Displaying items by tag: north boundary greenway

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.