Work crews at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in Kentucky have removed and cut up nearly 500 large components, known as converters, from the C-333 Process Building, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said this week.
Work crews recently completed the “segmentation” of all 497 converters from the C-333 facility, DOE’s nuclear cleanup office said in a Tuesday Feb. 10 news release.
C-333, which is undergoing deactivation, is one of four huge process buildings used for past uranium enrichment at the Paducah Site.
Segmentation is the term DOE used for removing and subsequently cutting down to size the converters, many of which weighed more than 70,000 pounds, according to the release. Many of these converters were eventually reclaimed “and stored onside for possible reuse,” according to the DOE release.
DOE’s Amentum-led contractor Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership gradually decreased the time necessary from 14 days per converter to eventually handling two converters per day.
The Paducah work crews used some information and lessons learned from similar process building demolition projects at its sister property, the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, DOE said.