Oak Ridge Today

Opinion: A blueprint for growth, the choice is yours

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By Leonard Abbatiello

Nov. 19, 2015

In a previous article, I pointed out how Oak Ridge has changed. To summarize, we have changed drastically since the mid-1970s, becoming Tennessee average in median income, graduation rates, ethnic and age distributions. We are also heavily in debt, as we continue to spend beyond our means for all of our high quality services.

About 50 percent of our housing is over 70 years old and in various conditions located on lots that are often unsuitable for today’s desired off-street parking. Currently, over 12 percent of all homes are vacant, and those on the market are selling at 75 percent of their initial asking price. All aging residential housing is collectively dropping in both value and desirability. Our low-income population has increased to the point that they are the majority of our residents, and they cannot financially support our high-end services. Today, we are building only 10s of new homes annually, and a large percentage of the Manhattan Era housing remains vacant. Department of Energy radioactive and hazardous waste storage taints the community image as an attractive place to live.

We have evolved to this condition from a city that was given to us citizens debt free in the 1960s and rocketed to be the highest property taxed Tennessee city by 1973. Since then, it has endured a long list of both failed and evaporated DOE promised self-sufficiency projects. Today, DOE self-sufficiency efforts are no longer offered by DOE. Things even got worse following the 1985 fragmentation of all DOE single contractor federal operations, which then made effective local financial discussions impossible. [Read more…]

Controlled burns scheduled on Oak Ridge Reservation

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office is starting a controlled burn of a small forestland area on the Oak Ridge Reservation for prescribed burning at the East Tennessee Technology Park and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Beginning Monday, November 16, weather permitting, a controlled burn was expected to take place on approximately four acres south of West Bear Creek Road near the DOE Central Training Facility southeast of ETTP.

The planned burn is being conducted as an effort to reduce the risk of wildfires and will be overseen by the State of Tennessee Division of Forestry, which maintains fire control equipment, certified burn managers, and trained personnel at the burn area with the support of the Oak Ridge Fire Department and the ORNL forester, a press release said.

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Radioactive components removed from former reactor at ORNL

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Group Photo Radioactive Components Reactor Pool

Federal and contractor employees who worked on the project to remove irradiated components from a reactor pool gather to watch the transport of the shipment offsite for disposition. (Photo courtesy DOE Office of EM)

 

Water was found seeping from a pool at a former reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory one year ago, and in August, workers removed four irradiated components from the pool that produced about 96 percent of the radiation, federal officials said Thursday.

The four irradiated components weigh about 200 pounds each, said the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management, or EM.

Water was found seeping from the reactor pool at the Oak Ridge Research Reactor during a routine inspection in September 2014. The facility, also known as Building 3042, is one of hundreds of Manhattan Project and Cold War-ear structures across the Oak Ridge Reservation monitored by the Oak Ridge Office of EM.

Nuclear research had not been conducted at the facility since 1988, but it still contained the highly irradiated components from those operations. The leak was causing the pool to lose the water that served as a protective, shielding agent for the irradiated components, officials said. [Read more…]

DOE seeks candidates for advisory board vacancies, applications due Sept. 30

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management is seeking volunteers to fill vacancies on the Oak Ridge Site Specific Advisory Board, or ORSSAB. The board is a federally chartered citizens’ panel that provides recommendations to the agency regarding cleanup activities across the Oak Ridge Reservation.

Chartered in 1995 under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the board is comprised of up to 22 members that are chosen to reflect the diversity of gender, race, occupation, and interests of people living near the Oak Ridge Reservation.

The board and its EM/Stewardship Committee meet monthly to discuss and develop recommendations on cleanup decisions and topics such as cleanup strategies, hazardous waste management, and long-term stewardship. The board also reviews the Environmental Management program’s planning decisions and cleanup-related documents. All ORSSAB meetings and its committees are open to the public. [Read more…]

DOE, TDEC, scientist to discuss environmental management at Sept. 22 seminar

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Sue Cange

Sue Cange

A scientist and speakers from the U.S. Department of Energy and Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation will discuss environmental management during a September 22 seminar. It’s the second of three new Community School seminars.

The September 22 seminar will feature Susan Cange, manager of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management; Ellen Smith, environmental scientist and Oak Ridge City Council member; and Chris Thompson, deputy director of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.

The meeting will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., Tuesday, September 22, at the Oak Ridge Unitarian Universalist Church at 809 Oak Ridge Turnpike.

Cange will introduce the DOE Environmental Management program, a press release said. Smith will present on the contaminants released and left behind from the federal government activities in Oak Ridge. Thompson will provide an overview of the monitoring of DOE’s activities in the Oak Ridge Reservation relative to public safety and the environment. [Read more…]

DOE event marks beginning of landmark ecosystem experiment

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Carbon Dioxide Test Chambers

By controlling the temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the test chambers, scientists hope to learn how microbial communities, moss populations, various higher plant types, and some insect groups respond. (Photo by ORNL)

 

GRAND RAPIDS, Minn.—Scientists are getting a glimpse of the future with a U.S. Department of Energy large-scale experiment designed to answer questions about how carbon-rich peatlands will respond to projected warming of the climate and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

