Environmental regulators, the city of Oak Ridge, Tenn., and community activists have pushed the Department of Energy to explore more alternatives before choosing a definitive site for a new CERCLA landfill for disposal of hazardous and radioactive wastes generated during cleanup projects at the Oak Ridge Reservation.
The department had previously put its eggs in one basket, with a proposed site east of the currently operated landfill known as the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility. EMWMF is located in Bear Creek Valley to the west of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.
The new landfill – if it is to be built – will be called the Environmental Management Disposal Facility. There is a sense of urgency because the current landfill for Superfund wastes in Oak Ridge could run out of space around 2022, depending on the funding for cleanup projects already on the drawing board.
It appears, based on DOE’s planning documents and what was presented during a late-May workshop to local stakeholders, that all of the potential landfill sites of the future are located in Bear Creek Valley.
Mike Koentop, the executive officer of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management in Oak Ridge, said public meetings will be held later this year – probably in the fall after the agency puts together a proposed plan for the project.
Koentop emphasized that DOE intends to far exceed the base requirements of CERCLA in an attempt to obtain the support of the community and regulators. He indicated that the public will have plenty of input in the process.
Besides DOE’s previously identified preferred site, which is called “East Bear Creek Valley” (directly west of EMWMF), the other possibilities are a “hybrid option” that includes a single small site in the Oak Ridge valley as well as some off-site shipment of wastes; a “dual site option” that would incorporate that single small site and another one farther to the west in the valley; and a greenfield site in Bear Creek Valley farther to the west but still inside the boundary with Highway 95.
Additional documents are expected to be released later this summer.
