Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) dinged the White House on Tuesday for sticking to its guns about defunding the American Centrifuge Plant near the former uranium enrichment facility at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site.
DOE announced in September it would pull the plug on the advanced centrifuge facility at Portsmouth, and plant operator Centrus Energy, of Bethesda, Md., has been paying out of its own pocket since October to keep the facility online.
The department had the option, under the 2016 omnibus spending signed in December, to divert $50 million from other programs to the centrifuge project this year. The agency opted not to, and instead concentrated domestic uranium enrichment research led by Centrus at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
In a Tuesday press release, Portman said he was “disappointed that the Administration has not provided any resources for the American Centrifuge Plant,” which the junior Ohio senator said is “critical for our national and energy security.”
If the plant closes down, Centrus will lay off up to 70 people. A final decision on the layoffs is expected later this month or in early March.
Elsewhere at Portsmouth, legacy cleanup work handled by Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth and overseen by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would get an 11 percent bump, up to about $322 million, in fiscal 2017.
Within that total, the White House proposed increasing the Portsmouth cleanup budget by about $11 million to nearly $215 million, about 5 percent over 2016 levels. Funding for the 15-U-408 on-site waste disposal facility would nearly double from 2016 levels to about $42 million.
It remains to be seen whether Congress will approve these elevated levels of funding, as it would require lawmakers to go along with a proposal in the White House’s latest budget request to pay for uranium cleanup by tapping into the moribund United States Enrichment Corp. Fund. Congress would have to pass a law authorizing DOE to spend any of the $1.6 billion fund for that purpose. The agency wants to make a $674 million withdrawal for several projects in fiscal 2017, which begins on Oct. 1.
