Page 6 – Defense Daily

Minotaur IV Used for NRO Mission from Vandenberg

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), U.S. Space Force’s (USSF) Space Launch Delta 30, and USSF Space Systems Command’s small launch and targets division launched defense and intelligence payloads aboard NROL-174 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif., on Wednesday.

Carrying the payloads was a Northrop Grumman [NOC] Minotaur IV rocket in what NRO said was the first Minotaur launch for NRO from Vandenberg since 2011. A decommissioned Peacekeeper ICBM supplies Minotaur IV with solid rocket motors for its first three stages, and the rocket uses a commercial upper stage.

Previous Minotaur launches for the NRO include the NROL-111 and NROL-129 missions from Wallops Island, Va., in June 2021 and July 2020, respectively, and NROL-66 from Vandenberg in February 2011.

In addition to the NRO launches, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland AFB, N.M. test flew a Minotaur carrying an unarmed Mk21A reentry vehicle by Lockheed Martin [LMT] for the Sentinel ICBM program last June 18 from Vandenberg.

NROL-174 is part of the NRO/SSC Rocket Systems Launch Program, which “focuses on the small launch market and primarily launches more risk-tolerant experimental, research and development, responsive space, and operational missions,” NRO said.

“NROL-174 is the third NRO mission launched from SSC RSLP’s Orbital/Suborbital Program-3 contract,” the agency said.

NRO said it has launched more than 150 satellites over the past two years for the agency’s proliferated architecture–the latest being the NROL-192 mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg on Apr. 12 (Defense Daily, Apr. 14).

L3Harris Expands Payload Facility in Indiana to Meet Demand for Missile Defense Capabilities

L3Harris Technologies [LHX] completed a $125 million expansion at its payload manufacturing facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to support its work for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the “Golden Dome” missile defense initiative. The facility will have capacity to produce 48 payloads per year when it is fully ramped up.

L3Harris has built payloads in the Fort Wayne facility since the 1960s. The facility focuses on infrared sensor payloads that serve national defense and civil weather, including the imager for NOAA’s GeoXO satellite system. The company’s heritage in weather payloads informed its missile defense capabilities, which is one of the few other missions that relies on real-time data from infrared sensors.

This expansion is part of a move toward productionizing space payloads instead of treating them as one-off, bespoke missions, Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of Spectral Solutions at L3Harris Technologies, told sister publication

Via Satellite last week during Space Symposium.

“It’s very important to create that scale necessary, the producibility, the predictability, and the schedule confidence at rate that’s required,” he said.

Mitrevski said L3Harris is scaling up in missile warning and missile defense with investments in facilities, workforce, and supply chain. He said it was a “calculated risk” for the company to make this investment in increasing production.

“We knew the Golden Dome, or some variant of that need, would come,” Mitrevski said. “If you pay attention to the threats and pay attention to our near peer adversaries and the progress they’re making, their evolution, you can extrapolate how things are going to go. We knew the U.S. would respond as a nation, I think we’ve seen that buyer signal strengthen over the years.”

Mitrevski cites the $2.5 billion in backlog L3Harris has won in missile defense, although this is a new area of business for the company in recent years. L3Harris has five satellites on orbit and 34 satellites in development for the Space Development Agency’s Tracking Layer and the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) program.

This investment in production comes as the U.S. is imposing tariffs on all countries and much higher tariffs on China. Mitrevski said that the company’s supply chain is primarily based in the U.S., and the company is assessing the full impact of tariffs.

The full impact is “unknown,” at this point, he said. “In our business a domestic supply chain is vitally important. There’s potential that the raw materials aspect will create some impact but we really don’t know yet. It’s still early in the process. We’re all talking about it, but there’s been no effect as of yet that we’ve seen.”

This story was first published by Via Satellite

Autonomous Technology Company Scout AI Exits Stealth With $15 Million Seed Round

Scout AI, a year-old startup developing an autonomous platform for defense robotics, on Wednesday emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed $15 million seed round led by Align Ventures and Booz Allen Hamilton

’s [BAH] ventures unit.

Fury is the name of Scout AI’s artificial intelligence-based Vision-Language-Action model that controls a robot’s actions, with the ultimate goal being to power multi-domain robot armies using human-level intelligence. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company says it trains Fury on human-level behavior, which makes it AI embodied, giving it situational, physical, and adaptive intelligence.

