The remaining portions of the site that once housed the old Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Tennessee will be fully remediated within three years, well ahead of the original schedule, according to Ken Rueter, president of Energy Department site cleanup contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR).
The last Manhattan Project-era uranium enrichment building, K-27, came down just last year. UCOR is now cleaning up the 14-acre area the structure once occupied.
“The soils that have been sampled and determined to be contaminated will be removed as part of the overall cleanup criteria for the site,” Rueter said. After that, the whole area will be backfilled and hydro-seeded.
Meanwhile, cleanup work continues on a number of facilities at the former uranium enrichment complex that has been shuttered since 1987.
Piece by piece, UCOR is turning over the area now called the East Tennessee Technology Park to the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee (CROET) to reindustrialize the land for the city of Oak Ridge and for a regional airport. The site will also house a portion of the Manhattan Project National Park.
CROET already oversaw about 300 acres of the site when the Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation in April to make it the manager of the remaining 1,000 acres. Gov. Bill Haslam signed the bill, allowing the Department of Energy to transfer the rest of the industrial park to CROET.
As manager, CROET will enter into a lease agreement with the Oak Ridge Industrial Development Board to hold the property until it is sold for industrial and commercial development. Rueter said the site turnover will be complete in 2020 at about $150 million under budget.
“The original timeline planned for cleanup of ETTP and removal from the national priority list was 2024,” said Rueter, a veteran of remediation operations for the DOE complex, with stops at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Hanford Site in Washington state. “UCOR has been able to accelerate that cleanup by four years.”
Rueter characterized the ETTP cleanup as the most successful on which he has worked. “It has incorporated a lot of the lessons we’ve learned cleaning up other Manhattan Project legacy sites,” he said.
Progress is evident around the site. Tie-lines that once connected the site’s facilities are being torn out and removed. In mid-June, UCOR began demolishing the first of 23 buildings that made up the Poplar Creek Facilities that once supported the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The contractor plans to completely demolish the support buildings by 2019.
The remaining four major facilities on the property are in the decommissioning stage of the contaminated building teardown process, summarized as “the four Ds:” decommissioning, decontamination, deactivation, and demolition.
To decommission a building, all operational parts and potential hazards must be removed.
K-1037, the plant that supported the gaseous diffusion process through production of barrier material, is among the most challenging facilities to get through this step, though not so much for hazard abatement. The building is still full of highly classified equipment that must be removed without exposing it to public view.
Another facility, the K-1200 complex, consists of 11 buildings that had been employed in study of uranium enrichment alternatives to the plant’s gaseous diffusion process. Classified contents are the main obstacle to decommissioning here as well. All contractors who enter the building must be Q-cleared with the Department of Energy.
The site’s Central Neutralization Facility has completed its “cold and dark” period, during which it was completely cut off from outside energy sources. The wastewater treatment facility consists of 49 structures, including storage tanks and support trailers. UCOR has removed hazardous chemicals from the building.
The Toxic Substances Control Act Incinerator that once handled all mixed radioactive waste in the country is also undergoing decommissioning.
Once decommissioned, all four buildings must be decontaminated before moving into the deactivation phase, which takes hazard abatement even further. To deactivate a facility, special crews must remove any leftover chemical or nuclear hazards such as asbestos, uranium, mercury, or lead.
Rueter said he expects all four facilities will be deactivated by the end of 2018. Then they can be condemned and demolished. “That’s essentially putting the heavy equipment to the building, knocking it down, reducing the size of the rubble and then transporting the debris to whatever its final disposal location is,” he said.
For the most part, the final disposal location is the on-site Environmental Management Waste Management Facility.
Once the ETTP is turned over, UCOR will cease to exist. The contractor employs 1,600 people at the site. AECOM, one of UCOR’s parent companies via its acquisition of URS, may reabsorb some of those workers and move on to the next cleanup project, which might be just a few miles east at the Y-12 National Security Complex.
“The idea is to be able to finish this up and be positioned in Y-12 to begin the mercury cleanup, so that a lion’s share of those that do environmental remediation and cleanup for a living would just transfer over to a new contractor there,” Rueter said.
Awarded in 2011, UCOR’s contract would be worth more than $2.5 billion through 2020, if DOE picks up all of its options.
