The Department of Energy on Friday released a little more than $3.5 million in funding for Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership to demolish facilities at the shuttered Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.
The task order calls for demolition of the C-727 and C-146-A facilities. Parts of each formerly housed hazardous waste, so the Kentucky Energy & Environment Cabinet and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had to review DOE’s teardown plans, according to a DOE performance assessment plan for the Jacobs-led contractor.
The 1950s-vintage C-727 facility began life as a heat-treating and pipe fabrication shop that also stored asbestos waste, according to DOE slides published in 2021. Centrus Energy Corp., when it was still known as USEC, leased the facility from DOE in the 1990s, returning it to the government in 2014 when the company went bankrupt.
The C-746-A facility included a hazardous and mixed waste storage facility, plus a pair of smelters that were decommissioned and demolished earlier in the Paducah cleanup. The facility’s concrete slab remained to be cleaned up at the time DOE solicited bids for the contract Four Rivers eventually won.
Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership got the Paducah cleanup contract from DOE in 2017. With options, the deal is worth about $1.5 billion over 10 years. In June 2022, after Four Rivers worked through the contract’s five-year base period, DOE picked up the pact’s first option, a three-year option. The deal now runs through June 19, 2025. DOE still holds a two-year option.
