The dust is now settling around building K-27 at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Reservation, marking a prominent, but by no means final milestone for the agency’s cleanup of the former uranium enrichment complex DOE is redeveloping into the East Tennessee Technology Park.
When K-27 fell Tuesday, it marked the first time in the agency’s history that DOE has completely dismantled and torn down an entire gaseous diffusion complex. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said it is the first time in the world this has happened.
The department estimated the cost of demolishing the 383,000-square-foot building at just under $300 million. Demolition began in February, but contractor UCOR — an AECOM-led team that also includes CH2M — had been at work in K-27 since 2014, when the arguably more difficult work of making the former uranium enrichment facility safe to tear down began.
Crews now will move on to what DOE estimates will be a much smaller-scale cleanup: a roughly $75-million demolition of Oak Ridge’s so-called Poplar Creek facilities to the north and west of K-27. Those facilities include: building K-131, which purified uranium hexafluoride fed to K-27; the K-1232 chemical recovery facility; and the K-1203 sewage treatment plant, among others.
Poplar Creek demolition is expected to be complete by July 31, 2020, when UCOR’s nine-year, $2.4 billion cleanup contract is set to expire.
On hand for the ceremonial teardown of the final K-27 wall Tuesday was DOE’s top cleanup official, Monica Regalbuto, assistant secretary for environmental management. Joining the DOE vet were Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), along with Bob Martineau, Tennessee’s top environmental official, and Charlotte Bertrand, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Federal Facilities Restoration and Reuse Office.
Alexander, who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that writes DOE’s annual spending bill, praised department and contractor employees, lauding site personnel for avoiding costly court entanglements that have bedevilled other legacy nuclear-waste cleanup efforts across the complex.
“When issues have arisen, they have been resolved by people working together to get a result – not by the courts, and that has allowed more money to be spent on cleanup, not legal fees and court costs,” Alexander said in a press release.
Tuesday’s final teardown was cataloged photographically on the agency’s Flickr account. K-27 was one of five uranium enrichment buildings built at Oak Ridge to support the World War II-era Manhattan Project. K-27 operated until 1964.
Other gaseous diffusion plants await decontamination and demolition at DOE’s Paducah and Portsmouth facilities.
