DOE considers recycling Paducah’s contaminated nickel

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.

The DOE issued an expression of interest on November 21, seeking input from industry on operationally mature technologies capable of supporting the potential commercial reuse of the radiologically contaminated nickel, which was removed from Paducah's uranium enrichment equipment, smelted, and cast into approximately 1-ton ingots.

According to the DOE, the information gathered from the EOI will be used to evaluate whether it is in the department's best interest to have industry selectively extract the nickel from the ingots to produce a high-purity nickel product suitable for commercial use in accordance with the DOE's criteria for unrestricted release of materials.

Broader strategy: The DOE added that responses to the EOI may also be used in the future to develop an acquisition strategy for commercial-scale processing of a nickel extraction technology. This could support broader national energy priorities, including grid-scale batteries, the nuclear power industry, and artificial intelligence initiatives, contingent on the following:

• Successful technical validation of the proposed process (including verification testing).
• Completion of an economic assessment by the DOE of the proposed approach demonstrating, if appropriate, the overall advantages of the initiative.
• The development of an acceptable regulatory approval and environmental impact evaluation approach.