Keeping the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in operation for another year, the Department of Energy has finalized a deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority, Energy Northwest and USEC to re-enrich 9,075 metric tons of depleted uranium tails from the DOE’s stockpile. The arrangement comes after months of discussion between the parties and is intended to provide a financial lifeline to plant operator USEC and prevent a shutdown of the plant at the end of this month, which USEC has said would occur without sufficient demand. “After much hard work, the Energy Department, in cooperation with the other organizations, has identified a creative path forward to utilize a portion of our depleted uranium inventory in a way that brings together the public and private sector to advance America’s national security interests at a reduced cost to taxpayers,” Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said in a statement. “This effort will also provide benefits to electric ratepayers in two areas of the country and maintain operations at the Paducah enrichment plant, thereby avoiding costs to the Department’s cleanup program and keeping jobs in the local community.”
This month DOE plans to transfer the depleted uranium currently stored at Paducah to Energy Northwest for essentially no cost, though it would pay DOE $5 million for handling tanks storing the tails. The utility would then pay USEC $706 million to provide about a year’s worth of enrichment services at the Paducah plant, totaling about 5 million separative work units that would result in 482 metric tons of low enriched uranium. Energy Northwest would use 47 metric tons of the LEU to fuel its Columbia Generating station, and would sell the remaining 435 metric tons to TVA over the course of several years for use in its reactors for a price of $731 million. That fuel would be used to produce an estimated 15 years’ worth of tritium for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The deal was finalized after DOE completed a uranium market impact analysis gauging the effects of such an arrangement on the uranium mining, enrichment and conversion industry. “The analysis took a comprehensive view of the Department’s uranium sales and transfers, including additional transfers to support the cleanup at the Department’s Portsmouth site in southern Ohio and transfers of low-enriched uranium related to NNSA’s programs for down-blending surplus U.S. highly enriched uranium,” according to a DOE release. The industry association Uranium Producers of America has steadily opposed an increase to DOE’s self-imposed 10 percent cap on domestic uranium supply, fearing it would depress prices. But DOE states that based on the analysis “Secretary Chu made a determination that the above transfers will not have an adverse material impact on the domestic uranium mining, conversion or enrichment industry.”
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