The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in recent weeks approved the final design for a new On-Site Disposal Cell at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
The Department of Energy received the approval within the past month or so, Joel Bradburne, deputy manager for DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, said Thursday on the sidelines of the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz.
“It was designed to a pretty robust standard,” Bradburne said. The next step will be Ohio EPA approval of the waste acceptance criteria for the $900 million facility to store 2 million cubic yards of contaminated waste resulting from demolition of buildings once used for uranium enrichment at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Bradburne said he does not know when that might occur.
The waste that goes into the on-site facility will be basic construction material, Bradburne said. This includes building debris, structural steel, and electrical components that don’t have anything more than surface radiation contamination, he added.
The mayor of nearby Piketon, Ohio, said February flooding in the area reinforces his point that the Department of Energy should not build the disposal facility.
Heavy rains forced the Pike County Board of Commissioners to declare a state of emergency Feb. 11 due to flooding of the Scioto River and flash flooding that washed out roadways, Mayor Billy Spencer noted by email last week.
The county typically gets about 44 inches of rain annually, but it received roughly 60 inches in each of the past two years, said Spencer, a longtime opponent of the project. “My point is as we have always been saying, it is just too wet here for a hundred-acre nuclear dump.”
Area residents fear potential contaminated runoff from the cell during such heavy rains could pollute local tributaries or have other environmental impacts.
Bradburne, however, said the facility is being built to hold up under wet weather. “It’s not a landfill, it’s an engineered facility,” built to protect the environment, Bradburne said of the cell.
With concurrence of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, DOE in June 2015 issued the final record of decision (ROD) laying out plans for the cell. Piketon and other local governing bodies have been unable to persuade the agency to reopen the ROD, which found the cell posed no major environmental risk and is a good way to dispose of waste with low levels of contamination.
Spencer said he is undaunted by the fact that site preparation work on the disposal cell is well underway: “They are continuing to work. We are continuing to fight.” He added DOE Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White, and her staff, have met with local foes of the project.
The work is progressing well, Jeff Bettinger, Portsmouth site lead for the PPPO, said during the conference. “We have the first cell excavated and are installing the liner on it right now,” he said during a panel discussion on the cleanup of the Energy Department’s former gaseous diffusion sites at Portsmouth and Paducah, Ky.
Workers are expected to start demolition of the Process Building X-326 in 2020. Material from this 30-acre building will be the first waste to go into the facility starting in fiscal 2021.
