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KNOXVILLE — The U.S. Department of Energy's research and nuclear weapons complex in Oak Ridge expects to create 1,500 jobs and demolish scores of Manhattan Project-era buildings with a $755 million infusion of federal economic stimulus money for environmental restoration.

"Oh my God, this is more than anything we have ever seen before," DOE-Oak Ridge Manager Gerald Boyd said Tuesday. "It is really an unprecedented effort to try to add funding to the environmental cleanup budget."

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the award as part of some $6 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act projects over the next 2½ years in 12 states aimed at putting "Americans to work while cleaning up contamination from the Cold War era."

"We should be hiring within weeks," Boyd said.

DOE's 33,000-acre Oak Ridge reservation, which helped developed the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan in World War II and continues to make parts for every nuclear warhead in the U.S. arsenal, currently has about 2,500 employees trying to remove a half-century legacy of waste and contamination on a $515 million annual budget.

That's been enough to keep the reservation on track with ongoing projects, mostly the laborious leveling of the shuttered K-25 uranium enrichment plant.

But DOE-Oak Ridge has an even bigger cleanup plan — a massive 20-year project called the Integrated Facilities Disposition Project. It's a $9.5 billion to $14.5 billion demolition dream to remove buildings and restore the landscape throughout the reservation, primarily at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"This $755 million allows us to jump start that work," Boyd said, at least three years ahead of schedule.

Some buildings highly contaminated

DOE will use the money to demolish 49 Oak Ridge buildings, including some highly contaminated by uranium — a total of 330,000 square feet of rusty, hulking, leaking structures.

Another 1.1 million square feet will be decontaminated for future demolition, including a Y-12 building considered the plant's most significant source of mercury contamination to surface water and offsite release into East Fork Poplar Creek.

Tennessee congressmen Zach Wamp and Lincoln Davis praised the award.

Wamp, a Republican whose district includes Oak Ridge, called it "considerable during an economic downturn," but one that will "save significant taxpayer dollars in the long run."

"It's important to all the investments on the Oak Ridge reservation and is necessary to meet the current missions that are needed to move the country forward," he said.

Davis, a Democrat on the House Appropriations energy subcommittee, said the funding shows "the work conducted at Oak Ridge has been and continues to be of vital interest to our national security and economic future."

The award is addition to $71 million in stimulus funding announced last week for a new chemicals and materials research building at the Oak Ridge lab and other infrastructure improvements.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.