[Tennessee_Bob]

Actually - it's not the National Lab - that's a separate facility in function and location. K-25 (used to do uranium enrichment) is in one valley - that was where this occurred, Y-12 (weapons manufacture and disassembly) is in another valley, and ORNL (used to be X-10) is in yet another valley.

That'll be for the DOE and EPA investigation teams to figure out. Then again, this is Oak Ridge - strange things happen. Just up river from this facility is the tower shielding facility at ORNL - where they used to hoist operating nuclear reactors into the air to see how they would function. There's also a facility where they were going to build a liquid metal cooled reactor - but didn't get the funding to go beyond building the containment facility (now used for developing military robotics).

[datura]

I've had little experience with ORNL - looked at buying some machine tools of theirs one time (nice stuff!). Liquid Na is even worse than the solid form, which makes me wonder what it was in solution with? (NH3?) If so, that's one heck of a mess, and little wonder they didn't try to fight it.