The planned release of a draft record of decision (ROD) for a new 2.2-million-cubic yard landfill for the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee has been delayed again, with the new target release date set for Dec. 19, a U.S. Energy Department spokesperson said Monday by email.
The document had most recently been scheduled to drop yesterday. Its release has been delayed several times since May.
Officials from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the state of Tennessee hope to reach agreement on regulating landfill wastewater effluents containing radionuclides prior to issuance of the draft ROD.
The new Environmental Management Disposal Facility would replace the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility, which will reach its capacity limit in the 2020s. Like the existing landfill, the new facility would be built in the Oak Ridge Site’s Bear Creek Valley. It would take low-level radioactive and mixed waste from cleanup at the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The existing landfill holds debris from demolition of buildings by AECOM-led contractor UCOR at Oak Ridge’s East Tennessee Technology Park, which enriched uranium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program for decades.
The DOE’s preferred alternative for the new landfill site was published in September 2018 and the public comment period ended in December. The final ROD would lay out the plan for the landfill.
Jay Mullis, manager of DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, has filed written arguments with EPA leadership saying the agency’s Atlanta-based Region 4 wants to impose tougher standards for management of runoff from nuclear sites elsewhere in the United States.
While EPA has authority at Oak Ridge under the Superfund law, it is challenging long-held criteria on managing radionuclides used under the Atomic Energy Act criteria by DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Mullis asserted.
