The village of Piketon, Ohio, wants more time to respond to the Energy Department’s plan to lease or sell substantially all of the land now occupied by the agency’s Portsmouth Site following cleanup of Cold War-era uranium enrichment facilities there, according to a village resolution dated Feb. 6.
The village is seeking a 60-day extension to respond to a DOE draft environmental assessment released for 45 days of public comment that will end Feb. 18. The municipality wants to stretch the deadline to April 12 “to analyze the full range of direct, indirect, and cumulative effects” of DOE’s plan.
Uranium enrichment facilities at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant are set to be decommissioned under a 10-year contract awarded in 2010 to Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth — and demolished later under a successor contract — but other parts of the site might be useful for economic development, DOE says.
The agency’s list of possible post-demolition uses for the Portsmouth Site includes heavy industries such as manufacturing, timber processing, and electronics recycling, according to the draft environmental assessment released Jan. 4 in the waning days of the Barack Obama administration.
To that end, the agency plans to sell or lease land and facilities across the 3,677-acre Portsmouth campus, with its plentiful utility connections, to an intermediary that would then make the property available to end users.
The village of Piketon, however, “wishes to propose reasonable alternatives,” according to the resolution signed by Mayor Billy Spencer.
In an email to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, Spencer said the village would like DOE to remain in Piketon and repurpose the site to demonstrate new technology for “robotics, clean coal, [a] gas generating plant and maybe a small reactor.”
“We haven’t been able to get a commitment from DOE to clean the site for any future development that would somewhat replace the jobs that will disappear when [decommissioning and decommissioning] is competed,” Spencer wrote. “Without a firm commitment from the DOE we don’t believe for a second that this site will be used by a non-DOE business.”
Any such leases are years away, assuming DOE goes through with its plan. Portsmouth decommissioning is running behind schedule and would not be complete until 2021 at the earliest. After that, DOE must demolish the old uranium enrichment buildings, remove the resulting waste, and clean up any soil contamination on the cleared land. Only then would the agency start leasing unneeded property.
