By Dennis Carr
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth (FBP) prefers to operate DOE’s Portsmouth, Ohio, site with 100 percent appropriated funds from Congress. But that has not been the reality during the last six years when up to 75 percent, currently 30 percent, of funds to support the Ohio site’s 2,000 jobs carrying out the Energy Department’s D&D mission has had to come from monetizing uranium barter transfers.
As recently as FY 2015, as Weapons Complex Monitor reported: “Portsmouth D&D workers faced the threat of significant layoffs last year, when site contractor Fluor-B&W Portsmouth, LLC, warned that it would have to cut about a third of the site workforce—a total of 675 positions out of the project’s then-workforce of approximately 1,900 employees—heading into FY 2015 becaU.S.e of budgetary concerns. FBP was able to largely avoid such layoffs, though, after lawmakers provided an additional $76.4 million as part of the final FY 2015 appropriations legislation.”
Therefore, FBP has strongly recommended to the Department in its Request for Information (RFI) to “Stay the Course” and finish the recovery, transfers, and sales of excess DOE natural uranium (UF6) over the next three years. Maintaining the 1,600 MTU per year rate does not create an adverse material impact upon the domestic mining, conversion, and enrichment industries while fulfilling one of the most-cited encouragements from the nuclear industry: disposition of the excess inventories in a predictable, transparent manner. If the Department would follow that guidance, then the last of the near-term, natural UF6 inventories would substantially clear the overhang to the market during the next three years of 2017-2019. This would enhance and reinforce the market recovery for all supplying parties, in advance of the forecasted 2020s recovery.
“Stay the Course” not only avoids Ohio workers being put under the cloud of Worker Adjustment and Training [WARN] notices for possible job loss in 2017, but would also continue the positive outreaches to the nuclear industry FBP and Traxys have put in place. Since the 2015 Secretarial Determination FBP found a way to share its annual uranium barter quota with the sole U.S. converter located in Metropolis, Ill.
In addition to assisting U.S. conversion, the majority of the 2016-2018 uranium barter transfers are already committed through contracts to both U.S. nuclear utilities and to help struggling Wyoming uranium production. The FBP barters provide U.S. nuclear utilities a lower-cost supply of domestic. uranium to offset foreign imports—U.S. buyers imported 94 percent of uranium requirements in 2015. Additionally, the leading Wyoming uranium producer is able to preserve its U.S. production operations and staff by reducing production levels while purchasing the DOE-FBP-Traxys supplied uranium to deliver on sustaining higher-priced long-term contracts. This support was a direct result of the U.S. miners calling upon the Department and FBP to make uranium available to U.S. producers that could then deliver the DOE uranium into their long-term contracts.
U.S. production has not fallen due to DOE transfers but instead fell due to decisions made by producers to expand their lower-cost assets in Canada and Kazakhstan, while scaling back their smaller (non-Tier 1) U.S. production facilities. At the same time DOE has reduced its EM Uranium Barter transfer quantities by 33 percent per year (Total NNSA and EM reductions of 25 percent). Therefore, FBP reiterates that “Stay the Course” is the right option for the 2017 Secretarial Determination outcome unless that adequate funding will be provided to sustain our forward progress and our workforce.
Dennis Carr is the site project director for Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth at DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio.
