Portman grills DOE Secretary over Obama administration's broken promise to the Piketon community
After U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) secured funding needed to maintain current employment levels for the decontamination and decommissioning work at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and to maintain operation of the American Centrifuge Plant (ACP) in Piketon, the administration failed to utilize those funds. This week, Portman grilled U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz for his department’s failure to use funding provided by Congress and therefore causing layoffs in Piketon.
An excerpt of Portman’s comments is below.
“I’m profoundly disappointed in the way you’ve handled the cleanup at Piketon.
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“I asked you if you would come out and take a look at Piketon, and I’ve asked you at every one of these hearings. I think you would have a different perspective if you would come out and see it.
“It is amazing to me that we are pulling the plug on the one American source, the only American source of enriched uranium which we need for nuclear power, we need for our nuclear Navy … we have to have it and we need it for our nonproliferation efforts.
“60 people lost their jobs this week. Their last day of work is going to be tomorrow … 140 are going to work themselves out of a job as they’re forced to deconstruct our best technology, the best centrifuge technology that we have.”
“I think it’s just wrong and it’s going to be very expensive to our taxpayers.
“It would take probably seven years minimum to reconstruct what we have there now. You lose the supply chain, you lose the workers, you lose all this expertise … As Americans, we should all be concerned about this … How long would it take to rebuild that capability?”