| Alert - letter to Secretary of Energy |
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| Written by Tom Clements | |
| Wednesday, 22 April 2009 | |
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Secretary of Energy Steven
Chu
U.S. Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20585
Opposition to DOE-EM Undermining Blue
Ribbon Waste Panel by Pushing Spent Fuel Storage & Reprocessing at the
Savannah River Site
Dear Secretary Chu:
I am writing to you as a
resident of South Carolina in order to express my deep concern about recent
comments made by Department of Energy officials encouraging spent fuel storage
and/or reprocessing at the Savannah River Site (SRS), located here in our
state.
Comments made by Office of
Environmental Management (EM) officials - Acting Assistant Secretary Ines Triay
and Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Gilbertson - at a public meeting in
Augusta, Georgia on March 18 clearly urged special interests around SRS to
pursue, among other things, spent fuel storage and/or reprocessing at SRS. Further, they pledged EM help in private
pursuit of those projects. Such projects
would be detrimental to the environment of our state as well as to fiscal responsibility
and sound national energy policies and we call on you to stop these EM
officials from promoting reprocessing and spent fuel storage at SRS.
The officials pitched the
idea of an “energy park” at SRS as a place which could accommodate new types of
nuclear reactors, spent fuel storage or reprocessing. It was of great concern that these officials
said that “stimulus” funds being provided by EM could be “leveraged” into
creation of an “energy park” at SRS. The
stimulus money should be used to clean up SRS and other DOE sites and not enable
dirty projects such as spent fuel storage or reprocessing.
Given that you have said that
you will establish a blue ribbon panel to discuss new approaches to spent fuel
management, it is quite out of line for any DOE official to come down here and
already be pushing SRS as a spent fuel storage or re
processing site, something
that we as stakeholders do not support. As
your waste panel will be analyzing spent fuel options, I request that you
instruct DO-EM officials to refrain from undermining the panel’s work with
their promotion of SRS as a spent fuel storage or reprocessing site. EM is damaging the panel’s work and
credibility with its active attempts to influence the outcome of the panel’s
work.
I further request that
citizen representatives be placed on your blue ribbon waste panel and that it
include a cross section of scientific opinion and understanding.
Thanks very much for your
consideration of my views and for your response to this letter.
Sincerely,
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