The Department of Energy selected four companies to provide enrichment services to help establish a U.S. supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The selected companies are Louisiana Energy Services (which operates the Urenco USA enrichment plant in Eunice, NM), Orano Federal Services (a subsidiary of Orano USA), General Matter (appears to be a recently formed company), and Centrus (operator of the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, OH).

According to DoE, "the contracts will allow the companies to bid on work for enrichment services, a key piece of the high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) supply chain." These contracts are part of the program to establish domestic enrichment capacity in the United States.

UPDATE: World Nuclear News reports that

According to publicly available information, General Matter Inc is a company that was registered in California earlier this year, with Scott Nolan named as its CEO. Nolan, a former SpaceX employee, is a partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund which was co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

Urenco USA installed first centrifuges as part of the project to expand the capacity of the enrichment plant in Eunice, NM. The company confirmed that the the current phase of expansion will increase the capacity of the plant by 700 tonnes of SWU per year and that the cascades will become operational in 2025. The Eunice site "has the physical space and license to further expand its annual production up to 10 million SWU." The facility began operations in 2010.

The expansion is intended to take advantage of the Department of Energy program aimed at boosting the production of enriched uranium in the United States.

US National Nuclear Security Administration reported the completion of the production of the first plutonium pit for the W87-1 Modification Program. The NNSA reported that

Plutonium pit manufacturing was completed at LANL, with Livermore Laboratory responsible for the pit design and KCNSC [Kansas City National Security Campus] responsible for production of non-nuclear components.

This process is part of the effort to rebuild the capability to manufacture plutonium pits. The production was stopped in 1989. The goal of the current program is to reach the capacity of 30 pits per year at LANL and "no fewer than 80 pits a year" across the nuclear enterprise.

The W87-1 warhead will be deployed on the Sentinel ICBM, which is currently under development.

France's state-owned company Orano announced a plan to build a large enrichment facility in the United States. The facility will be located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The company apparently plans to use the funds allocated by the US Department of Energy to boost domestic enrichment capacity.

In 2008, Orano's predecessor, Areva, had a plan to build an enrichment facility, known as Eagle Rock Enrichment Facility, EREF, in Idaho. The project, however, was abandoned in 2011 and Orano USA withdrew the license in 2018.

INS Arighat, India's second nuclear-powered submarine, was commissioned into the Indian Navy on 29 August 2024 (see also a post on X). The ceremony took place in Visakhapatnam. The submarine joins the lead ship of this class, INS Arihant, which entered service in October 2016.

INS Arighat (also Arighaat or S2) was built at the Ship Building Centre in Visakhapatnam. It was launched in November 2017.

Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL) officially announced that it has postponed the completion of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant. The plant is expected to begin operations in FY2026 (which ends in March 2027). This is the 27th delay since the construction began in 1993. In December 2022, the plant was projected to be completed by mid-2024.

This newly announced delay, assumed to be of two and a half years, is required to address serious issues raised by Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA). One major reason for the slow pace of the process has been the need to complete a review of the "ground model" for the earthquake-resistant design attempted by JNFL. The NRA is concerned about the project being "schedule-driven".

The completion of the MOX fuel fabrication plant, previously scheduled to start in the "first half of fiscal year 2024," has been postponed as well, with the new date in FY2027.

UPDATE: JNFL has published process charts for both the reprocessing plant and the MOX facility.

Reprocessing plant

MOX fabrication facility

Nuclear Fuel Services, a subsidiary of BWXT, has been awarded a contract by the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to conduct a domestic uranium enrichment pilot plant study (see also the ANS story). The cost of the year-long contract is $3.3 million. This study, which is part of the NNSA's Domestic Uranium Enrichment (DUE) program, should "inform the acquisition approach for a DUE pilot plant that can be repurposed for High Enriched Uranium (HEU) production."

