For nearly a decade, a team at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been working to develop and demonstrate the next generation of gas centrifuges, technology that will restore a crucial capability the U.S. last had in 2013: to enrich uranium for defense-related missions, such as naval nuclear propulsion.
The ORNL-based Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment, or DUECE, is the result of a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) need for domestically enriched uranium by the 2040s. The new centrifuge technology will produce unencumbered and unobligated enriched uranium for the NNSA Defense Fuels Program.
Now, after years of research and development at ORNL, the technology has advanced enough for NNSA to start executing the next phase of deployment: the DUECE Pilot Plant. In August 2025, NNSA announced that it had placed a sole-sourced contract with a subsidiary of BWX Technologies, Inc (BWXT) to complete the efforts necessary to demonstrate the DUECE manufacturing and technology in a pilot plant.
"The launch of this partnership highlights the national imperative to reestablish and secure the United States' ability to enrich uranium for defense," said ORNL Director, Stephen Streiffer. "Both our nuclear deterrent and the Nuclear Navy depend on it."
Earlier in 2025, BWXT acquired 97 acres of land in the Horizon Center Industrial Park near the lab for the Centrifuge Manufacturing Development Facility that will support the pilot plant. The private company will partner with ORNL to achieve this mission for NNSA.
"BWXT's history in supporting the U.S. Defense Fuels and Navy Nuclear programs, as well as their experience with classified manufacturing and operations, creates a strong synergistic partner for this project," Streiffer said. "We are proud and excited to be working so closely with BWXT in this next phase and to have them as our partners and neighbors."
"The NNSA sees us as being the enduring capability for the country to develop and deploy these designs and these technologies," said Michael Whedbee, ORNL's technical project manager for DUECE. "That's a big responsibility. I don't think anybody on the team takes it lightly."
Nuclear legacy
ORNL's rich history helped position the lab to earn that responsibility.
By 1943, after the start of the Manhattan Project during World War II, Oak Ridge was working on uranium enrichment to support the nation at two sites.
One was the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, on the site where Horizon Center Industrial Park and BWXT's centrifuge manufacturing development facility currently sit. That technology, cutting-edge for the time, forced gaseous uranium hexafluoride through a series of microporous membranes, separating isotopes by weight. Sending the gas through cascades of these separations allowed for the creation of uranium hexafluoride rich enough in the uranium-235 isotope to create fission as nuclear fuel. K-25 was the first of three massive U.S. gaseous diffusion plants.
The other enrichment site housed the calutron technology that was deployed at what is now Y-12 National Security Complex, near ORNL. The calutrons combined magnetic fields and electric beams to separate isotopes by mass, which afforded the ability to obtain substantial quantities of high-purity isotopes - including U-235.
Gaseous diffusion was more complicated than calutrons, but it was also more efficient. By 1946, only one calutron at Y-12 was still operating, enriching stable isotopes for a stockpile that ORNL stewards today. That calutron, Beta 3, had its last run in 1998.
But gaseous diffusion had a longer lifespan. The K-25 site in Oak Ridge ran about 40 years, the Portsmouth, Ohio, plant, ran just less than 50 years, and the Paducah, Kentucky, plant remained open until 2013.
"The U.S. invested a lot of money, time and effort from 1946-1956 to stand these gaseous diffusion plants up, and they used them for a long time," ORNL's Whedbee said. "They produced a lot of material and really kickstarted the availability of enriched uranium. They kickstarted the idea of commercial nuclear energy, the idea of utilizing it for other purposes, the idea of a Nuclear Navy."
Yet, at the same time the gaseous diffusion plants were operational, the U.S. was developing centrifuge technology at the K-25 site with an eye toward eventually expanding it to replace gaseous diffusion, which was a complex and energy-intensive method of enrichment.
Changing demand for centrifuge
Those plans were halted in the 1980s by a series of recent events: the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, the end of the Cold War, and the international decrease in demand for enriched uranium. The market did not support the further development of centrifuge technology for commercial use.
2014 told a different story. The government realized it was going to need more enriched uranium in the next two decades to fulfill nuclear-related mission needs. Large commercial reactors can produce tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that benefit some nuclear programs. By the terms of an international treaty, foreign-supplied uranium cannot be used for weapon-related purposes, but domestically enriched uranium with fully domestic technology is "unobligated" and "unencumbered" and can be used for nuclear defense missions without violating international agreements.
The U.S. need for enriched uranium for naval reactor fuel and tritium production for the stockpile prompted the DUECE project, which began in 2016.
Secure facilities were built at ORNL to develop and demonstrate a small centrifuge option for domestic uranium enrichment. In just four years, ORNL had completed a facility for testing centrifuge designs, built a laboratory-scale cascade to showcase the technology's capabilities, successfully demonstrated the capability with UF6 gas, and developed a high-confidence long-range R&D plan to deploy a small gas centrifuge to enrich uranium. NNSA accepted the long-range plan by the end of 2020 and has been funding ORNL annually according to this plan.
Also at the end of 2020, the Isotope Science and Enrichment Directorate's Enrichment Science and Engineering Division was created, headed by Brian Anderson, who led the development of the long-range plan.
By the end of 2021, the team had an operating centrifuge that met NNSA requirements for complexity and performance. In 2022, the team started building a facility that would house an engineering-scale cascade to demonstrate the higher-technological maturity of the DUECE design.
By 2023, ORNL had developed a design that met NNSA requirements, and a decision was made for ORNL to focus on that as the Generation 1 design. The first Generation 1 design release was in 2024, and in 2025 the team completed the first iteration of single machine gas testing. Construction started on the larger engineering-scale testbed for the centrifuge machines.
Moving forward
The BWXT contract puts ORNL in a long-term role as the design authority for the Generation 1 DUECE technology, which is now deployed in a laboratory cascade that started operations on June 1. Additional deployments of the Generation 1 machine at ORNL are planned through the early 2030s to mature the Technology Readiness Level of the design in time for the Pilot Plant deployment.
Whedbee said the lab's multifaceted science makes it an ideal location for developing such an important technology.
"ORNL continues to utilize new advancements in computing, in materials, in all the areas in which ORNL excels," he said. "The DUECE project plans to use these developments to continue to advance and develop new potential designs and capabilities in the centrifuge arena."
That said, the initial focus is still on the Generation 1 machine, he said.
By the mid-2030s, BWXT plans to deploy it into a cascade in a pilot plant, and by the 2040s, if all goes according to plan, the U.S. should have capability to enrich uranium for defense needs.
"There have been some pretty incredible individuals and teams and organizations that have worked on this technology," Whedbee said. "I very much feel like I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I think it's exciting that ORNL continues to be trusted with these types of missions - missions that are critical not-to-fail-type missions for this country. That's a testament to its people."
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE's Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science. - Kristi Bumpus
