In coming weeks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will review hundreds more documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request about a new low-level radioactive waste landfill at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, according to a Jan. 5 court filing.
In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility will update U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes in Washington by Feb. 29 on the status of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case, the parties said in the joint filing.
EPA proposes to review 400 documents a month that might contain information that can be made public about the agency’s approval of the 2.2-million-cubic-yard Environmental Management Disposal Facility at Oak Ridge, according to last week’s status report. EPA has already gone through more than a third of 3,700 “potentially responsive” documents turned up in the FOIA request with 2,450 left to be reviewed, according to the federal government’s filing.
DOE and environmental prime United Cleanup Oak Ridge held a groundbreaking for the new disposal site in August. A new landfill for disposal of low-level radioactive disposal material had been pushed hard by U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), who chairs the appropriations panel that writes DOE’s spending bills.
Fleischmann, whose district includes part of Oak Ridge, has called the landfill, which will replace a nearly full existing one, critical to future cleanup of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex.