“At the core of Scout’s breakthrough is Fury, a defense-specific Vision-Language-Action foundation model engineered to transform every defense robot into an intelligent, autonomous agent,” Scout said in a statement. “Unlike traditional robotics software, Fury is an embodied AI system—capable of perceiving the physical world, interpreting natural language, and issuing real-time motor commands to act decisively even in communication and GPS-denied environments.”

Scout said it has received multiple Defense Department contracts. The company currently has two prototypes, the G01 unmanned ground vehicle and the A01 unmanned aerial vehicle, both of which are operating autonomously at Scout’s proving grounds in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The company’s technology is designed to be modular and hardware-agnostics, able to run on a commercial off-the-shelf camera and low-power inference chip to rapidly integrated into existing and future robotic hardware systems.

Fury is designed for human-machine teaming.

“Physical AI is the most decisive military advantage of the century,” co-founder and CEO Colby Adcock said in a statement. “Our vision is one warfighter commanding many robots, seamlessly integrated into a unified team. That level of human-machine integration requires an AI brain like Fury that understands commander intent and can think, move, and collaborate like seasoned operators.”

Adcock has worked in private equity and is on the board of Figure AI, a humanoid robotics company. His co-founder, Collin Otis, is chief technology officer and was a founding engineering and director of autonomy and AI at Kodiak Robotics, and head of data science at Uber’s [UBER] former Advanced Technologies Group.

Other investors in the seed round include Draper Associates, Decisive Point Ventures, Perot Jain, Sigmas Group, Evolution VC, BVVC, Habitat Partners, Piedmont Capital Investments, FJ Labs, Revelry Venture Partners, Monte Carlo Capital, Expansion VC, and Gaingels.

USAF Offensive sUAS Program Surveys Industry for Multi-Domain Comms for Drone Swarms

The U.S. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Offensive Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) program (AFLCMC/WISS) at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio wants to hear from companies able to integrate low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) multi-domain communications and data relays on Group 2 and/or Group 3 UAS within 18 to 24 months.

Group 2 drones weigh between 21 and 55 pounds, Group 3 more than 55 but less than 1,320 pounds.

AFLCMC/WISS wants low SWaP-C radios, antennas, and down links with technology readiness levels of 7 or higher to integrate into Group 2 and/or Group 3 drones to provide “dynamic multi-domain communications capabilities/services within, and/or to, a sUAS swarm in contested and denied environments” and “data relay (ranging in size and complexity from simple status messages to full motion video) to/from stations inside denied and contested environments,” the Request for Information (RFI) said.

The U.S. government (USG) “will use the data gathered through this RFI process to inform USG acquisition strategies for initial and future capabilities and other efforts requiring Offensive sUAS, which may lead to contract awards,” the business notice said.

“This RFI informs sUAS capabilities that USG expects to begin integrating and fielding in 18–30 months,” according to the notice. “There is an expectation to field additional platforms beyond the initial effort. Should USG field initial operational systems, conceivable upgrade cycles could follow regularly. USG may replace any component or integrator during such cycles to maximize
operational capabilities with best-in-class technologies.”

Established last year, AFLCMC/WISS is under AFLCMC’s Air Force Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance and Special Operations Forces directorate.

L3Harris Technologies [LHX] and Shield AI said that they have developed a software-defined Distributed Spectrum Collaboration and Operations (DiSCO) electronic warfare (EW) battle management system to aid drone initiatives like DoD’s Replicator and the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (Defense Daily, March 11).

For DiSCO, Shield AI has developed software algorithms under its Hivemind drone autonomy effort to enable “swarms of effectors,” while L3Harris has been working on the optimization of non-kinetic EW.

Air Force Special Operations Command’s top acquisition priority has been the Adaptive Airborne Enterprise to allow an aircrew to control multiple drones (Defense Daily, May 9, 2024).

Saronic Acquires Gulf Coast Shipbuilder; Introduces 150-Foot USV

Saronic on Wednesday said it has acquired Louisiana-based Gulf Craft, a small shipbuilder that gives it a strategic location on the Gulf Coast and facilities to immediately support development and production of the startup’s latest autonomous surface vessel (ASV), the 150-foot Marauder.

