March 17, 2014

USEC

By ExchangeMonitor

USEC’s announcement earlier this month that it may cease operations at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant next spring is worrying Department of Energy officials who had originally anticipated that the plant would be shut down around 2020. USEC noted in a financial filing that it will stop operations at the DOE-owned plant at the end of May if several conditions are not met, a move that could be expensive for the Department. “That would cause a tremendous perturbation for all the assumptions that have been made,” William Murphie, manager of DOE’s Portsmouth Paducah Project Office, said Friday at a nuclear decommissioning conference in Charlotte. “We’re kind of on pins and needles right now. The decision on shutting the plant down is a USEC decision as a commercial entity not a Department decision. The strategy was originally to do an initial cleanup, wait for the plant to be shut down, we come back with a comprehensive site wide operable unit study to see what we didn’t get done.”

Murphie told WC Monitor that it is unclear at this point when decontamination and decommissioning work will start if USEC decides to shut down the plant in the spring. “That’s the multi-billion dollar question. That’s exactly what we’re trying to consider and evaluate,” he said. “USEC has to notify us under the lease of their intentions. Upon that notification the Department is of course going to evaluate the alternatives. Of course we are looking at some of those potential alternatives in parallel and anticipation so we’re better prepared, but until we actually know what is being proposed and the timing for that it’s going to be very difficult for us. Whatever they do is going to have an impact on the program and it’s a large potential cost liability for the Department.” Murphie added that USEC has had discussions with DOE about the future of the site, and that there have been meetings on the matter in Washington and Paducah. “It’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to get prepared,” he said.

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