Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
10/30/2015
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management has started communicating with other government bodies about how shutting down the Piketon, Ohio, portion of the American Centrifuge Project (ACP) will be paid for, and who will foot the bill, Mark Whitney, DOE principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, told House lawmakers on Wednesday.
Whitney did not name any specific agencies or DOE offices, but the National Nuclear Security Administration has transferred money to the program—worked through a subcontract from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Centrus—in the past. In May 2014, the agency transferred $56.7 million from other programs to ACP in an effort to preserve ACP technology. No decisions have been made on what funding lanes would be established to actualize the shutdown, Whitney said. But during the hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Environment and the Economy Subcommittee, member Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), expressed concern to Whitney and the other attendees that cutting the Piketon portion of the program could draw would-be funding from decontamination and decommissioning activities at the nearby Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Johnson noted that ACP shares utility and overhead costs with Portsmouth, and that closing that portion will shift cost burdens to the D&D budget. After EM gains full ownership of the project, it will perform a comprehensive calculation of costs, including those for transitioning ACP work solely to the DOE site at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and those for a presumptive new D&D project—Piketon ACP—after the plant shuts down, Whitney said, adding that such an evaluation would probably take just a few months. That evaluation could include adjustments to ACP’s baseline and life-cycle cost estimates.
“Generally, once we have ownership of the facility, it would not take a long time, because we have a lot of precedent at other facilities,” Whitney said. “It might be similar [to D&D] at other sites, like Oak Ridge.”
ACP contractor Centrus Energy in September confirmed that DOE would no longer provide funding for the Piketon piece of the program, and officials have said all ACP operations will be limited to development activities at Oak Ridge, at a cost of $35 million per year. Centrus employs about 300 technical and other staff in Piketon. ACP is an advanced uranium enrichment facility intended to produce low-enriched uranium for commercial nuclear reactors.
“Allowing the ACP [at Piketon] … to shutter its operations down only to require its inevitable remobilization shortly thereafter, seems to me is a severe mismanagement of federal resources and an ill-advised decision, because rehiring of this uniquely skilled workforce and its overall remobilization will prove costly,” Johnson said.
