Eight members of Ohio’s delegation to the House of Representatives on Monday urged new Energy Secretary Rick Perry to visit the department’s uranium enrichment decommissioning project at Portsmouth. This is the latest of several invitations Perry has received from lawmakers to take an up close and personal view of DOE’s cleanup of its Cold War nuclear complex.
“The decontamination and demobilization of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is massive in scope and complexity, employing nearly 2,000 skilled workers who labor ceaselessly through our highly uncertain fiscal environment,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Perry. “Meanwhile, DOE is assessing options for domestic uranium enrichment capability, including advanced centrifuge technology demonstrated at Piketon” at the now-shuttered American Centrifuge plant.
The former Texas governor has been on the job for less than two weeks. Traveling to the Portsmouth Site would give him “crucial insight” that would help guide his decision-making in the near future, according to the lawmakers, who expressed their hope for a visit “as early as possible in your tenure.”
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth is conducting remediation operations at Portsmouth under a contract worth up to roughly $3.5 billion over a decade. About 80 percent of the funding comes from DOE bartering surplus federal uranium to the contractor, which then sells it on the open market. But this has proven a volatile mechanism that has regularly required extra funding from Congress to sustain work at Portsmouth. The Department of Energy last week announced it would review the uranium barter funding system.
Meanwhile, DOE in 2015 halted funding for Centrus Energy’s American Centrifuge enrichment technology demonstration facility, though research is ongoing at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Signatories to the letter to Perry were Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R), Marcy Kaptur (D), Steve Chabot (R), Tim Ryan (D), Michael Turner (R), Bill Johnson (R), Steve Stivers (R), and David Joyce (R).
