Stories
Pure success
The quality of the Purification Facility's initial batch runs exceeded expectations.
The history associated with the Manhattan Project is awesome. In less than 30 months four production plants were built in Oak Ridge; 125,000 people were hired; a city was built to support their efforts; tons of materials were transported and then transformed — all to obtain a small amount of U‑235 and to prove the production of a new element, plutonium, was possible.
You can almost hear it: “Well, back in my day, it didn't take a decade to design a facility. We just got the job done.”
Now, employees involved with the site's newest production building, the Purification Facility, can make the same claim. To meet a critical mission need, construction and operational startup on Y‑12's Purification Facility was successfully fast-tracked: Turnkey operations were achieved faster on the Purification Facility than any new Y‑12 National Security Complex production building since the 1940s.
Getting a job done efficiently despite the many things that can go wrong (natural disasters, funding issues and administrative red tape, for example) is an impressive achievement; getting the job done safely and securely is Y‑12's top priority.
Thankfully, the recent operational startup of the Purification Facility achieved both goals. During the readiness and startup phases, which spanned 33 months, there was not a single reportable accident within the facility.
Of the approximately quarter-million (250,000) man-hours worked on this project, no lost workday cases happened during construction and only two Occupational Safety and Health Administration recordable injuries of minor nature occurred.
Only 4 months after completion of the NNSA readiness assessment and authorization to operate, the Purification Facility was making product. Since then — and equally fast — initial batch runs were also successfully finished.
The startup of Y‑12's Purification Facility was not without several surprises. Incompatible materials, extremely sensitive monitoring systems and other lesser design issues all influenced schedule — and all were quickly overcome.
According to the production manager, the Purification Facility staff “worked extremely hard and expended many intense hours” to make the facility fully operational. The small, highly qualified professional group of technical and craft personnel worked quickly and efficiently to begin operations in record time.
A shift technical advisor attributed the operational success to the “excellent team support” and the fact that Y‑12 personnel, especially the maintenance organization, were actively responsive to the team's needs. He recognized particularly the East End Multi-Craft Group, which not only corrected design issues in record time (such as replacing incompatible O-rings) but also used their expertise and availability to avert possible additional problems.
The operations manager who led the successful startup of the Purification Facility is now helping other Y‑12 projects like the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility and the Uranium Processing Facility avoid potential pitfalls. Lessons learned from the Purification Facility concerning design have been shared with other construction projects.
Still ahead for this new Y‑12 facility is process prove-in, engineering evaluations and production processing.