Centrus Energy on Wednesday said it had finished the $15 million decontamination and decommissioning of the K-1600 plant at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
The Bethesda, Md.-based nuclear fuel supplier met its budget and schedule commitments for the job, according to a press release.
“I’m pleased our team was able to deliver the results the Department expected on a very short timetable,” said Centrus President and CEO Daniel Poneman, former deputy energy secretary, said in the release. “This success demonstrates our broad technical capabilities and reflects our strategy of diversifying the business by offering advanced engineering, manufacturing, and D&D services.”
The Energy Department leased the facility to Centrus from 2002 to 2018 for testing and demonstration of the company’s American Centrifuge uranium enrichment technology. Centrus last year received a state license to conduct further testing at its Technology and Manufacturing Center in Oak Ridge, which was already home to centrifuge production, engineering, and design operations, the release says. That made K-1600 unnecessary for its needs.
Centrus received the DOE work authorization last September, covering extraction and disposal of the facility’s equipment and material to eliminate radiological contamination and any classified items. That sets K-1600 up for demolition by a contractor, which will be either Oak Ridge cleanup prime URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) or one of its subcontractors.
The current contract for the UCOR joint venture is set to expire in July 2020. The building should come down by then, UCOR President and CEO Ken Rueter said last month.
K-1600 is among the few leftover facilities at the 2,200-acre former K-25 uranium enrichment complex at Oak Ridge, now being readied for commercial industrial use as the East Tennessee Technology Park.
Meanwhile, at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, Centrus is building a new 16-machine enrichment cascade based on its AC100-M technology. The company is doing the work on the site of its canceled American Centrifuge Project, under an undefinitized, $115 million, cost-sharing contract with DOE’s Office of Science.
The office did not reply to a request for comment this week about whether the contract, terms of which Centrus posted online over the summer, has yet been finalized.
The cascade is to produce 600 kilograms of high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel by June 1, 2020. The material would not be for defense nuclear use, but the centrifuge Centrus is building under the contract, which would be made only from domestic-sourced parts, conceivably could.
Centrus is one of two companies in the running to provide technology for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s next-generation domestic enrichment facility. The weapons agency will first have need of low-enriched uranium for defense use in the 2040s. Commercial uranium often can only be used for peaceful purposes.
