A draft energy and water development bill for fiscal 2023 posted last week by the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee directs the Department of Energy to spend $2 million on a “reindustrialization” study at the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
The document did not provide any detail on the scope of the study or when the document should be completed. The money would come from Paducah’s $240-million decontamination and decommissioning budget.
The chair’s mark, from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) overall includes $8.3 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for the budget year starting Oct. 1. If the spending plans passes the Senate it would have to be reconciled with the energy and water funding legislation that passed the House in July.
Among early expressions of interest for post-cleanup use of the site, the DOE is studying a proposal from a company, Global Laser Enrichment, to use laser technology to re-enrich depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) from the old gaseous diffusion plants for resale on international markets.
The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was built during the Cold War days of 1952 to enrich uranium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Its mission was later updated to provide enrichment services for commercial nuclear power plants between 1993 and 2013, according to DOE. The site in McCracken County, Ky. is roughly 3,550-acres in scope with 750 acres of that within the security fence.
The DOE first started its cleanup at the site in 1988 and in 2015 published an environmental assessment on potential land and facility transfers as cleanup allows.
