Cleanup of the former uranium enrichment facilities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, would slide into the 2030s under a new demolition plan DOE and site remediation contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth are discussing internally.
According to the plan obtained by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the agency and Fluor-BWXT would delay demolition of Portsmouth’s three main uranium enrichment process buildings — X-326, X-330, and X-333 — by between two and nine years. Under the contractor-produced plan, X-326 would be demolished in 2022 instead of 2018; X-330 would be demolished in 2028 instead of 2026, and X-333 would be demolished in 2030 instead of 2021.
Only X-326 is supposed to be torn down under Fluor-BWXT’s current contract. That building is now scheduled to be cold and dark — isolated from electricity sources and ready for tear-down — by the end of this year, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has said. That is more than a year later than DOE envisioned when it put the company under contract in 2010.
Along with demolition of the three process buildings, DOE would delay construction of the first waste disposal area at Portsmouth’s planned On-Site Waste Disposal Facility by three years to 2023. The agency plans to permanently dispose of irradiated debris from demolition of the three uranium enrichment buildings at this facility.
The technical challenges of the Portsmouth cleanup — Fluor-BWXT has had trouble characterizing exactly what sort of mess it has on its hands using non-destructive sampling techniques to look inside radioactively contaminated pipes — have been amplified by the site’s unusual and unstable funding arrangement: DOE now pays about 30 percent of its contractor’s costs by bartering surplus government uranium to the company, which then resells the material on the open market.
Uranium regularly sells for less money than Fluor-BWXT projected when it budgeted cleanup costs, forcing Congress to make up the shortfall with tax dollars.
Work under Fluor-BWXT’s contract began in 2011. The deal now is worth up to $3.5 billion over 10 years, including options.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth and DOE did not reply to requests for comment.
