Nuclear superstructure's demolition ahead of schedule
A nuclear colossus is coming down.
Demolition crews are having their way with K-29, a mega-sized building once used to process uranium for atomic bombs and nuclear reactors.
Since January, about three-fourths of the two-story structure has been demolished, and the rest will soon become radioactive rubble.
“We expect to have the superstructure demolished and on the ground by the end of July, with the balance of the waste shipped off site at the end of August," David Crossley, the project manager for Bechtel Jacobs Co., said as he watched the heavy-duty "excavators" take down walls and columns.
Crossley said the K-29 project is about four months ahead of schedule, and the progress is obvious. All that's left in some areas is a concrete pad.
K-29 was built as the Cold War was just taking off, and enrichment operations began there in 1951, supplementing the earlier facilities that were constructed for the World War II Manhattan Project. Operations ceased in 1985, when declining demand for enrichment services and the high cost of electricity sealed the plant's fate.
K-29 is the first of the big processing facilities in Oak Ridge, TN to be knocked down.
BNFL Inc., now known as BNG America, dismantled the equipment inside K-29 and two nearby facilities, K-31 and K-33, during a seven-year period beginning in the late 1990s. The original plan was to clean up each of the three mammoth buildings and convert them into private industrial parks.
Later, however, it was decided that K-29 was not suitable for reindustrialization. The U.S. Department of Energy and the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee, a nonprofit organization, are still trying to find suitable tenants for K-31 and K-33.
Bechtel Jacobs, DOE's environmental cleanup manager in Oak Ridge, also plans to dismantle and demolish much of the K-25 building, the original, mile-long, uranium-enrichment plant, and its companion facility, K-27. Some of the lessons learned from the K-29 demolition reportedly will be applied to those projects.
According to Crossley and his DOE counterparts, Ron Kirk and David Queen, the work has gone almost perfectly. About 60 people are working at the demolition site.
"We have a very detailed collapse plan, and the plan specifies which columns can be taken down and in what sequence," Crossley said. "Resulting from the work that we've been doing, we've been able to see that the building is responding precisely as the collapse plan had predicted."
The building was 524 feet by 560 feet, with floor space equal to 6 1/2 football fields.
Crossley said Bechtel Jacobs engineers evaluated the use of explosives but that the building's squat-like structure made it an unattractive option.
"It just doesn't lend itself to gravity, so you would really have to load each one of those columns to knock them out so that the building could fall down," he said. "And that creates seismic issues with regard to surrounding buildings and operations in those buildings."
During the past five months, more than 26,000 tons of radioactively contaminated rubble has been hauled from the K-29 site to a nuclear landfill a few miles away. Washington Group is doing that work under a subcontract to Bechtel Jacobs.
"We have a dedicated fleet of 10 trucks, and we have shipped up to 41 loads to the landfill on a given day," Crossley said. All told, more than 2,000 truckloads have made the trek, he said.
Demco and Broadway Electric are the other subcontractors supporting the project
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