The Tennessee Valley Authority and Babcock and Wilcox announced Wednesday a major step in their joint effort to build and test the nation’s first small modular reactor at TVA’s Clinch River Site in Oak Ridge.
TVA and B&W signed a contract Feb. 7 that formalizes the process toward the eventual submittal and Nuclear Regulatory Commission review of a licensing application for a B&W mPower small modular reactor, or SMR, nuclear plant at Clinch River.
Y-12 National Security Complex (Submitted photo)
A report released Wednesday said the automatic federal spending cuts set for March 1 would require furloughs at the Y-12 National Security Complex and a shutdown of the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The report was issued by Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
It said Y-12 would have to furlough 700-1,000 of its 4,500 employees for up to six months, and there would be hundreds of layoffs at national laboratories, universities, research facilities, and private sector companies that rely on grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science for energy research, the report said.
The U.S. Department of Labor will host three town hall meetings on Wednesday in Oak Ridge to provide information about the medical benefits provided under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act.
The EEOICPA provides compensation and medical benefits to employees who became ill as a result of working in the nuclear weapons industry. At the meetings, specific information will be discussed concerning home health care services, the Privacy Act, and how to better serve EEOICPA claimants.
The meetings are scheduled for 9:30 a.m., 4 p.m., and 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Editor’s note: The Oak Ridge City Council recently established an ad hoc subcommittee to focus on issues related to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrative order on inflow and infiltration of the city’s wastewater system. Councilman Chuck Hope, who is chairman of the subcommittee, provided the following report on its recent meeting with the EPA in Atlanta.
The subcommittee of City Council that was formed to address our EPA Administrative Order concerns, went to Atlanta, Ga., on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013, to meet with staff from the Southeast Regional (Region 4) EPA office.
The meeting was attended by four EPA staff members: Denisse Diaz, clean water enforcement branch chief; Maurice Horsey, municipal and industrial enforcement section chief; Michele Whetherington, assistant regional counsel; and Dennis Sayre, our assigned contact in municipal and industrial enforcement.
By identifying two genes required for transforming inorganic into organic mercury, which is far more toxic, scientists today have taken a significant step toward protecting human health.
The question of how methylmercury, an organic form of mercury, is produced by natural processes in the environment has stumped scientists for decades, but a team led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has solved the puzzle. Results of the study, published in the journal Science, provide the genetic basis for this process, known as microbial mercury methylation, and have far-reaching implications.
There’s no nice way to spin it: The results of our city’s bad decisions for the past decade are catching up with us.
In addition to having high debt and property taxes, our sales tax revenues continue to decline, we are exporting more than $727 million per year in U.S. Department of Energy payroll (1), and we have a comparatively stagnant population growth. Even with all the new restaurants opening, these projects won’t fully replace the revenue we’ve lost from the countless businesses that have closed up shop or left town for greener pastures.
Continuing down this path is not an option. Thankfully, our city manager understands this and wants to strategize a more competitive position for Oak Ridge. He is proposing that we change our approach to economic development (2) by finding other uses for the $1-2 million we’ve been spending annually on nearly 20 different external organizations like the Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce.
Mark Ferri
Jeff Bradford
Mark Ferri, who has led the safe, successful deactivation and demolition work at K-25 since UCOR arrived in Oak Ridge in August 2011, has announced that he will retire from the company at the end of February and will accept a CH2M Hill corporate opportunity in the United Kingdom.
Ferri was part of UCOR’s original, handpicked leadership team. His selection proved a wise one, as progress under his leadership has been stellar. Workers have demolished more than two million square feet of the old gaseous diffusion facility, and more than 15,000 loads of waste have been shipped under the “pack as you go” philosophy that he and his counterpart, Waste Management Manager Jeff Bradford, installed as part of the UCOR way of doing business.
Chuck Fleischmann
Third District Rep. Chuck Fleischmann has announced the Tennessee Valley Corridor National Summit will be held the last week of May and return to the site where it started 18 years ago—Oak Ridge. The exact dates are being determined based on the schedules of several anticipated national speakers, including U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Senior decision-makers representing academia, government, and industry from Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina will convene in the New Hope Center at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 National Security Complex for the two-day meeting. Fleischmann will serve as host and be joined by of members of the TVC congressional delegation.
B&W Y-12 historian Ray Smith, left, joins Lincoln Memorial University board of trustees chairman Pete DeBusk in front of the “Scientists Who Changed the World” exhibit in the university’s Math and Science Building. (Submitted photo)
Sharing information related to the early years of Oak Ridge is all in a day’s work for Y-12 National Security Complex historian Ray Smith.
Recently, Smith’s flair for historical detail was incorporated in a permanent display on the main campus of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn. Located in LMU’s new Math and Science Building, the display pays tribute to nuclear energy research and the subsequent creation of what is now the U.S. Department of Energy.
An extensive molecular map of poplar tree proteins from Oak Ridge National Laboratory offers new insight into the plant’s biological processes. The study is featured on the cover of January’s Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. (Submitted photo)
Researchers seeking to improve production of ethanol from woody crops have a new resource in the form of an extensive molecular map of poplar tree proteins, published by a team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Populus, a fast-growing perennial tree, holds potential as a bioenergy crop due to its ability to produce large amounts of biomass on non-agricultural land. Now, a study by ORNL scientists with DOE’s BioEnergy Science Center has provided the most comprehensive look to date at poplar’s proteome, the suite of proteins produced by a plant’s cells. The study is featured on the cover of January’s Molecular and Cellular Proteomics.
Steven Chu
After serving one term, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced Friday morning that he will not serve a second four-year term in the Obama administration.
In an announcement posted on the U.S. Department of Energy website, Chu said he will continue to serve as secretary through the ARPA-E Summit at the end of February and may stay beyond that “so that I can leave the department in the hands of the new secretary.” ARPA-E stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
Chu said he would like to return to an academic life of teaching and research, and he informed President Barack Obama of his decision to return to California shortly after the Nov. 6 election.
The third annual U.S. Department of Energy’s East Tennessee Middle School Science Bowl will be hosted Saturday at the Oak Ridge campus of the Roane State Community College.
Starting at 9 a.m., students from 12 local middle schools will participate in a fast-paced academic competition offering students the opportunity to match their wits in math and science, a press release said.
