National Strategic Protective Services LLC announced Monday morning that it now provides guard services at U.S. Department of Energy sites in Oak Ridge.
NSPS won the protective force services work under a five-year, $182 million contract announced in January. The company will guard the East Tennessee Technology Park, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Joe L. Evins Federal Building, and part of the Oak Ridge Reservation. [Read more…]
Friday was the last day for many employees at security company WSI Oak Ridge, which lost its contracts to protect federal facilities after the July 28 security breach at the Y-12 National Security Complex.
After 13 years of protecting federal facilities, WSI Oak Ridge has left the Secret City.
Friday was the last day for many employees at WSI, and the contract ended Sunday, spokeswoman Courtney Henry said.
Formerly known as Wackenhut Services Inc., the company once provided up to 1,000 security police officers and support staff at federal facilities that included East Tennessee Technology Park, the Joe L. Evins Federal Building, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Y-12 National Security Complex.
But WSI lost its contract to guard Y-12, a National Nuclear Security Administration site, after the July 28 security breach, and it did not win a separate contract to protect local U.S. Department of Energy sites, including ETTP, ORNL, the Federal Building, and the rest of the Oak Ridge Reservation. That contract was awarded to National Strategic Protective Services LLC, or NSPS. [Read more…]
David Martin
By David Martin, Oak Ridge Site Specific Advisory Board chair
There is great uncertainty on what the looming federal budget cuts will be and what effect they will have on funding for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environmental Management, or EM, program at the Oak Ridge Reservation. We can be confident that budget cuts are coming. It is going to take a coordinated effort on the part of the DOE-Oak Ridge EM, regulators, and stakeholders to minimize the impact on current and future remediation projects, and on the men and women who carry out this work.
Right now DOE-EM is operating on a temporary six-month budget. This budget covers just the first half of Fiscal Year 2013 and is based on half of the FY 2012 budget. We should know soon how changes in the federal budget affect Oak Ridge EM for the second half of 2013. This still leaves the 2014 budget in question. [Read more…]
Technologies from Oak Ridge National Laboratory are among winners of 2013 national and regional Federal Laboratory Consortium Awards.
ORNL’s awards, which recognize outstanding work in transferring a federal laboratory-developed technology to the commercial marketplace, were in the Excellence in Technology Transfer and Interagency Partnerships categories. [Read more…]
Oak Ridge Associated Universities gave $25,000 to a classroom at A.L. Lotts Elementary School in Knox County in an Extreme Classroom Makeover contest. (Submitted photo)
A fifth-grade math and science teacher at A.L. Lotts Elementary School in Knox County has won $25,000 in an Extreme Classroom Makeover competition sponsored by Oak Ridge Associated Universities.
It was the third time teacher Karla Fultz has submitted a video for the annual contest, which is now in its fifth year.
A press release said her winning video was a parody of “Gangman Style,” the Korean pop song and video that has been watched more than one billion times online. [Read more…]
Robert Craig
Belinda Price
The U.S. Department of Energy appointed two new members to its Oak Ridge Site Specific Advisory Board.
Susan Cange, deputy manager for DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, introduced Robert Craig and Belinda Price as the latest appointees at the board’s meeting on March 13. [Read more…]
Now mostly demolished, the former mile-long, U-shaped K-25 Building is pictured above. The site has previously been identified for possible inclusion in a Manhattan Project National Historical Park. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy)
A bill to set up a Manhattan Project national park that would include Oak Ridge has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The bipartisan legislation was reintroduced on Friday in the U.S. House by Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, a Washington Republican; Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Tennessee Republican; and Rep. Ben Luján, a New Mexico Democrat.
The legislation—H.R. 1208—would establish a Manhattan Project National Historical Park that would include facilities in Oak Ridge; Hanford, Wash.; and Los Alamos, N.M.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office is initiating a series of controlled burns of grassland areas on the Oak Ridge Reservation for prescribed burning at the East Tennessee Technology Park and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory during March and April.
On March 15, weather permitting, controlled burns are taking place:
Jeff Nichols, associate director for computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in front of Titan, the world’s fastest supercomputer. (Photos courtesy of ORNL)
Hundreds of connectors are being re-soldered each week, and the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—the world’s fastest machine—could be in regular production by May, a lab official said Wednesday.
Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences, said connectors on the $100 million computer’s motherboards had too much gold, and solder was interacting with the gold on connector pins, making the solder unstable and leading to cracks.
There are about 20,000 of the pencil-sized connectors, which link central and graphic processing units, or CPUs and GPUs. Each connector has about 100 pins.
Tom Morris, B&W Y-12 vice president of projects, presents construction safety awards to Monica Lewis, Y-12 craft safety lead representative, and Kevin Adkisson, Knoxville Building and Construction Trades Council president.
(Submitted photos)
A B&W Y-12 construction team was recently honored for two major safety achievements: working more than one million hours without a lost-time accident and having no recordable injuries in 2012, a press release said.
The B&W Y‑12 Direct-Hire Construction team achieved the one-million-hour milestone in June 2012. By January 2013, the team had reached 1.4 million hours (more than 800 days) without a lost-time accident, the press release said. The team’s last lost workday occurred in September 2010.
Jim Haynes, B&W Y-12 senior vice president and deputy general manager for projects, called it “a superb accomplishment.
Andy Page
Oak Ridge Associated Universities recently welcomed Colorado State, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Philadelphia University, and South Carolina State as its newest sponsoring institutions.
The new members were welcomed during the 68th annual meeting of the ORAU Council of Sponsoring Institutions in Oak Ridge, a press release said.
“We’re honored to have these six institutions join our growing university consortium,” said ORAU President and Chief Executive Officer Andy Page. “Membership in ORAU’s consortium broadens the already diverse opportunities these universities provide for students and faculty researchers in many critical areas of science and technology.”
Tom Beehan
A group of local governments associated with U.S. Department of Energy sites has reaffirmed its support for a Manhattan Project national park.
Proposed through legislation in the U.S. Congress, the park would commemorate the Manhattan Project, the top-secret federal program to build the world’s first atomic weapons during World War II. The park would include Oak Ridge; Los Alamos, N.M.; and Hanford, Wash.
“We are thrilled to see this step toward making the new national park a reality,” said Steve Young, secretary of the nonprofit Energy Communities Alliance and mayor of Kennewick, Wash. “There’s no question that the story of the Manhattan Project and the contributions of the men and women who supported it are of high interest to the American public. This creates a real opportunity for our communities to share our collective history while realizing the benefits of the heritage tourism industry a national park is likely to create.”
