EM prime ready to demolish more aging Oak Ridge structures

The Department of Energy is continuing its own brand of urban renewal at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, with plans to tear down more dilapidated, contaminated structures.

In a Tuesday news release, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and its Amentum-led prime United Cleanup Oak Ridge announced plans to demolish aging infrastructure at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The projects should make way for new facilities.

Within the next year, crews plan to take down Building 3038 as well as 11 very contaminated former radioisotope processing facilities dubbed Isotope Row, DOE said in the release. These are structures DOE has been targeting for a long time.

According to a fact sheet, Building 3038 is a 7,700-square-foot building in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) central campus. It was used for radioisotope-related packaging, inspecting, and shipping until 1994.

Work crews have already removed three of the five concrete hot cells in the building and the two remaining should be taken out in coming weeks, DOE said in the news release. Extracting the hot cells are one of the major remaining tasks prior to demolition.

Building 3038 is more than 75 years old and is considered “one of the most high-risk facilities on the ORNL central campus due to its past and current condition and contents,” UCOR Project Manager William Lloyd said in the release.

The Isotope Row structures were built in the 1950s and 1960s to process radioisotopes, DOE said in the release.