Congressman Worries About Nuke Waste Facility in Oak Ridge
February 13, 2007

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp has strong concerns about locating a nuclear waste processing facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Department of Energy installation is one of 11 sites being studied as part of the Bush administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

The strategy would reverse the country's long-held policy banning the reuse of spent nuclear fuel, which is now stored at nuclear power plants around the country awaiting the long-stalled opening of a permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The plan also envisions U.S. companies selling reactors and fuel to developing countries, with the fuel returning to the United States for reprocessing.

"We're really not aggressively going after it," Wamp, a Chattanooga Republican who represents Oak Ridge, told The Chattanooga Times Free Press.

"Once we modernized our facilities (in Oak Ridge) and moved away from the Manhattan Project era, we do not want waste. We do not want to process waste. We do not want waste coming in. We want waste leaving Oak Ridge," he said.

Supporters, however, see the economic benefits of locating some or all of three proposed facilities - a recycling center, an experimental advanced recycling reactor and an advanced fuel cycle research facility - in Oak Ridge.

"The jobs are important," Lawrence Young said. "And the expertise is just as important. Oak Ridge truly wants to stay at the forefront of this technology."

Young heads the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee, an Oak Ridge group that finds commercial uses for former government facilities. The group received a DOE grant of $894,704 in January to study Oak Ridge's potential for the nuclear waste processing operations.

The 10 other candidates include five owned by the Energy Department, including the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. Others include the Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, uranium enrichment sites and the Hanford nuclear site in Washington.

Public hearings at the various sites began Tuesday in Oak Ridge, with proposals to be submitted to DOE in about 90 days. Oak Ridge officials say the state will have to OK the local plan, and Congress will have to fund it - at potentially $20 billion to $40 billion.

Sherill Greene, director of the Oak Ridge Lab's nuclear technology programs, said recycling the waste is better than storing it.

"I feel a personal responsibility to my children," he said. "I think about the world they are going to inherit. We have got to solve this problem, and this is an approach that we can take."

But the Union of Concerned Scientists interest group said any community hosting a reprocessing facility "will by necessity become a long-term dump for spent fuel shipped from nuclear plants around the country."

"Even if this spent fuel is eventually processed," said Ed Lyman, the group's senior staff scientist, "the residual highly radioactive wastes will have to stay where they are generated unless another site and be found to take them - an unlikely prospect."