The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is preparing the next wave of buildings for the demolition of the Y-12 National Security Complex as part of a new chapter of the Oak Ridge cleanup.
According to a press release, the crews are deactivating three contaminated facilities on Y-12 after being placed in a “cold and dark” state in which all potentially dangerous energy sources are isolated. This is a critical step before complete deactivation.
Workers turn to vacant 1940s-era buildings that do not support current Y-12 missions. EM and its contractor UCOR are focusing their efforts on Alpha-2, the Old Steam Plant and the Old Criticality Experiment Laboratory. The latter is the only one of the three buildings that was not built as part of the Manhattan Project.
UCOR works in all three buildings at the same time. Some team members isolated utilities and equipment while others performed early deactivation tasks such as asbestos removal and waste disposal. The experienced staff at Oak Ridge made it possible to do all of this work in tandem.
“These crews were part of the team that completed the world’s first gas diffusion complex removal last year, and they also completed demolition preparations for the biology complex at Y-12,” said UCOR Oak Ridge Reservation Environmental Cleanup Manager Dan Macias in the press release. “The skills and training these employees bring to any project enable them to complete our work safely and efficiently.”
More than 50% of the facilities in the entire National Nuclear Security Administration complex, which includes Y-12, are over 40 years old, and 30% of them were built in the era of the Manhattan Project. EM’s work in Oak Ridge is beginning to clean up this deteriorating infrastructure to enable modernization and provide land for national security missions.
Alpha-2, also known as Building 9201-2, is the largest building that is being deactivated on site. The three-story, 325,000 square meter facility was built to enrich uranium using an electromagnetic separation process that ended in 1946. The facility was used for a variety of other missions until it was closed in the 1990s.
The old steam plant, also known as building 9401-1, is a one-story, 13,454 square meter facility from 1943. This building has been used several times over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s, a dipping process for original parts was developed with it. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) then used the facility to test fuels and later became a maintenance and storage facility.
The Old Criticality Experiment Laboratory, also known as Building 9213, was built in 1949. The two-story, 24,000 square meter facility housed more than 9,700 experiments from 1950 to 1961. It later became a high-flux support. of the ORNL uses isotope reactor program. The building has been closed since 1992.
The Y-12 cleaning is taking place at the same time as other cleaning projects running at the ORNL, in which crews are dealing with 16 inactive research reactors and isotope systems, according to the press release.
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