Page 229 - Beyond Decommissioning

210 Beyond Decommissioning

There is (DOE, 2015) a prohibition against the removal of concrete floor material
or the penetration of concrete floors in specified rooms of T Building without prior
written approval from EPA, Ohio EPA, and Ohio Department of Health. These activ-
ities could result in unacceptable exposures. The basis for this prohibition can be
described as follows.
During the remediation of the T Building, the contractor encountered bulk contam-
ination of the floor and footings in certain areas. Efforts to remediate the contaminated
floor and footer in certain rooms were technically and economically difficult to justify.
Following an assessment of the risks involved to the building’s structural integrity if
removal of contaminated concrete continued, a decision was made to leave the con-
taminated concrete subfloor and footer in place, and to add a cap of color coded (red)
concrete to provide a margin of safety from the residual contamination. The
T Building remains a case of difficult reuse.
An example of a large underground military base converted into tourist attraction is
given by Worldcrunch (2018). A nuclear base, codenamed “816 Nuclear Military
Plant,” had been installed under the mountain in Fuling, southwest China. The size
of this installation, which was intended to produce Pu239 for atomic weapons, is enor-
mous. With over 20 km of tunnels and 18 huge caves excavated for the reactor and its
systems, the site is regarded as the largest network of underground tunnels in the
world. In fact, the site was never used as a military installation. The Chinese govern-
ment abandoned in 1984 the project, which was 85% complete. Much of the military
facilities was converted into factories. In 2010, the government decided to turn the
base into a tourist attraction. The base remained closed since while it was being
restructured until it reopened for public access in 2017.
The City of St Paul, MN, USA requested consultants to study the feasibility of an
integrated, district energy system for the 55-ha Ford site redevelopment. The consul-
tants were requested to assess the potential reuse of the former steam plant and steam
tunnels. The reuse of industrial buildings has been covered in other sections of this
book, so the following applies to the reuse of the steam tunnels.
The project was expected to establish a heat distribution system (a.k.a. district
heating) through a piping network to a number of buildings. The site has an old steam
pipe that runs through a bridge structure from the steam plant to the steep face and
from there through a tunnel about 5 m underground to the center of the
ex-assembly area. Some 24 m further down there are old vehicle tunnels used until
1959 for hauling cars from the assembly plant to the river (230 m each). There is also
an extensive network of sand mining tunnels (some 3800 m total length), excavated
between 1926 and 1959, when the plant manufactured glass for vehicle windows with
silica mined from underground sandstone onsite. When the glass manufacture was dis-
continued, the mining tunnels were shut down and the entries closed, but the tunnels
were still there. The total length of utility tunnels (for steam, drains, and electric
cables) is around 1200 m.
A structural analysis will be needed if any of the tunnels are envisaged for reuse.
Moreover, as a totally new infrastructure is planned for the site, including ad hoc hot
water district heating, the consultants find it difficult to justify the reuse of the sand
tunnels for district heating. This reuse option would pose unneeded and expensive