Jennifer M. Granholm Secretary, U.S. Department of Energy | Official Website
The Department of Energy (DOE) has entered into an agreement to sell depleted uranium to GE-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment, LLC (GLE) over a 40-year period. The uranium will be enriched at a proposed GLE facility that aims to use the material to produce natural uranium for fuel in civil nuclear reactors. This new state-of-the-art facility is planned near DOE’s Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky and could create approximately 800 to 1,200 jobs.
“This agreement furthers the Energy Department’s environmental cleanup mission while reducing cleanup costs, creating good local jobs, and supporting an economical enrichment enterprise for our energy needs,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “The sale contributes to two key Energy Department mission areas – to fulfill the federal government’s responsibility to manage the safe storage and disposal of nuclear materials and to enable nuclear power, America’s largest source of zero-carbon energy and an important enabler for reduced greenhouse gas emissions.”
GLE will finance, construct, own, and operate the Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility (PLEF) adjacent to the DOE site. This commercial uranium enrichment production facility will operate under a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) license. The DOE's inventory of depleted uranium is currently stored in approximately 65,000 specialized cylinders at its Paducah and Portsmouth sites.
Constructed in the 1950s, the Paducah plant originally enriched uranium for national security applications before transitioning to commercial nuclear power generation. The DOE resumed control of the plant's enrichment facilities in 2014 after gaseous-diffusion enrichment operations ceased in 2013.
The Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office (PPPO) is deactivating the plant in preparation for decontamination and decommissioning while continuing environmental cleanup efforts initiated in the late 1980s. These efforts include groundwater remediation, demolition of inactive facilities, conversion of depleted uranium into more stable forms for reuse or disposal, among other projects.
The Office of Environmental Management (EM) remains committed to safely cleaning up the environmental legacy resulting from five decades of nuclear weapons development and government-sponsored nuclear energy research.