This effort is distinct from the program that seeks to establish the production of High-Assay LEU (HALEU) based on the American Centrifuges operated by Centrus. Instead, this program is based on the work of the Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) that has been carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 2016. This work focuses on the development of a small centrifuge that can be used to produce LEU to fuel tritium producing nuclear reactors (see Tritium and Enriched Uranium Management Plan Through 2060). In addition, the NNSA "hope[s] to leverage this pilot plant for future Highly Enriched Uranium production for naval nuclear propulsion." The pilot plant is expected to begin LEU operations "by approximately 2030." It will also be required to demonstrate the capacity to produce HEU with enrichment of 93% or higher.

The Request for Information, released in July 2023, indicated that the capacity of the pilot plant after conversion for HEU production is expected to be about 50,000 SWU/year. The production-scale capacity is likely to be considerably higher.

According to the inter-governmental agreement between Russia and China signed in June 2018, Russia will supply fuel for China's CFR-600 reactor during its entire life cycle. The text of the agreement is available at the Russian government's portal (in Russian).

According to Article 5.2 of the agreement, Russia will supply "fuel assemblies containing uranium or uranium-plutonium fuel pellets ... during the entire operational lifetime of CFR600."

In a contract signed in January 2019, Russia committed to supply HEU fuel for the reactor during the first seven years of its operation. The HEU fuel was delivered in 2022 and the reactor began operations in December 2023.

Article 5.2 of the agreement also includes Russia's commitment to supply equipment and provide assistance with setting up production of "fuel assemblies containing uranium-plutonium fuel pellets" in China. It is possible that the fuel fabrication facility that this cooperation will set up in China will be producing fuel for the second CFR-600 reactor, which is being built at the same site. It is not entirely clear from the agreement whether this facility will be producing MOX fuel pellets (presumably from the plutonium separated by China) or whether Russia will remain the source of fuel pellets (and, accordingly, of plutonium).

The agreement appears to assume that the MOX fuel supplied by Russia will include Russia's plutonium. Russia uses reactor-grade plutonium in its own breeder program and it is highly likely that the fuel pellets for China's CFR-600 will use reactor-grade plutonium as well.

Importantly, the agreement contains provisions that directly prohibit the use of the materials or technologies that will be supplied to China for any military purpose, confirming the obligations in the umbrella agreement on cooperation and Russian export control regulations. According to Article 8.2,

Nuclear materials, equipment, special non-nuclear materials and related technologies received by the People's Republic of China in accordance with this Agreement, as well as nuclear and special non-nuclear materials, facilities and equipment produced on their basis or as a result of their use:

Shall not be used to produce nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices or to achieve any military purpose;

Note that this provision covers the "equipment ... and related technologies" received by China as well as "nuclear materials and equipment produced [by China] on their basis." This directly prohibits the use of plutonium that will be produced by both CFR-600 reactors for any military purpose.

Under an agreement between the State of Idaho and the U.S. government, reached in 1995, U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Navy provide the state with information about spent fuel shipped to the Idaho National Laboratory. The chart above and the table at the end of the message summarize this information as of the end of 2023.

The information is published by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality as a document "Cleanup Progress at the INL under the 1995 Settlement Agreement". The document is regularly updated and contains information about two most recent calendar years. Here are archived copies of the document with information for 2019-2020 and 2021-2022, and 2022-2023. Earlier information, published in 2018 and 2019, used data provided by the Snake River Alliance.

The government of Japan released The Status Report of Plutonium Management in Japan - 2023 report, which details its plutonium holdings. According to the report,

As of the end of 2023, the total amount of separated plutonium both managed within and outside of Japan was approximately 44.5 tons, approximately 8.6 tons of which was held domestically and the rest of approximately 35.8 tons was held abroad.

This is a decrease of 0.6 tons from the total of 45.1 tons that Japan reported having in 2022. The amount of plutonium held in Japan decreased as well, from 9.3 tons in 2022. This is due to 0.6 tons of plutonium in MOX fuel loaded into the Takahama Unit 3 reactor.

Of the plutonium stored abroad, 14,097 kg are stored in France (14,113 in 2022) and 21,735 kg - in the United Kingdom (21,757 in 2022).