Close to two miles of pipes were replaced at waste treatment systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The two-year, $18 million project was completed three months ahead of schedule and $900,000 under budget, according to federal officials. The project replaced above-ground pipes and valves at the 3608 Process Waste Treatment Complex, “making the system more efficient and reliable and helping avoid the possibility of disrupting ongoing ORNL operations,” federal officials said.
The piping replacement was a project of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and its contractor UCOR. The goal was to extend the life of the Liquid and Gaseous Waste Operations (LGWO) system at ORNL. DOE said the LGWO system is critical to ORNL’s ongoing missions, and an outage would result in immediate impacts at the site.
“Replacing the piping and completing other upgrades alleviates the recurring need for maintenance and repair of aging infrastructure built many decades ago and ensures the system’s reliability,” the Office of Environmental Management said in a electronic newsletter, “EM Update.” “Portions of the piping had corrosion that needed to be addressed.”
LGWO contains three waste treatment systems that collect, treat, and reduce the volume of liquid and gaseous waste across the laboratory.
“LGWO encompasses more than 60 facilities and 27 miles of piping that process waste generated from cleanup operations, research and development laboratories, and active and deactivated nuclear reactors,” the newsletter said.
During the pipe replacement project, employees safely executed 132 critical lifts. That is a much larger number compared to typical lifts done in Oak Ridge cleanup projects, federal officials said.
“The lifts for the piping replacement project were crucial due to increased risk from lifting large, heavy fabricated piping loads over the system’s critical infrastructure,” the newsletter said.
During the project, crews disposed of 115,000 pounds of waste, installed approximately 5,500 feet of new piping, conducted heat tracing to maintain the proper temperature of the piping, and installed insulation. The work required 5,000 hours of welding to complete the nearly two miles of welded lines.
The work is the latest of several modernization efforts of LGWO facilities, the newsletter said. Most recently, workers completed replacement of the Distributed Control System, which controls LGWO’s instrumentation.
Other efforts included installing a new pretreatment facility that treats low-level liquid waste and allows it to be diverted from storage tanks directly to the Process Waste Treatment System, and replacing a diesel generator that powers critical pumping stations and valve boxes if power is interrupted.
-Contributor: Shannon Potter
More information will be added as it becomes available.
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