Saronic said the acquisition is foundational toward its vision of a larger waterside shipyard it calls Port Alpha that will feature advanced manufacturing capabilities for its future vessels (Defense Daily, Feb. 18). The Austin, Texas-based company’s current lineup of three ASVs run six-, 14-, and 24-feet in length.

Marauder’s design boasts a 40 metric ton payload capacity, a 3,500 nautical mile range or the ability to loiter for more than 30 days depending on the mission, a 12 knot cruise speed, 18-plus knot burst speed, and a price point far lower than legacy manned systems, Saronic said. The medium unmanned surface vessel will have the same autonomy stack as Saronic’s existing ASVs, the company said.

Design and development of the initial prototype are underway with plans to put it into the water within one year, with production units following shortly after, the company said. The medium ASV will use a conventional diesel powertrain and jet drives found on similarly-sized commercial and military vessels.

Saronic’s announcement of Marauder follows the emergence from stealth last week of Blue Water Autonomy, a Boston-based startup that is early days in the design and development of a 100-foot-plus class of low-cost multi-mission, ocean-going ASVs (

Defense Daily, April 11). Blue Water this month began testing its autonomy suite in the water.

The Gulf Craft acquisition provides Saronic 30 new employees and nearly 100 acres of space–25 used by the shipyard and other 65 for capacity expansion–adding to its current 520,000 square-feet of manufacturing and related space. Saronic plans to invest more than $250 million into its new shipyard for upgrades and new machinery, with a focus on creating a rapid and agile production system that can built up to 50 unmanned vessels per year.

Founded 60 years ago, Gulf Craft specialized in designing and building 100 to 200-foot aluminum hulled ships. The shipbuilder does not have an existing backlog and all capacity will be used for Saronic’s priorities.

The company expects to create more than 500 new jobs at the shipyard in the next three to four years.

“While we actively search for a home for Port Alpha, this acquisition gives us the immediate capacity to meet urgent customer needs for larger autonomous vessels and the flexibility to scale to address emerging commercial and defense applications of these advanced systems,” Dino Mavrookas, co-founder and CEO of Saronic, said in a statement.

Saronic said it plans to invest more than $2.5 billion to develop Port Alpha. The two-year-old company has raised $850 million in capital.

Sentinel To Have New Silos, Air Force Leaders Tell Town Halls

The Northrop Grumman [NOC] LGM-35A Sentinel ICBM, which has a significantly larger design than its predecessor 1960s-era Minuteman missile series, is to have new silos, U.S. Air Force leaders told community leaders during program town halls in Kimball, Neb., and Pine Bluffs, Wyo., on Apr. 1 and 2.

The Minuteman “silos are already really old so if we use them for Sentinel, they are going to be over a century old,” Col. James Rodriguez, Sentinel program infrastructure and deployment division director, said on Apr. 1. “There were a number of other issues that were driving costs to be quite large, and it was becoming prolifically expensive to try to renovate them, so sometimes it is just cheaper to build something new.”

Air Force leaders have previously not given a straight answer when asked whether Sentinel would need new silos and have downplayed the significance of new silo construction.

The provision of multiple warheads, countermeasures, and increased range to hit China means the Sentinel design is significantly larger than that of the current Boeing [BA] Minuteman III.

In February, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces panel, said that he believed that the Air Force would have to build new silos to house Sentinel (Defense Daily, Feb. 26).

The Air Force fielded 450 Minuteman siloes between 1962 and 1967, of which 50 are decommissioned but may be brought back for future testing. Experts have said that placing Sentinel in Minuteman silos may lead to several degrees of tilt in such silos.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) suggested this month that the Air Force may be able to re-use some Minuteman III silos for Sentinel and that the Air Force is increasingly discussing possible concurrent upgrades to house Sentinel at the three ICBM missile wings under Malmstrom AFB, Mont., F.E. Warren AFB, Wyo., and Minot AFB, N.D. (Defense Daily, Apr. 1).

“To the degree that it’s possible yet to modify the design of Sentinel to utilize existing silos, it would be a tremendous opportunity,” he said. “We’ll see. Some of them [silos] are gonna have to be [replaced]. Some of them are full of water.”

The Air Force plan has been to conduct sequential upgrades at the bases with Minot being the third and final base.

