Energy Secretary Rick Perry postponed a visit this week to the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said.
The meeting had not been rescheduled at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.
“While I’m disappointed that Secretary Perry cannot make it to Piketon on Monday I’m pleased he has indicated that he will reschedule the visit soon,” Portman said in a prepared statement July 29. “I look forward to showcasing the important work being done there, their importance to the local economy, and the potential for economic development in the future. I’m also excited to show Secretary Perry the infrastructure in place at the American Centrifuge Project plant should the Administration restart a domestic uranium enrichment program.”
Portman had announced the visit July 21. Perry announced the trip, and media availability, Thursday. The DOE chief planned to tour the former uranium enrichment facilities along with Portman and Reps. U.S. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Bill Johnson (R-Ohio).
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 enrichment 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.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Piketon, Ohio, bitterly opposed to the Energy Department’s strategy for disposal of nuclear waste from demolition of the Portsmouth Site’s uranium facilities, is angling for few minutes alone with Perry — whenever the DOE chief actually visits the Buckeye State.
“I sent a letter about a month ago asking for a few minutes of his time away from DOE and plant officials and will be asking again today for when he does make it to Piketon,” Mayor Billy Spencer wrote in a Monday email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Perry attended a meeting of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet on Monday.
The Village of Piketon has lately contested DOE’s intention to build an on-site disposal cell at Portsmouth, where radioactive waste from demolition of Cold War uranium-enrichment facilities would be stored permanently.
The village, citing an independent study it commissioned from the Washington, D.C.-based Ferguson Group, says DOE has known for years that its preferred site for the landfill sits atop fractured bedrock that could leak radiation into the surrounding land.
Spencer and other village leaders have contended that the disposal facility would undermine DOE’s plans to redevelop and re-industrialize the Portsmouth Site after the cleanup is done.
“A nuclear dump is not the legacy we want for our community,” Spencer has said.
DOE estimates it will finish the Portsmouth cleanup in the mid 2040s or early 2050s, according to the agency’s 2018 budget request.
