The following interview with Ken Rueter, president and project manager of Oak Ridge cleanup contractor UCOR, was conducted by Weapons Complex Monitor Senior Editor Kenneth Fletcher on June 17. It came just before this week UCOR wrapped up demolition of the K-31 former gaseous diffusion plant, a milestone in the cleanup of the East Tennessee Technology Park.
UCOR has used what you call a “bridging” concept to move workers in a sequence between different major D&D projects in an attempt to maximize efficiency. How has that played out as you moved from K-25 to K-31 and K-27?
Really the bridging concept is laid out in our overall cleanup technical approach, and there are really two main pieces to that. There is the D&D or sometimes referred to as D4 which is the, you know, de-connect, decommissioning, decontamination, deactivation, demolition portion of addressing the facility or the structure, and then there is the waste component.
So what we try to do is we line up the work window or the work sequence. The active work window is typically six months to 12 months. That has the very detailed specific plans that obviously line up with the funding and the commitments that we’ve made to the Department of Energy, along with any associated federal facility agreement milestones, to ensure those are delivered fully during that period of performance. But then we expand that planning window out about another 18 months to 24 depending on the size of the job to identify the step-off points or the building blocks that are part of that bridge or that sequence because the way the work is performed it’s not you go into one building and everybody works there holistically for X amount of time and then the minute the last piece falls on the ground, you know, the whole crew moves to the next one. It’s a continuum of the four D’s. So as crews are finishing up sampling, characterization and associated decommission activities like taking the building cold and dark, isolating it from power and other hazards, removing combustibles, deinventorying, tankage or bases or things like that—as they are finishing that up they enter into the next series of bridge activity.
I want to talk specifically about the sequence over the last four years. It was all in on K-25, very focused on recovering that project and turning it around and then ultimately building on that through the north end and the east end and ultimately accelerating it to deliver to the Federal Facility Agreement or and/or better. So as we got into the tech section of the building which was those last six units in the east side, we began to build the bridge within the contract which is performance-based, which then would have the workers coming out of the tech section and beginning to go into K-27 relative to doing sampling characterization, readying the building to enter it to do deactivation. We had to do safety mods, like put up walkways and shore up sections of the building, things of that nature. So the labor component of the work left the tech section of 25 and went over and began to perform those front-end activities which we classify decommissioning in 27 as the operating engineers, those are the people that run the heavy equipment and the iron workers and the teamsters who run the trucks, as they began to finish up the tech section they were then inserted into the sequence or the bridge to go to K-31.
In parallel with that we were working with DOE to get K-31 turned on earlier in the contract based on our performance because there are criteria for that. Obviously that was achieved, along with readying the K-31 site for doing large-scale demolition, so we began to address the tie line. So that’s the bridging piece where you start to build these sequences. This was not the type of work where you could realize your need to address something in a sequence on a Thursday and magically you can do it on a Monday. As you’re progressing through the active work window you have to be in the bridging window laying out the sequence. So that was the bridge then from 25 into 27 and 31.
Now where we sit, as the crews begin to finish up in sampling, characterization and decommissioning activities, readiness activities in 27, they then moved into the next element of the bridge. If DOE decides we have earned it to exercise the options in our contract, we could begin to insert those elements as bridging elements into the sequence. So that would be, for example, Building 1037 which is the barrier plan, the centrifuge facility K-1220 and 1210 and obviously all of Poplar Creek. So we began then to introduce those on the next bridge for the people coming out of 27, those sampling characterization crews along with the people that do decommissioning activities. That would be people that go in and isolate the building from power. We developed a transition fire hazards analysis that allows us to recognize the building as inactive, decommissioning. And then we go ahead and remove all the combustible hazards. That includes boxes of papers, desks, plastics, and all those kind of things. Those crews are actually off beginning to do that kind of work activity as we speak. So the bridge from 27 people is into those areas.
