Disposal of Nuke Scrap Ordered

Oak Ridge site has about 42,000 tons from decades past

FRANK MUNGER / Knoxville News Sentinel 3jan04

OAK RIDGE - On 30 acres not far from the Clinch River, mountains of metal rise from the weeds as a rank reminder of radioactive days gone by.

The massive load of scrap, estimated at 42,000 tons, was dumped there in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Workers at the government's K-25 uranium-processing plant used to haul surplus or undesirable equipment to the site and leave it in the outdoor yard to rust and bleed its radioactive contaminants into the environment.

Now, decades later, the U.S. Department of Energy has told its contractors to remove the scrap and dispose of the radioactive material properly. That promises to be a daunting - and potentially hazardous - task.

"I'm sure the copperheads have a condo association in here,'' John Lea, the project manager for Bechtel Jacobs Co., said during a recent tour of the site.

Ten-foot trees wind through the innards of old bulldozers and other discarded equipment, providing evidence of the scrap's lengthy tenure at the site. After years together, nature and nuclear trash have become intimate partners.

"Once we start moving this stuff around, there's going to be an urban relocation for a bunch of critters,'' Lea said.

Bechtel Jacobs, DOE's environmental manager in Oak Ridge, plans to award a cleanup contract in early 2004. Four companies have prequalified for the project and are expected to bid.

Besides removing the piles of scrap metal, contractors will be asked to demolish a couple of buildings at the site.

The timetable calls for all of the material to be gone by February 2006. Much of it will be transported to a nuclear landfill near the Y-12 National Security Complex.

"It's going to be a challenge,'' Lea said.

The biggest challenge, he said, will be characterizing the scrap and determining the type and level of radioactivity. That information is necessary in order to meet the waste-acceptance rules at landfills, he said.

Most stuff came from the uranium-enrichment operations at K-25, an old government plant that is being converted to private uses. As such, the primary contaminant is uranium.

At least a small share of the scrap, however, came from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Lea said. Those pieces could be contaminated with a range of radioactive elements, Lea said.

"With Savannah River, we're mainly worried about tritium,'' he said. "For ORNL it will be mostly cesium-137 and cobalt-60."

Bechtel Jacobs employees did about a two-month document search to determine - as best as possible - the origin of materials dumped at the site.

After the scrap has been removed, another contractor will be hired to survey the site and determine how much radioactive contamination seeped into the soil beneath the metal piles. If it is significant, the soil may have to be excavated and disposed of as nuclear waste.

Lea said he's certain that some soil will have to be excavated in the river floodplain, where a lot of the scrap resided until the 1980s. Quadrex Corp. was hired about 20 years ago to remove nuclear junk from the floodplain, reduce the size of the scrap pieces and sort it into various piles. The contractor also segregated some of the hotter scrap materials.

Much equipment at the scrap yard was originally part of the uranium-enrichment processes at the K-25 plant. It was stripped from K-25 buildings during modernization efforts in the 1970s.

Aspects of the process previously used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs are still classified. Because of that, two security officers accompanied News Sentinel staff on the recent tour of the scrap yard and did not allow photographs of certain pieces of equipment.

Some rusty remnants had nothing to do with weapons work. Asked about an old car and truck turned on their sides, Lea shrugged his shoulder and replied, "Evidently, they had some level of radioactive contamination."

Storage cabinets, machine lathes and a seemingly endless array of equipment are strewn amid weeds and brush.

"Once we get going in here, we're liable to find all kinds of relics,'' Lea noted.

Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.

source: URL: http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_2549540,00.html 3jan04