US government to ship enriched URANIUM to Oak Ridge nuclear fuel plant planning 400 jobs!
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A subsidiary of Amazon-backed X-energy will get uranium from the U.S. government to support its $300 million plant in Oak Ridge.
The company says its pebble-shaped fuel, which contains TRISO particles, cannot melt in an advanced reactor.
Two TRISO-X plants in Oak Ridge could one day employ around 1,000 people to support new nuclear reactors.
The U.S. Department of Energy will ship specialized uranium to a nuclear fuel plant under construction in Oak Ridge, bridging a gap in the domestic uranium supply chain for a company with plans to create hundreds of local jobs.
TRISO-X, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon-backed advanced reactor developer X-energy, is building a fuel fabrication plant at the Horizon Center Industrial Park to enter operations by the end of 2027.
Its near-term goal is to supply pebble fuel for X-energy's first small modular reactors at a Dow manufacturing facility in Seadrift, Texas. TRISO-X wants to supply fuel to other companies in the future.
TRISO-X is one of five companies selected by the U.S. government to receive shipments from the government's store of uranium while it helps a handful of uranium enrichment companies including Centrus Energy and Orano build out a domestic supply chain.
"We are clearly in the right position to be able to bring these advanced technologies on board and get them operating," Joel Duling, president of TRISO-X, told Knox News in an interview.
TRISO-X will not enrich uranium at its Oak Ridge plant, but will manufacture spherical nuclear fuel using enriched uranium. The process is critical to X-energy's push to build its own fuel supply chain.
The first TRISO-X facility in Oak Ridge will employ around 400 people once it is operational, Duling said. The company broke ground for the $300 million plant in 2022 and began site preparations in November.
It plans to begin construction on its first plant in July or August, having originally planned to open in 2025. A second plant slated for Oak Ridge will increase the local TRISO-X workforce to around 1,000 people.
Why U.S. is sending uranium to Oak Ridge
The lack of a U.S. source of high-assay, low-enriched uranium is a major hurdle for advanced nuclear companies. The fuel, also called HALEU, is more concentrated than the uranium in commercial nuclear power plant reactors, but less powerful than bomb-grade uranium.
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