With the Department of Energy and USEC having wrapped up the final transfer of facilities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant for inclusion in the D&D project at the site, DOE site manager William Murphie had nothing but positive things to say about the process late last week. “I personally think it went better than we expected. … It was a very complicated, difficult challenge for us and USEC and the contractors,” Murphie, manager of the DOE Portsmouth/Paducah Site Office, told WC Monitor. He added, “This is probably the mist complicated thing I’ve worked on in years, and I’ve worked on some pretty complicated stuff in the Department."
On Sept. 30, DOE and USEC completed the transfer of approximately 170 facilities, such as buildings and site infrastructure systems, at the Portsmouth site from USEC to DOE. In addition, approximately 500 USEC employees associated with the transferred facilities became employed by Fluor-B&W Portsmouth, LLC, the site’s D&D contractor. As a result, USEC’s role at the Portsmouth site, where it was the long-time leaseholder, has been reduced to its American Centrifuge Project. Initially, Murphie said, USEC “had a long protracted schedule to return the buildings. They had a potential plan to maintain a presence for a long period of time on the GDP side. But that changed well over a year ago and for whatever reasons they agreed to accommodate the accelerated turnover and once that happened, obviously that matched up with our objective. We were able to get the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] to support that. Fluor supported it. Everybody came together.”
