Completion of the depleted uranium conversion program at the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in Kentucky could take three decades or more, an agency boss told the Paducah Site Citizens Advisory Board in Kentucky last week.
Even before the depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) plants in Paducah and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio went offline in March 2020 due to the pandemic, it was expected the two-site project would last until 2054, DOE’s DUF6 program manager for the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, Zak Lafontaine, told the advisory board meeting Thursday. The session was webcast.
“We are going through and doing an evaluation of our current lifecycle right now because we haven’t updated it since the COVID impacts,” Lafontaine said.
The plants turn most of the DUF6, left over from decades of uranium enrichment at DOE’s Portsmouth, Paducah and Oak Ridge in Tennessee, into a more stable uranium oxide form.
Both conversion plants in Kentucky and Ohio suspended operation in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the plants offline, DOE and Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services, the DUF6 prime, used much of the past two years to upgrade the facilities, installing additional compressed air and backup power generation and reducing “single points of failure” that can knock the plants offline, Lafontaine said.
The Paducah DUF6 facility resumed operation in November 2021 and the Portsmouth operation is to resume production work this summer, the DOE official said.
When the work started about 10 years ago DOE had an inventory of about 800,000 metric tons of DUF6 held in 67,000 steel canisters, according to Zak’s presentation to the board. Of those, 46,000 were at Paducah, home to four of the seven operating lines. The other three are at Portsmouth.
Each line can process a cylinder per day, LaFontaine said. However, Paducah usually has only two or three of its four lines operating at a time, he said.
The current DOE Office of Environmental Management DUF6 conversion contract for the plants at Portsmouth and Paducah is held by Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services, which could stay on the job until September 2023 while DOE solicits bids for a new follow-on contract.