New Uranium Reclamation Furnace at Y-12 Starting Up in 2026, Defense Board Says

The first of multiple bottom-loading furnaces designed to reclaim uranium scraps from the manufacture of nuclear-weapon components at the Y-12 National Security Site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is scheduled to start up in September 2026, an independent federal nuclear watchdog said recently.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to install four direct chip melt bottom load furnaces in Y-12’s Building 9215, eliminating the need to move chips from 9215 to 9212 as the agency’s site operations contractor does now. In its budget request last year, the agency said the first of the furnaces would be finished by fiscal year 2024, which runs through Sept. 30, 2023, and cost about $18.5 million.

In its latest weekly site report on Oak Ridge, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wrote that the direct chip melt “project startup date is forecast to be September 2026.”

The new furnaces will replace the current crop of front-loading furnaces and perform essentially the same function job as the old units: collect chips — excess pieces of uranium created during the processing of the fissionable material into shapes required for nuclear weapons — and melt them down so they can be used to manufacture more weapon parts instead of going to waste.

The NNSA in November awarded a new site management contract that covers Y-12 and the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas and planned to transition the incumbent, the Bechtel National-led Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS), off the sites by March 31. However, the award drew protests, including from another Bechtel-led bidder. The successor contractor would be responsible for the construction and commissioning of two new bottom-loading furnaces, according to a statement of work the NNSA released last year as part of the competition for the follow-on contract.

Consolidated Nuclear Security, however, would stay on at Y-12 to finish building the Uranium Processing Facility, which the NNSA says will be finished by December 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. The new facility will take over most of the manufacture of nuclear-weapon secondary stages and other defense-uranium tasks from the World War II-vintage Building 9212.

CNS took a little flack last year from the NNSA for delays related to the new melt chip furnaces, according to the company’s fiscal year 2020 performance evaluation summary.