End in sight on cleanup of WWII nuclear fuel plant

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- Building the world's first full-scale uranium enrichment factory -- a 45-acre monster that was the biggest industrial structure in the world at the time -- took 18 months amid the race for the first atomic bomb.

Six decades later, federal authorities think they finally have a handle on just how long it will take to clean up and tear down the long-shuttered relic of the Manhattan Project: About 15 years.

The K-25 Building anchored the facility that supplied that first bomb dropped on Japan, then supported the nation's nuclear arsenal in the early years of the Cold War and finally fueled commercial power reactors.

Now, though, the roof is leaking, the walls are buckling and threatening substances from mold to mercury are rife.

"We thought it would be done sooner. We thought it would be further along than it is now. But structural issues and additional contamination have slowed the work up," Robert Brown, deputy director of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge complex, said recently. "There has been a lot of work concentrating on making sure that people going into that building come out in the same condition they went in."

Popular Science magazine once listed "K-25 demolition worker" as one of the "worst jobs in science." A K-25 worker made the nomination, citing a workplace full of toxins, required head-to-toe protective gear and concerns that when you leave "you don't contaminate your car, your family or anything else."

The massive four-story U-shaped structure, a half-mile long, dominates a 1,500-acre site DOE has been working since 1996 to convert into an industrial park for the Oak Ridge community.

In 2002, the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state accelerated the cleanup. Crews have made enough headway that the DOE and its contractors now say K-25 will be leveled by late 2010, and the rest of the site finished by 2016.

Demolishing K-25 has always been the biggest hurdle to "reindustrializing" the site. But the deteriorating state of a contaminated building also filled with PCBs, asbestos and radioactive uranium adds to the urgency.

"We knew it was in bad condition, we just didn't know it was in horrible condition," Brown said.

The government built K-25 and its supporting buildings for $500 million in 18 months between 1943-1945. Cleaning it up is taking much longer, though the projected price of $3 billion is a relative bargain. That $500 million spent in 1945 equals about $5.8 billion in today's dollars.

The wartime rush to build the plant apparently led to short cuts. A concrete floor on the fourth level was so thin a demolition worker fell through in 2006. He survived, but everyone else now working more than six feet off the ground must wear a safety harness.

No heat, no air conditioning, a rats' nest of electrical wiring and a crumbling support system -- those are just some of the problems the 820 workers on the job have encountered. Often repairs must be made so demolition can proceed.

"I would say it is a difficult work environment," Kelly Trice, the project manager with cleanup contractor Bechtel Jacobs Co., acknowledged during a recent tour. "We do our best with it, but it is a hazardous job."

So far about half of the more than 500 buildings on the site less than an hour west of Knoxville have been removed or cleaned. Eighteen companies employing about 350 workers have moved in. The site has been renamed East Tennessee Technology Park, putting its military-industrial complex roots in the past.

The government has spent about $1.6 billion to this point. Most of the work on the K-25 Building has been on the inside -- retrieving uranium residue for recycling and cutting up some 300 miles of pipe. The first large exterior wall is scheduled to come down in October.

Trice said each of the building's two wings will create about 20,000 truckloads of debris. Most will go to a special DOE landfill in Oak Ridge.

K-25 was code-named "K" for designer Kellex Corp. It produced the fissionable uranium-235 isotope and was the largest industrial building under one roof in the world, employing 12,000 people and consuming one-tenth of the nation's electric power at the time.

K-25 used a gaseous diffusion process that separated and concentrated the lighter U-235 isotope from natural uranium by heating it into a gas and passing it through membranes or "barriers" in a series of hundreds of boxcar-size machines.

Though gaseous diffusion is fast becoming outdated by more efficient centrifuge technology, the old K-25 barriers continue to have some value, at least to national security. Federal agents arrested a K-25 janitor last year on allegations of trying to sell barrier parts to the French government.

Some Manhattan Project veterans and enthusiasts consider K-25 a national treasure worth preserving. DOE continues to study whether to spare the bottom of the U, or North Tower, for public tours.

"There are several factors that have to be taken into account," Brown said. "One is we are not going to spend more money on it than it would take to tear it down. And secondly and overwhelmingly, we are not going to put people's lives at risk."