The Department of Energy last week issued a task order for Jacobs-led Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership to continue with shipment and destruction of legacy R-114 refrigerant, better known under the brand name Freon, from the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
Four Rivers, which also has Fluor and BWX Technologies on its team, received its $16 million task order under its existing eight-year, $1.6-billion deactivation and remediation contract at the former gaseous diffusion plant in Kentucky.
The task order notice was published on the federal procurement website, SAM.gov.
Four Rivers has already met the DOE Office of Environmental Management 2022 goal to ship one million pounds of the refrigerant away from the property, DOE’s Paducah Site lead Jennifer Woodard told a Paducah citizens advisory board meeting last month.
Paducah began removing and shipping Freon in 2020. In 2021, Four Rivers was scheduled to remove 750,000 pounds of the refrigerant that was used to cool equipment during uranium enrichment at Paducah, DOE has said. R-114 or Freon is a greenhouse gas found to contribute to ozone depletion.
The freon is sent to a Veolia facility in Texas where it is incinerated, Woodard said. The DOE did not respond to requests for comment last week on the task award.
In a Tuesday news release, the agency said Four Rivers has removed 40% of the site’s former 8.5-million-pound R-114 inventory, filling over 100 containers for offsite shipment. DOE and the contractor aim to remove the remaining 5.3 million pounds over the next three years. Paducah used a lot of the refrigerant over the years to deal with the heat generated via uranium enrichment that ceased in 2014.
