After being offline for nearly two years due to a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and plant upgrades, the Department of Energy says conversion of depleted uranium hexafluoride to a more stable form is resuming at the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
Likewise, depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion into uranium oxide at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio should restart by the end of the year following a readiness review, DOE said. The operations are run for DOE at the two locations by Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services. The National Nuclear Security Administration has plans for a depleted uranium tetrafluoride (DUF4) production line at the Portsmouth Site, which will be made from depleted uranium hexafluoride.
During the production hiatus, workers completed key upgrades and maintenance at both of EM’s DUF6 conversion facilities near Paducah, Kentucky and Portsmouth, Ohio, the agency said in a Feb. 22 announcement. The DOE statement did not list an exact date for restart.
“After shutdown of the facilities due to COVID-19 the DUF6 project took the opportunity to begin an early start of planned safety and maintenance improvements that will benefit future plant operations,” a DOE spokesperson said in a Friday email. The DOE has installed backup systems and taken other steps to reduce changes of plant outages, chemical leaks or workplace injuries. Both plants are now equipped with a backup system for producing hydrogen when the main system is offline.
The DOE and contractor Mid-America Conversion Services had not until now outlined a schedule for DUF6 work to resume. “Although COVID-19 protocols presented an operational proximity challenge, the value of completing upgrades also factored into plant restart schedules,” the DOE spokesperson said Friday.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management in January issued a draft request for proposals for a new contract to replace the existing $703 million DUF6 business held by Mid-America, which started in February 2017 and is scheduled to run through March 2023. The next agreement, expected to include certain other environmental duties at the former gaseous diffusion plants in Kentucky and Ohio, has been dubbed the Portsmouth Paducah Project Office Operations and Site Mission Support Contract.
Most of the DUF6 is converted into depleted uranium oxide, a more stable chemical form that can be reused, stored or disposed of. There are more than 63,000 cylinders of DUF6 stored at Portsmouth and Paducah, according to Mid-America.
