Officials with the National Nuclear Security Administration got an earful at a public meeting Wednesday over a contested power line for Y-12 National Security Complex’s new power substation.
The substation will replace the existing, deteriorating power station for the Department of Energy facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. It will provide the power needed for Y-12’s coming Uranium Processing Facility.
The line will run 2.1 miles along Pine Ridge, which separates Y-12 from Scarboro, a historically black community that lies on the other side of the ridge. However, local leaders and residents worry about a potential new eyesore going up in the area.
“People need to remember in 2015 during the five-year property reappraisal, property values in Oak Ridge went down for the first time in history,” Oak Ridge Mayor Warren Gooch said during the meeting, which drew about 100 people. “We can’t have the government just coming out and taking ridgelines that will cause a negative perception of the city.”
Gooch said the city is conducting a $100 million revitalization effort, which includes a new pre-kindergarten center near the ridge on which the power line will run. Dale Christensen, NNSA federal project manager for the Uranium Processing Facility, said some of the city’s existing power lines are closer to the center than the Pine Ridge line will be.
The NNSA, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, had at one point planned to put 15 of the line’s 30 transmission towers on the ridge. Each tower would have been 79 feet tall. The agencies revised the tower designs after public blowback in November and December.
Revised renderings show several of the towers will be shortened to remain hidden in the tree line. Eighteen two-pole structures will be painted brown to blend in with the trees on the ridge in the winter, and Christensen said the poles will hardly be visible in the summer.
Gooch said the new renderings look better, but he still has concerns over how much of the ridge will be logged to prevent diseased or dying “danger trees” from impacting the line.
After the meeting, the mayor said he was “disappointed” in the NNSA’s responses to his concerns: “I will be very assertive in getting answers to the questions that were posed by me and the citizens of Oak Ridge about the additional requirements on removal of trees on the line’s right of way,” he said.
The bigger issue of the evening however, was that the city only found out about the plan to build the power line a couple weeks before logging on the ridge was set to begin on Nov. 16, though Christensen said the plans had been in the works for about 18 months.
After Oak Ridge contested the plans, the NNSA first responded to inquiries over alternate routes for the power line with a deadline to pick a paint color for the towers. After meetings with city officials, the agency twice agreed to delay logging to consider alternate routes, but ultimately decided to shorten the poles instead.
Logging of areas that wouldn’t impact alternate routes has already been done. The rest of the logging will begin by early February, followed by the power-line construction.
Christensen told the audience the NNSA posted its National Environmental Policy Act categorical exclusions to Y-12 online in April of last year, signaling the to begin the project. “It was available for folks at that point in time,” he said.
“Could we have reached out? Yes, we could have, but we did not,” Christensen explained. “It’s not required, it’s not been our practice of doing that for any of our actions.”
He added that it was always his intention to reach out to the public before logging began so that no one was surprised, but he did not think a power line would prove so controversial in the community.
The Uranium Processing Facility, which the NNSA has pledged to build by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion, will replace aging buildings at Y-12.
