DOE to Meet With S.C., EPA in August to Resolve Tank Closure Dispute

South Carolina and the Environmental Protection Agency have refused to give the Energy Department more time to close two liquid waste tanks at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., and the parties are slated to meet in August in an attempt to resolve the deadlock, an EPA official said Tuesday.

In a presentation Tuesday to the SRS Citizens Advisory Board, DOE’s SRS Director, Jack Craig, said the agency asked South Carolina and EPA for about two more years to remove bulk waste from Tank 10, and about a one more year to remove bulk waste from Tank 15. DOE cited technical concerns, and a need to test a new waste-removal process.

The state and EPA did not accept DOE’s argument for blowing the Sept. 30, 2016, deadline written into in the 1997 Federal Facilities Agreement that governs SRS cleanup, and refused the extension.

That prompted DOE on July 12 to invoke the agreement’s dispute resolution process, which begins with talks among agency officials at the site, local representatives from the EPA, and South Carolina officials.

“Right now, we’re in what we call the informal dispute stage, and so we have talks scheduled for next month,” Deidre Lloyd, EPA remedial project manager at SRS, said in the same CAB meeting in which Craig disclosed the dispute.

If the informal talks do not yield a solution, the issue will escalate — eventually, all the way to DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C.. A South Carolina official is hopeful that will not happen.

“We have had to go to a dispute only twice since 1997,” Shelly Wilson, permitting and federal facilities liaison for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, said at the CAB meeting. “And those two times, we did, eventually, work things out.”

While Craig cited technical reasons for the delay DOE requested, Tank 10 and Tank 15 are also plagued by budget shortfalls. In a 44-word footnote tucked into a 70-page SRS liquid waste strategy published in March, DOE warned that with current budgets, it will take until the 2030s to fully clean up and cap off these tanks: more than a decade longer than expected.