Transformation of Oak Ridge

By Peggy Waldman
Photo by Lynn Freeny/DOE Photo

One could say that the fate of the modern world was decided at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There, in 1943, scientists working on the secret Manhattan Project produced the world’s first enriched uranium. The breakthrough led to the atomic bombs that ended World War II.

During the past half century, Oak Ridge has expanded far beyond its first mission. Today, the sprawling Oak Ridge Reservation, operated by the U.S. Department of Energy, is home to the Y-12 National Security Complex, the East Tennessee Technology Park, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where scientists conduct world-class research in physics, medicine, clean energy, and environmental protection, in addition to national defense.

Some areas of the reservation still suffer from contamination left over from nuclear projects that were active through the Cold War. But that, too, is being relegated to history, thanks to a massive cleanup project managed by Bechtel Jacobs Company LLC, which is on its way to transforming abandoned property at Oak Ridge into productive real estate.

Bechtel Jacobs, owned by Bechtel and Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., has worked at Oak Ridge since 1998. In 2003, DOE awarded Bechtel Jacobs a $2.25 billion cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for accelerated environmental site cleanup. The compressed schedule is expected to save the government billions in cleanup, operating, and maintenance costs by completing the work 21 years ahead of an original 2030 target date.

“The Oak Ridge Reservation Environmental Management Program is one of the largest, most diverse, and technically complex nuclear cleanups in the country,” says Bechtel Jacobs President and General Manager Mike Hughes. “We’re now about halfway through completing the job.

”Bechtel Jacobs expects to finish correcting the legacies of more than 50 years of nuclear research and weapons production in 2009. An annual operating budget of $400 million to $500 million includes payroll expenses for 3,000 direct-hire and subcontractor personnel working on the project.

Remediation work covers 2,100 hectares contaminated by radio­active elements, mercury, asbestos, PCBs, or industrial waste. To date, the project has disposed of more than 500,000 cubic meters of waste—most of it a legacy of Cold War operations—from across the reservation, safely and on time. Radioactive scrap metal, contaminated soil, construction debris, organic liquids, wastewater, and sludge residues filled 27,000 containers, including concrete casks, large metal boxes, and shipping containers. If laid out on a football field, the material would have created a pile more than nine meters high. Moving the waste to disposal facilities in Tennessee, Nevada, and Utah eliminated temporary storage and maintenance costs. Gerald Boyd, manager of DOE’s Oak Ridge office, called it “a major accomplishment.”

In Melton Valley, grassy slopes now cover 58 hectares that in the past were used to dispose of some 155 million liters of liquid waste and 2.9 million cubic meters of solid waste. The project team used a technique called “hydrologic isolation,” in which an impermeable barrier is constructed to prevent rainwater from percolating through the waste and possibly contaminating water supplies. Other work in Melton Valley included removing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated soil, demolishing structures, and restoring wetlands.

“Anyone familiar with East Tennessee Technology Park who hasn’t visited in a while would be amazed at the changes taking place there,” says Stephen McCracken, DOE Oak Ridge office assistant manager for environmental management. Accomplishments to date include:

• As of August 2006, shipping 5,300 steel cylinders of uranium hexa­fluoride (88 percent of the total) to DOE’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio for processing. Each cylinder holds 12.7 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride—a hazardous byproduct of the uranium enrichment process used at Oak Ridge until the mid-1980s.
• Tripling the disposal capacity of an environmental waste management facility to 917,000 cubic meters.
• Demolishing several hundred buildings at the East Tennessee Technology Park, including K-29, which is one of five huge gaseous diffusion facilities built in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project.
  

By the end of 2006, Bechtel Jacobs expected to complete demolition of several more facilities and the disposal of the uranium hexafluoride cylinders—three years ahead of schedule.

“One of the biggest challenges of this job involves safety,” says Vice President Steve Buckley. “There are always surprises in demolition and cleanup work, since many of these facilities and waste sites have few written records and have deteriorated with age. This presents us with many unknowns that need to be mitigated as we approach the work.”

When DOE expedited the cleanup schedule, some people feared the acceleration could jeopardize safety. It didn’t. In 2006, Bechtel Jacobs worked more than 3.3 million hours without a lost-time accident and traveled more than 2 million kilometers transporting waste to disposal without an incident.

Looking ahead, final milestones will be the demolition of abandoned contaminated buildings in East Tennessee Technology Park and the remediation of related waste sites. This includes demolishing the original main processing facilities, K-25 and K-27. These two facilities alone cover nearly 186,000 square meters and, at the time of construction, were the largest buildings in the world under one roof. Because they have been shut down for almost 40 years with limited maintenance, they are in an extremely deteriorated condition. Bechtel Jacobs has had to develop a new approach to protect workers from falling debris while in the building, and heavy equipment will be used to sort and segment equipment and demolish the buildings, thereby limiting workers’ exposure.

When that is completed, the complex will be transformed into an industrial park under the leadership of the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee. DOE already has transferred titles to six administrative buildings to the redevelopment organization.

When the entire project is complete before the end of this decade, the history of the East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge will have been replaced by its future. 

Back to top