The final paperwork is being filed to declare the Department of Energy’s X-326 building at Portsmouth, Ohio, “cold and dark” and ready for demolition, Robert Edwards, manager of DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, said Wednesday.
The cold and dark designation could come in early 2018, Edwards and Dennis Carr, site director for Portsmouth cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, said during a panel discussion at the National Cleanup Workshop Wednesday in Alexandria, Va. DOE is shooting for doing the actual demolition in fiscal 2022.
The Portsmouth Site over the decades produced enriched uranium for nuclear deterrence and then for the nuclear power industry, before halting operations in 2001. The two-floor X-326, which encompasses 56 acres under one roof, is one of three process buildings to be torn down at Portsmouth.
“Cold and dark” status means the plant is cut off from electricity and remediated to the point to effectively preclude any threat of nuclear criticality. The process required upgrades to some aging infrastructure – including cranes, elevators, lighting — that had eroded at X-326. “We needed that infrastructure,” Carr said.
Fluor-BWXT received its Portsmouth cleanup award in 2011, a contract now worth up to $3.5 billion over 10 years, including options. The contracting team initially anticipated X-326 would be ready for demolition by March 2016, but a modification to the contract earlier this year gives it until the end of next February to reach that status. However, Fluor-BWXT would lose 30 percent of its award fee for the project if it takes that long.
Teardown of X-326 was at one point anticipated to be completed in 2018. That was set to 2022 in a 10-year planning document Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth issued earlier this year. Demolition of the other two process buildings, X-333 and X-330, is also pushed back, with X-333 torn down in 2030 rather than 2021. X-330 would be demolished in 2028 rather than 2026, the document says.
