| History | Built by Frank Briscoe in 1981, this four-story ( two underground), 186,000 sq. ft. building housed the recovery and refining of plutonium metal and americium oxide laboratory. It is a rectangular building with windowless reinforced concrete walls on a reinforced concrete foundation. The reinforced concrete roof is flat and a one-story wing along the south side contains fixed single pane windows and an entrance ell. Building #371 was built to assume the operations from Building #776/777 to remove plutonium from residues and convert it into high-purity metal. It was operated on a pilot scale until 1983 when serious design and construction deficiencies were identified, hindering full-scale operations. These deficiencies were never fixed and recovery operations were terminated in 1986. In 1988, the pyrochemical processes also ceased. |
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