The conversion of depleted uranium hexafluoride at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio and Paducah Site in Kentucky came to a stop in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and had yet to restart as of last week, federal and contractor representatives said during an online conference.
Neither Zachary Lafontaine, DOE’s program manager for depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion, nor Zack Smith, president and project manager for conversion prime Mid-America Conversion Services, offered a definitive timeline for restarting the mission to dispose of uranium enrichment byproducts at the two former weapons plants. They told the online Waste Management Symposia the plants would restart as soon as safety protocols allow.
The production lines at Portsmouth and Paducah had converted about 390 cylinders of DUF6 for fiscal 2020 before suspending operations in March of that year, Lafontaine said. A total of 6,670 cylinders have been turned into uranium oxide since processing began in fiscal 2010, Lafontaine said in his slide presentation to the conference, normally held in Phoenix.
In the coming year, Portsmouth plans to complete plant modifications to produce high-purity depleted uranium metal for nuclear weapons programs at the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, Lafontaine said.
Also during the past year, a pilot shipment of six oxide cylinders arrived at the Waste Control Specialists site in Andrews County, Texas in October from the Paducah DUF6 plant, according to a presentation at the same conference by Mid-America’s Paducah plant manager Jim Barker. There are plans for a second pilot shipment of 12 cylinders from Paducah to Waste Control Specialists that should occur by Sept. 30, according to the presentation.
Meanwhile, DOE and contractor Fluor-BWXT are set to start structural demolition of the X-326 Process Building at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio later this spring, which is later than the pre-COVID target cited by managers at the site during the 2020 Waste Management Symposia.
The 30-acre building has been deactivated and crews are already starting to remove transite, said Jeff Bettinger, the Portsmouth site lead for DOE. Transite is a construction material frequently known to contain asbestos. Demolition of X-326 should be finished in 2023, he said.
The debris from the X-326 building will be buried starting this fall at a $900-million On-Site Waste Disposal Facility at Portsmouth that was opposed by many local officials there. DOE officials said during the online conference that a three-mile haul road is being built to line the old process buildings with the waste disposal facility.
