PHOENIX — Demolition of the X-326 Process Building at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio should begin this fall, managers said here Wednesday.
Cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT finished deactivating the facility, disconnecting the utilities and making the structure “cold and dark,” in 2019, DOE Portsmouth Site Lead Jeff Bettinger said at the Waste Management Symposia. Cold and dark means the facility no longer has electricity and is remediated to the point there is no threat of nuclear criticality.
Energy Department officials previously hoped to have the building cold and dark by the end of 2017, but work took longer than anticipated.
Plans for demolition are being finalized and approvals are being secured from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Bettinger and other managers across the Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office (PPPO) said during a panel discussion on remediation of the former gaseous diffusion complexes in Ohio and Kentucky.
At Portsmouth, the 30-acre X-326 will be the first teardown over the next decade of three large gaseous diffusion process buildings that were used in uranium enrichment. Demolition of X-326 should be finished by the end of 2023. Under the DOE schedule, it would be followed by the X-333 Building by 2027 and then the X-330 Building by the end of 2029.
The structures will be done “one right after the other,” Bettinger said. This will avoid the complications of demobilizing and restarting demolition crews, he added.
The new On-Site Waste Disposal Facility at Portsmouth will take the construction debris from the buildings, starting this fall. The first few disposal cells are about ready at the $900 million facility. When all 12 cells are completed, the facility will have a disposal capacity of 2 million cubic yards.
