B&W Conversion Services, LLC, no longer expects to have the Department of Energy’s two depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion plants operating at full commercial throughput by the end of this fiscal year as previously planned. Due in large part to continued technical challenges, BWCS now expects to need until the end of Fiscal Year 2013 to know the “sustainable steady production rate” at which the two plants will be able to operate, which may be less than had been anticipated, according to contractor President and Project Manager George Dials. “In FY 13 I think we will be moving up the ladder so we’re meeting increased production goals. I think in FY 13 is when we’re really going to have enough information to define what the commercial production levels ought to be,” Dials told WC Monitor last week. “I think you can say [the plants] aren’t operating at the level any of us anticipated, but you have to go back to the basis of the assumptions that were made. I don’t know that there was a lot of empirical data available that defined either the plant throughput or the availability number that was used in the [Request for Proposal] or in our proposal,” he said. Dials added, “What I can tell you is I do think we’ve affirmed our value to the project because we presented ourselves as a … group that had some operating experience with uranium chemistry and uranium operations and processing operations. We presented ourselves as problem solvers and that’s what we’ve been doing.”
The two DUF6 conversion plants, located at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites, are intended to help disposition more than 700,000 metric tons of material stored in thousands of cylinders at the two sites. The plants are used to convert the DUF6 into uranium oxide, a more stable material, for disposal; and hydrofluoric acid, which can be sold for reuse. In March 2011, BWCS—made up of B&W Technical Services and URS—took over as the plants’ operating contractor while they were in the midst of a hot functional testing period, and last September the contractor met a goal for having the plants deemed fully operational. Now, by the end of this fiscal year, according to Dials, BWCS hopes to reach a milestone of having the two DUF6 plants complete a “partial conversion operations” phase, which entails demonstrating that all of the conversion lines at the two plants can operate for a two-week period. “As we get the plants back together for the rest of this fiscal year, we think we’ll be moving them up to a level that will demonstrate that we can actually run them in a stable, sustainable way for a couple of weeks with everything running. That would allow us to say we’re through partial conversion operations and request permission to move to full conversion operations,” Dials said.
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