Lynchburg firm aims to advance nuclear technology in space

A Lynchburg-based company hoping to use nuclear power to help blaze a new trail for the future of space exploration has its sights set on a target tens of millions of miles away.

BWX Technologies is working with NASA, the military and private industry to develop fuel and components for nuclear-powered spaceships that could be faster and more efficient than spacecraft using traditional chemical rockets. Among other goals, BWXT hopes that its work will help send a crewed mission to Mars.

“You want to harness the energy density of nuclear energy — specifically nuclear fission — to be able to travel places further in space faster, in less time than you can with existing propulsion techniques today, or have the power to stay places in space longer than we can,” said Kate Kelly, director of space and emerging programs at BWXT Advanced Technologies, a division of BWXT.

It’s all part of an ongoing quest to push the boundaries of human travel through space. During a visit to BWXT in January, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson paraphrased a line from President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech about going to the moon, saying, “We choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”

“I think that’s an expression of our character,” Nelson said. “That’s a part of us, of who we are. We are pioneers. We are adventurers. We are explorers. And the exploration of space is clearly part of that.”

Space exploration helps people research new technologies and could benefit climate studies, and the nuclear power research being done for space could have applications on Earth, said Alizera Haghighat, a Virginia Tech professor and director of the university’s nuclear engineering program.

“It’s not just taking a trip,” he said.

But getting to the moon or Mars comes with challenges.

A one-way trip to the Red Planet, in particular, would take an estimated six to nine months. By some estimates, a round trip could take two to three years, not just because of the travel time required but because the crew would need to stay on Mars for months waiting for the two planets to be properly aligned for the return journey.

Longer missions mean astronauts would be more exposed to cosmic radiation, which NASA says could increase their risk of cancer and other illnesses.  Research published just last month suggests that long space missions could seriously damage astronauts’ kidneys.

BWXT hopes its work will help cut the travel time to Mars to around four months, making such missions simpler and safer.

Nelson, the NASA administrator, even envisions a nuclear-powered “sprint”: “On the first trip to Mars, you could get there maybe in two and a half, three months. You could stay on the surface for a week and then get back in two and a half, three months.”

The key to shooting through space faster could rest with a developing technology called nuclear thermal propulsion. It would use very hot — over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit — nuclear fuel to heat up a very cold substance such as liquid hydrogen, which would rapidly expand and be expelled through a nozzle, creating thrust. The whole system could be about the size of a 55-gallon drum.

“The efficiency is, depending on the mission and depending on the system design, two to five times greater than chemical propulsion,” Kelly said.

For longer space missions, nuclear power is the only practical solution, said Haghighat, the Virginia Tech professor. Traditional chemical rockets require a lot of fuel — think of the large orange tanks of liquid hydrogen and oxygen that dwarfed NASA space shuttles on the launch pad.

“Nuclear rockets, because of the significant amount of power they can produce in a very small amount of mass, they are much more efficient, much lighter, and also faster,” Haghighat said.

The marriage of space and nuclear power traces its roots to 1959, when NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission started up a program to develop nuclear rockets for long missions. Multiple reactors were tested in the 1960s, but the program was canceled in 1973 without any flight tests.

Fast forward to today, and at its Mt. Athos site in Campbell County outside Lynchburg, BWX Technologies is building out what it calls the BWXT Innovation Campus on 11 acres acquired four years ago from its next-door neighbor, the French nuclear firm Framatome, which has its North American headquarters in Lynchburg.

BWXT’s primary business is providing nuclear fuel and components for the U.S. military. It employs about 7,000 people, including about 2,800 in the Lynchburg area, most of whom work at the company’s highly secure Mt. Athos complex.

Its products power the Navy’s nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. The company also converts highly enriched uranium — also called weapons grade uranium — into a form suitable for commercial nuclear reactors. It has a subsidiary, BWXT Medical, that develops products such as isotopes for hospitals to use in diagnostic imaging. And it’s involved in the nascent commercial market for small modular nuclear reactors.

The company’s Innovation Campus is home to its Advanced Technologies division and is where that division’s research and development and space programs are coming together under the roof of a two-story, 170,000-square-foot facility. About half of that square footage remains under construction; company officials expect it to be complete by the end of this year.

