PIKETON — Crews at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Pike County have converted depleted uranium hexafluoride from 4,500 legacy storage cylinders into a more stable chemical form, passing the 20 percent mark for the site’s total cylinder inventory, the department’s Office of Environmental Management announced this week.
The milestone came ahead of schedule. The agency said crews have already exceeded the site’s fiscal year 2026 target of converting 546 cylinders, reaching that goal roughly two months early, and recently set a site record with 60 consecutive days of continuous production across all three conversion lines.
The material, known as DUF6, is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment that took place for decades at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant outside Piketon. At its peak, the site stored more than 20,000 of the large steel cylinders, and working through that inventory has been one of the longest-running pieces of the federal cleanup mission in southern Ohio.
Conversion changes the chemistry of what is inside each cylinder. The process transforms the DUF6 into uranium oxide powder, a form the Energy Department describes as safer for long-term storage and better suited to potential reuse or eventual disposal than the original material.
It is slow, industrial work. According to the agency, each cylinder takes about 10 hours of heating followed by another 18 to 20 hours of processing to complete the conversion. Spread across the 4,500 cylinders finished so far, that adds up to roughly 135,000 hours of processing time at the plant.
Program leaders credited the pace to the workforce rather than the equipment. DUF6 Program Manager Chris Richards called the milestone a tremendous accomplishment for the workforce in a statement, and officials with Mid-America Conversion Services, the contractor running conversion operations at the site, including operations manager Curtis Miller, site program manager Tim Warren and plant manager Pete Coutts, echoed that credit for sustaining production.
For Pike County, the work matters on two levels. The conversion plant is a major employer in a rural part of Southeast Ohio, and every cylinder processed is one fewer piece of Cold War-era material sitting in storage yards near Piketon while the broader demolition and cleanup of the old enrichment complex continues around it.
With more than 20 percent of the inventory now converted and the fiscal 2026 target already beaten, the remaining cylinders — still numbering in the thousands — will keep the three conversion lines running for years to come. The agency has not announced a completion date for the full inventory, but officials say the current production pace is the standard the site intends to hold.
