Nuclear cleanup crews at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio have taken down a huge chunk of the X-333 Process Building as part of the ongoing demolition of the 33-acre facility.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management said in a Tuesday press release that workers have torn down the 66,000-square-foot southwest corner of the building, which represents about 5% of the total demolition project.
Roughly 10,000 cubic yards of rubble resulted from the demo work, which will be buried at the On-Site Waste Disposal landfill at the Piketon, Ohio gaseous diffusion plant campus. Large process gas valves were also removed during the work by Southern Ohio Cleanup Company, an Amentum-led contractor for the property.
The X-333 demolition work started in April 2025 and is expected to last until 2031, DOE said. X-333 is the second of three mammoth process buildings that will eventually be torn down at Portsmouth. The prior decommission contractor took down X-326 in 2022. The third of the big process buildings is X-330.
The demolition was mentioned last week at DOE’s National Cleanup Workshop by the head of Environmental Management, Tim Walsh. “We are working ahead of schedule to demolish the second of three massive enrichment plants” at Portsmouth, Walsh said in Arlington, Va.