A new contract modification will enable the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to participate in a cancer research arrangement.
The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) said a third-party medical company – whose name was not disclosed – will “milk” thorium from uranium stores at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
The Energy Department approved the contract modification between OREM and Isotek, DOE’s contractor for uranium disposition at ORNL, at the end of 2017 after the office’s 45-day review, an assessment that allows Environmental Management offices around the country to find areas for improvement.
ORNL’s uranium-233 was created by a thorium fuel cycle that co-produces hazardous uranium-232. Much of the U-233 stores are left over from the laboratory’s 1964 molten salt reactor experiment. Metals, oxide powders, and contaminated materials from old glove boxes and reactor plates also remain within ORNL’s Building 3019.
Because the items are contaminated with both uranium and thorium, they must be processed before disposal. To do that, OREM Manager Jay Mullis said, DOE would have to move the material from Building 3019 to ORNL’s building 2026, which it recently acquired, to cross-dissolve and solidify it.
However, Mullis recently told the Oak Ridge Site Specific Advisory Board, due to OREM’s funding target profile for the disposition project, the office couldn’t maintain the workforce during the design and build portion for that process. Instead, the office would have to rehire and retrain everyone when processing began about five years later.
The potential lag in the uranium disposition program might have influenced the Department of Energy’s quick approval of the medical research contract. In 2011, DOE called the building, which was built in the 1940s, the “oldest operating nuclear facility in the world.”
The U.S. Senate’s fiscal 2018 energy appropriations bill expressed strong interest in moving the process along. “Removal of the Uranium 233 will enable the overall security posture at the laboratory to be relaxed, which will reduce costs and eliminate nuclear safety issues, and make the campus more conducive to collaborative science,” the bill said. “The Committee encourages the Department to seek opportunities to expedite the cleanup of Building 3019, including public-private partnerships that may reduce the overall cost of cleanup.”
Mullis said the office can use ion exchange to extract thorium from the uranium left in the building and hand it—and its ion exchange waste—over to Isotek, which would sell it to the medical research company. The medical group would take responsibility of any waste from the ion exchange columns used to extract the thorium, in a deal Mullis called a win-win-win.
The research company will use the thorium to produce an element called actinium, which can be used for cancer treatment. The funds pay Isotek, which will allow OREM to borrow the money to get a jump on the disposition program without any layoffs. Then, Mullis said, the Oak Ridge office will pay Isotek back over time. which will allow OREM to use the money to give the waste disposition program a five-year jump—without any layoffs.
