A brief not-in-my-backyard bout between the city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) appears to have ended, with the agency announcing Thursday it plans by late 2019 to erect power lines and a substation for the future Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency had been planning the new substation, with power lines running 2 miles along a hill called Pine Ridge, for about two years. However, Oak Ridge city officials said they only learned about the plan in November after the NNSA posted flyers around town regarding the power lines.
After city officials complained about possible eyesores along the hill, which separates Y-12 from the historically black community of Scarboro, the NNSA decided “to lower the transmission poles below the tree line – rendering the poles significantly less noticeable and preserving the integrity of Oak Ridge’s Pine Ridge skyline. Additionally, the poles will be painted brown in order to blend in with winter views.”
That is according to a joint statement from the city and NNSA. The DOE branch prepared and distributed the statement Thursday.
“Oak Ridge citizens are very interested in the project’s community impact and proposed routing alternatives,” Oak Ridge City Manager Mark Watson said in the joint statement. “We have appreciated NNSA’s willingness to work with the City to identify a better path forward and their pledge for more and frequent communication to the community.”
The Department of Energy’s contractor on the power project, the Tennessee Valley Authority, started clearing Pine Ridge in December.
“So far, we have logged less than a mile on the most western part of the route closest to Y-12,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in an email this week.
The operation has by all accounts gone smoothly, except for some logs on Feb. 6 that got away from workers on the hilltop and rolled down onto Bear Creek Road on Y-12. Nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged by the logs, which were about 2 feet long and 2 feet wide, the spokesperson said.
Bechtel National is building the Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12. The NNSA has promised Congress the new plant, which will replace World War II-era uranium enrichment facilities, will be done by 2025 and cost no more than $6.5 billion. More details are to be available in March, when the NNSA plans to set a cost and schedule baseline for the facility’s Main Process Building, according to the White House’s 2018 budget request.
