Displaying items by tag: north boundary greenway

A standing-room-only crowd implored the Oak Ridge Planning Commission on Jan. 15 to preserve a forested tract on the west end of the city for its recreational and cultural values. Ben Pounds/Hellbender Press 

Public protests consideration of development of forested West Oak Ridge property

OAK RIDGE — A crowd of city residents filled the Oak Ridge’s Municipal Courtroom with a message for the Planning Commission: Keep a parcel in West Oak Ridge a wooded park.

Oak Ridge Planning and Development Director Jennifer Williams described the relevant land in a memo as containing about 336 acres adjacent to the Westwood subdivision. It’s currently federal Department of Energy land, but the city of Oak Ridge has formally requested its transfer to the city. It contains three mountain bike trails and a portion of the North Boundary Trail.

Williams told people at a Jan. 15 meeting of the Oak Ridge Municipal Planning Commission, however, it is not connected to the North Ridge Trail as she said some believed, which is a different trail in East Oak Ridge. Williams said that the parcel connects the neighborhood to the Lambert Quarry and Black Oak Ridge Conservation Easement (BORCE) but doesn’t directly include those areas.

The Planning Commission met to discuss principles for the land’s future if the city acquires it. A draft included principles stressing the value of conservation, but also a desire for housing and possibly even commercial development. Even at this early stage, concerns about the land’s future led to a standing-room-only crowd with speaker after speaker opposing residential or commercial development on the parcel. Planning Commission voted instead to further discuss the principles at a non-voting work session set for 5:30 p.m. Thursday Feb. 12.

This map shows several of the various options that were proposed over the years for a new power line to the Horizon Center. Options numbered 1 here would have severely impacted the North Boundary Greenway. Options 1 and 2 also would have diminished the ecologic values of the Black Oak Ridge Conservation Easement. The now authorized option 5 will tap into the existing 161 kilovolt TVA power line at a new substation to be built on the south-east side of Oak Ridge Turnpike (TN-95).  City of Oak Ridge Electric Department

Conversations, letters, alliances and action prompted electrifying win for East Tennessee citizens

OAK RIDGE — After a grassroots citizen effort highlighted the fact new electric lines would mar habitat and popular hiking trails, the city plans to put them elsewhere.

The move came after objections raised by East Tennessee environmental groups, previously reported by Hellbender Press, to protect the land along the North Boundary Greenway, a wide gravel path used by hikers and cyclists. The new route goes down Novus Drive’s median, starting south of State Route 95.

Contractors aren’t done building the Novus Drive route, but city staff made the new route clear in December when asking for funding. Oak Ridge City manager Mark Watson stated the new lines and substation need to be ready for the proposed TRISO-X nuclear fuel facility by December 2024.

OAK RIDGE — WBIR channel 10 News 2-minute video highlighting a controversy that has been brewing for a decade.

Infographics and more details added May 5, 2022

Tree clearing would radically degrade the visual experience and take away shade crucial to enjoyment of a walk during increasingly hot weather

On April 4, TRISO-X LLC, a subsidiary incorporated last August by X-Energy LLC, disclosed plans to build a plant at Horizon Center to manufacture a new kind of “unmeltable” tri-structural isotropic nuclear fuel (TRISO) for high-temperature pebble-bed gas reactors. It will use uranium, enriched to less than 20 percent, to fabricate spherical, billiards-ball sized High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) pebbles.

Horizon Center,

situated among sensitive natural areas, was designed as an upscale light-industrial and office park. Despite its fancy landscaping with sculpture gardens, it failed to attract the many buyers that had been anticipated when it was created a quarter century ago. A principal argument for its establishment was that Oak Ridge needed to attract more private enterprise to reduce dependency on Federal jobs.

Terragenics’ $38 million plant, which was built to manufacture implantable radioactive pellets to treat prostate cancer never went into full production and was abandoned in 2005. 2015, with Governor Haslam in attendance, Canadian CVMR promised 620 jobs, using the plant for it’s first U.S. production site and to move its headquarters to it from Toronto, too.