NRC Close to Approving Plan to Ship Waste Out of American Centrifuge Plant

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the final steps of an environmental assessment that would clear the way for Centrus Energy Corp. to start shipping radioactive debris out of a shuttered, next-generation uranium-enrichment demonstration in Piketon, Ohio, an NRC spokesperson said Tuesday.

NRC “is currently working on an Environmental Assessment of the environmental impacts of transporting the waste,” a commission spokesman wrote in an email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. “We have requested comments from the state of Ohio and expect to receive them soon.”

After the environmental assessment is done, “a decision on approval for shipping the waste would follow shortly thereafter,” the commission spokesperson wrote.

A spokesperson for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency could not immediately comment by deadline Tuesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.

Centrus is in the process of tearing down the industrial-scale American Centrifuge lead cascade uranium-enrichment demonstration at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth site. The Barack Obama administration defunded the demo in 2015.

Centrus paid out of its own pocket to keep the American Centrifuge project going in Ohio until early 2016, then announced it would shutter the facility. In December, the company submitted to NRC its plan for transporting radioactive waste from the decontamination and decommissioning of the Ohio facility. The commission approved the transportation plan, part of the broader environmental assessment that is still pending, on May 25.

In its latest quarterly earnings report, Centrus said it would substantially finish tear-down of the American Centrifuge lead cascade facility by Dec. 31.

In regulatory filings with the NRC, Centrus — the former U.S. Enrichment Corp. — said it planned to dispose of American Centrifuge waste at DOE’s Nevada National Security Site. Some of this waste would first be processed at DOE’s Oak Ridge site in a privately operated facility run by EnergySolutions of Salt Lake City.

The waste from the American Centrifuge lead cascade plant includes classified material categorized as low-level mixed waste.