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WASHINGTON NEWS DOE Plans to Modernize Oak Ridge The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a five-year, $201 million plan to modernize its facilities at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. The plan includes construction of 11 new facilities and the renovation of several existing buildings at the laboratory. The plan, which was announced by DOE Secretary William Richardson in September, will include a $26 million contribution from the State of Tennessee, and up to $50 million in private funding. DOE will cover the remaining $125 million. The ORNL modernization was first proposed by UT-Battelle, the new management contractor for the laboratory, a partnership between the University of Tennessee and Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio. Battelle has served as the management contractor at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, since that laboratory began its own five-year modernization effort in 1993. Last April 1, UT-Battelle succeeded Lockheed Martin Energy Resources, the previous ORNL manager. According to Jeff Smith, deputy director of operations for UT-Battelle, the modernization has been under study since October 1998, when the organization first began to consider competing for the ORNL management contract. That effort led to a formal proposal to DOE in July 1999 and awarding of the contract at the end of last year. UT-Battelle officially took over management in April 2000, and spent the next six months formulating the modernization plan. “Once we finally took over, we immediately saw that significant modernization would be required,” Smith said. “For example, the main chemical lab, a 600,000-square-foot building, still had fifties’ vintage plumbing and electrical systems. So did the cafeteria and library.” Much of DOE’s share of the new funding will go toward renovating those and other basic facilities. Winning DOE’s approval of the proposal proved a double challenge for UTBattelle, Smith said. On the one hand, the work was badly needed. On the other hand, no money in the DOE budget was earmarked for such expenditures. Therefore, UT-Battelle would have to persuade DOE not only to fund the modernization, but also to do so not at the expense of scientific programs. Instead, DOE would have to create a new line item for that effort in its Fiscal Year 2001 budget request. The new funding item would be crucial, Smith said, because
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otherwise it would force the modernization effort to compete with other DOE science programs for funding and no doubt would generate opposition from other program managers. At the same time, Smith said, UTBattelle recognized that DOE could not foot the entire bill. That is why they approached the State of Tennessee, as well as several private companies and organizations. As a result, Tennessee agreed to contribute $26 million to fund four new institutes, including $8 million for a Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences, to be affiliated with DOE’s Spallation Neutron Source, the six-year, $1.4 billion proje
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