Oak Ridge Environmental Cleanup

In 1943, scientists in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, working on the secret Manhattan Project produced the world’s first enriched uranium. Today, some contamination remains from nuclear projects that were active through the Cold War. But they are being relegated to history, thanks to a massive cleanup project managed by a joint venture of Bechtel and Jacobs Engineering.

Bechtel Jacobs Company (BJC) is the lead contractor for the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge Reservation Environmental Management program, one of the largest and most complex nuclear cleanups in the United States. BJC is responsible for environmental cleanup and waste management on the reservation and supports DOE in a reindustrialization program to find commercial uses for many Oak Ridge facilities and land parcels that no longer have a mission.

At the center of the cleanup is the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Process Building. Built in the 1940s, the U-shaped uranium enrichment facility was the largest building under one roof in the world at the time of its completion. Now it is structurally unsound and contaminated with uranium and other hazardous materials. In January 2010, the BJC team completed demolition of the 800,000-square-foot (74,322-square-meter) west wing of K-25. Environmental mitigation work is currently under way in the remainder of the building to prepare it for eventual demolition.

BJC began working at the Oak Ridge Reservation in April 1998 and is expected to continue through June 2011.