Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/24/2014
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.—This week marked the official handoff of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant to the Department of Energy and deactivation contractor Fluor, and the focus in the coming months will now be on deactivation work and integrating scope with outgoing cleanup contractor LATA Environmental Services of Kentucky, officials said here this week. DOE awarded the deactivation work in July to a Fluor-led team. While the new contractor aims to deactivate the recently shut down Paducah plant, it will also take over other cleanup and remediation work at the site when LATA’s contract ends in July 2015. “Fluor is working with LATA Kentucky directly to provide waste management services to the team already on the ground, and analytical services along with environmental monitoring and regulatory compliance,” LATA Kentucky Project Manager Mark Duff, who is also Fluor’s Paducah Director of Environmental Management, said at the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum. “It makes a lot of sense to have just one shop on site so there is only one interface with the regulator as well as the site office.”
Duff continued, “We have a very unique situation where the incumbent contractor still has to perform. In fact it is the biggest funding year in the life of the LATA Kentucky contract. We didn’t want to lose all of our skilled staff to Fluor deactivation folks, and ironically enough since LATA is on that team there’s a unique dynamic between the two.”
Turnover Success ‘Testament to the Shared Lessons Learned’
USEC, now known as Centrus Energy Corp., enriched uranium at the plant until mid-2013 and has since shut down operations and prepared the plant for the handoff to DOE. The Paducah turnover comes after a similar process when USEC ceased operations at the similar Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in 2001 and performed some deactivation work, although the Department has some lessons learned from that experience. “Up at Portsmouth it took us nine months to return the facilities from USEC back to the Department, at Paducah we did that in three months,” DOE Portsmouth Paducah Project Office Manager Bill Murphie said here this week. “A tremendous amount of effort went into that process. It’s also a big testament to the shared lessons learned between Portsmouth and Paducah. We obviously learned a lot from what we did up at Portsmouth and were able to use a lot of documentation down at Paducah. But I will tell you it was a lot of work and a lot of time spent to make that successful.”
DOE is now developing an “integrated strategic plan” that will encompass the D&D activities at both the Paducah and Portsmouth plants into the cleanup plan at the sites. “We have had a cleanup plan at Paducah for a long time, but unfortunately it was a cleanup plan independent of the GDP decommissioning,” Murphie said. “Now that we have the GDP back we have to bring those two together and come up with an integrated approach.”
‘We Are Just in the Process of Getting Our Hands Around What Those Risks Are’
Officials are still surveying the scope of the deactivation and cleanup work at the Paducah plant, according to Duff. “Unlike a lot of sites, DOE has been handed back several hundred facilities, some of them significantly contaminated, some of them not, so understanding what those risks are associated with this building is all new,” he said. “DOE and its contractors have spent very little time in these buildings prior to the last three months. We were doing walkdowns, so we are just in the process of getting our hands around what those risks are and which buildings will be priorities.”
Workforce Impacts a Concern
Impacts to the community is another issue still being addressed. The Paducah site has been a top employer in the region, and has seen about 1,200 layoffs in the past year, Duff noted. “This has really impacted our community in a dramatic way,” he said. The new Fluor contractor will employ 400 workers initially and ramp up to 500 employees over the next year, which will be “primarily” former USEC and LATA Kentucky workers, according to a DOE release.
However, exactly how many LATA Kentucky workers will ultimately be moved over to the new contract will be dependent on funding, Duff said. “The exact number that would transition over would be largely dependent on funding for FY’16 specifically. Not everyone will move over,” he said. “There’s been some duplication and departures due to retiring. Our hope is that we can get just about everyone over there. The environmental scope will be largely intact under LATA Kentucky until July 2015 and then that scope will bolt onto the Fluor contract. Some of the support services will probably take a little bit of a hit, but we’ve worked it out with Fluor to make sure that will be minimized.”
Plant Operated for 60 Years
The Oct. 21 handoff also marked the close of a 60-year era of enrichment activities at the plant. “For more than a decade, United States Enrichment Corporation employees in Paducah operated this plant at record-high levels of productivity in a safe and environmentally responsible manner,” Steve Penrod, vice president of American Centrifuge for Centrus and former general manager at Paducah, said in a statement. “When enrichment ceased in 2013, this same team came together to safely and diligently wind down operations and work closely with DOE to effect a smooth and successful de-lease and return of full control of the site to DOE. I want to thank them and our counterparts at DOE for the tremendous efforts that led to this successful outcome.”
