Ohio’s U.S. Senate delegation this week formally invited newly minted Energy Secretary Rick Perry to tour the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, where the Energy Department is weighing big changes for a uranium cleanup that could take much longer than expected.
“We would like to formally invite you to Piketon, Ohio, to see firsthand the decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) work being being [done] at the site as well as existing technology also at the site that could play a key role in future domestic uranium enrichment efforts,” Sens. Sherrod Brown (D) and Rob Portman (R) wrote in a March 21 letter to Perry printed on Senate letterhead.
During Perry’s Jan. 19 confirmation hearing in the Senate, the former Texas governor promised Portman he would visit Portsmouth, where DOE is cleaning up after decades of uranium enrichment for U.S. nuclear weapons and warships.
It is taking longer than DOE expected to clean up Portsmouth’s uranium enrichment facilities. Remediation ramped up in 2010 when the agency’s Office of Environmental Management awarded Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth a 10-year decommissioning contract that including options is now worth nearly $3.5 billion.
The department then expected Portsmouth cleanup to last into the mid-2020s, but the end date could stretch on into the 2030s or later, according to a preliminary 10-year plan DOE and its contractor are discussing internally. Portsmouth has faced technical challenges, funding uncertainty in Congress, and commodity market instability that hurts DOE’s ability to pay for cleanup at the site by bartering uranium to the contractor.
Also at the site, and to Portman’s continuing consternation, a DOE contractor is now dismantling an industrial-scale uranium-enrichment demonstration known as the American Centrifuge Plant. The Obama administration pulled the plug on most of this project in 2015 and contractor Centrus Energy Corp. has been decommissioning the Portsmouth portion of the demonstration since early 2016.
Portman, who had fought to keep the uranium enrichment demo going, has continued to criticize DOE’s decision to shut down the American Centrifuge Project down.
