OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — For the first time in Oak Ridge history, the Department of Energy said Thursday that crews are taking down a former reactor facility in Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
They are working on demolishing the Bulk Shielding Reactor, an inactive facility that was built in 1950 to research ways aircraft and flight crews could be protected from radiation. It was part of the federal government's aircraft nuclear propulsion program, according to an earlier release from the DOE.
Inside the facility was also a low-power reactor used to train reactor operators and give them hands-on experience before working on larger reactors. The low-power reactor was shut down in 1987. The entire facility was shut down permanently in 1991.
The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, in the Department of Energy, is working alongside United Cleanup Oak Ridge for the demolition project.
"It means a lot. It keeps us moving forward on our mission, which is to clean up this campus and move forward with our commitment to the country," said Nathan Felosi, the OREM Federal Project Director. "Our response, our environmental responsibilities and everything going into this building — bringing everybody along, all the regulators of the state, everybody that you need to bring this together."
Workers in Oak Ridge were also the first to remove a former uranium enrichment complex in 2020, from the East Tennessee Technology Park. Since then, they began projects to take down old facilities at ORNL and Y-12.
On Thursday, crews moved large construction equipment next to the Bulk Shielding Reactor facility and removed parts of the building piece by piece.
"The first stages of the building is a decommissioning stage and then we move it to a decontamination stage and a deactivation stage and then what we're seeing here today, which is the demolition phase," said Ken Rueter, president of UCOR. "The interesting part always to me is that probably 90 to 95% of the work happens in the first three 'Ds', and you don't really see the folks that do it. They really are these unsung heroes."