Officials from the Paducah, Ky., area met with Department of Energy cleanup chief Dave Huizenga yesterday on Capitol Hill to discuss DOE’s future plans for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant site. With the plant currently being shut down, in an effort to avoid layoffs of the plant’s more than 1,000 workers Paducah officials have lobbied for future uses of the site and an accelerated cleanup of the plant. “Our community has been a strong supporter of DOE and its mission for 60 years and certainly we want to continue that,” McCracken County Judge Executive Van Newberry told WC Monitor following the meeting. “We’d like to see certain things happen— reindustrialization of the site, especially in the nuclear area because we have the workforce to do that and we support it, and especially cleanup needs to be done.”
Huizenga was not able to provide a time frame for D&D work at the Paducah plant, stating it depends on future funding, according to officials. While Paducah officials have been critical of DOE for a lack of information, they hope that the meeting will be part of a continuing dialogue with the Department on the site. “We told them how important it is to us that we have openness and transparency to be able to talk with DOE. So many times we feel like there’s nothing but a wall there. I know they can’t tell us everything, but they can talk with us,” Paducah Mayor Gayle Kaler told WC Monitor.
The officials praised DOE’s recent Request for Offers for depleted uranium at Paducah and Portsmouth, which has an Aug. 14 due date with any selections to be made this fall. “We certainly appreciate them fast tracking the RFO. That’s almost unheard of to have that done in a month,” Kaler said. Charlie Martin of Paducah Economic Development added, “They indicated that there are a lot of factors in the RFO that would lean towards economic development at the existing site and reuse of the assets there at the site.”