The Energy Department’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant complex in Ohio is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and the state’s historic preservation office wants a voice in cleanup plans for the contaminated site.
The Ohio History Connection said in a May 16 letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission it should be consulted on decontamination and decommissioning plans at the former uranium enrichment site. This includes the essentially complete remediation by Centrus Energy of its American Centrifuge Operating Lead Cascade Facility, which is located on the Energy Department property.
The preservation believes the work might diminish the historic value of the site, so consultation is needed.
The NRC sent a letter to Ohio History Connection in April seeking comments on Centrus’ remediation of the lead cascade facility. Spokeswoman Prema Chandrathil, described it as part of the regulator’s routine public outreach.
“Except for NRC’s confirmation of the results of Centrus’ final status survey, all physical decommissioning activities have been completed,” Chandrathil said by email Tuesday. The NRC is evaluating a Centrus request to basically close out its license responsibilities at the Portsmouth Site. The agency has not yet replied to the request for consultation.
“The Department of Energy has found, and our office agrees, that the PORTS campus is historically significant in its entirety,” Ohio History Connection spokeswoman Emmy Beach said in a Tuesday email. “Preservation is always our preference, however, that is not always possible. In cases where the historic place cannot be preserved, we pursue mitigation.”
Beach did not specify what mitigation might look like, but her organization has been working with DOE and the NRC on Portsmouth issues since 1994.
Centrus, then known as USEC, in 2007 opened its American Centrifuge test facility for advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges at Portsmouth. Centrus eventually hopes to employ the technology in a new plant. But months after DOE stopped funding the project, Centrus began decommissioning the lead cascade in mid-2016. The lead cascade equipment has already been removed.
“We did not actually remove any buildings at the site,” Centrus Energy spokesman Jeremy Derryberry said by phone. Instead, the company is merely removing equipment, and is not affecting the historic nature of the site, he added.
