Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/31/2014
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.–While the Department of Energy’s two depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion plants did not meet a goal to reach 100 percent operational design plate capacity by the end of Fiscal Year 2014, the facilities are seeing improvements in production rates, DOE Portsmouth Paducah Project Office Manager Bill Murphie said last week. The plants have gone from about 26 to 35 percent availability in 2012 to 77 to 80 percent availability currently. “That’s a dramatic and necessary improvement, but not exactly where we want to be. There’s still a lot of lessons learned. I kind of think of this as the nuclear power industry back in the ‘60s. It was a great idea, built a lot of plants, but their operability and availability and reliability factors were pretty poor,” Murphie said at this year’s Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum. “We are going through that right now to try and get to the point where we can improve that up to 80 or 90 percent, which would be our ideal goal.”
The two DUF6 plants, located at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites, are operated by B&W Conversion Services, LLC, and aim to process for disposition more than 700,000 metric tons of material. Since construction was completed the plant has achieved about 70,000 tons of conversion, “so we still have a long way to go,” Murphie said. In FY14, BWCS reported a total production of 22,596 metric tons processed, compared to a goal of 22,700 metric tons, according to the DOE Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office. “Our goal was to try and achieve 100 percent in operational design plate capacity by the end of this fiscal year. We didn’t quite get there although the plant has been operating at times at nameplate capacity but we are still struggling to get it to be operable and available such that we can get to what we call the 32,500 tons per year rate,” Murphie said.
Equipment, Hiring, Challenges
There are several challenges facing the project. For example, “sometimes getting a cylinder requires you to move 20 cylinders to get to it, which makes things more difficult,” Murphie said. Additionally, the hydrofluoric acid and uranium hexafluoride processed in the facilities are highly corrosive. “Some of the equipment, it doesn’t take but a small speck of surface area to be exposed to one of these chemicals and you can have deterioration and breakthrough,” Murphie said. “We are seeing where some of that is happening. We just had a leak the other day.” Staffing is another issue. “We continue to have to bring on a lot of outside consultants and experts. We’d love to be able to hire more locally, but some of these require special expertise and skills, which make it harder,” Murphie said.
The DUF6 project is also incurring more costs due to the transfer of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant from USEC to DOE that was completed this month after USEC ceased operations there. “There are a lot of services that USEC used to provide,” Murphie said. “Those services now have to be provided by ourselves and in some cases the DUF6 plant and their operators have to perform work that was previously provided by USEC and those costs now have to be incurred directly by our project.”
DOE Looking at Facility Improvements
The Department is looking at improving several processes at DUF6, such as the hydrogen generation technology, in which natural gas is used to create hydrogen. Improvements are also needed at the autoclave conversion heating units. “When we get the heat and the cylinder heated up and we basically suck off the initial UF6, 90 percent of it coming out goes very quickly but then we start getting less of it as we get to the heel and that slows the process down. So we are looking at ways to improve that process,” Murphie said.
When asked about efforts to boost operational capacity, BWCS said in a statement that it is “focused on safe and compliant operation of the DUF6 plants with continued improvement in production towards the design capacity of the plant while maintaining the plant in condition to allow multi-decade operation. To this end, BWCS has safely and progressively increased annual production levels throughout the contract period. Increased production is expected from facility design improvements and growing experience in operations and maintenance. While our contract with DOE incentivizes us to safely maximize production, our expectation is to convert about 25,000 tons of DUF6 in FY15 or 80% of the contract defined design capacity. This methodical increase in production goals provides the opportunity for sustained production at stable rates to minimize interruptions which impact overall annual production.”
