The Department of Energy has yet to reply to an angry letter from Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) demanding details about the agency’s plan to help Centrus Energy Corp. build a new uranium enrichment cascade in Ohio.
A Senate aide said Friday that DOE had not respond to the Jan. 23 letter, despite Barrasso’s request for written answers to nine questions by Feb. 8. A DOE spokesperson did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Earlier in January, DOE’s Nuclear Energy Oak Ridge Site Office in Tennessee said it would issue Centrus subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating LLC a contract worth up to $115 million over three years to build a brand new series of its AC-100M centrifuges at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio. The 16 machines would by October 2020 produce an unspecified quantity of 19.75-percent enriched uranium fuel product known as high-assay low-enriched uranium.
Barrasso — whose home state is by far the largest employer of uranium miners in the nation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — has complained that Congress did not authorize or fund the planned Centrus centrifuge demo in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
The powerful Republican and chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee wanted to know, among other things, how much uranium Centrus would need for the demonstration and whether any commercial spinoff of the demonstration centrifuge would be required to refine only U.S.-origin uranium.
Centrus, the one-time U.S. Enrichment Corp. run by former Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman, would build the new cascade at the same DOE property that once housed the much larger American Centrifuge industrial-scale enrichment demonstration. The Energy Department defunded that demo in 2015, and the company has since demolished it.
The new enrichment cascade to be built for the Nuclear Energy office could refine uranium usable for defense purposes, unlike the now-demolished American Centrifuge Project. The canceled demo included parts that were not of U.S. origin, or which carried international peaceful-use restrictions that precluded their use for defense programs.
The NNSA estimates it will not need a new domestic enrichment facility until 2014. Until then, the agency will get the low-enriched uranium it needs for tritium production by downblending its own stock of highly enriched uranium. BWX Technologies’ Nuclear Fuel Services, of Edwin, Tenn., will handle that work, downblending more than 20 metric tons of the material under a seven-year, $505 million contract awarded in 2018.
Tritium gas boosts the explosive power of nuclear weapons. The gas decays rapidly, so weapons need their reservoirs refilled periodically.
The NNSA still plans to complete an analysis of alternatives for a domestic enrichment capability by December 2019, Kelly Cummins, agency program executive officer for strategic materials, said last week at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Arlington, Va. The analysis will select the agency’s preferred enrichment technology; Centrus’ AC-100 technology is in the running, along with separate enrichment technology developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
