The Energy Department said Friday it saved close to $500,000 by using a lubricant it already owned to clean a polychlorinated biphenyl-contaminated oil once used in transformers that helped power the now-shuttered Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.
DOE did not say how much the cleanup cost in total.
“In compliance with the Toxic Substance Control Act, the Fluor Paducah Deactivation Project initiated removal of PCB oil from the transformers in early summer 2015” DOE said in a press release. “To ensure all PCB oil has been removed from the transformers, Environmental Protection Agency regulations required that the transformers be rinsed. Rather than purchasing a rinsing agent, such as kerosene, DOE and its contractors developed a unique idea to rinse the transformers with lube oil already at PGDP that also was scheduled for disposal. This idea saved nearly a half-million dollars, while enabling an existing product to be reused before its ultimate disposal.”
The department by the end of 2015 moved about 100,000 gallons of transformer oil and 113,000 gallons of PCBs safely off-site, ahead of schedule.
The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant once refined uranium for the Pentagon’s weapons and, later, for commercial power plants. Fluor Federal Services Inc. Paducah Deactivation Project is the prime on the cleanup under a three-year, $420 million contract that phased in back in July.
Jobs