| 4/4/2005 3:00:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | Judge: Army taking too long on JPG plan
By: Peggy Vlerebome
Courier Staff Writer
A federal administrative judge says that Save the Valley and the people who live around Jefferson Proving Ground have had to wait too long to find out what the Army intends to do about the radioactive depleted uranium it left behind after testing munitions.
The judge, Alan S. Rosenthal, wrote in a memo Thursday that the “responsibility for this state of affairs cannot be laid at the doorstep of (Save the Valley). Rather, it has been brought about by the conduct of the (Army) over the course of the past five years, conduct that has received to a significant extent the seeming indulgence of the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) staff.”
Rosenthal, who is with the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, wrote the memo to bring his concerns to the attention of the appointed commission. He wrote that he and Paul B. Abramson, special assistant and also an administrative judge, do not have the authority to tell the Army or the NRC staff what to do. The Army had obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in order to test depleted uranium at JPG.
The Army has changed its approach for dealing with the depleted uranium several times, and the NRC staff has repeatedly said it needs more information from the Army for the various proposals.
The NRC staff announced in late 1999 that a hearing could be requested on a license-decommissioning plan the Army had submitted, and Save the Valley’s request for such a hearing was granted in 2000.
“It is now five years later and there has yet to be a single filing by any party addressed to (Save the Valley’s) quite legitimate concerns regarding what disposition is to be made of the amassed DU munitions on the JPG site,” Rosenthal wrote. “And, perhaps of still greater significance, more than a decade has now passed since the testing activities were brought to an end.”
When Save the Valley requested a hearing, the Army asked that scheduling of a hearing be put off because it was thinking about changing what it proposed to do.
More than a year later, the Army submitted a new plan, but the NRC staff said it needed more information, some of it site-specific data that the Army would have to gather at the former proving ground for a part of the process called site-characterization.
The Army, however, said it would be too dangerous to collect the information because of the presence of unexploded ordinance in the same area as the depleted uranium.
“Some eleven years have now elapsed since the licensee (the Army) terminated testing activities on its JPG site that left behind an accumulation of DU munitions,” Rosenthal wrote. “Perhaps more to the point, this past March 23 was the fifth anniversary of the grant of the hearing request of Petitioner (Save the Valley), an organization with members who live in proximity to that site and who profess concern about the site’s condition — a concern scarcely unreasonable given that, according to what the licensee (the Army) apparently represented to the staff, the site cannot now be even characterized without subjecting the personnel and that of contractors to an unacceptable safety risk.”
The Army withdrew that plan in mid-2003 and proposed an approach that never has been tried anywhere. Called a possession-only license, it would be renewable every five years until technology or science enabled the Army to safely gather the data the NRC staff said was needed.
“As a result of its failure over an extended period — justified or unjustified — to provide the information the staff requested, the licensee (the Army) has, in effect, possessed the very POLA (possession-only license) that is the subject of the present proceeding,” Rosenthal wrote. “Indeed, it might be reasonably said that it has had the equivalent of such a license for the entire eleven years or so since it ceased the testing of the DU munitions. It seems highly unlikely that such was the contemplation of the staff or the commission at the time of the grant of the materials license under which the testing was performed — to the contrary, we think it most probable that the expectation was that, upon cessation of operations at the JPG site, a decommissioning plan would be forthcoming in relatively short order.”
The NRC staff says it needs more information before it can proceed with its review of proposal for a possession-only license.
But the Army also told the regulatory commission staff in January that it would submit a letter to clarify its “planned path forward,” as the Army was again considering a change.
Richard Hill, president of Save the Valley, said of Rosenthal: “I believe that he has run out of patience.”
Hill said Save the Valley and its attorneys are “looking into what it does all mean.
“Obviously, it does mean that years have gone by now,” Hill said. “There should have been some concrete direction that they should be going in. It keeps changing all the time.
“The way things are going, nothing is being done.”
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