Staff Reports
WC Monitor
11/13/2015
An electrical switchyard that was part of the early uranium enrichment work in Oak Ridge is about to be eliminated from the landscape at the sprawling site now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management earlier this year awarded a $2.1 million fixed-price contract to CTI and Associates, a small business based in Michigan, and a CTI executive said the actual demolition is beginning.
Executive Vice President Joey Brown said the company received the prime contract in June, but that it took months of pre-demolition activities, as well as coordinating the work plans with URS-CH2M Oak Ridge – DOE’s cleanup contractor and site manager at Oak Ridge – to reach this stage.
An unusual aspect of the contract is the requirement to recover assets from the site and save money through recycling. Mike Koentop, executive officer of DOE’s EM office in Oak Ridge, said the scope of the project includes the “removal and recycling of electrical equipment” such as a variety of transformers, circuit breakers, bus bars, switches, cabling, and other items.
The switchyard is located on the far west end of the East Tennessee Technology Park near the K-27 Building – the last of the former gaseous diffusion plants to be demolished at the Oak Ridge site. Koentop said the value of the recovered materials — copper, aluminum, steel, and more — is expected to reduce the government’s costs on the project.
CTI has joined with a number of specialty subcontractors, including TCI, a company in Alabama that specializes in recycling electrical equipment, Brown said. “We’re just committed to recovering as much of these materials as possible,” he said.
Asked if the transformers contain polychlorinated biphenyls, Brown said some of the transformer oils do, but not all of them. “It’s sort of a mix,” he said. DOE said any equipment to be sent off-site for recycling will be drained of oils and disassembled before processing occurs.
Koentop said, “The K-732 Switchyard is not a nuclear facility, and no radiological contamination is present at the site.” Brown reaffirmed that statement and said the site has been surveyed, with no radioactive contamination above background.
