Portsmouth Ohio’s Uranium Enrichment Legacy – A Tale of Two Complexes

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). The world was a different place in ’54, when the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and operated by USEC Incorporated (Bethesda, Maryland) in Piketon, Ohio, began producing highly enriched uranium to produce nuclear weapons and fuel military reactors. It was a simpler time when every grade-schooler knew to hide under their desk if a nuclear attack came during the school day. Plans for a family fallout shelter and the materials with which to build one were available from mail order catalogues, if one could not afford to have one built by a specialist. There was always a supply of canned and powdered foods, as well as water, in the bunker if there happened to be an emergency. In those days, one tended not to worry so much about nuclear waste and chemical disposal as being “wasted “ by a nuclear hailstorm of mind bogglingly destructive multi-megaton warheads, courtesy of the Russian Bear. Hence, it was a while before we as a nation took notice and began to address some of the problems developing from a rapidly accelerating flood of technology following a period of tremendous industrial growth.

The combined total investment value (TIV) remaining for ongoing and anticipated future projects at the Portsmouth sites will likely exceed $7.5 Billion (This figure does not include the actual operating costs of the American Centrifuge Plant) over the next 25-30 years. It is likely that $2.53 billion of this total will be spent on projects by the end of federal fiscal year 2012. Americans’ environmental awareness and concerns, federal policies responsive to this, a desire to change our image throughout the world and resulting deep pockets for anti-proliferation projects and chemical/nuclear remediation have made the DOE Portsmouth site a contractors’ destination spot.

The DOE PORTS site is actually two distinct separate areas of a federally-owned 3,714 acre plot, of which approximately 1,500 acres is “industrialized” and much of the remainder acts as a security and safety buffer. The two distinct areas onsite are the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Plant Profile # 1073485), commissioned in 1954, and the portion of the site with buildings dating back to the early 1980’s that is the new Portsmouth American Centrifuge Plant (Plant Profile # 1012816).

The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is in cold standby, having ceased enriching uranium in 2001. Functionally, only three portions of the “old” Gaseous Diffusion Plant are active in performing other tasks required before its cold shutdown. Ultimately decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) (Project # 1003990) await the monolithic piece of nuclear history. In 25-30 years, there will be nothing left of the monument to early advances in a technology that once shook the very foundations of our world and still holds an unsettling power over our imaginations and the future to come.

The Gaseous Diffusion Area houses not only the “old” Gaseous Diffusion Plant but a Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (DUF6) Conversion Plant (Plant Profile #1073514) being constructed (Project # 10003967) to remove aqueous hydrogen fluoride from depleted uranium and convert it to uranium oxide. The Gaseous Diffusion Area is also the site of extensive groundwater remediation of trichloroethene (TEC) and solid waste management/ dispositioning by quadrants (Project # 1003987).

The American Plant Centrifuge Plant is to be a state of the art uranium enrichment facility of leviathan proportions. It will consist of lead cascades of separation centrifuges totaling approximately 11,500 centrifuges with provisions for a total of around 33,000 centrifuges. Between the second quarter of 2007 and the fourth quarter of 2012 approximately $2.1-2.3 billion will be spent on this plant. (Projects #’s 1003983 1003966 1003976 1003977 1003978 1003982) The equipment will eclipse the gaseous diffusion technology that it replaces with a capacity of 3.8 Million SWU (separative work units) and a tremendous savings in power required per SWU returned.

View Plant Profile – 1073485 1073514 1012816
View Project Report – 10003966 10003967 10003976 10003977 10003978 10003982 10003983 10003987 10003990

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