DOE: Push to Suspend Uranium Transfers Would Stop Work at Ports.

Pushing back against an effort by ConverDyn to stop the Department of Energy’s uranium transfers, DOE this week told a court that suspending the transfers would bring to a halt cleanup work at Portsmouth and the highly enriched uranium downblend program. Last month uranium conversion company ConverDyn filed in federal court a request for a temporary injunction to block transfers scheduled in July and the coming months, claiming they will have a negative impact on the company’s business.  “The two DOE programs threatened by plaintiff’s motion — the clean-up of the environmental contamination at the Portsmouth uranium enrichment plant and the program to down-blend, and so render safe, weapons grade uranium — are largely funded from DOE’s uranium transfers,” states DOE’s July 7 filing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Both programs will effectively come to a halt if the preliminary injunction is entered, causing significant harm to the public interest.”

More than half the cleanup funding at DOE’s Portsmouth site comes through the transfers of DOE’s surplus uranium, adding up to around $160 million per year. Halting the transfers would result in layoffs of up to 825 workers at the Portsmouth site in addition to hundreds of layoffs that had already been planned, according to a court declaration by Office of Environmental Management official Jim Owendoff. “While the transfers were originally a means to accelerate the cleanup and D&D of PORTS, the UED&D appropriations funding available to DOE for that work has steadily declined due to the overall Federal budget constraints,” Owendoff said. “Consequently, the transfer of uranium is now required just to provide sufficient funding at PORTS to maintain the ongoing pace of cleanup and D&D.”

DOE’s recent decision to boost its uranium transfers to up to 15 percent of the domestic fuel market from a self-imposed cap of 10 percent will challenge ConverDyn’s long-term viability, according to the company, which has said that under federal law DOE is required to ensure that its uranium transfers will not have an adverse material impact on the U.S. nuclear industry. But DOE says it has ensured that in a May Secretarial Determination. “Plaintiff has not offered any reason to question the reasonableness of that conclusion or the analysis that informed it,” DOE said in its filing. “The relatively small size of DOE’s proposed transfer compared to global uranium supply was an important element of DOE’s ultimate conclusion that the transfers would not have a ‘material’ impact.”

ConverDyn believes that DOE’s response is not convincing. “Nothing in the DOE’s response changes our view that DOE failed to follow Federal law,” it said in a statement. “ The agency acknowledges that its ‘actions will necessarily have some impact on the market, and that this impact is greater now than it was in 2012.’ The DOE response also makes clear that DOE applied the incorrect standard in assessing the impacts of the transfers.”