The depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion plants at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky, both back in service after extended outages, are benefiting from backup sources of hydrogen, the federal agency said Tuesday.
The Paducah facility in western Kentucky was the first to restart conversion of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) into depleted uranium oxide. That was in November 2021, after an extended pandemic outage for renovations. The Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio restarted in July, an agency spokesperson said via email.
Both DUF6 plants started back up “with improved safety, performance and facilities” after renovations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Joel Bradburne, who heads DOE’s Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office, said Tuesday.
One of the biggest upgrades is a new “bulk hydrogen” backup system that ensures uninterrupted delivery of hydrogen to the conversion process, Bradburne said in a press release. The new system installed by subcontractor Air Products stores and delivers excess hydrogen from onsite generating units that supplement hydrogen delivered by truck, DOE said.
“The bulk hydrogen upgrade has been instrumental in improving the versatility and reliability of operations at both plants,” said Zak Lafontaine, DOE’s DUF6 program manager. “In less than a year, we can already directly attribute more than 50 days of additional conversion operations to this key plant improvement.”
Both DUF6 conversion plants, run by contractor Mid-America Conversion Services went offline in March 2020 after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Before restarting the facilities, DOE decided to carry out various plant renovations, including the hydrogen.
The plants enable DOE to convert leftover DUF6 from the Cold War into a uranium oxide form that’s easier to transport, ship or dispose of. The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to use roughly 800 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride from Portsmouth annually for its nuclear-weapon refurbishments.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management is currently reviewing proposals for a new contract combining the DUF6 work held by the Atkins, Westinghouse, Fluor partnership with some operational and cleanup-related work at Portsmouth and Paducah. The new contract could be worth $2.9 billion over 10 years.
