Energy Secretary Rick Perry is scheduled to travel to Ohio on July 31 to view the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and American Centrifuge Project, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) announced Friday.
“I’m excited to announce that Secretary Perry has accepted my invitation to visit the cleanup site of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant to get a firsthand look at the cleanup work and to see the importance of the work to the local economy,” Portman said in a press release. “Secretary Perry made a personal commitment to me that he will use his executive experience to better manage the work at Piketon to ensure the site can be cleaned up faster and reindustrialized for a new purpose that will benefit the Piketon economy.”
Cleanup of the shuttered enriched uranium production plant in Pike County has regularly faced budget challenges, partly due to a unique system in which roughly one-third of its funding is provided by reselling government uranium that DOE barters to site contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth.
The Portsmouth Site is also home to the primary American Centrifuge facility, an industrial-scale demonstration of advanced uranium enrichement technology that Centrus Energy closed in 2016 after Energy Department funding dried up. The plant is now being decommissioned, with closeout anticipated in early 2018.
“I’m also pleased to show Secretary Perry the factory where the American Centrifuge Project was located,” Portman said. “Secretary Perry understands the importance of having a domestic enrichment capability and I’m excited to showcase the potential the site still has for future enrichment activity.”
Perry has visited a number of DOE sites and national laboratories since being sworn in as energy secretary on March 2. He has also indicated his intention to visit the Hanford Site in Washington state, the department’s largest, most complex cleanup project, at some point this summer.
