Agreement buys time for Paducah uranium enrichment plant

A complex four-party deal brokered by the Department of Energy and Kentucky lawmakers will postpone the closure of a Kentucky uranium enrichment plant until well after November’s election.

The agreement announced 15 May also will provide tritium for US nuclear warheads and fuel for two nuclear power plants’ reactors.

“After much hard work, the Energy Department, in cooperation with the other organizations, has identified a creative path forward to utilize a portion of our depleted uranium inventory in a way that brings together the public and private sector to advance America’s national security interests at a reduced cost to taxpayers,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu in a statement. “I’m pleased there is an agreement that will allow 1,200 hard working employees to continue to work for another year at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “This plan will give the workers and the city additional time to prepare for the future as DOE works to transition the facility.”

Under the arrangement, the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant owned by USEC Inc will enrich some of the depleted uranium hexafluoride owned by DOE into low-enriched reactor fuel. The product will be purchased by Energy Northwest, operator of a nuclear power plant in Washington State, which will resell most of the fuel to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The quasi-governmental TVA, which operates several nuclear power plants, has contracted to produce tritium for the US nuclear arsenal.

Tritium—produced by the irradiation of lithium in control rods—is used to boost the fission process in nuclear weapons. It decays at a rate of 5.5% annually, and stockpiled warheads must be periodically replenished with the gas. By law, DOE can only accept tritium for weapons if it is manufactured using nuclear fuel that both originated in the US and was enriched using technology of US origin. Right now, Paducah is the only domestic facility that can meet those criteria. Much of the uranium that is fueling US reactors today originated from Russian weapons-grade uranium that has been blended down to low-enriched material in a program dubbed “megatons to megawatts.”

Although the arrangement will keep the Paducah plant in operation for about a year, lawmakers have warned that the city still must brace for the eventual shutdown of the uneconomic facility. “We must continue to work together to ensure a viable transition plan is developed as this plant faces eventual closing,” said Representative Ed Whitfield, whose district includes Paducah.

Late last year USEC informed DOE that it is considering closing the Paducah plant due to a lack of commercial demand as few new nuclear reactors are being built, the sudden closure of reactors in Japan and Europe have created a glut of fuel in the global market, and the economic recession is suppressing US electricity demand.

USEC has been struggling to obtain financing and loan guarantees to complete a partially built gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant in southern Ohio. The centrifuge process can enrich uranium at considerably lower cost than the World War II–era gaseous diffusion process. Beginning this month, DOE is to transfer ownership of more than 9000 metric tons of depleted uranium tails stored at Paducah to Energy Northwest, which in turn will contract with USEC to enrich the material into 482 tons of low-enriched uranium (LEU). Of that, 435 tons will be sold to TVA beginning in 2015. That’s enough LEU to provide up to 15 years of uninterrupted tritium supply for the US stockpile.

Prior to finalizing the agreement, DOE paid for a market study that determined the agreement would not adversely impact the domestic uranium mining, enrichment, or conversion industries.