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EM Update | Vol. 4, Issue 1 | January 2012

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. – Last year, Oak Ridge’s Environmental Management (EM) program logged one of its most successful years due to sound project management and achievements in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act work.

Oak Ridge plans to maintain that momentum in 2012, and the year is off to a great start. EM employees are making considerable progress on Oak Ridge’s largest projects, specifically the K-25 Demolition Project and Uranium-233 Disposition Project. 

“Our employees laid an excellent foundation last year through the Recovery Act and cooperation with our newly selected prime contractor, URS | CH2M Oak Ridge,” said Sue Cange, assistant manager for EM in Oak Ridge. “Those efforts have set the stage for an ambitious year, allowing us to make substantial gains in our work to meet requirements with regulators, protection of the environment, and furthering DOE’s other missions onsite.”

Employees at Oak Ridge are accelerating work at K-25’s East Wing. Sixty percent of the remaining structure is expected to be down by the end of the September. 

Currently, Oak Ridge’s EM program has a list of 40 active projects with a wide range of scopes and complexity. At the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP), employees are removing K-25’s East Wing more rapidly than anticipated, with 26 percent of the 796,000-square-foot structure down and 60 percent planned for demolition by the end of September. Built as part of World War II’s Manhattan Project, K-25 housed the world’s first gaseous diffusion plant for enriching uranium.

EM is making progress finalizing the K-25 site’s historic preservation plans, which have been under negotiation since 2006. A final agreement is expected this spring.

Also at ETTP, pre-demolition work is scheduled to begin in Building K-27. The eventual removal of this highly contaminated, 383,000-square-foot former gaseous diffusion facility will substantially eliminate risks and free millions of dollars in security and maintenance costs for cleanup elsewhere.

At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), employees removed the 4,000-gallon Tank W-1A this month. The tank, located in ORNL’s central campus, was the greatest source of groundwater contamination at the site. From 1951 until 1986, the tank collected and stored liquid waste from radiochemical separations and high-radiation facilities at ORNL, until significant levels of soil and groundwater contamination were traced to the vessel. Currently, employees are removing the surrounding contaminated soils. The project is expected to be complete this summer in accordance with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) milestone.

Also at ORNL, Oak Ridge’s EM program is advancing the Uranium-233 Disposition Project. In late December, the first shipment of inventory from Building 3019 was sent offsite, marking the beginning of the end for the world’s oldest operating nuclear facility. The first phase of shipments is expected to be complete during the next six to nine months.

 At the Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12), workers continue performing the second round of Recovery Act projects made possible through savings from previous Recovery Act projects. This second round of projects is directed toward mercury mitigation. For example, EM workers are developing an absorption unit to capture and treat mercury-tainted water from a location that is one of the main contributing factors of mercury entering the Upper East Fork Poplar Creek.  

EM is making headway on its National Priorities List (NPL) Site Boundary Delineation Project, which is in the final stages of characterizing 16,000 acres within the Oak Ridge Reservation. When complete, the uncontaminated areas will be removed from the existing NPL. The list, maintained by the EPA, contains sites with known or threatened releases of hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants.

Once areas are removed from the list, they can be approved for a greater range of new development and reuse activities. Most water and soil samples have been analyzed and validated, with the final two samples scheduled for completion this month. The overall project remains on schedule to meet a Sept. 30 milestone with TDEC and the EPA.

AIKEN, S.C. – In 2012, the Savannah River Site (SRS) is scheduled to achieve a milestone by completing processing of 5,000 cubic meters of legacy transuranic (TRU) waste for shipment to a safe, permanent disposal facility.

A large portion of that waste — a byproduct of nuclear defense program research and weapons production — has already been shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The site will continue shipments until the remaining inventory is removed. Following the scheduled completion of processing the 5,000 cubic meters of TRU waste later this year, only 200 additional cubic meters of TRU waste will remain at SRS for treatment.

“By the end of 2012, we will have remediated, repackaged and certified for shipment all but 200 cubic meters of transuranic waste at SRS, meeting a vitally important milestone for our site-wide cleanup program,” said David Moody, DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office Manager. “This means that over 95 percent of our legacy TRU waste will soon be gone from South Carolina for long-term storage at the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, leaving a very small amount that will require some special treatment.”

