ALEXANDRIA, VA. — The demolition of the massive X-326 Process Building, which began in the spring, is underway and should be finished in summer 2022, an executive with the decommissioning contractor at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio said at a conference here this week.
“We are off to a very good start of the demolition,” Greg Wilkett, chief operating officer at Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, said Wednesday at the National Cleanup Workshop, sponsored by the Energy Communities Alliance. “Expect to have structural demolition of the building completed in June or July of 2022.”
Demolition commenced in May, Wilkett said. The roughly 2.5-million square-foot facility, built in the 1950s as part of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant’s uranium enrichment operations, is the most contaminated of the major process buildings at the federal complex scheduled to come down in the next few years.
Demolition materials from the buildings are being taken to the new On-Site Waste Disposal Facility at the Portsmouth Site, officials said.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is providing independent air monitoring during the demolition, said Joel Bradburne, acting manager of the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Portsmouth-Paducah Project Office.
“Portsmouth, unlike some of the other sites [in the weapons complex] is not a Superfund site,” Bradburn said. As a result, the Ohio EPA rather than the federal EPA is the Portsmouth Site’s primary regular.
Additional air monitoring and appointment of a DOE community liaison was announced by the agency earlier this year following public pressure by Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who is also expected to run for the U.S. Senate.
Concerns of contaminants from the Portsmouth Site migrating outside the fence during major demolition have been heightened since radioactive material was found on the grounds of a local middle school in 2019. The school has not reopened since spring 2019. The same year, after friction with her boss over her response to the incident, the Donald Trump administration’s assistant secretary for Environmental Management resigned.
