As part of President Joe Biden’s executive order to review certain policy 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 in a letter last month to regional advocacy groups.
“EPA is in the process of reviewing the decision,” issued by then-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Andrew Wheeler in December 2020, according to a June 9 letter from the acting assistant administrator Lawrence Starfield to Tennessee environmental groups.
In a May 26 letter to current EPA Administrator Michael Regan, the Southern Environmental Law Center asked the agency to revisit Wheeler’s December 2020 decision in light of President Biden’s Jan. 22 executive order on “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.”
The groups asked that EPA review the Wheeler decision on radionuclide pollution discharges before allowing the government to move ahead publishing a record of decision on a proposed new on-site landfill to replace an existing one that will soon be filled to capacity.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the request on behalf of several community groups: Advocates for the Oak Ridge Reservation, Tennessee Chapter Sierra Club, and Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning.
Officials from EPA’s Atlanta-based Region 4 were expected to meet with environmental group officials June 14 to better understand the concerns about the Wheeler decision, according to the EPA letter.
The draft Record of Decision on the proposed 2.2-million-cubic yard landfill known as the Environmental Management Disposal Facility has previously been expected out this month. 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. DOE says the old one, called 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.
