K-27, the last of five gaseous diffusion plants to be demolished at the government’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., complex, appears to be coming down quicker than any of its predecessors (K-25, K-29, K-31, and K-33).
That may be due to lessons learned from earlier demolitions, an increasingly experienced workforce, and/or an unusual period of mild winter weather and a so-far sunny spring in Tennessee.
URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), the Department of Energy’s cleanup manager at the site, is approaching the halfway point on the K-27 project only 10 weeks after demolition began on Feb. 8.
Knocking down K-27 and cleaning up the mess will allow DOE and its contractors to complete what has been called Vision 2016, the project to eliminate the site’s old uranium-enrichment footprint and set the stage for other cleanup priorities and ultimately economic redevelopment of the sprawling site now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park.
K-27, a four-story, 383,000-square-foot industrial facility, was a sister plant to the mile-long, U-shaped K-25, the original gaseous diffusion plant that was built during the World War II Manhattan Project. The Oak Ridge facilities provided enriched uranium for the Cold War nuclear arsenal, as well as producing the uranium fuel for the early generations of nuclear power reactors.
It appears UCOR will have little trouble meeting DOE’s end-of-2016 deadline for completing the K-27 project. About 230 people are working on the demolition, with about three-fourths of them UCOR employees. The rest are associated with various staff-augmentation contractors, UCOR spokeswoman Anne Smith said. Most of workforce participated in earlier demolition activities at the Oak Ridge site, with prior training allowing the work to proceed at an even quicker pace than before.
The large-scale demolition activities are coordinated with the trucking teams ready to deliver the massive amount of contaminated debris to landfills.
Smith said one of the lessons learned from the demolition of K-25 was to ship the rubble as quickly as possible, thus avoiding a situation in which heavy rainfall can wash away contaminants at the demolition site. More than 1,500 truckloads of K-27 waste had been shipped to disposal sites by the end of March, Smith said. Much more has been moved in the first weeks of April.
UCOR said about 90 percent of the K-27 debris is being sent to the CERCLA landfill in Oak Ridge known as the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility. The other 10 percent is shipped off-site for disposal at the Nevada National Security Site or elsewhere.
After the gaseous diffusion plants are removed from the landscape, DOE will focus on other remediation tasks at the East Tennessee Technology Park. Those future priorities will include removal of the Toxic Substances Control Act Incinerator, which was shut down in late 2009 after burning more than 35 million pounds of hazardous waste over two decades, and a large facility that once manufactured highly classified “barrier” materials for the gaseous diffusion plants.
