The Energy Department could soon revise an Obama administration decision that bartering government-owned uranium to pay for nuclear cleanup at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, does not harm the domestic uranium market, a March 9 regulatory filing shows.
“The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is beginning the process to consider a new Secretarial Determination covering potential continued transfers of uranium for cleanup services at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant,” the agency wrote in a request for public comment filed only a week after former Texas governor Rick Perry was sworn in as President Donald Trump’s first secretary of energy.
Comments are due April 10.
In 2015, during the Barack Obama administration, “the Secretary of Energy determined that continued uranium transfers for cleanup services at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and for down-blending of highly-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium will not have an adverse material impact on the domestic uranium mining, conversion, or enrichment industry,” DOE wrote in a May 1, 2015, secretarial determination.
Trump transition officials have had DOE’s uranium barter arrangement in their crosshairs since before Inauguration Day. In a now-infamous, since-disavowed questionnaire sent to DOE in December, the transition team asked the agency how it planned to pay for Portsmouth cleanup “when the current uranium inventory designated for barter in exchange for cleanup services is no longer available?”
In the past, DOE has paid up to 75 percent of its uranium-enrichment cleanup bills at Portsmouth by bartering surplus government-owned uranium to contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, which then sells the material on the open market. Today, it is more like 30 percent of the yearly bill, said Dennis Carr, site project director for prime Portsmouth contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth.
Volatile and generally sagging uranium prices make this arrangement an annual tap dance for the contractor, which routinely does not get enough money for the uranium to cover its annual cleanup bills and must then ask Congress to fill the shortfall from the Treasury.
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s began work in 2011 under a contract that, including options, could be worth just under $3.5 billion over 10 years. Portsmouth is a Cold War-era plant that enriched uranium for Pentagon bombs and the nuclear Navy.