SPRUCE, which stands for Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climatic and Environmental Change, was launched Wednesday, August 26, at the experiment site about 25 miles north of Grand Rapids. Among those attending the ceremony were Gary Geernaert and Daniel Stover of DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research; Thomas Schmidt, assistant director for research, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Northern Research Station; and Martin Keller, associate laboratory director of Energy and Environmental Sciences at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The site consists of about seven acres of raised bog in the peatlands of the Chippewa National Forest. The natural spruce bog in northern Minnesota contains more than 10,000 years of carbon accumulated from peatlands and answers to questions related to the predicted warming of ecosystems. [Read more…]

UCOR recognizes small businesses at awards ceremony

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Karen Reeve and Tim Melberg

Karen Reeve, UCOR small business manager, and Tim Melberg, UCOR supply chain manager, present the 2015 UCOR Small Business Awards. (Photo courtesy UCOR)

 

UCOR, the U.S. Department of Energy’s cleanup contractor for the Oak Ridge Reservation, presented awards to seven small businesses at its annual Small Business Awards ceremony, held Monday, July 27, at the Double Tree Hotel in Oak Ridge.

The categories and winners are: [Read more…]

K-31 Demolition: 200 acres now available for development at ETTP

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K-31 Demolition

The last section of the K-31 Building at East Tennessee Technology Park was demolished on Friday, June 26. It’s the fourth of five buildings to be demolished where gaseous diffusion was once used to enrich uranium. (Photo by Lynn Freeny/DOE) 

 

Demolition now complete on four of five gaseous diffusion buildings

Demolition of the large K-31 Building in west Oak Ridge means that 200 acres of flat land are now available for industrial development at East Tennessee Technology Park, officials said.

“It’s the largest parcel of land available at ETTP,” said Sue Cange, manager of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management.

Infrastructure is already in place, including water, sewer, roads, and electricity, Cange said. Also, ETTP is close to Interstate 40, a short rail line, and possibly an airport. (There are plans to build an airport at the site, which is also known as Heritage Center.)

K-31 is the fourth of five gaseous diffusion buildings demolished at ETTP. The site, which has also been known as K-25 and Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, was built during the Manhattan Project in World War II as part of a top-secret federal program to build the world’s first atomic bombs. Officials say it helped to win the Cold War, enriching uranium for commercial nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons.

But operations ended in 1985, and the site was permanently shut down in 1987. DOE then began cleanup operations and—with the help of contractors, a nonprofit organization, and others–is converting it into a large private industrial park. [Read more…]

DOE Oak Ridge names director of facilities, information, reservation management

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Johnathan Sitzlar

Johnathan Sitzlar

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office recently named Johnathan Sitzlar as director of the Facilities, Information, and Reservation Management Division, or FIRMD, in the Office of Assistant Manager for Administration at DOE-ORO.

In this position, Sitzlar directs a staff of 24 federal employees in the FIRMD with responsibility for the development and execution of a variety of programs including reservation management and infrastructure and facility management.

Sitzlar is directly responsible for all support services and reservation management issues on the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation. His duties also include planning and executing programs for the federal workforce designed to provide a clean, safe work environment with all the necessary resources required for ORO employees and customer organizations to fulfill their assigned missions. [Read more…]

Letter: Expansion of DOE waste storage highlights environmental justice problem

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To the Editor:

For years, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 have steered their workers to live in surrounding counties. This has boosted those economies—while lowering our home values, financially burdening our schools, and limiting our retail growth.

Now, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to store more of its nuclear waste here.

In the last four years, our two counties (Anderson and Roane) lost 20 percent of their resident DOE workers, costing us an estimated $93 million in annual DOE payroll.

DOE’s economic favoritism is environmentally unfair and politically dumb. It works against the long-term interests of DOE’s important nuclear programs—which need a strong local political base of support to successfully operate. [Read more…]

DOE offers expanded public bus tours of federal sites in Oak Ridge

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DOE Public Bus Tour

Public bus tours of the U.S. Department of Energy’s facilities in Oak Ridge are now offered nine months of the year. (File photo courtesy DOE/Lynn Freeny)

 

The U.S. Department of Energy’s public bus tour of federal sites in Oak Ridge is now offered to visitors nine months out of the year, versus only summer months as in the past.

This popular tour of the 33,000-acre DOE Oak Ridge Reservation offers visitors a first-hand look at all of the DOE’s Oak Ridge facilities and provides historical commentary on the transformation of the Oak Ridge Reservation during the past 70-plus years.

The reservation-wide tour is a popular attraction for tourists visiting the area.  Since its inception in 1996, the DOE public tour program has attracted approximately 35,000 visitors from all 50 states. The three-hour DOE tour allows visitors to see the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation and learn about its rich history and how Oak Ridge became a secret city of 75,000 people with a mission to end World War II. [Read more…]

Kevin Hall named DOE Oak Ridge Office manager

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Kevin Hall

Kevin Hall

The U.S. Department of Energy has named Kevin Hall as the manager of its Oak Ridge Office. Hall has served as the office’s deputy manager since April 2013.

As manager, Hall oversees the Oak Ridge Integrated Support Center, which provides critical mission support services in the personnel, finance, budget, procurement, legal, security, and emergency management, and employee health and safety on a local and national level, a press release said.

Hall is also responsible for managing the 33,500-acre Oak Ridge Reservation. This function involves managing issues that impact areas surrounding Oak Ridge National Laboratory, East Tennessee Technology Park, and National Nuclear Security Administration Production Office, and leading projects that may affect multiple sites. [Read more…]