Contractors from CTI and Associates Inc. are finishing the final paperwork on a demolished switchyard at the old Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Tennessee. Last week, CTI hauled the last pieces of the switchyard away from the site, now called the East Tennessee Technology Park.
Constructed in 1944, the 4-acre K-732 switchyard was one of several that delivered power to the plant’s uranium enrichment facilities during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. The plant required massive amounts of electricity. Switchyards including K-732 transformed voltages to feed the transformer banks at the large gaseous diffusion buildings.
As operations at the plant waned, so did the need for the switchyard. Its use was gradually decreased until it was ultimately closed in 2012.
Before workers could tear down any of the power structures, they had to move asbestos and other universal waste. That included entering oil tanks and other confined spaces that once housed materials rich in carcinogenic PCBs, and haul three 110-ton condensers across public roads.
Despite the risks, no work-loss injuries occurred since CTI took the project in June 2015.
“It was a good project and I think it was a very strong team effort to make it successful,” said Joey Brown, CTI’s senior vice president. “We’ve had excellent working relationships with UCOR and DOE and our subcontractors have been excellent, so we’ve just been able to get it done on budget and on schedule and we’re happy about it.”
To reduce the cost of the project the company recycled oil and high-value metals from the switchyard, including more than 800 tons of steel, 28 tons of copper, and 7 tons of aluminum and brass. The sale of the materials recouped more than $115,000 of the $3.8 million project cost.
Brown said the bigger savings was the amount of landfill space saved by selling the material rather than depositing it at the facility.
The Department of Energy expects the landfill currently used to dispose of low-level waste from the Oak Ridge nuclear facilities will fill up by 2020. Plans for a new environmental management waste disposal facility in the area are underway and budgeted for about $5 million.
The 4-acre turnover of the old switchyard is the latest step forward in Energy Department Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management’s plan to turn the old uranium site into an industrial park. CTI left two of the newer transformers at the switchyard in place for the city of Oak Ridge to use to power the industrial complex someday.
URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), the managing contractor for the ETTP cleanup, has said the rest of the land should be ready for turnover by 2020.
