Staying the Course

The following was an op-ed by UCOR President and Project Director Ken Rueter that was featured in the Oak Ridger.

For the past four years, our company, URS I CH2M Oak Ridge LLC (UCOR), has supported the Department of Energy’s mission of cleaning up the environmental legacies of the Manhattan Project at the former K-25 site, now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP). Together, our goal is to complete in 5-7 years the removal of environmental hazards from millions of square feet of legacy facilities, leaving behind clean land and buildings that will be used by the private sector to bring hundreds of new jobs to the Oak Ridge region.

As the lead contractor in cleanup and reindustrialization of the East Tennessee Technology Park, we have demolished and disposed of dozens of structures, including some 60 acres of the massive K-25 and K-31 gaseous diffusion buildings. The process has generated an enormous volume of debris and waste.  About 95 percent of the waste was placed in the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility, a secure onsite depository designed for safe, permanent storage.

Without the availability of secure, onsite disposal, we would have been forced to send hundreds of millions of pounds of waste by truck to repositories around the country. The substantial costs required for cross-country transportation would have resulted in fewer cleanup activities in Oak Ridge and added years to our cleanup schedule.

Within the next decade, the current waste disposal facility will be full from the materials collected at the ETTP site.  If the community wishes to continue cleanup of deteriorating facilities with environmental hazards at the Y-12 National Security Complex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory—in particular buildings contaminated with mercury—we will need to construct an additional waste disposal facility. In anticipation of this need, the Department of Energy is developing plans for the Environmental Management Disposal Facility.

The new waste disposal facility will be designed and managed like the current facility, which has operated for 14 years without incident.  In contrast to the burial ground approach, the Oak Ridge facilities are engineered and constructed with a liner system that prevents leakage of waste.  A cover placed at closure isolates the waste and prevents infiltration.

In both technology and policy, we have moved far beyond the more primitive method of burying contaminated waste in unlined trenches, without engineered covers, that decades ago in Oak Ridge was the accepted waste disposal standard.  Today, safe operation and continuous regulatory monitoring are the guiding principles of our landfill operations.

The new waste disposal facility will be built only after public input and approval by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the Environmental Protection Agency.   As with the current facility, federal and state regulators will provide weekly monitoring of waste disposal operation, including hundreds of samples used to analyze the surrounding air, groundwater, and surface waters.  The waste currently shipped offsite consists of the more highly contaminated items, about 5 percent of the total volume. We expect this ratio to continue with the new waste facility.

For nearly 15 years the use of onsite disposal has proved to be a safe and cost-effective way to clean up the Oak Ridge Reservation.  If the Oak Ridge community wishes to finish the job at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time, we must stay the course. Providing a new waste disposal facility is a strategy we cannot afford to abandon.