The Pike County Chamber of Commerce recognized the Portsmouth Site Specific Advisory Board as its 2015 organization of the year, the Energy Department wrote in a Feb. 12 press release.
Established in 2008, the board provides community input and recommendations to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which is responsible for legacy waste cleanup at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant Site, a former uranium enrichment facility near Piketon, Ohio.
The DOE-chartered Federal Advisory Committee Act board provides nonbinding policy advice about the site, including budget, waste management and disposition, decontamination and decommissioning activities, environmental restoration, future land use, historic preservation, and community engagement.
Each of DOE’s 16 active legacy cleanup sites has an associated site specific advisory board. A national Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board also comprises leaders of all the local boards.
The Portsmouth site is one of three former uranium enrichment cleanup jobs managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, along with Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant near Paducah, Ky. Oak Ridge cleanup is furthest along, with Portsmouth and Paducah slated to ramp up under the fiscal 2017 budget request the White House unveiled last week.
DOE faces a roughly $20 billion shortfall for uranium enrichment cleanup work, which the agency estimates will take until the 2040s to complete. The White House has proposed, as part of its latest budget request, tapping into the $1.6-billion United States Enrichment Corp. fund to help pay for the work. The plan would require two acts of Congress: one to authorize any cleanup spending from the fund, which was not created for that purpose, and another to actually appropriate the money for remediation.
