As part of President Joe Biden’s executive order to review policies issued by the Donald Trump White House, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking another look at its December 2020 approval of plans for a new landfill at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the agency said recently.
DOE’s draft record of decision for the proposed 2.2-million-cubic yard landfill, the Environmental Management Disposal Facility, was expected in July. The new landfill would take low-level radioactive debris from demolition of contaminated buildings at the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
But as of late June, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) was still meeting with three Tennessee-based environmental groups to discuss then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler’s December approval of the proposed landfill, the head of one of these groups told Weapons Complex Monitor this week.
Officials from EPA’s Atlanta-based Region 4 held a “listening session” with the groups June 23, after first meeting with the organizations on June 14, to better understand their concerns, Virginia Dale, chair of the Advocates for the Oak Ridge Reservation, wrote Wednesday in an email.
“EPA continues its review, we do not have additional timeline details to share at this time,” on when the review of the Wheeler decision will be complete, an agency spokesperson said in a Friday email.
Along with the group Dale chairs, the Tennessee Chapter Sierra Club and Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning asked EPA to review Wheeler’s eleventh-hour approval of the proposed landfill at the shuttered uranium enrichment site. The groups cited Biden’s Jan. 22 executive order on “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the request on behalf of the community groups, and the EPA wrote back on June 9th to say that the agency was “in the process of reviewing [Wheeler’s] decision,” according to a letter from Lawrence Starfield, EPA’s acting assistant administrator under Biden.
DOE says Oak Ridge’s existing onsite landfill, the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility, will be at capacity before the end of the decade, filled largely with material from demolished structures at the K-25 uranium enrichment complex, known now as the East Tennessee Technology Park.
During a May 6 Congressional hearing, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granhaolm told Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) that she supports the new landfill that will take “low-risk” material from Oak Ridge. “We are working with the EPA and the state of Tennessee on a scientifically-driven approach on this,” Granholm said.
EPA is a key regulator at Oak Ridge because the uranium reservation is a Superfund site covered by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980. The environmental agency is involved with cleanup at the site under a 1989 Federal Facility Agreement that also includes DOE and the Tennessee Department of Environmental Conservation.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management had appealed to Wheeler in April 2019 to reverse an earlier decision by the Atlanta-based regional office, saying Clean Water Act rules usually defer to Atomic Energy Act regulation when it comes to radionuclides.
“It is longstanding EPA policy to consider reasonably anticipated future land use in conducting a baseline risk assessment,” Wheeler said in his Dec. 31 opinion. Given that, the person with most exposure from radionuclides from landfill runoff would be a fisherman along Bear Creek, said the former EPA chief.
The Superfund law “is a remedial statute” that gives the president broad discretion “to reduce risks to human health and the environment” but not necessarily “eliminating all exposures to hazardous substances or eliminating all risks,” Wheeler said.
