Having lined up a potential two-year extension for environmental remediation at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, an Amentum-Jacobs joint venture is wrapping up work on the grounds of a former uranium enrichment complex, top managers said Thursday.
Without offering much detail, leaders at URS/CH2M Hill Oak Ridge (UCOR) affirmed they are also eyeing the next cleanup contract on the DOE property.
The contractor has essentially finished taking down buildings and disposing of waste from the East Tennessee Technology Park, the former K-25 gaseous diffusion complex, UCOR President and CEO Ken Rueter said during a session at the ExchangeMonitor’s virtual RadWaste Summit.
Rueter and UCOR Waste Disposition Manager John Wrapp discussed completion of the so-called Vision 2020 initiative to finish tearing down the old enrichment complex for nuclear defense by the end of the year.
The five major uranium enrichment buildings, some of the largest structures in the world when constructed during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, were taken down by the end of 2016. The core remediation job ETTP, taking down 500-plus ancillary facilities and disposing of the resulting debris, is virtually done, Rueter said.
The DOE Oak Ridge Office of Environmental plans for a finishing ceremony in or around October.
In addition to helping produce a 1,900-acre industrial park, the ETTP land also includes a 100-acre national park devoted to the Manhattan Project, Rueter noted.
UCOR started work on the existing $3.3 billion contract in August 2011. In July, DOE announced it was keeping the incumbent around at least through July 2021. If two more six-month extensions are picked up, the tenure could last until July 2022.
That should give the Energy Department time to select a new contractor for Oak Ridge. The DOE Office of Environmental Management issued a draft request for proposals (RFP) last month for a new long-term agreement that could be worth $8.3 billion. Comments on the draft are due Sept. 17, and a final RFP could be released as early as November.
In answering a question during the presentation, Rueter said to expect UCOR’s parent companies to be among the prospective suitors for the next contract. He did not discuss the matter further.
The chief job now facing UCOR is migrating its workforce from ETTP work to decontamination and decommissioning projects for the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rueter said.
The migration from the western to the eastern side of the 37,000-acre reservation is “not one of those things you realize on a Thursday and implement on a Monday,” he added. The Energy Department and UCOR started a “glide path” toward the transition back in 2018, according to Rueter.
The incumbent contractor employs about 1,800 people at Oak Ridge.
Such a transition features cooperation between the Office of Environmental Management and DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Rueter said. Environmental Management oversees cleanup at Oak Ridge, but the NNSA owns Y-12, an active nuclear-weapon facility.
The Office of Environmental Management has been assigned by DOE to remediate old excess facilities at NNSA sites and help convert them into reusable federal properties, Rueter said. The two entities work together to identify high-risk facilities that can be decontaminated for future use, he added.
The former Biology Complex at Y-12, being prepared for demolition by the nuclear cleanup office, is the preferred site for the NNSA’s potential $1.65 billion Lithium Processing Facility.
In addition, DOE said last month that UCOR workers will be deactivating Building 3005, which houses the former Low-Intensity Test Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“From a waste management standpoint, it is going to be quite a different game for us,” Wrapp said. At ORNL, there is more high-activity waste than found at ETTP, while there are many mercury-laden buildings at Y-12, he added.
There are four active landfills at the Oak Ridge Reservation, including the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility, which takes the property’s Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) debris. That facility should be filled within five years, Wrapp noted. The Environmental Management office is seeking regulatory approval for a new 2.2 million cubic yard facility to replace it.
While most of the Oak Ridge waste volume is disposed of on-site, 90% of the radionuclides are shipped off-site to the Nevada National Security Site or commercial low-level waste operations: EnergySolutions in Utah or Waste Control Specialists in Texas, Wrapp said.
