"STEWARDSHIP" is in danger of becoming a buzzword. Once taken to mean the care and conservation of a resource, it now implies the administration of a site that has not - or cannot - be cleaned up entirely, such that the public and environment continue to be protected.

Within the past few years, think tanks such as Resources For the Future and our own home-grown End Use Working Group have begun to produce documents exploring what stewardship should look like at contaminated sites. This is particularly relevant to the Oak Ridge Reservation, where pragmatic voices note that there is not enough money in the entire federal budget to dig up and dispose of all the buried contamination, let alone find a place to accept it for reburial.

On one hand, there are justifiable fears that DOE will attempt to use stewardship as a substitute for appropriate cleanup. On the other hand, there are equally valid concerns that DOE will not fund stewardship at all. In the worst of all worlds, DOE would leave Oak Ridge with site closures of dubious long-term effectiveness and lacking regular monitoring and maintenance.

To date, DOE has refused to commit to long-term stewardship at any of its sites in a concrete way by providing funding. Oak Ridge stakeholders recognize that stewardship is an essential element of site closures and are urging its incorporation into decision documents and life-cycle cost estimates.

The State of Tennessee has already made it clear that a stewardship program must be funded before the State will sign off on any watershed or on-site disposal facility Records of Decision.

This is an opportunity for Oak Ridge Operations to provide leadership within the DOE complex. It can start with a relatively small effort to plan for specific stewardship requirements at the watershed level. This will position DOE to move smoothly into the line-item budgeting necessary to satisfy the State and stakeholders that progress is being made.

DOE ORO knows it can count on us all for support in justifying a comprehensive stewardship program to DOE Headquarters and Congress.

WIPP will open - finally

by Barbara Walton

The Department of Energy issued two Records of Decision (RODs) this past January that affect transuranic (TRU) waste on the Oak Ridge Reservation.

For More

In opening WIPP, DOE has chosen the preferred alternative outlined in the WIPP Disposal Phase Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, DOE/EIS-00260F2, September 1997.

DOE discusses which sites will be used for storing and preparing TRU waste in the DOE Final Programmatic Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement, DOE/EIS-0200-F, May 1997.

Under the first, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, will open after years of delay.

The second ROD discusses the sites that will be used for storing TRU waste and preparing it for shipment to WIPP for disposal.

What is TRU?

"Transuranic" refers to elements heavier than uranium, which are produced in nuclear reactions. For disposal at WIPP, transuranic waste is defined as waste containing more than 100 nanocuries of alpha-emitting transuranic isotopes per gram of waste, with radiological half-lives greater than 20 years.

TRU waste is categorized as either "contact-handled" or "remote-handled," depending on the level of radiation found at the surface of the waste container. Remote-handled TRU waste emits a radiation dose of 200 millirem or greater per hour and requires special handling and shielding.

Up to 175,600 cubic meters of TRU waste will be disposed of in the WIPP. Of this, up to 7,080 cubic meters will be remote-handled. Shipments are limited to TRU generated by defense activities and accumulated in above-ground storage since 1970.

It will also include waste generated for about the next 35 years, including waste generated by cleanup activities.

The WIPP document estimates about 4,800 cubic meters of TRU will come from Oak Ridge National Laboratory through 2033, including waste generated from cleanup activities. Of this, 1,700 cubic meters will be contact-handled and 3,100 cubic meters will be remote-handled. The TRU Waste Management Plan projects disposal of ORNL TRU at WIPP to begin in 2002; final dates are dependent on budgeting.

Plans call for TRU waste at the Oak Ridge Reservation to be stored, treated and prepared on site for shipment to WIPP. The programmatic waste management document has no TRU from other sites coming to Oak Ridge, but it does leave that possibility open if DOE decides on-site storage and preparation is impractical at other locations. The ORR is one of four sites that may receive such outside waste, after "appropriate NEPA review" and agreement by the states.

The LOC provided comments on both these documents. These RODs reflect a significantly better outcome for Oak Ridge than may have been expected without our active involvement.

At the end of May, DOE announced that Foster Wheeler Environmental Corp. will be awarded a $200-million contract to retrieve, treat, package, and certify ORNL's TRU waste for disposal at WIPP.

(Barbara Walton is a member of the Citizens' Advisory Panel)

LOC calls for DOE actions
on Bear Creek Valley, TSCAI

The LOC Board took stands on Bear Creek Valley and the TSCA Incinerator at its May 21 meeting, signing off on three resolutions from the CAP after making minor modifications.

