Fluor-BWXT’s Portsmouth could wait until February 2018 to prep the X-326 uranium enrichment building for teardown, but only if it forgoes 30 percent of its award fee, according to a substantially modified contract the Energy Department released late Thursday.
DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office uploaded the modified contract, last altered May 1, to its website in response to queries by Weapons Complex Monitor. The total value of the pact is essentially unchanged since its last major overhaul in 2016, when DOE split what had been one five-year contract option into a pair of two-and-a-half year extensions.
The first option, which runs to Sept. 30, 2018, is still worth about $870, including costs and fees. The second, which runs Oct. 1, 2018, through March 28, 2021, is still worth just over $695 million, including costs and fees.
Fluor-BWXT began work under its contract in 2011. The deal now is worth up to $3.5 billion over a decade, including the options. That is over $1 billion more than it was worth when DOE awarded the pact.
At the time of the award, DOE and Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth thought the X-326 building, one of three process buildings the company must tear down at Portsmouth, would be ready for demolition by March 2016. The date later slipped to June of this year before sliding rightward once more under the latest modifications to the company’s contract.
Now, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has until Feb. 28, 2018, to prepare X-326 for demolition, though waiting that long would cost the company 30 percent of its award fee for that work. To net all of the fee available, a little over $10 million, the company must have X-326 cold and dark — isolated from electricity and cleaned up enough that there almost no risk of nuclear criticality — by Dec. 31.
Cleanup at Portsmouth, a Cold War-era site that manufactured fissile material for weapons and power generation from the 1950s to 2001, has gone slower than expected. That is in part because of trouble with the Fluor-BWXT’s plan to scan contaminated uranium-enrichment equipment at the plant and quantify its radioactivity without destroying the equipment to inspect its insides.
The process is known as nondestructive assay (NDA), and Fluor-BWXT this week said it has a plan to speed up contamination scans by focusing only on the most radioactive areas of the old enrichment equipment.
“Previously, we were doing quantitative NDA measurements, which isn’t necessary in all cases,” Jeff Stevens, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth’s deputy project manager, said in a Wednesday press release. “By using a systematic approach that focuses on scanning for ‘hot spots,’ NDA can finish its work faster, which allows us to move forward sooner.”
Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth mailed out the press release this week to highlight the partial deactivation of one of the X-326 building’s 10 cells. Each cell is split into an upper cell floor and lower operations floor. During the plant’s uranium enrichment days, workers on the lower level controlled equipment that sat on the upper level.
In the release, Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth said it deactivated the cell floor of X-326’s unit 25-6, which under the terms of the new contract means equipment in the area has either been deemed “criticality incredible” — clean enough that nuclear criticality is extremely unlikely — or has been removed from the area.
The remaining nine X-326 cells have to be deactivated by Aug. 22, according to the modified contract.
Per a 10-year planning document Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth created earlier this year, X-326 will not be fully demolished until 2022. The company once thought the building could be torn down by 2018. Demolition of the other two process buildings, X-333 and X-330, also would be delayed, with X-333 coming down in 2030 instead of 2021. X-330, meanwhile, would be demolished in 2028 instead of 2026, according to the document.
Besides the technical complexities, Portsmouth cleanup has since the beginning been bedeviled by a peculiar funding arrangement in which the contractor covers a significant fraction of its costs — 30 percent of the total in 2016 — by selling uranium bartered to it by DOE. Effective May 1, Energy Secretary Rick Perry cut the barter rate for Portsmouth cleanup to 1,200 metric tons annually from 1,600 metric tons.
A generally slumping commodity market has ensured that Congress, which appropriates funds for Portsmouth costs and fees not covered by the barter arrangement, has to step in about every year and provide extra funding to avert layoffs at the site.
The fiscal 2017 omnibus spending bill that President Donald Trump signed into law Friday raised Portsmouth’s budget by almost 40 percent to some $315 million. That includes nearly doubling funding for the On-Site Waste Disposal Facility where, beginning next decade, DOE plans to bury waste from the demolition of the site’s uranium enrichment buildings.
