Livermore crews prepare to remove concrete slab at Building 251

Work crews at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California will soon start removing the concrete slab from the site of Building 251, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said Tuesday.

Once the slab is gone, Building 251 or the Heavy Elements Facility will become available for future work by DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the nuclear cleanup office said in a newsletter.

The work is overseen by Lawrence Livermore National Security, a team of Bechtel, the University of California System, BWX Technologies and Amentum.  

“This successful D&D [decontamination and demolition] means that the significant risks at three of the four highest-risk excess facilities have now been removed: Building 175, Building 280 reactor and Building 251,” Kevin Bazzell, the Environmental Management office’s federal project director for Livermore and nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said in the announcement.

Tearing down Building 251 also marks completion of the first task order awarded under a nationwide deactivation, decommissioning and removal contract. Aptim was used in the work, awarded through a 2020 procurement for nationwide decommissioning.

Late last year, trucks hauled the last three containers of Building 251 demolition waste to an EnergySolutions disposal site in Clive, Utah. Altogether, more than 220 trucks carrying over 250 containers of waste traveled to the disposal facility following five months of Building 251 demolition. 

Abatement and hazard removal, vent duct removal and decontamination preceded the teardown. Environmental Management finished restoring the site late last year.