Oak Ridge Today

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…]

Guest column: Selling Oak Ridge to the DOE workforce

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Change in DOE Payroll Chart

by David Stanley

Our city urgently needs to market Oak Ridge to the local U.S. Department of Energy workforce. That workforce brings a billion dollar payroll into East Tennessee each year. Unfortunately, the Oak Ridge economy sees very little of this money.

Over the last two decades, the erosion of DOE residency has cost the City of Oak Ridge a great deal of payroll. The problem looks even worse when one considers the concurrent payroll increase of our city’s competition. For example, over those two decades the gap between the annual Oak Ridge and Knox County DOE payrolls grew by $130 million dollars. That’s just the growth in the gap. The total gap in DOE payroll between Oak Ridge and Knox County is now approximately $270 million dollars per year.

No wonder Turkey Creek and so many new housing developments have gone over there. That’s where the DOE payroll went! [Read more…]