The DOE picks six HALEU deconverters. What have we learned?

What do the chosen companies say about the future for HALEU fuels? A HALEU deconversion facility, licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a Category II fuel cycle facility equipped to handle HALEU enriched to between 10 and 20 percent uranium-235, could be co-located with either an enrichment facility or a fuel fabrication facility, or it could stand alone. These six contracts are going to an enricher (Centrus), a would-be enricher with experience in deconversion (Orano), and four fuel fabricators, some with specific advanced reactor designs—their own or a partner’s—that they want to fuel: BWX Technologies, Framatome, GE Vernova, and Westinghouse.

Details: Exactly which of these deconverters will get substantial market share and which advanced reactor designs the HALEU could fuel is unclear, but each of the six companies will receive a minimum contract of $2 million, with up to $800 million available for deconversion services over the 10-year contract period. The DOE is looking for 290 metric tons of HALEU during those 10 years—“an amount DOE believes will be sufficient to facilitate a domestic, commercial HALEU fuel cycle”—according to the DOE’s final HALEU environmental impact statement (EIS), also released yesterday.

The DOE’s deconversion RFP was released in November 2023, 42 days before an enrichment RFP in January 2024. That “divide and contract” approach to the front end of the fuel cycle was introduced in draft RFPs released in June 2023. All front-end activities, from mining through the storage of deconverted HALEU, are grouped together for contracting purposes under either the enrichment or the deconversion RFP. The enrichment RFP includes mining and milling, conversion, enrichment (which may be performed at two separate locations), and storage of UF₆. The deconversion RFP includes transportation of enriched UF₆, deconversion to oxide and metal, and storage. The DOE’s work on the HALEU Availability Program was authorized in the Energy Act of 2020.

What do the awardees have to say? Each of the six awardees spoke yesterday on the DOE’s decision.

BWXT: BWXT, a U.S. publicly traded company based in Lynchburg, Va., announced its Nuclear Fuel Services subsidiary as “one of the successful bidders.” BWXT is building microreactors under contract with the Defense Department for Project Pele and DRACO and is the only fuel fabricator with Category I fuel facilities (in Erwin, Tenn., and Lynchburg, Va.) equipped to handle HALEU and high-enriched uranium fuels. BWXT has experience downblending HEU and is working on HALEU TRISO fuel fabrication with plans to develop a larger-scale TRISO fuel production line; BWXT Advanced Technologies is developing its BANR reactor.

Centrus: “This award is an important step toward expanding and diversifying the capabilities of our Ohio facility,” said Amir Vexler, Centrus president and chief executive officer in a company press release yesterday. Centrus, a U.S. publicly traded company based in Bethesda, Md., and created in 2014 after a restructuring of USEC Inc., is demonstrating HALEU enrichment in Piketon, Ohio, under contract with the DOE and has announced HALEU supply agreements with companies including Advanced Reactor Concepts, Oklo, TerraPower, and X-energy.

Framatome: Framatome Inc., based in Lynchburg, Va., is a subsidiary of Paris-based company Framatome, which is majority owned by EDF Group, an electric utility owned by the French government. Framatome has a Category III fuel fabrication facility in Richland, Wash., and patented a dry conversion process at the site in 1989. “For more than 30 years, this environmentally friendly process has been utilized for commercial nuclear fuel production and is the foundation for producing HALEU for advanced reactors,” Framatome said yesterday, adding that the company “is working closely with nuclear reactor developers and the DOE to ensure the supply chain establishment of HALEU meets their needs at this critical time in nuclear energy progress.”

GE Vernova: GE Vernova, a U.S. publicly traded company based in Cambridge, Mass., is the owner (with joint venture partner Hitachi Ltd.) of Global Nuclear Fuel, which operates a Category III fuel fabrication facility in Wilmington, N.C. GE Vernova said its HALEU work “could involve deconverting uranium hexafluoride gas to a metal and oxide that will be transported and stored until there is a need for it to be manufactured into fuel for advanced nuclear reactors.” GNF and TerraPower are partnering on plans for a Category II metallic fast reactor fuel facility in North Carolina. A GE Vernova spokesperson confirmed to Nuclear News that GE will “continue to take steps to be positioned to serve the advanced fuels market including oxide and metal forms.”

Orano: Orano USA, based in Bethesda, Md., is a subsidiary of Paris-based company Orano Group, which is majority owned by the French government, and said that for its HALEU deconversion bid, “Orano formed a team bringing together the best-in-class capabilities and experience of its affiliates led by Orano Federal Services (Orano FS) with teaming partners including Fluor, Spectra Tech, Shine Technologies, and others.” Like Framatome, Orano points to “decades of deconversion expertise.” (The two companies were once both part of the same company—Areva.) Unlike Framatome, Orano is also a potential enricher, and announced last month that Oak Ridge, Tenn., is where it wants to build a new enrichment facility

Westinghouse: Westinghouse, based in Cranberry Township, Pa., is owned—after a deal that closed in November 2023—by two publicly traded companies headquartered in Canada: Brookfield, a global investment company, and Cameco, a uranium company. Westinghouse, which has a Category III fuel fabrication facility in Columbia, S.C., and extensive light water reactor experience, is marketing its HALEU-fueled eVinci microreactor with plans for a test reactor at Idaho National Laboratory’s DOME, and is developing a lead-cooled fast reactor.

What does the EIS say about deconversion? The DOE’s final EIS follows a draft released in March and analyzes potential impacts of proposed actions at sites that for the most part have yet to be determined, which makes for an unusual EIS, bounded in part by existing U.S. experience with the low-enriched uranium fuel cycle.

“The release of this final EIS comes after months of hard work to consider the environmental effects of commercial HALEU production,” said acting assistant secretary for nuclear energy Mike Goff. “The analysis has been strengthened by public involvement at various stages of the process and the conclusion of the EIS brings us one step closer to establishing a secure, domestic HALEU supply.”

The DOE wants its HALEU enrichment and deconversion contracts to result in the production of 290 MT of HALEU over a 10-year period. Given that Category II facilities would need a few years for construction, once built, the EIS assumes a production rate of 50 MT per year.

Production at that rate “would require the conversion of about 75 MT of HALEU as UF₆ into a form suitable for fabrication into reactor fuel. This could be 50 MT of uranium metal, 57 MT of uranium dioxide (i.e., UO₂), or an equivalent amount in another chemical form,” according to the EIS, which also states, “Although deconversion into either a uranium metal or UO₂ has been assumed for this EIS, the form of HALEU to be stored or provided to fuel fabricators is not ripe for a decision.”

The processes for deconverting UF₆ to oxide or metal are “well-understood technologies and performed routinely” for LEU and depleted uranium, and the HALEU EIS focuses on those techniques. “Although not analyzed, construction and operation of a HALEU deconversion facility that would produce other unique forms of HALEU would be expected to have similar impacts,” the EIS states.