The Department of Energy’s top brass joined the governor of Tennessee, congressmen and local dignitaries Tuesday at the Oak Ridge Site to celebrate taking down contaminated facilities at what was originally the K-25 uranium enrichment complex, now the East Tennessee Technology Park.
“The work that this entailed is simply staggering,” Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said during the webcast event. Over decades DOE and its contractors tore down 500 structures that could cover 225 football fields. “Many of them in terrible shape as you saw,” in a video about the contaminated nature of many facilities that had to be shored up before they could be safely dismantled, the DOE chief said.
The mile-long, 44-acre, K-25 gaseous diffusion plant building was the world’s largest structure when built in the early 1940s to aid the Manhattan Project.
During early stages of cleanup, one Oak Ridge worker was seriously hurt when he fell 30 feet after the floor he was standing upon collapsed. The incident drove home the care that must be taken in tearing down old contaminated buildings, officials noted.
“Oak Ridge is never asked to do things that are easy but perform things that are hard,” said Oak Ridge Mayor Warren Gooch (D), who joined Brouillette, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R), Sen. Lamar Alexander (R), Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R), among others, on the stage. Gooch said plans are underway to use a section of the East Tennessee Technology Park as a general aviation airport for the community.
In 1999, the first major structure to be removed was one of the first built at the site — the K-1001 Administration Building. The facility held offices for contractors and the DOE Office of Environmental Management. Jay Mullis, the top DOE nuclear cleanup official at Oak Ridge, said his first office was in that building. He added that two other offices where he worked were in facilities there that have also been demolished.
“If I come to your office you better watch out,” Mullis said, drawing laughs.