The Advanced Technologies business unit has about 330 employees today, with a goal of 400 by this time next year. Most of those hired have been new employees rather than internal transfers, contributing to the company’s employment growth.

Today, engineers can send prototype designs of parts to 3D printers to be made while they eat lunch. A CT scanner — like the kind used in a hospital, but more powerful because it penetrates metal instead of flesh and bone — is used to cross-examine sections of parts for potential flaws. Special furnaces reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit to heat-treat materials.

All of this is part of a design-build-test workflow that is kept largely in-house to ensure security and secrecy. It’s these processes and technologies that BWXT hopes will help it produce the fuel and parts necessary to ultimately power crewed missions to the Red Planet.

To that end, BWXT is part of a team that is working to create the world’s first spacecraft demonstrating nuclear thermal propulsion. Led by Bethesda, Maryland-based aerospace company Lockheed Martin, the project is called DRACO — for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations. BWXT’s role is to deliver an assembled, fueled nuclear reactor for DRACO.

The $499 million DRACO program is backed by NASA and the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and would be fully funded by President Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2025 budget request. The contract provides $200 million to BWXT over three years.

If all goes according to plan, in 2027, the completed DRACO craft will use a conventional chemical rocket to “cold” launch, which means the nuclear reactor would be turned off until it reaches a certain distance from Earth.

“Once we’re at a specified altitude so that the reactor cannot come back to Earth before the fission products have decayed sufficiently, that it won’t cause harm to the public … then we’ll turn on the reactor and go through a series of experiments,” Kelly said.

Developing a nuclear thermal propulsion system comes with four major challenges, according to a 2021 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine: creating a system that can heat gas to such a high temperature, being able to get a system up to its full operating temperature very quickly, storing liquid hydrogen in space for a long time without losing a lot of it and overcoming a lack of testing facilities on the ground.

“Although the United States has conducted ground-based testing of NTP [nuclear thermal propulsion] technologies, those tests took place nearly 50 years ago, and did not fully address flight system requirements: recapturing the ability to conduct necessary ground testing will be costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, no in-space NTP system has ever been operated,” states the report, which was produced by a committee that included a BWXT senior vice president.

A second Lockheed Martin-led project, dubbed JETSON — for Joint Emergent Technology Supplying On-Orbit Nuclear — involves BWXT and the Los Alamos-based Space Nuclear Power Corp., aka SpaceNukes. The Air Force Research Laboratory, which is the main research and development arm for the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, awarded Lockheed Martin $34 million for the project last year. BWXT’s role is to supply nuclear fuel and components.

The goal of JETSON is to develop a nuclear reactor that could move spacecraft using nuclear electric propulsion and also supply electricity. Nuclear electric propulsion is similar to nuclear thermal propulsion in that they both produce force to move a craft through space, but a key difference is that nuclear electric propulsion would use a lower amount of thrust and would accelerate a ship for a longer period of time, Kelly said.

“Think on the magnitude of years, versus hours with nuclear thermal,” Kelly said.

The fundamental challenge of developing a nuclear electric propulsion system, according to the National Academies report, is creating something that can provide sufficient electricity for that long of a time, which the 2021 report notes would require scaling up such systems to “orders of magnitude higher than have been achieved to date.”

In a third project, BWXT is developing an application of nuclear power in space called fission surface power. Rather than propel a craft through space, fission surface power would supply electricity for tasks on the surfaces of the moon or Mars, such as supporting habitation systems for space crews. The company says nuclear power would provide more reliable energy than solar power, which can be limited by factors such as a lack of available sunlight in certain locations or dust impacting solar arrays.

BWXT’s space nuclear arm has reached across the Atlantic, as well. In April, BWXT and Rolls-Royce jointly announced that they had received $1.5 million from a UK Space Agency fund “to advance the technologies that benefit both the UK and U.S. space nuclear development programs.”

Rolls-Royce is a name perhaps most commonly associated with luxury cars, but those are produced by a separate company. The Rolls-Royce that’s partnering with BWXT is working to develop nuclear microreactors for use on a future moon base.

“This is an exciting time,” said Nelson, the NASA administrator, during his visit to the company’s Mt. Athos site. “This is the golden age of space exploration.”

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