Construction of a plant to treat mercury-laden water stemming from building demolition at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is more than a third complete, an agency spokesperson said Tuesday.
Construction of the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility by a joint venture of Louisiana-based APTIM and Idaho-based North Wind is about 35% done, the DOE Office of Environmental Management spokesperson said in an email response to an inquiry from Weapons Complex Monitor.
That’s up from about 25% at the beginning of 2021. The construction joint venture, which holds a $101-million contract scheduled to end in December 2022, has about 120 workers on the project, the APTIM-North Wind spokesperson said. Contract work started in 2018. The facility should be up and running in 2025 and, according to the 2022 budget request for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, cost a little under $225 million.
The facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex should treat up to 3,000 gallons per minute, reducing mercury concentrations in the water by 84%, according to an APTIM website.
During the Cold War days of the 1950s and 1960s, Y-12 used more than 20-million pounds of mercury, 700,000 pounds of which was evidently absorbed into the site’s buildings, soil and groundwater, APTIM said. Major demolition of old buildings is planned in upcoming years and the treatment is expected to blunt the impact of mercury that migrates from the structures.
The DOE said in a release this week that three 1940s-era buildings at Y-12 will soon be ready for demolition— Alpha-2, the Old Steam Plant, and the Old Criticality Experiment Laboratory. Deactivation is already underway at Alpha-2, also known as Building 9201-2. It is the largest of the structures at 325,000-square-feet.
