SUMMERLIN, Nev. — The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is just starting to get rolling on environmental remediation at the Paducah Site in Kentucky, an agency official charged with overseeing cleanup at the gaseous diffusion plants there and in Portsmouth, Ohio, said Wednesday.
“We are just dipping our toe into that,” Joel Bradburne, the manager of the Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office said during the Radwaste Summit here, hosted by Exchange Monitor Publications.
Overall, cleanup of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant is about eight years behind its counterpart site in Piketon, Ohio, Brandburne said.
Built in 1952, initially to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, Paducah later adapted its mission to uranium enrichment for commercial nuclear power plants from the 1990s until 2013.
In the next few years, work crews at Paducah will focus on cleaning up a trichloroethylene (TCE) groundwater plume, preparing the site’s former uranium enrichment process buildings for demolition and making plans to tear down the C-400 Cleaning Building, Bradburne said. DOE estimates it will demolish C-400 around 2027.
As for tearing down the process buildings at Paducah, Bradburne said that effort will look much like Environmental Management’s ongoing X-326 structural demolition, which is in the advanced stages at Portsmouth. The first of the three major process buildings at Portsmouth should be down to the slab level later this summer, DOE has said.