As the 31 team finishes up, which obviously is going to happen for demolition people next week, those laborers will bridge into K-27 because we were able to work with the Department to reach the necessary authorizations within the project to begin to take the transite siding off of K-27 probably about four or five months early. There are two net benefits for that. Obviously we connect the sequences so we don’t have a wall in the associated expense of demobilizing people and then remobilizing them, which is obviously a big morale thing too. But the other is it gets the building opened up in the summer time, which allows a lot more air flow so it does make the conditions on the final deactivation steps much more efficient, effective and certainly safer. There are about 7,000 to 8,000 panels of Transite on 27, kind of comparable to 31. So those crews will begin to go over probably some time right after July 4 and begin to stage and then begin to remove Transite panels. That timing works very well. It took about just shy of 5 months on 31 to take off 8,000 panels. That will then ready us for the back end of the year to then have successfully completed deactivation for 27, which is essentially making it so you can’t have an inadvertent criticality event during. You’ve also removed high-risk equipment, you have decontaminated the elements of the building that are part of the permit to demolish it with the state. We have two units that we’re deinventorying to eliminate the majority of the technetium risk. That’s the decontamination step. All that then is intended to culminate or triangulate in at the end of the year for us to be able to condemn K-27 officially and then move into demolition of it. So that’s the bridging from 31 over there.
That timing works well because after the final section of 31 is down, the remaining operating engineers and teamsters over on 31 will take up the rest of the pad and they will demobilize the K-31 site. It will then go and perform all the necessary preventative maintenance on their heavy equipment to get ready for 27 and do all their prerequisite training because there is always very building-specific training for those heavy equipment operators relative to how we’re going to manage storm water, solution prevention, what angle we’re going to come at the building and in what sequence. And then that bridges them into 27. At that point the deactivation crews will actually be ready to go into Poplar Creek into 1037. Now we’re talking like mid-2016. So that’s kind of how the current sequence in bridging has worked, you know, historically. And then what the vision is moving forward.
That building block approach in which, certainly my individual view is, once you have made the investment and you have begun to accumulate this acceleration and momentum in the job, it’s one of the greatest assets you have and you cherish it and you continue to build upon it all the way through the job. That’s why for example we’re now probably at around $110 million of cost underrun on the job and we’re forecasting coming in at about $145 million at the end. That’s the reinvestment concept. And then the bridging is a synergistic relationship with the savings because what really finances the bridge is the savings. That’s what happened with 31—the savings from 25 enables the ability to move into 31 sooner than later.
As you mentioned before, it’s really important to get your sequence worked out ahead of time. But it’s also clear that there are a lot of different moving parts when you’re working on several different projects at the same time and trying to balance workers. How do you adapt to changes in conditions when unexpected situations arise to make sure to keep things running smoothly? How much confidence do you have in your schedules?
It’s a very traditional project management 101 answer, but it really is that we clearly understand and literally have down on a day-by-day basis the critical path through the bridge design. When we’re in that 6-to-12-month physical work execution window we literally have a critical path through the jobs that’s day by day. Then we have contingency measures built into the job for those near-term critical path issues that could surprise you and become part of the critical path which obviously would blow it up at different levels depending on their significance. We have a very active risk management program in which the focus is on what investments do we make through our integrated priority list, through our process to mitigate risk.
One very classic example of that is the realization through that process that if we are successful enough to accelerate K-25 to be able to bridge into 31, it provided us the mitigation insight to then say, oh, well, that’s going to be the case then we have to go and get the water tower now. And we have to get the draw back or the isolation boundary and tie lines now in order to be able to do that.
