Isotope Row Demolition—Office of Environmental Management

I'm Tim Walsh. I'm the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Environmental Management. I'm out here today in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and behind me you can see what used to be called Isotope Row, where from the 1940s until recently, office science did a lot of scientific discoveries. But today, after five years of going through and decontaminating some pretty hot areas within those buildings, we're actually at the process now of what people actually like to see, and that's demo day. The building started to come down. You know, what's great about this is we're creating space for future scientific discoveries for Oak Ridge National Lab. Yesterday I had the opportunity to tour our Y-12 facility and see the really important work that National Nuclear Security Agency is doing there to protect the American people, to ensure our peace and prosperity through nuclear deterrence as they modernize our nuclear stockpile. A really important strategic mission. They're moving with a sense of urgency. It was fantastic to see. And our office, the Office of Environmental Management, is playing a critical role there by taking down some of the old Alpha and Beta buildings, creating new space, because today NNSA works in some very vintage buildings. Some of them dating back to the 1940s, but we're taking those buildings down to create new space for modern facilities that will take us well into the future. You know, what all of this means right here in Oak Ridge is there's three very distinct missions between what NNSA is doing at Y-12, what Oak Ridge National Lab is doing for scientific discoveries and advanced compute, to EM's mission to supporting all of that into clear space that's allowing the nuclear renaissance. So they say there's three distinct DOE missions here, but there's one bright future for Oak Ridge.