The Department of Energy’s environmental prime at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee has removed the lower reactor vessel from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Building 3042, the department said Tuesday.
The facility is also known as the Oak Ridge Research Reactor, which was built in the mid-1950s and used for isotope production before Oak Ridge shut down all its reactors in 1987. Taking down the facility is one of the biggest projects that Amentum-led United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR) has underway at the national lab, DOE said in a press release.
UCOR workers, using a 72-inch diamond wire saw, last week severed the connections holding the lower reactor vessel in place at the bottom of the reactor pool, DOE said in the press release. A 20-ton overhead crane was employed to life the vessel and place it into a cask for offsite shipment and disposal. DOE started removing the top portion of the reactor in November 2023.
Work on the bottom portion of the vessel has involved removing 127,000 gallons of sediment and water from the pool floor, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in the recent press release. Twenty crew members loaded 157,000 contaminated bricks from the basement that surrounded the pool.
Remaining work includes deactivating about 6,000 feet of pipe and draining the rest of the pool water, DOE said.
The vessel will be sent to the Nevada National Security Site for disposal, said a DOE spokesperson. EnergySolutions is assisting DOE with the process, the spokesperson said.