Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
8/22/2014
After the recent successful completion of demolition of Oak Ridge’s enormous K-25 building, work is proceeding ahead of schedule at the site’s two other gaseous diffusion plants, URS-CH2M Oak Ridge, LLC, President Ken Rueter told WC Monitor this week. The contractor is on track to meet its “Vision 2016” goal: an effort to bring down the K-31 and K-27 gaseous diffusion plant buildings by the end of that year. “It is an objective of UCOR and the Department of Energy to maintain the acceleration and momentum that we experienced with K-25 being six months early, pushing it through 31, and then through 27 with the goal of being done with gaseous diffusion plants in east Tennessee by the 2016. We believe that’s feasible,” Rueter said. “We currently are about two months ahead of schedule on K-27 and we are 18 months ahead of schedule on K-31 because we were able to insert it between K-25 and K-27.”
Rueter officially took over as head of UCOR at the beginning of this month following former UCOR President Leo Sain’s move to a corporate position with URS. Rueter previously led Savannah River Remediation starting last fall and before that was UCOR’s Chief Operating Officer.
In its D&D projects, the contractor is maximizing efficiency by assigning workers to the projects in a sequence that minimizes downtime. Demo crews were transferred from K-25 over to K-31 as the K-25 project neared completion in late June. “In parallel with that, the laborers, iron workers, then were ready to go over to K-27 and begin deactivation activities,” Rueter said. The company was also able to implement an integrated priority list buyback process to pump savings from a completed project into the next effort. “The savings from K-25 is what we use to seed the start of 31. This is reinvestment concept.”
‘We Have Done About $880 Million Worth of Work For About $790 Million’
The K-25 project ended up about $12 million under UCOR’s project baseline and $210 million under the federal baseline, which includes contingency, Rueter said. “Big picture wise, to date we have done about $880 million worth of work for about $790 million in cash, so we have about $90 million worth of savings that have been redeployed back into the work and right now K-31 and 27 are about 14 percent under budget,” he said.
Work Would Continue on Track Under CR
D&D work at Oak Ridge would continue on track in the likely event of a continuing resolution at the start of the new fiscal year in October, Rueter said. “With the efficiencies that we have experienced through 2014 we believe that we can continue to comfortably deliver our work plan for 2015 comfortably through the early February time frame in a CR,” Rueter said. DOE’s FY’15 budget request includes $138 million for D&D efforts at Oak Ridge, 22 percent below current funding levels—a number that “challenges” UCOR’s 2016 goal to complete K-31 and K-27 demo, Rueter said. Both House and Senate appropriators have proposed a boost in funds, which would still allow UCOR to meet its goal. But talks on a FY’15 spending bill are stalled in Congress, leading to the possible CR in October.
K-31 Demo Prep Nearing Completion
K-31 is currently being prepared for demolition. Transite siding is being taken off the building and is being transported to the on-site landfill, the Environmental Waste Management Facility, for use as protective flooring. The move reuses the panels and saves UCOR the cost of placing protective riprap at the landfill. UCOR is also undertaking a final hazard abatement and survey and soon hopes to declare it demo ready. “The building will go cold and dark, completely isolated, I would expect somewhere near the Labor Day time frame,” Rueter said.
Deactivation Progressing at K-27
Once K-31 demo is finished in late 2015, demo will start on the first three units of K-27. Right now UCOR is about 35 to 40 percent into deactivation activities at K-27. That includes venting and purging all the process piping in the building. “That has gone very well. We are actually complete with that significantly ahead of schedule,” Rueter said. “We had a number of very critical lessons learned from K-25 that we brought to 27 with regard to vent purge.” While there were initially some issues with the process on K-25, there have been no anomalous situations at all in K-27. “If you have an anomalous vent drain and purge you have to exit the crew, you have to replan the work. You can just imagine the productivity impacts that has. So the fact that we did not have any vent drain and purge contingency needs, that’s a significant savings also,” Rueter said.
UCOR is also undertaking inventory management, in which contents of the building’s cells are evaluated and then marked as to where they can be disposed of—either on site or at the Nevada National Security Site for some contaminated material. Then equipment that will be demolished with the building is also marked. “The more equipment we don’t have to rig up by hand, the better the safety and risk exposure is for the worker. That went very very well in 25, and so the key was to go in there and do the nondestructive evaluation,” Rueter said.
