The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is giving the Energy Department and the state of Tennessee a chance to file more information in a dispute over water discharge standards for radionuclides at the Oak Ridge Site.
EPA Region 4 is seeking a much more stringent standard on water discharges at Oak Ridge than those now used at government and commercial nuclear sites nationally, according to the Energy Department. Jay Mullis, manager of DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, requested in an April 5 letter that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler overrule the Atlanta-based regional office.
Susan Parker Bodine, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, acknowledged in an April 18 letter to the parties the federal regulator has received the appeal letter. Bodine gave the Energy Department 21 days to submit additional materials, and said Tennessee would also have an opportunity to address the DOE documents. It was not clear when exactly the 21-day close would start.
Once EPA headquarters has the additional materials in hand it will schedule a meeting with the parties.
At issue is a dispute dating to 2016 over an EPA focused feasibility study on water runoff and waste disposal standards across the Oak Ridge Reservation. The dispute has major implications on technical requirements for a planned new on-site landfill.
Mary Walker, acting administrator for EPA Region 4, said in a March 21 letter to Mullis that current DOE wastewater standards at Oak Ridge don’t provide enough protection against discharges of contaminated runoff into Bear Creek. The regional office said the Energy Department should reduce reliance on dilution and consider best available technologies at the site, according to the March 21 ruling.
The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) agrees with EPA Region 4, saying DOE should not publish a draft record of decision (ROD) on the new Environmental Management Disposal Facility (EMDF), until the Oak Ridge discharge issue is settled.
The Energy Department’s Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) Project in Utah recently marked 10 years of uranium mill tailings shipments to off-site disposal.
On April 20, 2009, the first load of mill tailings left the Moab site by rail. Today, more than 9.5 million tons of the estimated 16 million tons of tailings have been shipped 32 miles to the project’s Crescent Junction disposal cell, DOE said in an April 22 news release.
In February, the project increased weekly tailings shipments from two to four. In March, more than 73,000 tons of tailings were transported to Crescent Junction, according to the UMTRA website.
The tailings cleanup site sits on a larger 400-acre tract, the former location of an Atlas Minerals Corp. uranium-ore processing facility that operated from the 1950s to the 1980s. Milling is the first step in making natural uranium ore into nuclear fuel; mill tailings are a waste stream containing heavy metals and radium.
Idaho-based North Wind, through its January 2017 acquisition of Portage, is the cleanup contractor at Moab UMTRA through 2021. In April 2016, Portage received a five-year, $153.8 million follow-on task order to its initial five-year contract.
The contractor and DOE are monitoring the potential for flooding this spring at the UMTRA site. Due to winter snowpack levels, the Colorado River’s flow volume is expected to be 120% of average, which heightens the risk of flooding in the area due to runoff, according to the website.
Tailings disposal is conducted four days a week, with maintenance and security staff on-site continuously.
Las Vegas-based Longenecker & Associates has hired Brian Bielecki, a longtime manager with experience at Department of Energy sites and the nuclear power industry, as its group vice president for mission assurance.
The Energy Department subcontractor announced the addition Monday, the same day Bielecki joined the company.
Bielecki, who reports to Senior Vice President for Operations Christine Gelles, replaces Craig Ferguson, who left earlier this year to become the chief operating officer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Bielecki heads L&A’s Mission Assurance business unit, which includes contractor assurance, quality assurance, and safety support provided by Longenecker at DOE sites such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Nevada National Security Site.
“Mission Assurance is one of the core functions of L&A—finding and fixing problems before they impact mission,” CEO Bonnie Longenecker said in the release. She called Bielecki “an experienced problem-solver at both the weapons labs and within the commercial nuclear power industry.”
Bielecki has worked in various management and leadership roles at Exelon Corp., the Illinois-based electric power company, since 2013. While at Exelon he served a 30-month stint for the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) and World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), leading evaluations of nuclear power plant engineering and performance.
Prior to joining Exelon, Bielecki held management team posts within the DOE weapons complex, often as a manager for contractor Lockheed Martin, according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico as director of security and emergency management, and at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York as senior manager for engineering and operations.
