K-31 Demolition Ahead of Schedule, UCOR Chief Says
WC Monitor
11/21/2014
Demolition of Building K-31 at Oak Ridge got started on Oct. 8, and already the project is weeks ahead of schedule, according to cleanup contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge, LLC. UCOR President Ken Rueter said this week that the contractor has already knocked down major sections of the building and transported more than 500 truckloads of waste to the Department of Energy’s CERCLA landfill in Oak Ridge. The project is three-to-four weeks ahead of the projected timeline at this point, Rueter said, and that should translate to an early completion unless there are big weather interruptions.
DOE has projected that demolition of K-31 could take about a year to complete, and Rueter said UCOR expects to come in ahead of that schedule. “We were talking about [completion] in the fall or winter of 2015. We’re feeling pretty good about early summer now. Again, a lot depends on the weather,” he said. “We’re progressing very well,” Rueter said.
Similar gains are being made in the work preparing the K-27 building for demolition, where UCOR – transitioning from the former demolition of K-25 – is deactivating operations and removing the big uranium deposits and addressing other issues. “We’re in the building, removing most of the process equipment on the operational floor,” Rueter said. The focus, according to Rueter, is dealing with high-risk units with most of the radioactive technetium contamination – a problem that plagued UCOR at the K-25 project.
UCOR Recommending Draining ORNL Reactor Fuel Pools
WC Monitor
11/21/2014
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge cleanup contractor is recommending that the agency proceed with an aggressive approach to drain the reactor pools at two aged research reactors at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – a step that would reportedly reduce the maintenance costs at the sites until decommissioning and demotion work is done in the 2030s or sometime later. Ken Rueter, president of URS-CH2M Oak Ridge, said this week that UCOR is waiting on DOE’s decision on how to proceed with the projects now that the leak at the Oak Ridge Research Reactor has been identified. “We’ve submitted a series of recommendations to DOE, and we’re waiting to see what their decision is,” he said. “We expect something this year from them, and then we’ll move out [with the project].”
Rueter confirmed that UCOR recommended draining the pool at the Oak Ridge Research Reactor (Building 3042). “We did. We recommended removing the irradiated contents and draining it and going cold and dark,” he said. “Deactivated.” He confirmed that the recommendation also includes carrying out a similar project at the nearby Bulk Shielding Reactor (Building 3010) — another idle, decades-old reactor. Mike Koentop, executive officer at DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said the contractor’s recommendations are under review.
If the pools are drained, the radioactive metals stored in the reactor pools would have to be disposed of. Asked what UCOR would do with the irradiated materials, Rueter said, “We’d actually do a procurement on that and see what the best solution is. It could go to NNSS [the Nevada National Security Site], it could go to a commercial facility.” Asked about the possibility of storing the radioactive metals in one of the hot cells at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rueter said, “That was one of the options that we looked at, but that is not our preferred option. It’d be better to dispose of the waste.” He said UCOR’s general philosophy is to only deal with waste one time.
