The head of a union representing cleanup workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, joined Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) for President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Herman Potter, president of United Steelworkers Local 689, drew the invitation for being “a friend and a steadfast partner in the fight to accelerate cleanup of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and save jobs at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio," Portman said in a Jan. 11 statement.
Local 689 represents some 1,400 workers at Portsmouth, a former uranium enrichment facility now undergoing decontamination and decommissioning. The Energy Department expects cleanup work there to continue through the 2040s. Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth — a partnership of Irving, Texas-based Fluor and Lynchburg, Va.-based BWX Technologies — is DOE’s prime contractor on the cleanup. The company had prepared to lay off hundreds of workers from the Portsmouth project last fall due to a funding shortfall from DOE; the congressional omnibus budget for fiscal 2016 provided sufficient funding to avoid the layoffs.
Workers represented by Local 689 are also employed at the American Centrifuge Project in Piketon, which DOE has decided to close this year. The facility is the only U.S.-designed-and-built uranium enrichment plant in operation domestically.
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