Nuclear Power Related Media Thread, page-4479

Our old mate Clay is on the front foot again!!


the military's tritium problem is a window into the larger LEU (Low Enriched Uranium) supply crisis. This gets a bit deep, but I promise it's worth it.The NNSA is the part of the DoE that stockpiles HEU from retired warheads. Their new $24 billion budget includes the largest increase in their history and producing tritium is a part of that. Tritium is a critical part of every nuclear warhead, but it depletes about 5% per year. So, it must be replaced periodically to maintain the US nuclear deterrent.Tritium is made in reactors fueled with LEU. But, it must be a reactor that doesn't use Russian LEU and Urenco and Orano are forbidden (by European laws) from supplying LEU to reactors that produce tritium for military use. That also means Centrus can't supply it, either. Making military tritium requires All-American LEU!The solution has been to downblend HEU from the NNSA's retired warhead stockpile to make LEU for TVA's Watts Bar (commercial) nuclear plant, which produces the military's tritium. BWXT was awarded contracts totaling $627 million to continue this downblending. This is part of Project Sapphire. The NNSA uses HEU from the military stockpile, but that stockpile is also needed to fuel any new nuclear ships (AUKUS plus SMRs) that the military might build in the future. The US currently has no means to produce any more HEU.Downblending HEU to make LEU is an incredible waste of this precious resource. It will cost many more times more to replace it (and we will have to replace it). But, the military is stuck. They have no choice, because the US does not have an enrichment plant that can produce military LEU and none of our allies will provide it, either.By the way, this is the same downblending process as in the Megatons to Megawatts program, during the Clinton era. Russia was amazed we paid them to destroy precious HEU to make LEU. It should have been turned into HALEU and the US should have built centrifuges to make LEU. But, Russia shut up and took our money for decades of LEU shipments that destroyed our domestic uranium industry (mining, conversion and enrichment). There seems to be no limit to what US taxpayers will pay to make the world feel safer.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-aw…bwxt.com/news/2024/02/1…energy.gov/nnsa/budgetSo, how is this relevant to the commercial nuclear sector today? It shows how important the new Centrus cascade is to the US military and it begs the question, why have they not already built the 11,500 centrifuges required to produce LEU at scale? The only plausible explanation seems to be because they are confident about some newer technology filling the supply gap (before the NNSA stockpile runs out), such as laser enrichment.#Uranium $CCJ $SLX.AX $LEU $BWXT