By WAYNE ALLEN

PDT Staff Writer

Officials at Fluor-B&W Portsmouth, the Decontamination and Decommission (D&D) contractor at Piketon, are continuing to express concerns about how the project is going to be funded in 2013.

The Obama Administration’s budget is proposing $67 million in funding cuts.

“The Department of Energy has asked us to do an impact analysis. We are off doing that right now, we anticipate it will take up to 30 days to complete. The analysis is fairly complicated. It’s not as simple as X number of people. We have to evaluate the amount of work we are going to do next year that we can push back or pull forward,” said Dennis Carr, Fluor-B&W deputy program manager. “From an overall perspective 85 percent of our total dollars goes to labor. The reduction in funding represents about 15 percent of total funding. With a cut like that there has a high probability of impacting people; the objective would be to minimize that.”

Carr was joined by Joel Bradburne, Department of Energy Portsmouth Site Lead, at the Tuesday meeting of the Scioto County Commissioners to talk about recently released data. The data covers waste disposal alternatives considered as a part of the D&D project.

“We are moving down a path to were the Department Of Energy will be issuing what they call a proposed plan, which will identify their proposed remedy sometime during the summer. As a part of that process is to get the data out,” Carr said.

The waste disposal alternatives considered are on-site or off site disposal.

Fluor-B&W Portsmouth is estimating the all off-site disposal would cost about $1.62 billion and the on-site disposal would cost about $668 million.

Using the off-site alternative, 763,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil would be shipped away from the A-Plant site. There would be 1,032,000 cubic yards of building debris shipped off and a total of 2,177,000 cubic yards of material would need to be shipped off.

Using on-site disposal a total of 1,949,000 cubic yards of material would be processed on-site. Using the on-site disposal option, 228,000 cubic yards of material would still need to be shipped off.

The information presented to the commissioners was originally presented to the Portsmouth Site Specific Advisory Board at its February meeting. The full presentation is available at www.ports-ssab.energy.gov.

Wayne Allen may be reached at 740-353-3101, ext. 208, or wallen@heartlandpublications.com.