JONESBOROUGH, Tenn. (WJHL) — How risky scientists say BWX Technology’s (BWXT) proposed high-purity depleted uranium (HPDU) facility is to the surrounding land, water, and air, and to the people living nearby, depends in part on the scientist one asks about it.
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News Channel 11 has interviewed two scientists about the subject — one who has offered help to a community group that is fighting to prevent the proposed facility, and another recommended by BWXT as an expert in nuclear safety.
“It’s preposterous to talk about using ton quantities of uranium, nitric acid, HF (hydrogen fluoride) and all these other things and say there’s no significant impact,” retired analytical chemist Michael Ketterer, who has aided community groups in nuclear-affected areas, told News Channel 11. Ketterer’s bio says he provides expert technical assistance to affected communities and “specializes in understanding the sources, transport, and environmental fates of long-lived radioactive contaminants … near former and active nuclear sites.”
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Jim Conca, a retired nuclear scientist who’s worked in several national laboratories at the forefront of handling and storing higher-radioactivity nuclear waste, told News Channel 11 that if environmental regulations are applied rigorously, the type of process BWXT plans can be done relatively safely.
“Environmental standards have gotten better,” he told News Channel 11 during a Zoom interview from his home in Washington state. “As long as there’s a strong state monitoring program, that should be fine because … the thing about nuclear materials is they’re easy to see with any kind of monitor.”
Ketterer remains skeptical, saying, “Things are not just automatically much better in environmental practices because we’re in 2026.”
BWXT plans to build a new plant to make a metal form of HPDU, with much of the material going to the national Y-12 complex in Oak Ridge. The process will mark the first time in several decades that HPDU has been produced at scale in the U.S., with much of the product likely to go toward maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons. Previous production by several companies, as BWXT has acknowledged, resulted in Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites due to soil contamination from buried waste.
The company won a $1.6 billion contract from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) last year to complete the work. In a news release announcing the deal Sept. 30, the NNSA characterized it as a way to “help modernize and maintain the nuclear deterrent.”
HPDU metal has lower radioactivity than natural uranium because its feedstock comes from “tailings” remaining after uranium enrichment, but it is highly dense and is favored for use in tampers and other components of nuclear weapon housings. BWXT plans to receive shipments of triuranium octoxide (U3O8) from storage in Paducah, Ky., or Portsmouth, Ohio and convert them through a multiple-step process to the HPDU metal.
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Ketterer, who has conducted soil sampling downstream of Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin and at the BWXT Telford site, said he has aided community groups here, but beyond accepting airfare and some incidental expenses, has done so without payment. He said he’s measured what he described as uranium contamination in the area of both sites.
Conca said in response to a question from News Channel 11 that he isn’t being paid by BWXT for making himself available for an interview. A former Washington State University faculty member and staff scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (linked to the Hanford nuclear site), Conca has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and directed a lab that performed low-level radiological and chemical analyses on various samples from the Hanford Site.
He is a proponent of the nuclear power industry who said he believes the public often has incorrect assumptions about the relative danger of radioactive materials.
“If they’re built up in concentration and not dealt with, I mean, yeah, you don’t want those floating around,” Conca said of uranium components, plutonium, technetium, and other “radionuclides” — some of which are being purified out of the original HPDU material.
“They can be captured, they can be solidified,” he added. “Chemically, they like to be in grout.”
That’s what BWXT says it will do with the liquid process waste at the proposed plant, but Ketterer said community members who have strongly opposed the project are right to be concerned.
“I don’t see an effort on the part of BWXT to explain this to the community at, say, a reasonable level,” Northern Arizona University professor emeritus Ketterer said during a recent Zoom interview. BWXT has released two lengthy documents in response to questions posed by “Neighbors of BWXT,” a community group. The first was published in mid-January, and the second, responding to follow-up questions, on Feb. 19.
Ketterer said he’s concerned about the waste from radioactive impurities and other substances that will be removed during the purification process, as well as about the non-radioactive chemicals used to purify the depleted uranium.
“There’s going to be regular releases, emissions, if you will, and there’s going to be episodic events where there’s going to be things that go wrong,” he said.
