By the end of the year, the Department of Energy expects to file final reports with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Kentucky for taking down the C-400 building at the Paducah Site in Kentucky, officials said last week at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix.
The Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study Report for the C-400 Complex should be filed with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection this year, said Myrna Redfield, CEO of Jacobs-led Four River Nuclear Partnership, the cleanup contractor for the former gaseous diffusion plant.
DOE and the contractor expect a record of decision for the project, and its groundwater impact, in 2024, Redfield added. C-400 is a nearly 8-acre or city-block large building used to clean parts and equipment used in uranium enrichment from 1952 until 2014, according to DOE.
A degreasing solvent trichloroethylene (TCE) as well as technetium-99, a radioactive fission product, would ultimately turn up in residential groundwater samples outside the Paducah complex. The groundwater contamination would factor into the former gaseous diffusion plant site being added to EPA’s Superfund list in 1994.
The DOE has been using pump-and-treat technology to address the groundwater issues at Paducah for about 25 years, said April Ladd, a Paducah-based manager for the agency. The C-400 decision documents to be filed with the state and EPA “will develop a path for eliminating the primary source of the TCE groundwater contamination that was discovered off the DOE property in 1988,” DOE said in its “strategic vision” for Paducah released last year.