According to John Gilmour, Solid Waste director at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the SRS management and operations contractor, success in the TRU program has resulted from several factors. New, larger TRUPACT-III shipping containers eliminate much of the need to manually reduce in size numerous, large pieces of TRU waste, saving time and minimizing employee exposure to radioactive materials, primarily plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 was once used as a heat source to generate power for deep space missions.

"By May, we’ll have six TRUPACT-III shipping containers onsite and the shipping process to WIPP will be almost continuous,” said Gilmour. “Our highly trained and talented workforce has learned to quickly recognize and productively respond to variables found when working with legacy radioactive waste materials.”

Most of the Pu oxide in the U.S. has been consolidated at SRS and will eventually go to U.S. commercial power reactors in the form of new fuel rods. However, the relatively small percentage of Pu oxide at SRS without the properties needed for use as commercial reactor fuel will be packaged in rigorously tested containers for shipment to WIPP by SRNS Solid Waste personnel in 2012.  

“Over 100 of these specially designed metal containers, known as Pipe Overpack Containers, or POCs, have already been loaded with Pu oxide,” said Gilmour. “H Canyon has enough Pu oxide to safely fill approximately 600 of these new containers during the current campaign and potentially thousands in the future.”

2012 Holds Great Potential for Waste Remediation at SRS

In the past, SRS had a large amount of radioactive material stored in a variety of containers. “This waste would have been here a long time if it hadn’t been for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding,” said Gilmour. “It’s going to be a very busy year for SRNS as we safely prepare and send out shipment after shipment of TRU waste and excess plutonium to New Mexico.”

H Canyon is the only active nuclear chemical separations facility still operating in the U.S.

AIKEN, S.C. – The Savannah River Site (SRS) is breathing new life into the H Canyon, the only active nuclear chemical separations facility still operating in the U.S.

“After a history of primarily dissolving and separating materials found in irradiated reactor fuel rods, H Canyon continues to diversify its scope of work,” said DOE Savannah River Operations Office Manager David Moody. “H Canyon is a huge and dynamic production facility that continues to service the nation’s nuclear needs and does it safely.  It is one of the key facilities in the site’s Enterprise SRS strategic vision.”

Excess plutonium in the U.S. has been consolidated at SRS and is currently stored within a highly secure structure at the site. This plutonium will eventually be processed at the site’s Mixed Oxide Facility (MOX), which is currently under construction. The MOX production process will remove impurities from the stored plutonium and mix it with uranium oxide to form MOX fuel pellets for reactor fuel assemblies. When operational, this facility will be capable of turning 3.5 metric tons of plutonium into reactor fuel assemblies annually. Studies are underway to determine the optimum means to supply the feedstock to the MOX.

According to Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) H Canyon Facility Manager Mike Lewczyk, H Canyon and HB-Line, which is a sister facility also located in H Area, are scheduled to soon begin dissolving and purifying a quantity of the stored plutonium to demonstrate the capability of producing oxide material that meets MOX feedstock specifications. This new mission for H Canyon, once under way, will produce approximately one metric ton of acceptable plutonium oxide annually after an initial two-year period during which production levels increase. The scope of this mission is expected to be completed in five years and will provide the initial feedstock for MOX. SRNS is the management and operations contractor at SRS.

Increasing H Canyon’s Ability to Process Transuranic Waste

H Canyon is also scheduled to implement a revision to its Documented Safety Analysis to allow the handling and remediation of transuranic (TRU) waste with higher plutonium content than currently permitted in the H Canyon TRU Waste Program. “This revision will significantly increase the number of waste containers we can process in H Canyon, allowing the Savannah River Site to complete this task sooner than originally expected,” said Lewczyk.

The H Canyon TRU work is scheduled for completion by the end of 2012. 

Ensuring Unused Process Lines are Viable for Future Use

Throughout 2012, H Canyon personnel will conduct tests to ensure the major operating systems within production lines formerly used to dissolve and separate nuclear materials run efficiently. These efforts will maintain employee proficiency and keep equipment viable for future missions in the event the production lines are again used to process used fuel or other nuclear materials.

