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 the DOE Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, said Wednesday.
The cold and dark designation could come in early 2018, Edwards and Dennis Carr, site project director for Portsmouth Site cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, said during a panel discussion at the National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va. DOE is shooting for doing the actual demolition in fiscal 2022.
The Portsmouth Site over a period of 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 the current plan gives it until the end of next February to reach that status.
