About 81 million pounds of rubble have been cleared away from the two-acre footprint of the former Alpha-2 building site at the Y-12 National Security Complex at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the Department of Energy said Tuesday.
That amounts to about 3,500 truckloads of debris being hauled away from the former uranium enrichment building by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and its contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR).DOE said in January it had finished tearing down the building..
The remediation brings DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) closer to being able to use the site for future national security mission work, Environmental Management said in a Tuesday press release.The next project phase of the work starts in June and involves reducing the size of 800,000 pounds of lead extracted from the building, and packaging it for shipment according to DOE.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management and legacy remediation contractor Newport News Nuclear-BWXT Los Alamos (N3B) will hold a public meeting Wednesday evening June 3 in Santa Fe, N.M., to discuss wildfire preparedness and mitigation.
The region around DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory has suffered many major wildfires over the years.
A registration link for in-person and virtual attendance can be found here. The session is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. Mountain Time.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Finance Committee lost his Republican primary runoff Tuesday to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to national news outlets.
Paxton, recently endorsed by President Donald Trump, won about 64% of the vote in the GOP runoff, according to Wednesday morning data from NBC News.The winner will face Democrat James Talarico, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, in the November general election. In March, Talarico defeated U.S. Rep. Jasemine Crockett in the Texas Democratic Party primary.
Cornyn was first elected to the Senate in 2002. Paxton became Texas attorney general in 2015 and later withstood a 2023 impeachment vote in the GOP-majority Texas House of Representatives.