The Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility being built at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is roughly 25% complete and construction should be finished by the end of 2022, an agency spokesperson said by email this week.
A joint venture of APTIM and North Wind Construction was awarded the contract to build the facility in December 2018 and now has about 118 workers on the job, a DOE spokesperson at Oak Ridge said in response to a Weapons Complex Monitor inquiry.
Under the $92-million contract, the team is scheduled to finish construction in December 2022 and DOE should have the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility operational by September 2025. “Getting to that stage requires finishing construction, extensive testing, and startup operations,” the spokesperson said.
The plant is important to future remediation at the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex as 1940s vintage mercury-laden buildings there are taken down over time, DOE has said.
The project will consist of two major components — a headworks facility and a treatment plant linked via pipeline, according to DOE. The headworks facility will capture creek flow on the west end of Y-12, store excess stormwater collected during heavy rains, remove the grit, and pump water through the pipeline to the treatment plant on the east side of Y-12. The treated water will then flow into the East Fork Poplar Creek.
The facility will treat up to 3,000 gallons of water per minute and include a two-million-gallon storage tank to collect stormwater.
The plant will ultimately be operated by the winner of the next Oak Ridge Reservation Cleanup Contract. Bids on that potential $8.3-billion contract to succeed the Amentum-Jacobs partnership, UCOR, are due to the DOE Office of Environmental Management by 4 p.m. on Feb. 16.
