The Department of Energy said Tuesday 60 uranium-oxide storage cylinders recently arrived by rail at a private radioactive waste disposal site in West Texas from the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in a press release the 60 cylinders recently arrived at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas from Paducah.
The canisters arrived at the Waste Control Specialists on April 27, a DOE spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
DOE contractor Mid-America Conversion Services, a partnership of Atkins, Westinghouse and Fluor, convert depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) into depleted uranium oxide and hydrofluoric acid at former gaseous diffusion plants in Paducah and the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio.
The DUF6 is the residue of a half-century of uranium enrichment at the DOE plants, the agency said in the release.
“This first multi-car shipment from Paducah marked an important milestone toward achieving large-scale, routine disposal of uranium oxide, thereby addressing one of the nation’s most significant environmental legacies from the Cold War era,” Joel Bradburne, who heads Environmental Management’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office.
The recent shipment follows a September 2020 pilot shipment of six cylinders to Waste Control Specialists from Paducah that compared two rail transportation methods, the Government Accountability Office said in a July 2022 report. The pilot shipment also demonstrated Waste Control Specialists’ ability to receive and bury the oxide cylinders.
Since the DUF6 conversion plants were commissioned in 2011, more than 7,300 cylinders or more than 10% of the cylinders stored at Portsmouth and Paducah, have been converted so far.
DOE Environmental Management has been looking at options for disposing of the oxide cylinders and the National Nuclear Security Administration has said it could use some depleted uranium hexafluoride from the plants for nuclear weapons stockpile refurbishment.
