Georgia Funded to Monitor Radioactivity at Savannah River Site

WASHINGTON, DC, May 4, 2004 (ENS) - The U.S. Department of Energy announced Monday that it will provide the Georgia Department of Natural Resources $300,000 to continue its radiation monitoring activities of the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons plant through December 2004.

The extension will provide the Georgia Department of Natural Resources with more time to evaluate its needs for future monitoring and arrange for alternate funding. The grant also requires that Georgia provide the Department of Energy any analysis of data and/or statistical evidence that would suggest the Department of Energy's own monitoring program be revised.

"At the request of Governor Sonny Perdue and Georgia Representatives Max Burns and Charlie Norwood, we granted this additional funding to ensure continued operations of monitoring through the end of the calendar year," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. "We believe this is a reasonable request."

To date, the Department of Energy has provided the state of Georgia $2.2 million for monitoring activities.

Current waste management practices at the Savannah River Site threaten to make the watershed of the Savannah River into a high-level nuclear waste dump, according to a report issued in March by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nonprofit research organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland.

The report, details tritium contamination of the Savannah River and the environmental injustice caused by contamination to those who subsist on fish from its waters.

The Savannah River Site (SRS) on the Georgia - South Carolina border produced more than one-third of the plutonium for U.S. nuclear bombs, as well as almost all of the tritium, and other nuclear materials for the U.S. weapons program. Past waste dumping and mismanagement and a failure to implement a sound cleanup plan have created extensive water pollution beneath the site as well as risks for water resources in the region.

"Current cleanup policies at SRS will very likely leave a million or more curies of radioactivity in high-level waste on the Savannah River Site," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, IEER president and principal author of the report. "The DOE is turning SRS into a de facto high-level radioactive waste dump."

Makhijani says the Energy Department should "urgently" develop plans to recover buried radioactive wastes and highly contaminated soil, so that the main sources of water pollution over the long term are minimized.

"We are going to work in a bi-partisan way in the state of Georgia to hold the federal government's feet to the fire," said State Representative Nan Orrock, a Democrat, Majority Whip of the Georgia House of Representatives. "The Department of Energy simply must not be allowed to put our most precious natural resource - water - at risk in this appalling way."

"All that we want is a bi-partisan measure to put back into funding the testing for tritium and other radioactive products in the river," said State Representative Ron Stephens, a Republican who represents Savannah. "My constituents drink this water."

"There are serious problems that need to be dealt with in an expeditious manner, properly and correctly," said State Senator Regina Thomas, a Democrat who represents Savannah. "There are contaminants in our water supply and the Department of Energy should create a cleanup plan so as to eliminate pollution of our water."