The Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio last week made its first rail shipment of depleted uranium oxide containers to the Waste Control Specialists disposal site in West Texas, DOE announced Tuesday.
The shipment of 120 storage cylinders from the Mid-America Conversion Services depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion plant at the former gaseous diffusion plant complex in Ohio comes after the May shipment of 60 cylinders to the Texas site from Mid-America’s sister plant at the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
“This accomplishment shows that EM [DOE’s Office of Environmental Management] can effectively and efficiently ship this material in bulk from both the Portsmouth and Paducah sites in a safe and sustainable way,” said DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office manager Joel Bradburne in the news release.
A DOE Environmental Management spokesperson said Thursday the shipments arrived at Waste Control Specialists on Aug. 29.
DOE has more than 700,000 metric tons of DUF6, the residue of more than six decades of uranium enrichment at Portsmouth and Paducah as well as the now-dismantled uranium enrichment plant at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
According to the release, DOE has converted more than 90,000 metric tons of DUF6 into more stable forms for storage, disposal or reuse since the agency established the specialized conversion plants beginning in 2010. Eventually, EnergySolutions in Clive, Utah could become another disposal site for the material, pending approval by the state.
Mid-America Conversion Services, a team of Atkins, Westinghouse and Fluor, has a $789 million contract that started in November 2016 and is slated to expire at the end of September, barring an extension.
Meanwhile, industry speculation is that DOE could soon announce a follow-on contract of up to $5.9 billion over 10 years for a contractor to oversee both DUF6 conversion and additional operational and management responsibilities at Portsmouth and Paducah.