“I can just imagine there’s going to be accidents where workers are hurt and there’s going to be things where the community is harmed,” he said. “There’s going to be large shipments of hazardous material … I think all of these are scenarios worth considering.”
About the process
The company has insisted its operation will meet all environmental guidelines and normal operations — while they include some air emissions — won’t be harmful to human health or the environment.
BWXT outlined the process it will use at a pilot plant currently under construction in a document it sent the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) in May 2025. You can view that below:
Information on HPDU Pilot Facility by Jeff Keeling
It begins by converting a powder form of uranium trioxide (U3O8), through a several-step chemical process, into a uranyl nitrate after capture and removal of some impurities. That substance is then stripped of its nitrates and it then decomposes into UO3 (uranium trioxide).
The UO3 goes through a reactor process to become UO2 (uranium dioxide) before being treated with anhydrous hydrogen fluoride and nitrogen, creating UF4 (uranium tetrafluoride). It’s that UF4 “green salt” — that forms the basis for fabricating the HPDU metal.
Ketterer reviewed the plans for the pilot plant, which should be in production this year and can produce up to 20 metric tons of HPDU metal. The NNSA contract requires the full-scale plant to reach a capacity of 400 metric tons annually.
He questioned the contention that the process can capture what he considers an acceptable level of contaminants.
“There’s every reason to believe that contaminants are not going to be 100 percent captured. If they say it’s all being solidified and going to Texas I’m going to say, well what went into the air, what’s going into some outfalls or runoff or whatever that goes to Little Limestone Creek,” Ketterer said.
He also said he’s concerned about the various impurities the NNSA specifications demand be removed, as those include “transuranics” and other radionuclides like plutonium, technetium and neptunium. Those will be contained in the liquid process waste that’s then solidified.
“To say well it’s hardly radioactive at all because it’s depleted, that is patently ridiculous,” Ketterer said. “Give us an assay sheet and tell us, you know, how much TEC 99, how much neptunium 237, how much plutonium.”
Conca said he agrees area citizens should be paying attention, and he said opposition doesn’t surprise him.
“Best thing to do is to make sure environmental monitoring is going on and you know the HEPA filtration system’s working well,” Conca said, referring to internal systems that capture airborne particles.
“Corporations are corporations, that kind of thing, that’s why I love regulations. I mean I’m a regulatory hound. That’s the only way to rein in this kind of thing.”
But he added that the risks of radioactive material often get overblown and that he sees nothing in the materials involved that would reach significant levels.
“It is absolutely dependent on dose,” he said. “If you’re not getting more than 20 rem a year, the dose is insignificant.”
He said based on his assessment, the neighbors’ risk is likely minimal.
“I would say you don’t have much to worry about,” he said. “Now I don’t want to say you don’t have to worry about anything … there’s always some risk, you know, and risk. Again, you’re comparing different types of risk, and the normal day-to-day life has so many more risks in it than this.
“So unless you’re, you know, on site and something spills on you or you go outside and start eating dirt or something, you know, it’s like you have to do something really bizarre to get any dose.”
With a requested rezoning that would allow BWXT to site the plant on land currently zoned agricultural, set for a hearing Monday night, Ketterer expects continued opposition from community members he believes still have yet to fully level with BWXT.
“What I would advise my friends to do is just put immense pressure on the local community decision makers,” he said.
“There’s many people in favor of this and there’s many people that are not in favor of this, but to me, the environmental impacts of it all is a separate matter that’s unrelated to whether you want it or not. I think it’s a disaster.”
Conca said he doesn’t think companies like BWXT, which hope to be part of an increase in nuclear production, whether for commercial or defense purposes, can afford disasters in what he said is a very highly scrutinized industry.
“It’s pretty tough to get around those, and there’s no reason why they would want to. One thing about the nuclear industry is that we’re under a microscope all the time,” Conca said.
“You don’t even save much money if you’re sloppy. All you do is cause a problem, and everyone knows in the nuclear industry that, like, okay, we got another chance here.”
Whether BWXT proposes the plant for the area it wants to rezone, or for adjacent land it already operates under manufacturing zoning, the full-scale operation will require a National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) study. That process will offer an additional opportunity for community comment.
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