The DOE’s Joel Bradburne speaks to attendees of the Energy, Technology & Environmental Business Association’s Business Opportunities Exchange. (Photo: DOE)
Cleanup progress at the former Portsmouth and Paducah uranium enrichment plants is helping enable new opportunities for local communities to continue advancing U.S. energy and U.S. security goals, according to Joel Bradburne, manager of the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Paducah Project Office (PPPO).
Demolition and disposal shifted into high gear this spring at the DOE’s former uranium enrichment plant in Ohio.
In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Energy constructed the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in rural southern Ohio to enrich uranium, alongside two other federally owned and managed facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Paducah, Ky. The Cold War-era plant was built as a self-sufficient industrial city with more than 400 buildings and facilities centered around three massive gaseous diffusion process buildings that could enrich the level of the uranium-235 isotope for nuclear fuel in the defense and energy sectors.
The Fordow fuel enrichment site in Iran. (Source: MDAA)
Iran has begun enriching uranium to a purity level of 20 percent using advanced IR-6 centrifuges at its Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, a pilot facility located underground near the city of Qom. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran made the public announcement on June 10, although it reported the news to the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency two weeks before, according to NBC News.