The Energy Department should cease funding cleanup of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio with bartered uranium, a Washington-based trade group for the nuclear power industry said last week.
Further funding for cleanup of DOE facilities should be provided fully through congressional appropriations, so as not to disrupt uranium markets, Nuclear Energy Institute Fuel Cycle Programs Director Suzanne Phelps said in a response to DOE’s request for comments on excess uranium management.
DOE now barters up to 1,600 metric tons of natural uranium equivalent a year for Portsmouth cleanup, per a 2015 decision by then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The agency is now studying whether to change the rate at which it releases its excess uranium onto the market. Ceasing barter for Portsmouth cleanup altogether from 2017 to 2026 is one option DOE considered as part of a market analysis released in January.
Internally, DOE and Portsmouth cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth have discussed sustaining the uranium barter until the final option on the company’s 10-year cleanup contract expires in 2021 — around the time DOE’s inventory of excess uranium would run dry. Fluor-BWXT has argued the uranium it resells on the open market from DOE’s inventory does not have a negative affect on U.S. markets.
Lately, barter has accounted for about 30 percent of the cleanup costs at Portsmouth, though in past years it has accounted for more than half. Appropriations for the cleanup come out of the congressionally authorized Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, which will run dry in the 2020s: about a decade before the Portsmouth site will be fully remediated.
The Obama administration proposed turning uranium enrichment funding into mandatory federal spending and paying for it in part by reinstating a tax on nuclear utilities.
“NEI maintains its strong opposition to any attempt to reinstate the uranium enrichment decontamination and decommissioning tax on U.S. utilities, Phelps said.
