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 Monitor, 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.
Work under Fluor-BWXT’s contract began in 2011. The deal now is worth up to $3.5 billion over a decade, including options. That is over $1 billion more than it was worth when it was awarded, and the 10-year planning document forecasts more rising costs.
The plan says it will cost more than $1.8 billion to complete the five years of work split evenly between Fluor-BWXT’s two remaining contract options. Those options were worth a little more than $1.5 billion as of last year, when DOE modified the company’s contract to split what had been a five-year option into a pair of two-and-a-half-year options.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth and DOE did not reply to requests for comment this week.
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 intends to permanently dispose of irradiated debris from demolition of the three uranium enrichment buildings at this facility.
The plan also would allow Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth to avoid laying off some 450 full-time personnel in what remains of fiscal 2017, though the document did not specify how these people would be kept on the job. Between the difficulties of the cleanup and perpetual financial instability driven by the unusual funding arrangement at Portsmouth, the site faces layoffs practically every year.
It is also not clear how hard the current stopgap federal budget is driving employment levels at Portsmouth. The measure, which set government funding through most of April, generally holds federal spending to 2016 levels in a year for which the Obama administration had requested a 14-percent budget increase for Portsmouth cleanup.
In the stopgap budget, lawmakers provided an extra $90 million or so for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund that pays for uranium enrichment cleanup at DOE’s Portsmouth, Paducah, and Oak Ridge sites. The sites share this appropriation about equally, and assuming they also shared equally in Congress’ plus-up, Portsmouth would have gotten about the budget the Obama administration requested for 2017.
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.
DOE now barters up to 1,600 metric tons of natural uranium equivalent a year for Portsmouth cleanup, per a 2015 decision by then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The agency is now studying whether to change the rate at which it releases its excess uranium onto the market. Ceasing barter for Portsmouth cleanup altogether after 2016 is one option DOE considered as part of a market analysis released in January.
Despite that, the preliminary Portsmouth cleanup plan reviewed by Weapons Complex Monitor shows the barter arrangement would continue until the final option period on Fluor-BWXT’s contract concludes in mid-2021: right around the time DOE expects its inventory of excess uranium to run out.
Fluor-BWXT has said it would prefer to get all of its funding from the annual appropriations process, and the U.S. uranium industry has disputed DOE’s position that the barter arrangement does not hurt domestic producers by putting more uranium on the market.