Combined K-25/K-27 facility demolition and clean-up set to pass billion dollar mark.
At a time when some demolition companies are struggling merely to survive and others are making ends meet by selling their souls to the media devil comes news that the clean-up and demolition operation at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge facility may have already surpassed the billion dollar mark.
According to blogger Frank Munger’s latest post: The cost of the giant demolition and cleanup project at K-25 has been on the rise for years, so when talking with Dept. of Energy Manager Gerald Boyd the other day I asked him if it’d reached the billion-dollar level.
“K-25/K-27 (projects) together is close to that,” Boyd said. “I don’t have the exact (cost).”
There has been a lot of second-guessing about the strategy and cost of the Oak Ridge project, especially by some of the companies that looked at the sites years ago and said it would cost a billion dollars — or possibly much more — to take those uranium-enrichment dinosaurs down safely.
There were multiple studies done over the years, of course, and ultimately DOE decided to proceed with the work in-house, using its Oak Ridge environmental manager, Bechtel Jacobs Co.
“The thing that changed was that nobody knew the structural condition of that facility until, I guess it was in 2006, when we had a fall accident (a worker fell through a floor) and discovered that the integrity of the building was a lot worse than we thought,” Boyd said. That, in turn, required a complete reassessment of how to take down the building, he said.
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