HENDERSON, Nev. — There is roughly three decades of environmental work left at the U.S. Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, mostly at Y-12 National Security Complex and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to one official.
“We’ve got about 30 years of cleanup to do, we think, based on a relatively flat funding profile,” David Adler, director of the Quality and Mission Support Division for DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said Sept. 4.
Adler addressed cleanup at Oak Ridge together with UCOR President and CEO Ken Rueter during a panel discussion at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual RadWaste Summit. UCOR, the AECOM-led decontamination and demolition contractor for Oak Ridge, should finish its work at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) by the time its current contract ends in July 2020.
Rueter said only two major gaseous diffusion facilities at Oak Ridge, left from its Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear weapons work, remain to come down.
The East Tennessee Technology Park is the only property that DOE’s Office of Environmental Management actually owns at Oak Ridge, Adler said. But Environmental Management will also remediate areas of the 3,200-acre campus controlled by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
There is “extensive” groundwater contamination at Oak Ridge given that the three major complexes had unsophisticated “burial grounds” for radioactive and chemical waste, Adler said.
When UCOR’s current nine-year, $3.2 billion contract expires in 2020, AECOM will seek to remain on the job for future Oak Ridge remediation, Rueter said. He said he could not speak for Jacobs, owner of UCOR partner CH2M. Others attending the conference said to expect Jacobs to bid on the next Oak Ridge contract, along with Veolia, BWX Technologies, and others.
The next Oak Ridge remediation contract could run for up to 10 years and be worth $6 billion. The Energy Department has indicated a request for proposals for the Oak Ridge business could come this month.
