World War II atomic bomb development plant demolished [video]

Demolition of the 750,000-square-foot K-31 Building is underway Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014, at Oak Ridge's East Tennessee Technology Park. K-31 is the fourth of five gaseous diffusion buildings to be removed at the former uranium enrichment site. The clean up contractor, UCOR, plans to start demolishing the last enrichment plant, K-27, next year.
Demolition of the 750,000-square-foot K-31 Building is underway Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014, at Oak Ridge's East Tennessee Technology Park. K-31 is the fourth of five gaseous diffusion buildings to be removed at the former uranium enrichment site. The clean up contractor, UCOR, plans to start demolishing the last enrichment plant, K-27, next year.

OAK RIDGE, TN-The U.S. government moved a big step closer to cleaning up the remains of its atomic bomb development program here Tuesday morning, demolishing the final wall of the K-27 gas diffusion plant.

Completed as World War II was ending, only weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, the plant produced enriched uranium for the U.S. military and civilian nuclear programs until 1985.

Workers had already removed the highly radioactive metal equipment from the interior of the plant and hauled it to a federal nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada, according to project manager Bob Leonard.

Explosives were not used in the demolition because the cleanup team did not want to send a plume of contaminated dust into the air over Roane County, Leonard said.

K-25, the first gas diffusion plant built and at that time the largest roofed building in the world, was demolished several years ago.

As the U.S. raced Germany to develop the first atomic bomb, researchers tried several methods to enrich uranium sufficiently so it could power a nuclear weapon. Besides the gas diffusion plants at Oak Ridge, a nuclear reactor was also built nearby plus two other facilities that tried alternative methods of enhancing uranium.

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