Congress should enact legislation to clarify the Department of Energy’s authority to sell depleted uranium to private entities, the Government Accountability Office said this week, because such a move could curb the $7.2 billion cost to dispose of the material.
As of September 2021, the feds estimate it could cost DOE $7.2 billion to convert depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) from old gaseous diffusion plants at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky into a more stable uranium oxide for reuse or disposal, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a Wednesday report.
DOE and Atkins-led contractor Mid-America Conversion Services have in the past nine months restarted DUF6 conversion plants at Portsmouth and Paducah following $47 million worth of modifications meant to improve efficiency, GAO said. After going offline in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Paducah plant came back online in November 2021. Portsmouth, after some hiccups, followed suit this month.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) has three deals to reserve about 30,000 cylinders of DUF6, roughly 44% of the total volume, for use by other entities, GAO said.
“If the agreements are finalized, the agency may not need to convert all its DUF6 and could reduce operations of the conversion facilities by roughly 30 years, potentially saving over $2 billion in operations costs,” GAO reported.
While EM has two agreements to shift ownership of nearly 5,500 cylinders to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for two separate programs, the plans and timing of a third arrangement “are uncertain,” said GAO.
EM has reserved over 24,000 cylinders to sell DUF6 to a private company, Global Laser Enrichment (GLE), Wilmington, N.C., which plans to build a plant at Paducah where it will use laser technology to re-enrich DUF6 to natural uranium hexafluoride that GLE could sell on the world market.
However, DOE’s ability to sell depleted uranium “is doubtful ” due to a 1996 law, the USEC Privatization Act, which restricted the energy secretary’s ability to sell uranium, GAO said. “Clarifying DOE’s authority to sell depleted uranium could help avoid litigation that could interrupt DOE’s efforts to sell DUF6.”
As for disposing of converted uranium oxide, the DOE has expressed interest in three sites EnergySolutions in Utah, the agency’s Nevada National Security Site and Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Texas. So far, only WCS is fully licensed and ready to start taking the oxide. WCS has disposed of six cylinders from one pilot shipment from Paducah.
