Demolition starts at ORNL’s Isotope Row

The Department of Energy reported last week that the demolition of Isotope Row at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has begun. The demolition work follows six years of targeted decontamination efforts and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Isotope Row is a group of 10 facilities constructed at ORNL between the late 1940s and early 1960s for the production of radioisotopes that were used in medical, industrial, scientific, and defense applications. Isotope production stopped in the early 1990s, leaving behind buildings with contaminated ventilation systems, hot cells, and other equipment requiring specialized cleanup operations and teardown.

Cleanup process: In 2020, Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge began the complicated process of facility cleanup and deactivation at Isotope Row. In 2024, workers removed four 2,000-pound krypton tanks from a storage facility that had been used for thermal diffusion operations, and they completed ventilation isolation and removal activities at other facilities.

Earlier this year, workers removed process off-gas and central ventilation system lines that contained high levels of transuranic isotopes, as well as pipe bridges and radiological filter houses from the rooftops of several facilities. They also downsized and packaged remaining hot cells and conducted decontamination surveys across the area. This past June, OREM announced that its crews had finished preparing the buildings at the site for demolition in order to make room for new research facilities.

The Isotope Area Storage and Service Building, also called Building 3036, was the first of the 10 facilities to be demolished. The demolition was conducted in the late afternoon-after normal operating hours-to avoid impacting research work taking place near Isotope Row, which is situated in the lab's central campus.

UCOR president and program manager Jim Blankenhorn emphasized that the beginning of the demolition "is a significant milestone that reflects years of careful planning, technical expertise, and disciplined execution by our workforce. Our crews systematically reduced radiological and industrial hazards to safely reach this point, and now we're taking the next step in transforming ORNL's central campus."