Staff Reports
WC Monitor
1/22/2016
The Y-12 site’s Alpha-5 Building has been characterized as the “worst of the worst” of the excess facilities awaiting cleanup at Department of Energy sites around the country, and deactivation and decommissioning of the highly contaminated, highly deteriorated site is still years from happening.
However, Consolidated Nuclear Security – the government’s managing contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. – is evaluating some possible near-term actions to drain the polluted water, estimated at 2 million gallons, that has collected in the big building’s basement because of roof failures.
The pool of water, which is commingling with groundwater in the area, reportedly contains uranium, beryllium, mercury, and other hazardous materials. The flooded basement is also enabling the growth of mold in the 613,000-square-foot building, which has been shut down for more than a decade.
Ken Harrawood of CNS said contractor officials believe the existing Central Mercury Treatment Facility at Y-12 could be used to treat the Alpha-5 water, an opportunity that is now being studied. “We’re going to do some work this year to get some pumps and agitate water to get a representative sample,” he said.
If the water meets the acceptance criteria for the CMTF, the Y-12 contractor may proceed with the project, Harrawood said.
The CNS official said the treatment facility has enough capacity to do the job but there is a possible concern that the Alpha-5 water could be too briny for the CMTF systems.
The problems facing DOE and its contractors with Alpha-5 are symptomatic of problems with excess facilities throughout the department’s complex across the country. There are too many shuttered facilities that are no longer needed and not enough funding to begin their D&D on a timely basis. Therefore, the facilities, often with deteriorated structures and heavy contamination, require constant maintenance and surveillance and drain needed dollars away from operational funding at Y-12 and other sites.
Mark Whitney, DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, addressed the problem with excess facilities during a speech last month at the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association’s annual Business Opportunities Conference in Knoxville, Tenn.
“When it comes to excess facilities, the first thing to keep in mind is we’re talking about a tremendous number of facilities,” Whitney said. He indicated there could be as many as 1,000 excess facilities that need to be added to the D&D lineup already in the works.
“At times, the list seems never ending,” Whitney said, “but measurable progress is being made.”
Harrawood declined to give an estimate of what Alpha-5, which is the poster child for excess facilities, will cost to tear down and clean up. “We’re working on an estimate, but it’s a pretty rough estimate at this time,” he said.
The problem with waiting to shift facilities to EM for cleanup is that the old buildings often get worse during the wait. Alpha-5, for instance, was the subject of a $100 million project in 2011 that was paid for out of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money received by DOE’s Oak Ridge Office. That project removed tons of materials – including more than 5,000 containers that were shipped off-site to the Nevada National Security Site for disposal – to help prepare the big building for D&D, but those preparations were short-changed when the roof failed and allowed water to disperse the contamination throughout the building. It was a big setback.
Additional millions have been spent on measures such as roof repairs to keep the situation at Alpha-5 from getting even worse, but there’s still no end in sight.
The cleanup at Alpha-5 is complicated because it is located adjacent to active production facilities at Y-12, Harrawood said. That could hurt access by cleanup workers or pose additional risks to the production workforce at the plant.
Jeff Smith, deputy director for operations at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said DOE’s fiscal 2017 budget is expected to contain some EM money to specifically address the problem with excess facilities. He said there are indications that it could be about $100 million, but that number hasn’t been confirmed as to whether will be in the president’s budget request to be released in February.
Smith was co-chair of a Department of Energy working group convened last year to look at the problem with excess facilities at sites around the country. The group concluded the problem with such sites was not being addressed by any existing programs, he said.
“If you don’t start working on it, it’s going to get more and more costly and begin to impact existing missions because . . . some of these facilities are dispersed among production facilities,” Smith said.
ORNL has a number of inactive nuclear facilities awaiting cleanup attention on its campus, and the science lab also has responsibility for some facilities it once used for research at Y-12 – about 10 miles away. Among those is a biology complex, where thousands of mice were used for genetics research decades ago. The research program was later relocated, but the old buildings are still standing, although a couple of them have teetered with deterioration, and some parts of the exterior have actually fallen apart over the years.
Beta-3, another World War II-era building at Y-12, is waiting cleanup attention, but that will require a special approach because some of the equipment housed there – old calutrons originally used for uranium enrichment during the Manhattan Project – are protected for historical reasons and will be part of the evolving Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
Mike Koentop, executive officer of DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Oak Ridge, said the current fiscal year’s budget for EM has more than expected funding, and he hinted that some of that money might be used for get a jump-start on remediating some excess facilities.
“There is funding available that allows us to identify additional opportunities in the EM program where we can execute projects that will reduce risks and put some of the higher-risk facilities on the Oak Ridge reservation in a safer and more stable condition,” Koentop said.
Chris Thompson of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation said the state has asked for more information on DOE’s plans for deactivating buildings. She said TDEC is mulling the possibility of adding milestones to the cleanup schedule, and that the state of Tennessee is working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to establish priorities.
Thompson said the excess facilities at Oak Ridge have been factored into plans for completing the Oak Ridge cleanup effort by 2046 or thereabouts, and she said the state still anticipates that schedule holding if DOE receives an average of $420 million annually for Oak Ridge environmental activities.
