Amid some hoopla and a few dozen VIP onlookers, workers on Monday began tearing down the historic K-27 Building at the East Tennessee Technology Park.
K-27 is the last of five gaseous diffusion plants in the East Tennessee valley that once housed the world’s largest uranium-enrichment complex and provided fuel for early generations of nuclear reactors and fissile material for the nation’s Cold War arsenal of nuclear weapons.
In some ways the hardest work on the big demolition project has already been accomplished. Over the past 2 ½ years, workers prepared the four-story, 380,000-square-foot building for demolition, removing significant deposits of enriched uranium and equipment with the worst hazards, such as technetium-99. The transite exteriors had already been stripped away, minimizing airborne hazards, and inside equipment was foamed or stabilized to make the demolition job more worker-friendly.
The Department of Energy estimates the cost of demolishing K-27, which last operated in 1964, at $292 million. That dollar figure includes the work that has already been done at the site.
Sue Cange, DOE’s cleanup manager in Oak Ridge, told the gathering that tearing down K-27 is a big deal, completing what she has called “Vision 2016.” By the end of the year, all of the old uranium processing plants will have been torn down, paving the way for redevelopment of the site as an industrial park and eliminating some major hazards once and for all.
“This may be more historic than you realize,” Cange said, noting that the project will mark the first time in the world that an entire uranium-enrichment complex has been deactivated and demolished.
Prior to K-27, Oak Ridge workers demolished K-29, K-31, K-33, and The biggest of them all, K-25 — the original World War II plant that was a mile-long in the shape of a U.
Ken Rueter, president of URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), the DOE cleanup manager in Oak Ridge, said the demolition projects have cleared about 50 acres of high-hazard, high-security, and highly classified facilities.
“In the end, we owe thanks to people who trusted us with the taxpayer dollars to do this work,” Rueter said.
Hundreds of UCOR workers contributed to the predemolition activities that helped ensure safe operations during demolition and also helped prevent the spread of hazardous materials.
Rueter said demolition of K-27 will generate about 10,000 truckloads of contaminated rubble and debris. Some of the higher-risk equipment, containing deposits of enriched uranium or significant levels of radioactive technetium-99, has already been removed from the structure and shipped to the Nevada National Security Site for disposal.
UCOR spokesman Mike Butler said about 70 percent of the process gas equipment in K-27 will be shipped off-site because it doesn’t meet criteria for the CERCLA landfill in Oak Ridge that is known as the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility. So far, the DOE contractor has made 159 shipments of K-27 materials to the Nevada site.
Cange said DOE’s national environmental program chose K-27 as one of its most important projects of 2016, and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz cited the importance of the Oak Ridge demolition projects during his presentation this week on the fiscal 2017 budget.
“We intend to deliver on our commitment to safely complete the demolition by the end of the year,” Cange said.
Officials praised the Knoxville Building and Construction Trades Council and the skilled crafts workers who reportedly accumulated about 5.3 million safe hours during the predemolition work.
Mike Koentop, executive officer of DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said the K-27 cleanup team will apply lessons learned from the earlier demolition at K-25 — particularly the unexpected spread of technetium-99 that infiltrated a city of Oak Ridge sewage treatment plant — to this project.
