying a decision on whether to use the Oak Ridge enrichment technology or Bethesda, Md.-based Centrus Corp.’s AC100 technology as the basis for the next U.S., defense-usable uranium refineries. The agency had for years planned to choose between the two in December 2019.
Centrus’ “AC100 technology is mature enough, we think, to compete,” Thompson said. “[T]he small centrifuge being pursued by Oak Ridge National Lab is in the process of maturing and we want to make sure that that is at an appropriate point so that we can have, essentially, two choices.”
Thompson said there are “some other potential outside vendors … that may compete down the road, but I would say those are probably less mature and more aspirational at this stage.”
Thompson did not identify these vendors by name. He said the NNSA planned to wrap up its analysis of alternatives between Oak Ridge and Centrus “at the end of this year,” then “start the acquisition process formally to deploy an enrichment technology in the 20s.”
Centrus, the former U.S. Enrichment Corp. that emerged from bankruptcy reorganization in 2014, has been busy buffing up for the competition with Oak Ridge.
In 2019, DOE’s Nuclear Energy Oak Ridge Site Office gave Centrus a three-year 80/20 cost-share contract — worth about $115 million, including a two-year base and a one-year option — to build a 16-machine cascade of AC100-M centrifuges at DOE’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio.
The machines will be constructed only from U.S. parts, making them potentially usable for defense programs — something that Centrus’ now-decommissioned American Centrifuge Project, built in the same Portsmouth building that will house the new cascade, could not. The old project included some international parts that, according to the Department of Energy, could only be used for peaceful purposes, under international agreements.
The DOE science office wants the 16-machine Centrus cascade to produce, by October 2020, a test batch of high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel containing about 20% uranium-235. The fuel could be used to help DOE develop a fleet of next-generation nuclear reactors, the agency has said.
Whatever domestic enrichment technology the NNSA chooses would initially be used to produce low-enriched uranium that could be used in generating tritium — that radioactive hydrogen isotope that increases the yield of nuclear weapons. Eventually, the NNSA will need high-enriched and weapons-grade uranium for nuclear naval fuel and future nuclear-weapon refurbishments.
