Nearly a year after he made it, the Energy Department shot down a request from the mayor of Piketon, Ohio, to fund a third-party review of thousands of pages of documents that informed the agency’s decision to dispose of waste from uranium-enrichment cleanup at the Portsmouth Site at the facility.
Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer lodged the request in a letter to DOE in June and has lobbied for it since. The chief executive of the village of 2,000 asked the agency to fund the review via a technical assistance grant, but “DOE currently has no funding available for these types of grants,” acting Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Sue Cange wrote in a letter to Spencer dated March 24 — almost a year after Spencer wrote DOE asking for the grant.
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, Cange told Spencer he could seek funding for the grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Cange, the temporary head of DOE’s Cold War cleanup program since President Donald Trump was sworn in Jan. 20, also rebutted Spencer’s oft-voiced concern that the agency was hasty in its decision to dispose of waste from the Portsmouth cleanup on site, rather than shipping the material elsewhere.
No stranger to uranium enrichment cleanup from her days leading DOE’s Oak Ridge Site near Oak Ridge, Tenn., Cange pointed out that DOE followed the prescribed EPA process for siting the disposal facility over a four-year period that included many opportunities for public comment. Cange also noted that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency agreed with DOE’s decision.
Spencer has said the planned On-Site Waste Disposal Facility would take up the most commercially attractive plot of the former uranium enrichment site, which would deter commercial companies from redeveloping the area after DOE’s cleanup there is complete some time in the 2030s.
Spencer, reached Wednesday by email, was not content with Cange’s reply.
“Sue Cange’s very late response to the Village of Piketon’s June 2016 resolution is what I’d call an insult to a town that has supported the site and DOE for 65 years,” Spencer wrote. “I call for the DOE to care about the citizens of Piketon’s health and safety by meeting with us at a level of Sue Cange or higher to hear and act on our concerns about the nuclear dump they want to build in our back yard.”
