Officials from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management recently got a firsthand look at cleanup progress being made at the Paducah Site in western Kentucky. The site is owned by the DOE, which is overseeing environmental cleanup activities there, including environmental remediation, waste management, depleted uranium conversion, and decontamination and decommissioning.

The visit by Dae Chung, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for corporate services, and other EM officials included stops at the C-400 cleaning building remediation project, the new Large Item Neutron Assay System (LINAS), and the C-333 process building deactivation.

The Department of Energy has signed an amendment to a 2016 sales agreement with Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) that will provide the company with access to large stockpiles of DOE-owned depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) tails as GLE looks to build its proposed uranium enrichment facility at the DOE’s Paducah site in Kentucky. As announced on June 5, the amendment is one of the conditions of a 2019 agreement by Australia’s Silex Systems Limited, Canada’s Cameco Corporation, and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy for the restructuring of GLE, the exclusive licensee of Silex’s laser uranium enrichment technology.

Separately, the DOE announced on June 5 that it has issued a formal record of decision for the shipment and disposal of depleted uranium oxide from the former gaseous diffusion plants at the department’s Paducah and Portsmouth sites in Ohio to one or more disposal facilities in the western United States.