Another classic example to me on a contingency plan piece would be what we’ve had to do with 1037. So a little background on 1037, it’s the barrier plan, so it’s where the secret materials that were inside a converter were produced for the entire life of the gaseous diffusion plant process here from induction to the day it was finished up. And so there was an unfortunate security issue with that building, I think in the 2006 timeframe. There were significantly more security measures put on that building above and beyond it being a limited area or a classified area. So one of the things that are risk and then contingency process identified was this. And we started this over a year and a half ago. At some point we will need to get a revised security plan that acknowledges that the measures that were put in place for 2006 were effective, that they were pertinent to an operating facility, they’re not pertinent to a facility that’s going to be decommissioned and then ultimately demolished. And so we began work a multi-phase security step out plan like we do for our safety bases or our authorization bases for buildings to ensure they’re critically and nuclearly safe. We laid that out with DOE and ultimately then got approval of it. We’ve implemented two phases of that which has allowed us when it became time in the bridge to exit workers out of 27. So we’re doing sampling, characterization, decommissioning, the ability for them to go into 1037 because with the operating security constraint it was physically impossible.
We have these contingency plans that are built in into the work sequence. They are very refined obviously when we’re in the work window this 12 months active delivery window and there being either built or refined when we’re laying out the bridge. Okay, I’ll give a really good example, one you’re very familiar with is making sure you have the right color of money to do the job and that applies directly to the centrifuge building. So, you know, this was an effort that started over a year ago with Senator Lamar Alexander’s office to lay out what need to be done so that the centrifuge building was assigned to UE D&D funding at the right time in the appropriational process. Not only are they pleasant to work with under the sponsorship and the support of the senator, working with his staff timed perfectly with 2016, that all got laid out.
Back in November the Department of Energy introduced kind of a new vision for accelerated cleanup at ETTP and Oak Ridge that calls for finishing up gaseous diffusion plant demo by 2016 and ETTP cleanup by 2020. UCOR this month released a strategic plan that codifies your vision of how to actually make that happen. How did UCOR and DOE come together on an accelerated cleanup schedule?
It really starts way back in the proposal timeframe, so that will be, you know, the late 2010 to 2011 when we entered into the competitive process for the contract. This was a very different contract—it was non-M&O, it was scope based and it was completely performance based. So every element of scope outside of K-25 which was the additional scope you had to earn and there is very specific performance criteria that you have to satisfy and demonstrate. Then the Department will turn on the next piece. It is a true traditional federal performance-based contract. So with that knowledge, our technical approach essentially had two critical elements to it from a kind of commitment standpoint. One was recover K-25 and get it back on track with the federal facility agreement that the department had entered into with the EPA and TDEC.
The second part was how we built on that using our technical methods to be able to bring those efficiencies and those experiences from places like Idaho cleanup, River Corridor or Plateau Remediation, accelerated Savannah River cleanup, how we bring all those elements to refine the job, produce the efficiencies and savings, reinvest those through the buyback process to continue to build and accelerate through the job with a vision that if we delivered on 25 and we demonstrated that to them that it was feasible then to have a plan that could accelerate the job from the current federal baseline of 2024 to 2020. If you go back and look at the original RFP, that was the challenge they gave the industry. Completion time window, you know, there is no open-ended federal contract so there is always a completion window. The completion date for the challenge to us was July 2020. But there is no way you were going to get there if you didn’t demonstrate the performance against the criteria that they had set in the contract. So we built our whole technical approach around that, we built our cost model around that. The history speaks for itself. Obviously they made a choice and selected us.
I’ll tell you the same thing I told them on May 2, 2011, when I met with them after they called and awarded us the job on April 29. I won’t forget that date. What I told them on May 2 is that our number one priority from a delivery standpoint is we are going to build what we sold, because that’s going to be the unit of measure overall. So this is now essentially a reflection from a playbook standpoint of the fact that we have now collaboratively reached that point. They had a vision that was clearly reflected in the RFP, I it was clearly reflected in the contract. We’ve now demonstrated the ability to take that kind of blue sky aspect of it and turn it into a real vision. We had discussion with and good feedback from the workforce this morning. They have now got the strategic plan, they’ve had some time to digest it for about a week, the feedback is very positive. It’s this concept of put the best playbook with the best players and the best coaches and you will put the ball in the end zone.
