The Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Paducah Project Office is weighing options on reprocessing approximately 9,700 tons of contaminated nickel being stored at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky.

As part of its ongoing cleanup work, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management is looking into the potential reuse of approximately 6,400 tons of radiologically surface-contaminated nickel that has been removed from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio. DOE-EM began decommissioning the Portsmouth plant, one of three Cold War–era gaseous diffusion plant in the United States, in 2011.