Guest column: DOE has learned from challenges of cleaning up uranium ...

Last week, area media reported, appropriately and accurately, the findings of a recent report by the U.S. Department of Energy's Inspector General that identified cost overruns and missed milestones for the massive cleanup project at the East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge. For readers not familiar with the largest environmental restoration project in Tennessee's history, it might be helpful to have a broader understanding of the events and challenges that led to the Inspector General's report and, perhaps more importantly, where we go from here.

The sheer size of the project is mind-boggling. The area covers approximately 2,200 acres that housed a critical part of the super-secret World War II Manhattan Project. The complex contains 125 major buildings, including the mammoth, mile-long K-25 facility that in 1945 was the largest building in the world.

The K-25 complex produced enriched uranium used in the atomic bomb that ultimately ended the war with Japan. The facility, along with the men and women who worked there, are one of the great stories in American history. Unfortunately, the desperate race to develop a nuclear weapon before our enemies left behind some very serious environmental legacies. After the closure of the K-25 complex in 1987, the focus shifted to cleaning up the contaminated soil and groundwater, tearing down the buildings and converting the land for industrial use by the community.

The original plans for the cleanup project contained two fundamental mistakes that more than a decade ago contributed to the findings in the recent IG report. First, tearing down a uranium enrichment facility is not the same as tearing down an office building. Estimates of the cost and time required for the K-25 project grossly underestimated the extent of contamination and the complexity involved in removing some of the world's most dangerous materials, including technetium 99, from one of the world's largest buildings.

Second, the project's original planners did not — perhaps could not — fully anticipate the structural damage to a huge facility that had no heat and no maintenance for 15 years. Put simply, the K-25 facility became increasingly dangerous for cleanup workers to enter. The extent of the danger became apparent in 2006 when a worker was nearly killed after falling 30 feet through a deteriorating floor. The accident forced work to stop for nearly two years while a new cleanup strategy, with more machines and fewer people, was developed.

Special report: Goldman's new money machine: warehouses…(repost ...

The derelict neighborhood off Michigan Avenue is a sharp contrast to Goldman’s bustling skyscraper headquarters near Wall Street, but the two operations share one important element: management by the bank’s savvy financial professionals.

A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories.

Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year.

There’s just one problem: only a trickle of the aluminum is leaving the depots, creating a supply pinch for manufacturers of everything from soft drink cans to aircraft.

The resulting spike in prices has sparked a clash between companies forced to pay more for their aluminum and wait months for it to be delivered, Goldman, which is keen to keep its cash machines humming and the London Metal Exchange (LME), the world’s benchmark industrial metals market, which critics accuse of lax oversight.

Analysts question why London’s metals market allows big financial players like Goldman to own the warehouses which store huge quantities of metal even as they trade the commodity.

Robin Bhar, a veteran metals analyst at Credit Agricole in London says the conflict of interest is so acute he wants U.S. and European anti-trust regulators to weigh in.

Goldman’s warehouse business relies on a lucrative opportunity enabled by the LME regulations. Those rules allow warehouses to release only a tiny fraction of their inventories per day, much less than the metal that is regularly taken in for storage.

The metal that sits in the warehouse generates lucrative rental income.

Little wonder that so many want in. Metro was acquired by Goldman in February 2010, while commodities trading firm Trafigura nabbed UK-based NEMS in March 2010, and Swiss-based group Glencore International acquired the metals warehousing unit of Italy’s Pacorini last September.

Henry Bath, a warehousing firm and founding member of the London Metal Exchange in 1877, has been owned for about 40 years by traders or banks including Metallgesellschaft in the 1980s and failed U.S. energy trader Enron at the turn of the century. It now comes under the umbrella of JP Morgan, which bought the metals trading business of RBS Sempra Commodities in July last year.

Industrial project report

Industrial project report

Improving manufacturing performance in South Africa, the report of the Industrial Strategy Project

Kenya Gazette

Industrial project in statistical quality control, Report of a research and training project conducted by the Syracuse University Institute of Industrial Research, in cooperation with the Syracuse Chapter of the American Society for Quality Control