Virginia Company Scouting Wyoming For Spot To Build Uranium Fuel Plant

Wyoming often sends its commodities out to other states, losing all or substantially all of the items’ value before getting those finished products back at much higher costs.

But that might not be entirely so for nuclear. The abundance of Wyoming’s uranium reserves has at least one company seriously considering a uranium fuel manufacturing plant. 

BWX Technologies (BWXT) of Lynchburg, Virginia, has told Cowboy State Daily it is already looking at locations in Wyoming for such a plant.

“The fuel that we manufacture in Lynchburg, Virginia, if we’re going to scale that up, that’s a big enterprise, that’s a big investment,” BWXT Advanced Technologies President Joe Miller told Cowboy State Daily. “And it’s an investment we’re looking to bring to the state.”

Miller said BWXT has not yet made a decision on whether to locate its fuel manufacturing plant here, but it is among things the company is in the midst of “battle testing,” with the help of various Wyoming vendors, including L&H Industrial out of Gillette. 

“Wyoming has a tremendous amount of uranium,” Miller said. “And that uranium mining sector is very strong, and it’s starting to re-emerge. Bringing that uranium back to do all the high-value manufacturing to that uranium in state would just be a great outcome for Wyoming.”

Travis Deti, with Wyoming Mining Association, agreed, and said Wyoming is fully embracing the opportunity.

“These are exciting times for the Wyoming uranium industry,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “With new renewed focus on nuclear power and next generation reactor projects like BWXT, our uranium recovery industry is well-positioned to provide for a key link in rebuilding our domestic nuclear fuel chain.”

What’s A Micro Reactor Anyway?

Small micro reactors (SMRs) typically generate less than 300 megawatts of power and are typically designed with off-grid operation in a remote area in mind. They have roots in the defense industry, building tiny reactors for things like naval submarines. 

More recently, SMRs have become trendy as a means of providing flexible, cost-effective, scalable power that’s both low carbon and non-interruptible.

“For the micro reactor it’s more about on-demand power, where transmission is expensive, or you need very high temperature steam or high temperature gas for an industrial process,” Miller said. “It’s a little bit more niche than utility scale power. The cost, because you don’t have the economy of scale, will be a little different.”

SMRs could be used for peaking, which refers to high-demand periods where additional power may be needed quickly, as well as for baseloadpower in industrial settings, or in remote locations that don’t have economic access to transmission lines.

Tata Chemicals Soda Ash Partners LLC, which has mining interests in Wyoming’s trona patch, is the first company to sign a letter of intent with BWXT to place as many as eight of its small micro reactors, producing on average of 5 megawatts of electricity each, at its Green River operation. 

“They are just hyper-interested in having energy security and then controlling their own destiny when it comes to energy,” Miller said. “So they have a relationship with the local utilities, but have also already been producing their own energy on site for years.”

Miller said Tata is not the only company BWXT is exploring partnerships with in the Cowboy State. In fact, it’s the demand signal they’re seeing that has made them consider a uranium fuel manufacturing plant.

“There’s enough demand out there for a factory,” Miller said. “And we are absolutely considering Wyoming for that, and we have some agreements in place with the state, and a lot of activity right now to look at what scale-up would look like with our current manufacturing process in a location like Wyoming.”

The Fuel Cores Are Special

While both TerraPower and BWXT will use enriched uranium 235, the fuel cores manufactured for each facility are quite different.  

TerraPower’s Natrium reactor, which will produce 345 megawatts of power, uses HALEU in metal form that will be fabricated into fuel rods and inserted in the reactor core.

BWXT, on the other hand is using tiny, self-contained fuel cores, called TRi-structural ISOtropic or TRISO fuel kernels. They are about the size of a ball point pen, and look a bit like tiny BB gun pellets.

“You start off with a very small kernel that’s a uranium oxycarbide,” Miller said. “And that kind of fuel kernel has been manufactured for several decades worldwide.”

Each fuel kernel is wrapped with several layers. The innermost layer is a graphite buffer, which provides space for fission gas and carbon monoxide accumulation, as well as absorbing fission recoils and heat. The layer also slows neutrons down during operation of the reactor, so that fission can happen.

The next layer is an inner, pyrolytic carbon layer that keeps chlorides away from the fuel kernel, followed by a silicon carbide layer that further assists in retaining fission products inside the core.

A final pyrolytic carbon layer seals the whole thing up and acts as a final barrier for fission gas retention.

Built-In Safety

The fuel cores engineer built-in safety for BWXT Advanced Nuclear Reactors, or BANR.

“One aspect of this TRISO fueled micro reactor is that as the temperature increases, the ability for the chain reaction to be sustained decreases,” Miller explained. “So, well below any melting temperature, it will actually plateau and shut itself back down.”

That’s possible because the neutron capture efficiency in this fuel system decreases once temperatures exceed a certain threshold, making it difficult to continue fission from that point on. 

“That allows the core to plateau at a higher temperature, but well below the melting temperature of the fuel,” Miller said.

Miller believes this type of fuel will also mean easier waste disposal in the future. 

“Spent fuel is a hot topic,” Miller said. “It’s important for us in the nuclear industry to address that. And it’s something that we’re doing as part of our site evaluations in Green River.”

Reports on that will be forthcoming back to the state of Wyoming, Miller added, before any long-term business decisions about Wyoming are made.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.