H Canyon History

H Canyon was constructed in the early 1950s and began operations in 1955. The interior of the building resembles a canyon; the processing areas are similar to a gorge in a deep valley between steep, vertical cliffs. It is 1,028 feet long, 122 feet wide and 71 feet tall, with several levels to accommodate the various stages of material stabilization, including control rooms to monitor equipment and operating processes and unique overhead bridge cranes.

Those cranes are used to conduct work remotely to minimize radiation exposure. The thick concrete walls that separate workers from the processing areas provide added protection.

In past operations, H Canyon was used to recover uranium-235 (U-235) and neptunium-237 (Np-237) from aluminum-clad, enriched-uranium fuel tubes of the site nuclear reactors and other domestic and foreign research reactors through a chemical separations process. SRS also recovered Np-237 and plutonium-238 (Pu-238) from special irradiated targets at the facility. Pu-238 was produced by irradiating recovered Np-237 from SRS nuclear reactors that are no longer operational. Pu-238 was then recovered and used in 30 of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s deep space exploration programs, such as the Cassini spacecraft.

CARLSBAD, N.M. – Mining crews recently began tunneling areas in the north end of the 2,150-foot-deep Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) repository to support a new round of salt studies. Known as the Salt Disposal Investigations (SDI), the studies are designed to test the geologic response of salt to elevated temperatures. 

For more than 12 years, DOE has safely disposed of defense-related transuranic waste in the underground repository at WIPP. The salt beds of southeast New Mexico, where the repository is located, provide a natural barrier to radiological releases, are relatively easy to mine and offer geologic stability. Additionally, fractures within the salt close naturally.

Government scientists performed full-scale salt studies underground at WIPP prior to initiating disposal operations in 1999 to determine how the repository would respond to varying brine and humidity conditions at varying temperatures. Brine is a small pocket of salt-saturated water contained within salt. In the SDI thermal tests, brine is expected to vaporize into steam and move within the salt.

Renewed national interest in the disposal of high-level nuclear waste and used nuclear fuel prompted DOE to revisit salt as a possible disposal option for these waste types. The SDI studies will include field tests, modeling and laboratory work to supplement previous data related to the effects of thermally hot waste on the salt formation.

Planned field tests involve heated alcoves built into an underground passage. Electric heaters placed in the alcoves will be used to simulate thermally hot waste packages. The alcoves will be heated to temperatures in excess of 160 C in the undisturbed salt. Scientists will measure changes in the salt beds when the salt heats up and cools down, similar to the way a radioactive waste canister would reach a maximum temperature and then cool as the waste decays. They will track the movement of brine (trapped in salt crystals) and the salt’s ability to heal fractures.

Additional laboratory studies will include investigation of the solubility of radionuclides exposed to thermal heat. A radionuclide is an atom with an unstable nucleus, which is a nucleus characterized by excess energy available to be imparted either to a newly created radiation particle within the nucleus or to an atomic electron. Radionuclides occur naturally, and can also be artificially produced.

WIPP’s salt formation provides a cost-effective location for the studies, which will be conducted over several years. The SDI takes advantage of the project’s specialized contractor workforce, quality assurance program and the scientific expertise of local Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel. The research will be used by policymakers as they examine future disposal options. The SDI studies will not interfere with current disposal operations.

Mining of the test area, which began on Dec. 1, 2011, is expected to be completed in 2014.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – EM has been a leader in the use of performance-based contracts to reduce energy and water use and develop onsite renewable energy sources.

Performance-based contracts identify expected deliverables, performance measures and outcomes and make payment contingent on their successful achievement. They employ techniques, such as consequences and incentives, to ensure that the agreed-upon value to the federal agency is received.

