Mar 25 2010
Approximately 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, N.M. sits Los Alamos National Laboratory—a site which soon will be dotted with 11 SteelMaster Buildings.
The laboratory is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world that conducts multidisciplinary research for fields such as national security, outer space, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing. Los Alamos is one of two laboratories in the U.S. where classified work towards the design of nuclear weapons is undertaken.
In November 2009, the lab began tearing down buildings at Technical Area 21, a 22,000-square-foot structure used as an administration building for decades. The destruction is part of a program to dismantle a quarter-mile complex born from the Manhattan Project that developed the world's first atomic bomb.
While the nuclear weapons lab has planned demolition for some time, stimulus money is allowing the work to gain momentum. The SteelMaster buildings will be used temporarily during the environmental cleanup process.
“This project was quite complex in its requirements,” says William Swafford, design specialist for SteelMaster Buildings which is located in Virginia Beach, Va. “The site has (2) 550’ long waste trenches that need to be remediated, and because of environmental laws, this work has to be done under cover. The trenches also change in elevation at 5 percent gradient through the 550’. We designed a series of 75’ wide x 100’ long structures that will step down 5’ as they connect to each other. This coupled with a floating steel foundation and the need to constantly be erecting and tearing down the buildings as they move from one end of the trench to the other made SteelMaster the ultimate solution for the project.”
SteelMaster’s steel buildings have earned the favor of not only the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, and Coast Guard, but also the Departments of Corrections, Transportation and Defense, FBI, DEA, and the Army Corps of Engineers. NASA also chose SteelMaster Buildings to protect its shuttle components and valuable equipment.
“SteelMaster structures are the ideal application for the engineers at Los Alamos,” says Rob Poellnitz, vice president of SteelMaster Buildings. “These buildings are perfect for quick assembly, disassembly, relocation, and reassembly. We are pleased to be working once again with the U.S. Department of Energy.”