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Ward Plummer, a distinguished scientist with joint appointments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, said Thursday that ORNL has eliminated his lab position - effective June 30. "ORNL terminated me," Plummer said. "I got terminated without a review."

The Department of Energy has confirmed plans to rebid the Oak Ridge cleanup contract currently held by Bechtel Jacobs Co. Bechtel Jacobs has been DOE's cleanup manager since 1998 and the current pact, originally scheduled to conclude this year, was extended through 2011 to make progress on the much-delayed dismantlement project at the K-25 and K-27 uranium-enrichment facilities.

Ward Plummer, a distinguished scientist with joint appointments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, said today that ORNL had eliminated his lab position - effective June 30. "ORNL terminated me," Plummer said. "I got terminated without a review."

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - Building the world's first full-scale uranium enrichment factory - a 45-acre monster that was the biggest industrial structure in the world at the time - took 18 months amid the race for the first atomic bomb. Six decades later, federal authorities think they finally have a handle on just how long it will take to clean up and tear down the long-shuttered relic of the Manhattan Project: About 15 years.

OAK RIDGE - Thousands of truckloads of hazardous garbage have already been hauled from the site, and the heavy-duty demolition work hasn't even started. Workers will begin taking down the walls of K-25 in October, but preparations - such as removing asbestos, mercury and PCBs - have been under way for a long time.

As noted in a news story last week, the U.S. Department of Energy is once again trying to get rid of its 15,000-ton stockpile of radioactive nickel, much of which is stored in Oak Ridge.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - The U.S. Department of Energy has revived a plan to salvage millions of dollars from radioactive scrap culled from old uranium enrichment operations in Tennessee and Kentucky. The government has 15,300 tons of low-level contaminated nickel left from cleanup of the former K-25 plant in Oak Ridge, near Knoxville, and a still-active sister plant in Paducah, Ky. That's enough to fill 765 tractor-trailers or, if melted down, enough to cover an NFL football field 15 inches deep.

OAK RIDGE - The government has levied a $123,750 fine against B&W Technical Services, the contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, for safety violations related to a uranium chip fire in 2007.

Former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons workers plan to join a nationwide rally next week to protest what they call unfair treatment of sick workers who have been denied federal compensation. The Flats workers say they will protest at the Denver office of the U.S. Department of Labor, which runs the compensation program. Other workers and supporters plan similar gatherings in Cleveland, Ohio; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and Espanola, N.M.

OAK RIDGE - About 60 sick workers and their advocates gathered today for a rally to reform the compensation program to help those made ill at the government's Cold War nuclear weapons facilities.

OAK RIDGE - In separate incidents barely a week apart in April, nuclear warhead parts were dropped at the Y-12 National Security Complex, but a plant spokesman said today there was no threat of a nuclear explosion.

Special radioactive waste is proposed to be trucked from Oak Ridge across the country by way of interstates 75 and 24 through Chattanooga, and then through Birmingham, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The shipments could begin by the end of this year, if the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permit them.

WASHINGTON, June 26 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Energy says it has given Restoration Services Inc. a contract for assistance in decommissioning an Ohio nuclear facility. The contract requires the Oak Ridge, Tenn., woman-owned company to provide technical services for the remediation, decontamination and decommissioning of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant at the Energy Department's site in Piketon, Ohio.

OAK RIDGE - The small uranium fire extinguished itself within a matter of seconds March 15, 2007. But there were signs of broader concern when a radiation alarm went off in another area of the large building where warhead parts are assembled and taken apart.

Janine Anderson spent seven years as a secretary at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation, one of the nation's premier nuclear weapons development and production complexes. But that safe-sounding office position didn't protect her from the toxic exposure that has ravaged her body. Her lungs are scarred with deadly beryllium, a key ingredient in atomic bombs. Her immune system is attacking her body, which harbors an array of heavy metals in toxic quantities. Her liver is so enlarged that it is threatening to burst through her abdominal wall.

Regular shipments of radioactive waste left over from the Cold War era may begin this fall with trucks moving through northwest Georgia en route to New Mexico. The estimated 60 to 120 truckloads a year of waste from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will be buried nearly a half-mile deep in an underground salt formation. The transports to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., are expected to take three years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The shipments are awaiting approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

A push is on to try to stop a private firm from bringing waste from old Italian nuclear plants to Tennessee for processing. EnergySolutions of Utah has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval to haul up to 20,000 tons of the material to Oak Ridge, and a Rutherford County group has joined the fight to keep it out. Advertisement "If we don't act quickly, the application will be approved for this enormous shipment, and the doors will be open for all of Europe's nuclear waste to enter the U.S.," Kathy Ferris of Murfreesboro, with Citizens to End Nuclear Dumping in Tennessee, said in an e-mail.

In a couple of memos over the past couple of years, including one dated Jan. 9, staff of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Board have mentioned the Special Material Capability Project at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. Federal and contractor officials at the Oak Ridge plant have been mum on details of the project, at least publicly, refusing to address what work will take place at the facility or what "special material" will be handled there. Last month's safety board report notes that project construction is about 80 percent complete and includes installation of major machines, including "a new negative-pressure glovebox in a Y-12 facility that provides additional worker protection."

Darwin Morgan, a federal spokesman at the Nevada Test Site, today confirmed that all restrictions on Perma-Fix Environmental waste shipments had been lifted. In addition to the company's M&EC facility in Oak Ridge, Perma-Fix has waste operations at Richland, Wash., and Gainesville, Fla. "The three sites have met the requirements and are now back as approved generators to send us waste," Morgan said this afternoon.