Staff Reports
WC Monitor
1/8/2016
Contractors at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Savannah River sites have joined together to tackle mercury cleanup problems.
Anne Smith, a spokeswoman for URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), DOE’s cleanup contractor for the Tennessee site, said the company has formed a mercury issues coordination team with Savannah River Remediation, a waste contractor at DOE’s South Carolina site. Both contractors are partly owned by AECOM, so there already was a corporate relationship.
UCOR has been given the responsibility for designing a new mercury treatment facility at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, with preliminary design to be completed in spring 2016. Savannah River Remediation is also dealing with mercury issues at the South Carolina facility.
The Y-12 facility is expected to cost roughly $150 million. “UCOR has primary responsibility for design of the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility and is drawing on the resources of its two parent companies — CH2M and AECOM — in the design effort,” Smith said.
Smith said Harold Conner, UCOR’s manager of nuclear services and engineering, and three other UCOR employees are working on the multi-contractor team, which is to coordinate work on mercury issues at the two DOE sites. The team is reportedly conducting joint reviews of technical information and working on future approaches for cleanup activities, as well as coordinating communications to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Oak Ridge work on a preliminary design for the mercury treatment facility is focused on the “headworks” that will capture water from Outfall 200, which is where Y-12’s storm sewer system empties into the East Fork Poplar Creek. When the preliminary design work is done, the final design will begin, Smith said. That design effort is due to be completed in early 2017.
Y-12 received millions of pounds of mercury in the 1950s and ‘60s for use in processing lithium, a key part of the U.S. development of hydrogen bombs.
Many tons of mercury were spilled or otherwise discharged at the Oak Ridge plant, creating significant environmental problems. The East Fork Poplar Creek, which originates inside the facility before meandering through most of Oak Ridge’s west end, was the recipient of much of the toxic metal, and residual amounts of mercury continue to seep from the plant into the creek on a daily basis. The creek has been posted as a health hazard since the early 1980s.
Mercury will be a major focal point as the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management team tackles the cleanup and eventual demolition of old facilities at Y-12. Many of the aged production facilities at the site are contaminated with mercury, and the soil and groundwater are polluted as well.
The mercury issues are apparently less severe at Savannah River, but, according to UCOR, the contractor there is addressing mercury-related issues in its liquid waste system, primarily associated with the Defense Waste Processing Facility.