The first operational Minuteman fielded on Oct. 27, 1962 at Malmstrom during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC) had planned to “renovate all 450 existing [Minuteman] launch facilities in the missile fields to like-new condition.”

In addition to the Apr. 1 and 2 public discussions in Kimball, Neb., and Pine Bluffs, Wyo., the Air Force held another Sentinel town hall, as scheduled, on March 31 in Raymer, Colo., but the latter’s remoteness led to a lower turnout and no press at the event, Glenn Robertson, a spokesman for the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren, wrote in an email response to questions.

AFGSC said that more than 200 residents attended the three town halls.

For the town halls, “there were no transcripts or video…to ensure participation of the local public without fear of recording them,” Robertson wrote in an email.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Colin Connor, who heads the Sentinel Site Activation Task Force in his position as director of ICBM Modernization at Air Force Global Strike Command at Barksdale AFB, La., told the Pine Bluffs town hall that the Air Force plans to begin digging up the old, Hardened Intersite Cable System (HICS) copper wires for Minuteman III in 2027 to replace them with fiber optic cables for Sentinel by 2030.

Section 1638 of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act created AFGSC’s Site Activation Task Force to provide the Sentinel program with missileers’ insights.

On Jan. 18 last year, the Air Force said that it notified Congress that Sentinel had breached Nunn-McCurdy guidelines, primarily due to construction design changes, and then DoD acquisition chief William LaPlante ordered a root-cause analysis. The latter led last summer to the DoD decision to continue the program, due to its stated importance to strategic deterrence, but also to the rescinding of the Sentinel Milestone B engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) go-ahead from 2020 (Defense Daily, July 8, 2024).

Last summer, the Air Force pegged Sentinel cost at $140.9 billion, 81 percent higher than the September 2020 estimate when the program was approved for EMD–a rise that DoD said has less to do with the missile than the command-and-control segment, including silos, launch centers, “and the process, duration, staffing, and facilities to execute the conversion from Minuteman III to Sentinel.”

Initial operational capability for Sentinel will now likely be years past the Air Force’s initial goal of May 2029.

Air Force plans have called for a Sentinel launch center for at least 24 of the missile alert facilities and for 3,100 miles of new utility corridor for Sentinel.

The civil works for Sentinel may also include hardening silos to account for improved accuracy of Russian and Chinese nuclear missiles.

AUV Developer Vatn Systems Employs Palantir To Scale Manufacturing

Joining other defense technology startups that are leveraging Palantir Technologies’ [PLTR] software manufacturing platform, Vatn Systems on Wednesday said they have partnered with the company to help as it transitions to production.

The two-year-old Rhode Island-based startup is developing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for defense and commercial uses. Vatn has been testing its AUVs in military exercises, including with the Navy, and said it has a dozen vehicles with government customers and more on order.

The partnership with Palantir will accelerate production, Vatn said.

“What it allows us to do is build, basically, a digital twin of our entire manufacturing process that allows us to better understand on every level what’s happening,” Nelson Mills, co-founder and CEO of Vatn, told Defense Daily on Monday ahead of the announcement. “Like, where are some supply chain hiccups? Where along our production are we having assembly issues? What points of failure are we experiencing? And to understand that in one central platform where all our data comes in and allows us to better respond to that and scale our manufacturing.”

Palantir’s artificial intelligence-powered Warp Speed technology is “unique” to the market and offers users a “competitive edge,” Mills said. The manufacturing platform features machine learning that will allows companies to “understand and improve your processes and automate it,” he said.

Last month Palantir announced partnerships with startups Epirus, Red Cat [RCAT], Saildrone, Saronic, and Ursa Major, and non-traditional defense company Sierra Nevada Corp. to deploy Warp Speed to bolster their manufacturing, optimize maintenance, and improve other aspects of their operations. Palantir has similar arrangements with Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies [LHX], and others.

Vatn last fall announced a $13 million seed round to expand its team. Among others, investors include Lockheed Martin [LMT], RTX [RTX], and Science Applications International Corp. [SAIC] (Defense Daily, Nov. 12, 2024). At that time, the company had 18 employees and now has 37, Mills said.

Skelmir 6, a six-inch diameter AUV that looks like a torpedo and weighs between 50 and 60 pounds, is Vatn’s first product. The AUV is priced to be expendable, but is retrievable, and can carry a payload up to 20 pounds with a range of 20 nautical miles. The company is planning to introduce additional products with longer ranges.

