At a top-secret facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, workers are turning old, unexploded nuclear warheads into fuel that will power cities, CNN reported.
The recipe for creating advanced reactor fuel involves melting low-enriched weapons-grade uranium in a crucible — a massive metal cauldron heated to about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit — to turn its contents into a molten soup.
Out of the furnace, the glowing orange vessel filled with hot liquid uranium slowly descends into a cooling chamber. The solidified end product, which looks like charcoal black, can be safely held in the hand.
This fuel will power America's next generation of nuclear reactors -- small, modular power plants that are easier and cheaper to build. They require much less maintenance and space than the aging fleet of large nuclear power plants.
One drawback? For them, more enriched and more energy-dense uranium is needed.
Until last year, the US got most of its enriched uranium from Russia. A law passed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine put an end to that. Now scientists and companies are racing to produce it on the territory of the country. Recycling old weapons from the nuclear arsenal isn't the only way to produce this fuel, known as high-enriched low-enriched uranium — or HALEU for short. Several facilities in the country also produce it, and in the long term they are expected to produce the majority of the fuel. In the coming months, the federal government is expected to release more than $2 billion to uranium enrichment companies to help jump-start the supply chain.
At the same time, federal authorities are searching for suitable nuclear fuel that may have slipped into the country despite sanctions against Russia, said Michael Goff, assistant secretary of the Energy Department's Office of Nuclear Energy.
In addition to the US nuclear stockpile, the Idaho National Laboratory is also reducing some of its collection of research reactor fuel.
The fact that the U.S. is looking to its own arsenal for nuclear fuel shows just how big the fight is to get new-age reactors up and running -- like TerraPower, the Bill Gates-backed Wyoming project that recently started operating.
Projects like TerraPower are waiting for fuel supplies, but fear their time may be running out. The company was due to receive its first fuel supplies from Russia - the world's only commercial supplier of HALEU.
This changed after the war in Ukraine.
"We're getting to the point where we need to see more urgency from the government," said Jeff Navin, director of external affairs for TerraPower.
"There is a huge national interest in moving quickly." We do not fully understand why the same sense of urgency has not reached the Department of Energy to export this material,” added Naveen.
After all, the amount of HALEU the US can obtain from its nuclear stockpile is relatively small. A larger production line will be needed.
"The long-term solution is that we have to have enrichment," said Jeff Chamberlin, a defense expert on nuclear nonproliferation.
"Even if we were to lower the enrichment level of all this material tomorrow, we would not be able to satisfy the demonstration needs of all the companies for advanced reactors that the U.S. has requested right now," he stressed. | BGNES
