BWXT acquires Oak Ridge site as NNSA pursues unobligated enriched uranium

The study is progressing on schedule and could inform future potential work at the site, BWXT said on April 15, when it announced the land acquisition as “an additional step in the company’s long-term commitment to rebuilding the nation’s domestic uranium enrichment capability,” saying the project could create “hundreds of new jobs in the region over the next decade and unleash millions of dollars in further investments.”

A signal: Acquiring the site is a “signal,” according to BWXT, of the company’s intent to support future defense missions by supplying unobligated enriched uranium. U.S. policy and international agreements require that any uranium used for weapons purposes—including the low-enriched uranium used to produce tritium to maintain the nation’s nuclear deterrent—be “unobligated,” or free of peaceful use restrictions. That requires that U.S.-origin uranium be enriched domestically using technology developed in the United States.

BWXT, which has a long history of providing fuel fabrication and downblending services for the federal government, has not—until receiving a DUECE engineering study contract from the NNSA in August 2024—included enrichment in its portfolio.

“The Oak Ridge community is a hub of innovation and nuclear expertise ready to support the NNSA’s national security mission,” said Kevin McCoy, president of BWXT Government Operations. “The deployment of the domestically manufactured DUECE centrifuge resets our nation on the path to energy independence.”

The options: Previously, unobligated uranium was enriched using the gaseous diffusion technology first deployed in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during the Manhattan Project. The nation’s last gaseous diffusion plant, built in Paducah, Ky., in 1952 and shut down in 2013, has yet to be replaced with a more-efficient U.S. technology.

Over the last 10 years, the DOE and NNSA have effectively supported two gas centrifuge uranium enrichment technologies for potential future production: the American Centrifuge technology that Centrus is using to produce small quantities of high-assay low-enriched uranium for power reactors, and ORNL’s DUECE, which the NNSA hopes could supply the LEU it needs for a supply of tritium and the high-enriched uranium it needs to fuel naval reactors.

As recently as December the NNSA said it “has not made a final uranium enrichment technology down-select decision at this time.”

Separately, DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy is leading acquisition efforts to provide HALEU and LEU for commercial nuclear power reactors from a range of obligated and unobligated enrichment technology options. The NNSA said in September that the two agencies “maintain coordination . . . to ensure these two missions can be executed in a complementary fashion, sharing resources where appropriate and avoiding conflicts wherever possible.”

DUECE to date: DUECE has been under development since 2016 at ORNL. According to the request for proposals for the pilot plant engineering study contract won by BWXT, researchers at ORNL would demonstrate DUECE technology in an engineering-scale cascade test bed at the lab, to be followed by the pilot plant.

According to an NNSA announcement of the contract released September 11, 2024, “The pilot plant will pave the way for eventual deployment in a defense production facility in the 2030s.” Specifically, the technology would be used to produce LEU for tritium production and “eventually” high-enriched uranium for naval nuclear propulsion.

AC100 demo? On December 20, the NNSA released a request for information for industry input on an AC100 Deployment Demonstration to “provide NNSA with data required to determine which technology or technologies may be deployed for the full range of NNSA defense mission requirements,” with “candidates including the AC100 centrifuge and [DUECE].” The RFI is still labeled as active; responses were due in February.

The enrichment technology behind the NNSA’s AC100 RFI and Centrus’s HALEU demonstration in Piketon, Ohio, was expected to serve the needs of both defense and commercial power when it was developed by the DOE beginning in the 1980s, but in the fall of 2015 the DOE cut off funding for Centrus’s ongoing AC100 LEU enrichment demonstration, and it was around that time that DUECE research began at ORNL. Later, the DOE resumed funding and in October 2019 contracted with Centrus for a cost-shared demonstration program to produce HALEU; Centrus produced its first HALEU in October 2023.