In the first resolution, the Board endorsed an approach to the cleanup of Bear Creek Valley composed of three Records of Decision (RODs). The first two should specify immediate, short-term actions intended to reduce the off-site migration of contaminants to Bear Creek and its tributaries, to limit groundwater plumes, and to otherwise bring waters in the valley into closer compliance with the requirements for Waters of the State.

The third ROD should wait until these short-term actions can be implemented and evaluated. If these actions do not bring about sufficient improvement in the water quality of Bear Creek, DOE should re-evaluate the problem at that time.

In the second Bear Creek Valley resolution, the LOC endorses the construction of a low-level/mixed waste disposal facility on what is known as the East Bear Creek Valley site between the burnyard/boneyard and the Bear Creek Burial Grounds. This facility should be constructed as soon as possible, following specifications appropriate to the Oak Ridge Reservation, its disposal needs and its site characteristics. The facility should be designed primarily for the disposal of appropriate Oak Ridge Reservation low-level/mixed waste, irrespective of its DOE programmatic source.

The third resolution seeks to ensure that operation of the TSCA Incinerator as a national resource does not drain cleanup resources in Oak Ridge at a time of declining budgets in Environmental Management (EM).

Because the services of the incinerator are in demand by other DOE sites to process both low-level waste and low-level mixed waste, the incinerator should provide future services to other DOE sites on a fee basis that will not seriously reduce the Oak Ridge Reservation EM budget. The resulting incineration residues should be exported from the ORR to be disposed of by the originator.

Summer intern joins LOC

The LOC's summer intern this year is Jacinda Russell. A native of Nashville, Jacinda is pursuing a degree in Biosystems Engineering at The University of Tennessee, along with minors in Environmental Engineering and Business.

She hopes to broaden her experience and further her knowledge of the environmental field and related operations through this summer internship.

Upon graduation, Jacinda plans to begin a career in the environmental field.

Health studies seek answers

by Susan Arnold Kaplan

A variety of health questions have been posed in Oak Ridge over the decades. While answering these questions is a daunting task, several attempts have been made to do so.

For More

For more information on health studies in Oak Ridge, see Chapter 5 of the White Paper on the TSCA Incinerator and health issues at East Tennessee Technology Park (K-25), where the topic is explored in detail. Appendix 8 of that paper provides a bibliography of selected health studies performed from 1949 to 1995, listed by title and grouped by year.

This white paper is available for $9.50 from the LOC office or may be read at the Oak Ridge Public Library.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has funded, either fully or partially, a number of preliminary health studies among former and current workers. A few are complete, but none has provided definite answers. Unfortunately, it takes decades to obtain results from such studies. This article summarizes a more in-depth examination contained in the LOC white paper on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Incinerator (see sidebar).

Historically, workers employed at the DOE facilities in Oak Ridge have been included in a follow-up study to evaluate their long-term health. This study includes workers from the 1940s, when the Oak Ridge Reservation was created, through the 1980s. It was initiated by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1964 and transferred from DOE to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in 1992. The overall study was designed to look initially at death rates due to a variety of causes and to compare those rates with other populations having similar age, gender and race characteristics - the general U.S. population, for instance, or other groups of workers.

Some studies of illness rates have been conducted among subgroups of the Oak Ridge worker population as part of this overall study, often in response to findings of the study or to worker concerns. For example, former centrifuge workers at the K-25 Site were concerned about the incidence of cancer among them. This concern led to a pilot cohort study conducted by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, which found more than the expected number of bladder cancers in the group. An expanded study attempted to confirm this finding, but it could not (Cragle, et. al., 1992)

Another such study of illnesses focused on living former Y-12 mercury workers (Albers, et. al., Annals of Neurology, 24: 651-659; 1998) following on an earlier study of death rates among Y-12 mercury workers (Cragle, et. al., 1984)

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is conducting an ongoing case-control study of multiple myeoloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, for NIOSH.

One important contribution in this area is the Oak Ridge Health Studies, which are coordinated by the Tennessee Department of Health and overseen by the Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Panel. The studies stem from a 1990 agreement between the State and DOE, under which the federal agency pays for a group of independent health-related studies. The studies evaluate the health risks to offsite populations from exposure to radioactive and toxic substances released from the Oak Ridge Reservation. The studies are divided into two phases. The first concentrated on a Dose Reconstruction Feasibility Study, which looked to see if there was enough information available to conduct full-scale dose reconstructions for several priority contaminants. The second phase includes dose reconstructions in four areas: releases of radioactive iodine from ORNL, mercury from Y-12, PCBs from throughout the reservation, and cesium and other radionuclides from ORNL. The second phase also includes less rigorous screenings for uranium and a number of other substances.