So how much of a learning process has it been over the first four years of your contract? How many challenges did you have to work through? Or was everything pretty well defined from the get go?
It was pretty well-defined, but I don’t think it would be fair to leave the impression that there wasn’t quite a bit of learning going on. You know, on a completion-based contract there are those that believe in the fallacy that the owner knows everything and somehow if something less than 10 million pages could define all that cost and then we put together a 10 million page proposal, I’m being dramatic here, that defines everything. I think it was very well-defined. Relative to D&D work there was very little material change condition identified. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been quite a bit of learning. I would say that most of the learning has been in areas of things like storm water management, pollution prevention kind of things. How to manage large volumes of structural steel from a waste factory standpoint, there has been a lot of learning in that area. That has been positive learning, because that’s what has led us to make a smart decision with DOE to take up the pad at the same time we’re taking up the structural steel from K-31. That has now become a standard. So we will also be taking up the pad at 27 we believe in conjunction with demolishing the building structure because there is a natural efficiency with regard to the volume that you can fit in the truck. Another one has been, learning for us is the importance of integrating the end-state components of the site from a brownfield reindustrialization standpoint to how reindustrialization much more than a program but now a product line, if you will, and it has grown and become more successful for the DOE and us and our responsibility to be that intermediary, the facilitator from DOE or federally-owned property to another entity.
How we integrate that with the clean-up sequence is important and there are a lot of subtleties to that up to and including as you’re shrinking a federal site to make it a private sector industrial part, all the haul routes and we transport weights through there and how we do it so that it doesn’t cause anxiety for the city of Oakridge or Roane County and how it interacts with the rest of the reservation is key. So there has been a lot of learning in those areas, some of them very specific to here, that have then been incorporated in our work plan, some broader than that, I mean to be fair about it. I mean, we’ve learned a lot with regard to running a regulated landfill and how you integrate the waste factory with the point of generation. And we brought that here. One of the things that we’re going to take away from here is certainly effective storm water management in areas where you have higher rainfall.
You mentioned other major D&D projects around the complex, such as River Corridor and Savannah River. How much sharing of information goes on between large D&D projects? Given UCOR’s success so far at Oak Ridge, are there applications at the other gaseous diffusion D&D sites at Portsmouth and Paducah?
We do do a lot of sharing from two perspectives. One would be corporately, so that would be where the respective parents that make up UCOR resides, so that would be, you know, AECOM and CH2M. And so corporately we share a lot through there. So an example of that would be the number of the methods that we apply here for doing deactivation of high-activity areas.
You know Leo Sain, so Leo runs all of the waste management and D&D business for federal associated work for all of the AECOM. And so we actually have a working group that each of the presidents participate in which we share and interact with regard to these kind of things. And then more on the federal side. There was recently a gaseous diffusion plant workshop in which Paducah, Portsmouth and Oakridge were there. The majority of the workshop was focused on critical sharing. And a couple of things that came out of that was one was landfills because they’re getting ready to go on their journey there. And the other was the associated critical nature of waste management. That was in non-destructive analysis, non-destructive evaluation, the other was in deactivation methods holistically and where you draw the line between deactivation and what you have to deactivate and what you can take down with the building with heavy equipment because I know you know how much we prescribe to.
We will do the absolute minimum deactivation steps necessary to get the building to be removed from its safety bases determined to be critically safe. And at that point we put the yellow wire to the building because that is the safest posture for the workforce. There is a natural efficiency that comes with that too.
They were developed as part of the federal dollars and absolutely appropriate and responsible thing to do. We had a great interchange. Our company affiliations are company affiliations, the road to being partners in the industry if you will, a common industry. At Portsmouth Dennis Carr and I know each other very well. I know Scott Sax in River Corridor, or John Ciucci at CHPRC. We have Bob Nichols at Paducah. We have kind of a grid. We stand kind of little bit above with names on our badges when it comes to the type of work we do.
