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 yesterday. No decisions have been made. During a hearing yesterday of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy, member Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), expressed concern that shuttering the program could draw would-be funding from decontamination and decommissioning activities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Johnson noted that ACP shares utility and overhead costs with Portsmouth to the tune of $9-$10 million, 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 comprehensive calculation of costs, including those for transitioning ACP work to one Oak Ridge facility, 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.
“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 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 the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee 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.
