U.S. Department of Energy public bus tours have resumed in Oak Ridge after a two-year pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The tours began running again on July 11, and they are scheduled to continue through November.
“The program is a longtime staple in the community, helping educate residents and visitors about the site’s rich history and current missions,” DOE said in an EM Update newsletter published Tuesday. (EM stands for environmental management.)
The tour program started in 1996 and has attracted tens of thousands of visitors from all 50 states, DOE said.
The three-and-a-half-hour tours allow visitors to see all three DOE sites on the Oak Ridge Reservation, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Y-12 National Security Complex, and East Tennessee Technology Park.
This year’s tour will be the first to feature the newly constructed K-25 History Center. The facility opened only weeks before the COVID pandemic began. It offers 250 original artifacts on display. Nearly 1,000 oral histories were collected from former Manhattan Project and Cold War-era workers that museum professionals used to develop the exhibits and interactive galleries inside, the EM Update said. The K-25 History Center is a project of DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, or OREM.
Matt Mullins, marketing and communications director for the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, discussed what draws visitors regionally and nationally. The museum is the departure point for the bus tour.
“You see where that big science happened, and you realize in those three small facilities the fate of the world shifts,” Mullins said in the EM Update. “The small secrets that Oak Ridge held to themselves have gone public, and on this tour, you get to see where that action really happened.”
In the newsletter, OREM said it is currently advancing plans to complete its historic preservation commitments, which includes building the K-25 viewing platform and wayside exhibits around the K-25 Building.
Among the other stops, visitors on the bus tour go inside the Graphite Reactor at ORNL. The national historic landmark is a key component of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. It houses the world’s oldest reactor and served as the pilot plant that led to the first production of plutonium.
EM Update newsletter contributor: Ben Williams
More information will be added as it becomes available.
Most news stories on Oak Ridge Today are free, brought to you by Oak Ridge Today with help from our advertisers, contributors, and subscribers. This is a free story. Thank you to our advertisers, contributors, and subscribers. You can see what we cover here.
Do you appreciate this story or our work in general? If so, please consider a monthly subscription to Oak Ridge Today. See our Subscribe page here. Thank you for reading Oak Ridge Today!
Alternatively, you can donate to support our work here. Thank you for your support!
Copyright 2022 Oak Ridge Today. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Leave a Reply