Enriched Uranium, Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant: "The Portsmouth Story" 1956 US Air Force Lookout Mountain Laboratory

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Gaseous_Diffusion_Plant

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is a facility located in Scioto Township, Pike County, Ohio, just south of Piketon, Ohio that previously produced enriched uranium, including weapons-grade uranium, for the United States Atomic Energy program and U.S. nuclear weapons program. The plant is in shutdown status and is in preparation for decontamination and decommissioning (D&D), with some facilities overseen by the United States Enrichment Corporation, a subsidiary of USEC Incorporated, a publicly traded corporation (NYSE: USU). The D&D work on the older facilities to prepare the site for future use is expected to continue through 2024 and is being conducted by Fluor-B&W Portsmouth LLC.

The Portsmouth plant, so named because of its proximity to the city of Portsmouth, Ohio, was one of three gaseous diffusion plants in the United States, alongside the K-25 plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky. The plant was constructed from 1952–1956, with the first enrichment cells going online in 1954. The plant was operated by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company from its startup to 1986, when the contract was taken over by Martin Marietta. In 1993, the USEC took overall responsibility for the Paducah and Portsmouth enrichment plants, continuing the operating contract with Martin Marietta. In 1995, the operator became Lockheed Martin with the merger of Martin Marietta and Lockheed. In May 2001, the Piketon plant ceased operations and was placed in cold standby. In 2006, the site work shifted into cold shutdown transition in preparation for future Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D).

The former gaseous diffusion plant covers 640 acres (260 ha) of the 3,777-acre (1,528 ha) site. The largest buildings, the process buildings, have a combined length of approximately one and a half miles (2.4 km), and cover about 93 acres (38 ha) and contain 10 million square feet (0.93 km2) of space. In use, the plant consumed a peak electrical demand of 2,100 megawatts.

A commercial centrifuge plant at the Portsmouth site began construction in May 2007 for the production of commercial nuclear fuel for power reactors. Once completed, the commercial plant will use approximately 11,500 centrifuge machines to generate 3.8 million separative work units (SWU) a year...

Operations began in 1954 while construction was ongoing with the plant coming fully online in early 1956, several months ahead of schedule.

The primary mode of enrichment was the gaseous diffusion of uranium hexafluoride to separate the lighter fissile isotope, U-235, from the heavier non-fissile isotope, U-238. The plant initially produced material for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. In the mid-1960s, the plant converted to fuel production for commercial nuclear power plants. Portsmouth took material from Paducah that was enriched to 2.75% U-235 and further enriched it to approximately 4% and 5%.

...Six hundred eighty-nine million US gal (2,610 million l) of water went through the 11 cooling towers daily, of which 20 million US gal (0.076 billion l) evaporated into the air. Water came from well fields installed at the Scioto River...

To support operations, the AEC entered into the largest contract for a single customer in the history of the electrical utility industry for power at that time. Power usage was equal to the all-time high voltage requirements in the United States, more than 2,000 megawatts - 18 billion kilowatt hours yearly. To handle the power requirements, two large switchyards were constructed on site. Two large steam electric generating stations were built to supply power at Clifty Creek in Madison, Indiana and Kyger Creek in Gallipolis, Ohio. At the time, they were the largest power plants built by private industry as well as the most efficient, producing 1 kilowatt hour of electricity for 0.7 pounds (0.32 kg) of coal. The power plants used 7.5 million short tons (6.8 million t) of coal annually to support operations...