Cleaning up Y-12's Cold War salvage yard
This photo was taken in July 2009, at start of the project.
B&W Y-12
Visible progress is being made at Y-12's Old Salvage Yard as part of the Recovery Act cleanup program at the nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge. According info provided by B&W Y-12, the government's managing contractor at Y-12, the project is more than a third complete and currently on schedule and on budget, with no recordable injuries.
One of the first tasks was to remove the vegetation from the site to make it easier to assess conditions and facilitate the removal of radioactive scrap metal and other materials stored at the site. That is evidenced by the photo (click to enlarge), at right, which was taken in January.
The seven-acre scrap yard received junk from the Oak Ridge plant's operations from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s.
B&W has done some of the work on the Old Salvage Yard, with support by subcontractor Navarro-Gem.
At the beginning of the project, there were 897 B-25 boxes and 210 B-24 boxes and five piles of scrap, "none of which was in any type of order," according to Y-12 spokesman David Keim.
"Today, the vegetation has been cleared and many of the boxes are no longer there," Keim said via e-mail. He said all of the B-25 boxes had been visually inspected by Navarro-Gem and are undergoing "nondestructive assay," he said. After that is completed, the boxes are being sent to IMPACT Services for "sorting and segregation" before being transported to Nevada Test Site for disposal.
So far, 625 B-25 boxes have been sent to IMPACT, Keim said. The B-24 boxes are undergoing similar evaluations at the scrap site, and about half of those have been conducted so far, he said.
Navarro, one of the partners of Navarro-Gem, has a subcontract for work on the scrap piles, Keim said. That includes sampling to evaluate their compliance before being sent to DOE's CERCLA landfill a couple of miles away.
"Due to the size of the piles, material will be sampled and removed in 30-foot layers," Keim said. "The first phase of sampling is complete," he said, adding that after the results are received, that layer of material can be removed (allowing a second phase of sampling to start).
The cleanup project is scheduled for completion in September 2011.
Posted by Frank Munger on February 10, 2010 at 1:46 PM | 
Senior Writer Frank Munger covers the Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge facilities and many related topics — nuclear weapons, nuclear waste and other things nuclear, environmental cleanup and science of all sorts. Atomic City Underground is, first and foremost, a news blog, but there's room for analysis, opinion and random thoughts that have no place else to go. 
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