A recent ongoing study is being performed by Drs. Lockey and Bird on a group of K-25 workers who refer to themselves as "The Exposed." In addition, recent health evaluations/assessments that have been performed are the NIOSH cyanide study and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mercury study. Dr. Edelman, a certified Occupational Physician at Vanderbilt University, has been used by Lockheed Martin Energy Systems as a second-party physician to evaluate some of the claims for occupational exposure.

To date, relatively few epidemiologic studies have been conducted among the populations living around the Oak Ridge Reservation and other DOE facilities. For practical reasons such as cost and availability of data, they largely have been limited to the ecologic type of epidemiologic studies (i.e., those that are based on existing national, state and local mortality statistics). Note that cancer diagnoses have been reportable in the State of Tennessee only since the late 1980s. The LOC white paper provides an analysis of the Tennessee cancer data.

Several ecologic studies have been conducted of populations living around nuclear facilities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Europe. Although some studies indicate increased rates of some diseases or causes of death relative to comparable populations living elsewhere, none has demonstrated a statistically convincing link between an increased risk of disease (with cancer being of primary interest) and exposure to radiation in the local environment.

(Susan Kaplan is a member of the Citizens' Advisory Panel)

Hot Flashes

Al Brooks attends national conference

Al Brooks attended the National Conference on Environmental Decision-Making on May 4 and 5 at the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Knoxville.

The conference covered a wide range of topics, from Risk Assessment to Environmental Management Models. Judging from the presentations, Al reports Oak Ridge stakeholders seem to be well at the front of things. A number of the presentations addressed topics - such as end use, brownfields, stewardship, stakeholder participation and risk assessment - that Oak Ridge stakeholders are already considering. A fully funded private trust was the preferred stewardship funding method, but there was little hope for immediate implementation.

Al presented a critique of EPA risk assessment methodology entitled, "To Bias or Not to Bias - That is the Question ...," conducted a poster session entitled, "The Evolution of the DOE ORR EM Public Participation," participated in an Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry panel entitled, "Partnering for Better Environmental Decisions: Community and Agency Perspectives in the use of Risk Analysis," which focused on the Lower Watts Bar Reservoir Fish Advisory and PCBs Exposure Investigation.

New LOC Web site

The LOC has a new, improved Web site at http://www.local-oversight.org. The site contains a wealth of information on current issues, Oak Ridge history and the LOC itself. It also includes LOC newsletters, the TDEC DOE-Oversight Division's 1997 Annual Report and a rich collection of links to government and stakeholder Web sites.

Check it out and let us know what you think. This is a work in progress that we're striving to improve.

LOC/CAP reps to attend intersite meetings

Four members of the CAP plus the LOC's Executive Director will be traveling to Chicago and/or San Diego to participate in the Intersite Discussion on Nuclear Material and Waste, sponsored by DOE and coordinated by the League of Women Voters. Susan Gawarecki and Fay Martin will attend the San Diego sessions on June 21-23. Fay, Susan Kaplan, and Roger Macklin will represent the CAP at the Chicago workshop on June 25-27. Steve Kopp will also be at the Chicago session in his capacity as an SSAB member. These discussions are designed to explore the interests and issues between DOE sites regarding the transfer, storage and/or disposal of nuclear materials and wastes. The DOE will then use the stakeholder input gained from these sessions when finalizing key decisions.

Alphabet Soup

(Initials and acronyms to make this newsletter and other DOE-related documents easier to read)

CAP = LOC Citizens' Advisory Panel
CROET = Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee
DOE = Department of Energy
EM = Environmental Management
EPA = Environmental Protection Agency
EQAB = City of Oak Ridge Environmental Quality Advisory Board
EUWG = End Use Working Group
K-25 = Oak Ridge K-25 Site
LOC = Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee, Inc.
NEPA = National Environmental Policy Act
NIOSH = National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
ORNL = Oak Ridge National Laboratory
ORO = Oak Ridge Operations
ORR = Oak Ridge Reservation
PCBs = polychlorinated biphenyls
RCERB = Roane County Environmental Review Board
RI/FS = Remedial Investigation/Feasibility Study
ROD = Record of Decision
SSAB = Oak Ridge Reservation Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Board
TRU = Transuranic
TSCA = Toxic Substances Control Act
TSCAI = Toxic Substances Control Act Incinerator
WIPP = Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Y-12 = Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant

June 1998

'Stewardship': The latest word in DOE cleanup

WIPP will open - finally

For More

LOC calls for DOE actionson Bear Creek Valley, TSCAI

Summer intern joins LOC

Health studies seek answers

For More

Hot Flashes

Al Brooks attends national conference

New LOC Web site

LOC/CAP reps to attend intersite meetings

Alphabet Soup

LOC calls for DOE actions
on Bear Creek Valley, TSCAI