EM has excelled in the use of Energy-Savings Performance Contracts (ESPCs), performance-based contracts that leverage private sector funding. The ESPC is a partnership between a federal agency and an energy service company. Under this type of contract, the company conducts a comprehensive energy audit and identifies improvements to save energy. In consultation with the federal agency, the company designs and constructs a project that meets the agency’s needs and arranges the necessary funding.  The company guarantees the improvements will generate operational cost savings sufficient to pay for the project over the term of the contract. After the contract ends, all additional cost savings are retained by the agency.

EM’s use of ESPCs at the Hanford site in 2008 and 2009 improved energy efficiency of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and will result in nearly $2 million savings annually for at least 25 years.

The ESPC for the biomass cogeneration facility and two smaller biomass-fired steam plants was the largest ESPC — at $795 million — to date for renewable energy. First-year guaranteed savings are $34 million. By providing up to 30 percent of the site’s electricity, the new cogeneration facility is making a substantial contribution to achieving DOE’s renewable energy goals.

EM’s aging facilities and goals to reduce operating costs may present opportunities for additional ESPCs, as well as Utility Energy Service Contracts (UESC), another type of performance-based contract mechanism. UESCs are agreements that allow utilities to make energy-related improvements to federal facilities and can include utility-arranged funding. Costs are repaid over the contract term from resulting cost savings.

PIKETON, Ohio – Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant firefighters recently completed a prescribed fire, or controlled burn, of an 18-acre prairie at the site, two weeks ahead of a regulatory deadline.

“Burning the prairie in a controlled manner stimulates the germination of prairie grasses and reduces the invasion of woody plants to maintain a healthy prairie ecosystem,” said DOE Site Director Vince Adams. “Our plant fire services and the burn manager certified by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources did an excellent job to safely complete this project without incident.”

The burn was completed Dec. 18 after being postponed several times due to wet weather. The approved burn plan contained specific weather restrictions to ensure favorable weather conditions with acceptable relative humidity, wind speed, and temperature during the burning activities. It also required the closing of a public roadway alongside the prairie.

"Extensive coordination and communication is a must for a project like this,” Adams said. “We worked very closely with our state and local officials and the public to make all the proper notifications and to minimize the inconvenience of the road closure.”

The prairie ecosystem was the result of remediation of former lime sludge lagoons that settled out waste lime from the plant’s water treatment plant. The unlined sludge retention lagoons were originally constructed in 1954. During a brief period in the late 1950s, the lagoons received re-circulating cooling water sludge from the plant, including sludge contaminated with chromium due to the use of a chromium-based corrosion inhibitor in the cooling water pipes.  

The cleanup of the lagoons in 1996 and 1997 was the first Corrective Measures Implementation project completed under the site’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Corrective Action Program. The approved remedy by the U.S. and Ohio Environmental Protection Agencies involved dewatering the three separate lagoon areas encompassing 18 acres, installing a reinforced geotextile fabric over the sludge, constructing a soil and vegetative cover with a minimum two-foot coverage across the entire area, and finishing the project by planting 38 varieties of prairie grasses and plants. Under the maintenance and surveillance plan required by regulators, the prairie is to be burned once every three to five years.

AIKEN, S.C. – Supporting the development of young nuclear professionals in the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) is the purpose behind a new group forming at the Savannah River Site (SRS).

According to Aria Behrouzi, a Savannah River Remediation engineer and president of the leadership team, SR-YGN will bridge the generation gap among nuclear workers and promote the industry with open discussion and programming that will include technical talks, educational outreach and networking events. 

“YGN unites young professionals who believe in nuclear science and technology to share the passion for a field that is alive and kicking,” Behrouzi said. “By facilitating the sharing of ideas and new technologies that could be applied at SRS for future missions, we hope to attract and retain a new generation of nuclear professionals.”

Membership is open to young professionals who work in the nuclear industry or are interested in it. Honorary memberships are available for nuclear professionals with more than 10 years experience in the industry. 

Sandy Childers, Portsmouth site

Donna Green, EM Office of D&D and Facility Engineering

Rick Kelley, Savannah River Site

Jason Lovins, Portsmouth site

Susan Scott, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

David Sheeley, EM Office of Communications and External Affair

DT Townsend, Savannah River Site

Susan Weber, EM Office of Contract Assistance

Ben Williams, Oak Ridge Office