The Department of Energy’s cleanup contractor at the Portsmouth Site has nearly completed structural demolition of the X-326 Process Building, an agency official at the Ohio site said Thursday.
The major demolition is 91% complete “as of today,” Jeremy Davis, acting site lead at the Piketon, Ohio uranium enrichment cleanup site since January, told the Portsmouth Environmental Management Advisory Board during a meeting streamed over Youtube.
Work crews from cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth are very close to “actually having the building physically onto the slab,” Davis told the citizen advisory panel. That point could be reached in July, he added.
The 1950s-vintage X-326 is one of three process buildings designed to work together in a cascade configuration to enrich uranium, initially for use in U.S. nuclear weapons and later for the commercial power industry.
Demolition started in May 2021, Davis said, beginning after various delays in the deactivation of the half-mile-long building since Fluor-BWXT started work under its contract with DOE in 2011. Deactivation, making a stratucture safe for teardown, slipped to 2018 from 2016. Demolition, once supposed to be underway by 2018, slipped eventually to 2021.
Building 326 demolition is generating about 135,000 cubic yards of debris that will be reduced in size before being sent to the new Onsite Waste Disposal Facility, Davis said.
X-326 is the first of three mammoth process buildings scheduled to be taken down between now and 2030. The others are the X-333 Building and the X-330 Building. With the open-air demolition of the process buildings, DOE is sharing its air monitoring data with the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Davis said.
The DOE has increased air monitoring and transparency in part due to an ongoing controversy over the now-closed Zahns Corner Middle School outside the Portsmouth fence. Various families around Portsmouth have sued current and former DOE site contractors after what the plaintiffs describe as “hazardous levels” of enriched uranium and other contaminants were publicly reported inside the school.
Currently, the four largest contractors at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site together employ about 2,600 people, according to Davis’s slide presentation.
Fluor-BWXT, the remediation contractor, has 1,800 workers. Mid-America Conversion Services, which manages the Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Conversion, has 500 employees. Site services provider North Wind Group has 240 and Enterprise Technical Assistance Services, which provides regulatory and technical support, has 55 people
