Hundreds of employees evacuated the National Nuclear Security Administration’s main factory for nuclear-weapon secondary stages in Tennessee this week after a fire there, a spokesperson said.
“There was a fire at approximately 9:15 involving uranium in Building 9212, a production facility onsite,” a spokesperson for the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., wrote in an email to the Exchange Monitor. “There are no off-site impacts.” The fire broke out Wednesday morning.
“A couple of hundred employees” were evacuated from Building 9212 and more employees were evacuated “from next-door buildings,” the spokesperson said. “There are no reports of injury or contamination. Employee accountability has been completed.” The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether there was any damage to Building 9212,or its equipment.
Professional Project Services, known around the weapons complex as Pro2Serve, was Thursday awarded a new Department of Energy task order worth up to $50 million to provide technical services at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
The new five-year contract calls for one base year followed by four one-year option periods. Pro2Serve is the incumbent technical support provider for DOE Office of Environmental Management work at Oak Ridge, according to a Thursday press release from the agency.
The procurement was handled through National Nuclear Security Administration’s technical, engineering, and programmatic support services III blanket purchase agreements, DOE said.
Pro2Serve, a national security engineering and information contractor active at Department of Energy nuclear sites, has added Lloyd Caldwell, a retired military programs director for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to the Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based company’s board of directors.
As the top civilian leader for the Army Corps’ defense and interagency programs, Caldwell was responsible for an estimated $35-billion enterprise, Pro2Serve said in a press release dated Feb. 14. Caldwell retired from the Corps in October 2020, according to a bio posted by the National Academy of Construction.
Pro2Serve also said in its release the board re-elected Gerald Boyd, a former Huntington Ingalls Industries vice president for nuclear and environmental business development, to another term. Both terms started Feb. 14.
Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership, the Jacobs-led Department of Energy contractor remediating the Paducah Site in Kentucky, has removed oils and combustible materials from the C-333-A Feed Vaporization Facility at the former gaseous diffusion plant, DOE said this week.
The work at the 8,300-square-foot facility helps prepare the way for future demolition of the adjoining C-333 Process Building, the DOE said this week in a news release. C-333 will be the first of four process buildings involved in uranium enrichment to be taken down at Paducah.
“With C-333-A now disconnected from the process building, we are focused on the deactivation of the C-333 Process Building,” Four Rivers program manager Myrna Redfield said in the release.
