This is a sketch of the new uranium processing facility planned for the super-secret Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn.More than 40 Hamilton County businesses are aiming to bid for work on the huge Uranium Processing Facility going up in Oak Ridge, Tenn., as officials said Tuesday they’re trying to better link the two areas economically.
“There was a big disconnect,” said U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., as a group of nearly four dozen Oak Ridge business people and officials spent the day in Chattanooga looking for closer ties.
The UPF is a $6.5 billion project at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge and one of the biggest-ever construction projects in Tennessee. Officials have said that nearly half of the investment in the weapons plant will go into materials and equipment.
Fleischmann said that in addition to UPF, the federal government plows between $3 billion and $4 billion annually into the Y-12 weapons plant and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the largest research facility for the U.S. Department of Energy.
“We’ve got a lot to offer each other,” Fleischmann told the group, adding that the delegation checked out EPB’s nation’s fastest Internet, which offers the first citywide gigabit-per-second web connections.