Hundreds of employees evacuated the National Nuclear Security Administration’s main factory for nuclear-weapon secondary stages in Tennessee this week after a fire there, a spokesperson said.
“There was a fire at approximately 9:15 involving uranium in Building 9212, a production facility onsite,” a spokesperson for the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., wrote in an email to the Exchange Monitor. “There are no off-site impacts.” The fire broke out Wednesday morning.
“A couple of hundred employees” were evacuated from Building 9212 and more employees were evacuated “from next-door buildings,” the spokesperson said. “There are no reports of injury or contamination. Employee accountability has been completed.”
The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether there was any damage to Building 9212, any of the equipment inside of it or any of the surrounding buildings. The spokesperson did not answer questions about what started the fire or when the fire was extinguished.
In a Twitter post timestamped 1:12 p.m. on Wednesday, Y-12 announced that “curfews have been lifted at the site. All oncoming shifts are to report on time.”
Building 9212 contains quantities of uranium, the fuel for nuclear weapon secondary stages. The element is pyrophoric, meaning that it can, under certain conditions, combust spontaneously.
