Dismantling A-bomb sites daunting, expensive
Dismantling the massive K-25 and K-27 buildings where uranium was once enriched for bombs ultimately may cost $400 million to $500 million, up from earlier estimates of no more than $300 million.
Shuttered since the mid-1980s, the Energy Department site is being cleaned up as part of a transformation into an industrial park, already renamed the East Tennessee Technology Park.
Officials think they finally have a grasp of the cleanup complexities and from here on will use that understanding to drive costs down, not up.
“This is like Henry Ford’s dream in reverse,” Greg Eidam, who heads the giant project, told The Knoxville News Sentinel. “Instead of an assembly line, we’re looking at a disassembly line for 3,500 converters, 7,000 motors and compressors and 400 miles of pipe.”
The converters weigh as much as 12,500 pounds each, and just about everything is contaminated with radioactive uranium.
The uranium is highly enriched, which means it is fissile and poses the constant threat of nuclear criticality — an uncontrolled chain reaction with release of radiation.
Also, much of the equipment remains classified because it could be used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. That requires everything to be done under high security.
Eidam is a projects manager with Bechtel Jacobs Co., the Energy Department’s environmental contractor in Oak Ridge.
In October 2003, he inherited the K-25/K-27 project, one of the more daunting cleanup tasks in U.S. history. Since then, he has put together a management team and developed a strategy to complete the project by the end of 2008.
“We have a baseline, which includes a good, solid technical approach, to get us from beginning to end,” Eidam said. “We understand the crucial path, and we understand where the challenges are. But there will always be surprises.”
The uranium-processing operations are huge. The K-25 building alone covers some 40 acres, configured in the shape of a U that’s a mile long. The K-27 facility is not as large, but poses challenges of its own.
Some preparatory work is well under way, including removing asbestos and other hazardous materials. Duratek Federal Services has completed about 60 percent of that work.
Knoxville-based Safety and Ecology Corp. will begin a $12 million subcontract in April that involves removal of excess materials at the site — from old desks and file cabinets to several cases of 1943-era Spam.
About 300 converters that were disconnected from the processing system in the 1960s will be shipped to the Nevada Test Site this spring and summer, while contracts will go out for bids in coming months for removal of the rest of the processing equipment.
Sections of the big buildings could be demolished as early as 2005, Eidam said. “We’ll start making some skyline changes pretty soon,” he said.
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On the Net:
East Tennessee Technology Park: http://www.ettpreuse.com