Vestinghaus: one billion dollars into a new advanced LEU+ fuel plant in the U.S.

American company Vestinghaus announced an investment of one billion dollars in the construction of the first new nuclear fuel plant at the fleet-level in the U.S. in more than 50 years. The new facility will be built within the existing Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility complex in South Carolina, and the start of operation is planned for 2030

New factory will be dedicated exclusively to the production of LEU+ fuel (enriched uranium with isotope U-235 content higher than the previous standard limit of 5%, in the range between 5% and 10%). This fuel enables significantly higher reactor efficiency, longer operating cycles (transition from 18 to 24 months of operation without interruption) and increased power of existing nuclear power plants (uprating). The project is directly aligned with the UPRISE program of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), which aims to raise the capacity of the existing American nuclear fleet by as much as 5 GW by 2029 due to rising demand for baseload energy.

Unlike the 1968 plant whose technology does not meet the requirements for high enrichment, the new factory will use an advanced “dry” production process (similar to the one at the company's facility in the United Kingdom) with high automation and state-of-the-art safety standards. According to economic studies, the investment will over the next 10 years generate nearly 5 billion dollars of positive economic impact in South Carolina.

How is uranium enriched?

Natural uranium mined from the earth consists of over 99.2% of the U-238 isotope and only about 0.7% of the fissile isotope U-235, which is required to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. To produce commercial fuel, natural uranium is chemically processed into a gaseous form (uranium hexafluoride) which is then fed into cascades of gas centrifuges rotating at extremely high speeds. Because of the negligible difference in isotope mass, heavier molecules with the U-238 isotope are pushed toward the outer walls of the centrifuges, while lighter molecules with the U-235 isotope are again slightly more concentrated in the center. By repeating this process through thousands of interconnected centrifuges, the share of the fissile isotope U-235 is gradually raised to the desired level (from 0.7% to 3–5% for traditional LEU fuel, or up to 10% for LEU+). After that, the enriched gas is reconverted into a solid powder (uranium dioxide), from which pressed ceramic fuel pellets (bricks) are made.

Comment

This topic is extremely interesting and this time we must comment on it in more detail. Because when we talk about the growth in demand for electricity and nuclear energy as (in our view—the only ecologically and socially sustainable method of ensuring baseload supply), the construction of new reactors always comes to the forefront. However, this Vestinghaus investment points to several important but often poorly addressed dimensions of the energy transition. 

First and foremost, this is about optimizing the existing fleet. By introducing LEU+ fuel, operators can extract hundreds of additional megawatts of clean baseload energy from already built reactors, without the need for long and expensive investments in constructing new power plants. 

As we reported a few weeks ago about Framatome's contract for the first commercial delivery of LEU+ fuel for a U.S. reactor, the use of low-enriched uranium with enrichment above 5% represents the largest and most cost-effective technological and operational innovation for the conventional reactor fleet in the last few decades. Reducing downtime during the fuel replacement cycle and extending operation from 18 to 24 months bring enormous savings and radically increase the capacity factor of already-built power plants – providing the fastest solution to increasing electricity production; far faster than design and construction of new production capacities.  

The second thing we note – and which we will address going forward – is that building and maintaining fuel supply chains are just as important as building new capacities, but we will discuss this in more detail in the future.  

S.A.