Vatn is working with various government customers and “all of them have a clear pathway toward a larger program,” Mills said.

Ukraine Assistance Group, Now Led By U.K., Germany, Pledges ‘Record’ $23.7 Billion Aid Boost

The international coalition coordinating security assistance efforts for Ukraine, now led by the U.K. and Germany, has pledged a “record boost” of $23.7 billion in new weapons aid for Kyiv.

The update followed the latest Ukraine Defense Contract Group meeting on April 11 at NATO headquarters in Brussels, with the U.S. not announcing new security assistance plans and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participating virtually in the meeting.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov and UK Defence Minister John Healey hold a joint press conference on April 11, 2025 following the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Photo: Screenshot of livestream.

“Given Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, we must concede [that] peace in Ukraine appears to be out of reach in the immediate future. We will ensure that Ukraine continues to benefit from our joint military support. Russia needs to understand that Ukraine is able to go on fighting and we will support it,” German Defense Minister Borius Pistorius said in a press conference following the UDCG meeting.

U.K. Defence Minister John Healey, who joined Pistorious and Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov for the briefing, noted the latest UDCG meeting once again gathered senior defense officials from 51 countries to discuss Kyiv’s battlefield needs.

Healey noted that the “record boost in military funding” committed by UDCG members at the meeting included the U.K.’s plan to spend $6 billion in 2025 on support for Ukraine, announcing a new $462.4 million package to “surge” capabilities such as radar systems, anti-tank mines and “hundreds and thousands of new drones” and to repair vehicles its previously provided to Kyiv.

The U.K.’s new weapons aid is part of a larger $595.4 million tranche of support, co-funded by Norway, with the Ministry of Defence noting it will include “high maneuverable first-person view drones to attack targets, and drones which can drop explosives on Russian positions.”

“The new kit will be procured from a mixture of U.K. and Ukrainian suppliers, demonstrating how investment into Ukraine’s defense supports jobs and the economies of both the U.K. and Ukraine,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in a statement.

The U.K. on Monday also announced it’s transferred a $994.9 million loan to Ukraine, paid for by assets from Russian sanctions, that can be used for Kyiv to procure military equipment, including “urgently needed” air defense capabilities.

Pistorius, following the UDCG meeting, noted the German government has agreed to provide $12.4 billion in further security assistance to Ukraine through 2029 and that Berlin has plans to deliver Ukraine “additional air defense systems of different ranges as well as guided missiles” in 2025.

“[Germany] will [also] continuously make available self-propelled howitzers, infantry fighting vehicles as well as main battle tanks and ammunition to the Ukrainian land forces,” Pistorius said.

Pistorius also addressed Hegseth’s decision not to attend the UDCG meeting in-person, stating it was due to scheduling matters.

“The most important fact was that he took part. He addressed the auditorium with some, I would say, interesting and correct assessments,” Pistorius said. “In the future and the weeks to come, we will see what’s going to happen with the U.S. participation, with the U.S. support. I am not able to have a look in the crystal ball. We [will] wait and see.”

The Biden administration initiated the UDCG following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin led each meeting, with the U.S. having typically announced new weapons packages to coincide with each gathering.

Hegseth said last month that European partners must provide “the overwhelming share” of future weapons aid to Ukraine (Defense Daily, Feb. 12).

“What I have been saying during the last month too is we should better look on our own and do what we have to do and what we can do. And this is what we are doing now. We take on more responsibility as Europeans and NATO…We do whatever we can do to support Ukraine as long as it takes and I think today was quite impressive evidence of what we are capable of and willing to do,” Pistorius said on April 11.

Umerov noted Europe is “taking over the lead” for providing security assistance to Ukraine, while adding that the U.S. is Kyiv’s “prime partner.”

“The U.S. has told us, after the new administration stepped in, that they will be beside Europe, beside Ukraine, but their focus will be in the Indo-Pacific. They’re still participating in the UDCG, they are providing us security assistance and they took a lead in the peace initiative,” Umerov said.

The Trump administration in March temporarily paused the transfer of previously approved military aid to Ukraine, which was then lifted after Kyiv endorsed a 30-day ceasefire proposal aimed at ending Russia’s invasion (Defense Daily, March 11).

Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, head of U.S. European Command, recently told lawmakers that if the U.S. were to withhold future security assistance and intelligence sharing to Ukraine it would have “a rapid and deleterious effect on their ability to fight” (Defense Daily, April 4).

“Many of our allies have stepped up their ability to produce things for Ukrainians…There are some real advances and diversification of their supply sources,” Cavoli said. “But undoubtedly, the Ukrainians are very dependent on our assistance.”

Electric Boat UAW Union Authorizes Potential Strike Amid Negotiations For New Contract

About 2,500 workers represented by the Marine Draftsmen’s Association (MDA) UAW Local 571 union might go on strike if the union and shipbuilder General Dynamics Electric Boat [GD] do not reach a new agreement.

On Monday union leaders announced more than two-thirds of the local members voted to allow a potential strike. The last five-year contract for Local 571 expired on April 4.

The union represents draftsmen, designers, and various technical and office workers.

The Electric Boat Connecticut shipyard builds Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines for the Navy, alongside HII‘s Newport News Shipbuilding [HII] in Virginia.

Union leaders have made frequent video updates to members on Facebook and the union’s website.

On April 4, after being presented with what the company said was its final best offer, Local 571 president Bill Lewis said, “being pissed off is saying the least, I’ll be honest. We’re not happy with the process, where we are at this moment with what they’ve presented.”

While the company has offered a 5.4 percent wage increase in the first year and four percent each for the following four years, the union said the company refused to consider discussing other union complaints about cost of living adjustments given increased housing costs, profit sharing, and pensions for all employees.

Starting in 2010 after a previous round of negotiations during a downturn, new employees lost the chance for pensions, so 1,850 current members do not have them.

Lewis previously said Electric Boat started bargaining by offering wage increases of 4%, 3%, 3%, 2% and 2% over the next five years each.

Lewis argued one percent of the company’s profits would cover all of the union’s demands.

Previously, in 2023 Electric Boat and the Metal Trades Council (MTC) union, an AFL-CIO union, agreed to a five-year contract with 21.4 percent wage increases over the total five-year contract term, alongside other benefits increases (Defense Daily, Oct. 10, 2023).

MTC represents 3,400 skilled trades employees at the yard, which covers welders, electricians, machinists, pipefitters, laborers, painters, transportation services and administration support.

Beyond MDA and MTC there are two other unions at EB: the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Local 1302 and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1186.

While the membership approved of a potential strike, union leadership underscored the employees were directed to work as normal until such a decision is made.

During an April 14 meeting of union members, UAW President Shawn Fain backed their negotiations and threat to strike, arguing the company can go back to negotiations and get serious about demands or they can “keep messing around. The choice is theirs, and the clock is ticking.”

BWXT Acquires Land for Domestic Uranium Enrichment, NNSA Signals Intent For Sole-Source

BWX Technologies [BWXT] said Tuesday it acquired 97 acres of land in Oak Ridge, Tenn., with the goal of rebuilding domestic uranium enrichment capabilities by manufacturing centrifuges.

According to the emailed press release, the land acquisition would support DoE and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) deployment of Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) technology. The land is at Horizon Center industrial park near DoE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The NNSA also announced in a sole-source intention

notice on databases FedConnect and sam.gov April 9 that BWXT would likely be awarded a sole source contract for a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Pilot Plant. The company would design, license, construct and operate a uranium enrichment pilot plant facility to demonstrate “production readiness” of DUECE technology to establish a supply of low-enriched uranium, before transitioning to highly enriched uranium production in the future to support naval nuclear propulsion fuel production.

This contract, according to the sole-source notice, is in support of the DUECE Pilot Plant Deployment Study awarded to BWXT subsidiary Nuclear Fuels Services in August 2024. The contract requires Nuclear Fuel Services to complete a yearlong engineering study to evaluate options for the pilot plant.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory manages the DUECE program which aims to develop uranium enrichment technology and information for national security purposes. Oak Ridge’s DUECE program is one of two domestic uranium enrichment options, alongside Centrus Energy Corp.’s AC-100M, that NNSA had been considering for its defense-enrichment plant.

NNSA expects the second of two planned DUECE demonstrations to complete in fiscal year 2029, which runs through Sept. 30, 2029. The hope from the DoE is that it starts domestically enriching uranium by the 2030s.