The surging floodwaters of Hurricane Helene slightly damaged one of the two Nuclear Regulatory Commission uranium fuel fabrication plants licensed to process highly enriched uranium, Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., in Erwin, Tenn. The plant is in eastern Tennessee, just across the North Carolina line, 0.2 mile from the flooded Nolichucky River.
The Johnson City Press reported, “NFS suspended operations on Friday in response to local area flooding so that employees could get to their homes safely and also to allow the site’s essential personnel to focus solely on safety and security protocols.” Ronald Dailey, NFS president, said, “Our community has been hit hard, and we are working with local response leaders to allow focus on area recovery as the priority. NFS efforts to restart operations will be scheduled accordingly.”
The company said the plant safety systems performed properly, the nuclear material at the site “remains in a safe and secure configuration and was not impacted by weather conditions. NFS assessment teams have determined that site conditions pose no risk to the public or the environment.”
The Nolichucky River flows 115 miles through western North Carolina and East Tennessee. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the river’s flow over the Nolichucky Dam near Greenville, Tenn., after the torrential rainfall was almost twice the flow of water over Niagara Falls.
NFS is owned by BWX technologies (NYSE:BWXT, one of the stocks in the S&P 400 index) of Lynchburg, Va., which also owns the other NRC “category 1” nuclear fuel facility, located in Lynchburg. Both produce reactor fuel from low enriched and high enriched uranium. The NFS HEU is dedicated to the Navy for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. BWXT was created in a 2015 spinoff of the power sector from legendary 19th century boiler maker Babcock & Wilcox (NYSE:BW).
In service since 1959, NFS employs 1,200 – including direct employees, security workers, and contractors. The skilled workers are represented by the United Steel Workers. It is the largest employer in Unicoi county, Tenn., “providing approximately $160 million in annual payroll and benefits to employees and contract personnel who are employed in security, engineering and other technical fields.” An independent NRC inspector is stationed full-time at the plant.
In addition to its long-term mission of turning highly-enriched UF6 into uranium oxide fuel for Navy reactors, in 2018, NFS won a $505 million contract from DOE’s National Nuclear Safety Administration, in cooperation with the Tennessee Valley Authority, to downblend 20.2 tonnes of HEU into low-enriched uranium “suitable for use as commercial nuclear reactor fuel and for national defense programs.”
NFS noted that it has been mixing HEU with natural uranium to make conventional LEU reactor fuel since 1995 under DOE’s Project Sapphire. According to NFS, “Under prior contracts, NFS has downblended about 70 metric tons of HEU for the NNSA. This is the largest single downblending contract in NFS history.” The NNSA contract expires next year.
In August, BWXT announced NFS had won a NNSA contract to “complete a yearlong engineering study to evaluate options for the deployment of a centrifuge pilot plant that would establish a domestic uranium enrichment capability for national security purposes.” The contract is part of a large project to develop domestic centrifuge enrichment capacity at Oak Ridge, known as the “Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment,” with inevitable acronym of DUECE.
In its statement of work, DOE says, “The United States Government currently lacks the ability to enrich uranium to support defense missions. The last government-owned enrichment facility, the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, closed in 2013.” The agency awarded the basic contract in 2016, with a target date of 2017, which clearly didn’t work out. The dollar amount of the new contract was not disclosed.
POWER magazine reported that NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby in a speech in Tennessee in August said, “Our priority is to produce LEU to fuel tritium-producing nuclear reactors. Eventually, DUECE technology will be deployed in a pilot plant to mature and characterize the technology. Over the long term, we hope to leverage this pilot plant for future HEU production for naval nuclear propulsion.”
In other Hurricane Helene news, Bloomberg reports that floodwaters on Florida’s Gulf Coast inundated Duke Energy’s shuttered Crystal River nuclear power plant, located about 85 miles north of Tampa. The 860-MW Babcock & Wilcox pressurized water reactor went into service in 1977 after almost nine years of construction. It had a troubled history. After passing through multiple owners, Duke Energy acquired it with its 2012 takeover of Progress Energy and closed it in 2013.
A report filed last Friday (Sept. 28) with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection said a 12-foot storm surge hit the site. “The whole site was flooded, including buildings, sumps, and lift stations. Industrial Wastewater Pond #5 was observed overflowing to the ground due to the surge. We are still in the process of obtaining access and assessing the damage, but due to the nature of this event we anticipate difficulty with estimating the total discharge amount of wastewater, and impacts are unknown at this time.”
“All radioactive material has been segmented and permanently packaged in shielded containers impervious to the effects of extreme weather.” — Duke Energy
According to Bloomberg, Duke Energy issued a statement (not available on its website at this time), saying, “All radioactive material has been segmented and permanently packaged in shielded containers impervious to the effects of extreme weather.” That’s primarily a reference to the spent nuclear fuel stored at the site in steel and concrete dry casks.
–Kennedy Maize
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