WASHINGTON -- Kentucky political leaders are alarmed about a plan being considered by President Bush to slash $400 million from cleanup funds for dozens of former nuclear weapons sites, including the Paducah uranium plant.
Gov. Paul Patton and the state's delegation to Congress engaged in lengthy negotiations with the Clinton administration last year to boost federal spending to clean chemical and radiation contamination around the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which processed uranium for nuclear weapons.
Those efforts paid off in an agreement to add nearly $50 million to the Energy Department's $41 million cleanup budget for Paducah.
The prospect of a setback in fiscal 2002 has Patton and delegation members writing letters to defend the spending. Meanwhile, the proposed cut is being met with anger from some Paducah plant neighbors and environmentalists.
"You could almost see it coming," said Ronald Lamb, who owns Lamb Alignment, an auto repair shop in Kevil, Ky., near the Paducah site.
Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Republican whose district includes the Paducah facility, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said they intend to push hard for enough money to keep the decontamination and cleanup project moving ahead at Paducah.
"I'm not going to view (the proposed funding cut) as set in stone," Whitfield said. "We're going to continue our efforts to obtain adequate funding to keep the cleanup on schedule at Paducah, and I'm sure that many other people around the country will be doing the same thing."
The Energy Department is spending $6.2 billion this fiscal year on its various cleanup projects nationwide. A cut of $400 million represents about 6.5 percent of that total.
But Paducah, which ranks 15th in cleanup spending on the department's list of 65 contaminated sites around the country, stands to suffer more because it isn't among the top 10 sites. About three-quarters of DOE cleanup money goes to the 10 worst sites, a list headed by the Hanford nuclear reservation in Richland, Wash. Environmentalists have labeled Hanford the nation's most contaminated nuclear site because about 60 percent of the country's entire volume of nuclear waste is there.
At Paducah, the clean up is of contaminants including radioactive plutonium, uranium and technetium, as well as beryllium, chromium, arsenic, PCBs and various other oils. The site has cylinders containing an estimated 486,000 metric tons of depleted uranium, and 52,000 drums of various chemical wastes.
Even the current budget's $90 million isn't enough to clean up the Paducah site, government auditors have said.
The General Accounting Office, the nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress, has estimated a minimum commitment of $124 million a year would be needed to make notable progress toward ridding the 3,400-acre Western Kentucky complex of the worst radioactive and hazardous materials that threaten the environment and public health.
The GAO has said it will take about $1.3 billion to meet a previously agreed cleanup deadline of 2010. The state wants even greater spending, estimating the cleanup cost as high as $3 billion.
Patton repeatedly has told Congress that $200 million a year would be needed at Paducah to comply with the 2010 target date. At the end of last week, the governor was preparing a letter to Kentucky's congressional delegation and to the Bush administration reiterating his concern about losing ground on the Paducah project.
BUSH, WHOSE budget for fiscal 2002 is expected on Capitol Hill by the end of the month, is looking at various cuts in the Department of Energy, including a recommendation from the White House's Office of Management and Budget that $400 million be trimmed from cleanup spending nationwide.
But the administration isn't going public with its budget plans yet.
"We are trying to work through issues," said department spokesman Joe Davis. "But we are not commenting on any of the specifics."
Whitfield and House colleagues from other states that have contaminated facilities last week sent the second of two letters to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham urging an increase in cleanup spending.
"The president obviously is putting additional money into education and the military and some other areas, including tax reduction, and this is just his proposal for his budget," Whitfield said. "I'm sure the compromising will be started soon."
In their Feb. 14 letter to Abraham and OMB director Mitchell Daniels Jr., Whitfield and House members of both parties said the decontamination budget "must realize a significant increase to continue its legally binding cleanup commitments with our states in order to reduce long-term costs to the American taxpayer."
"A budget request below the necessary amount will result in delays and higher long-term costs to the American taxpayer," the lawmakers said, "not to mention added threats to the environment surrounding these former weapons production sites and legal actions by states against the federal government."
McConnell, in a statement released by his office, said the Paducah cleanup "remains one of my top priorities."
Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., also issued a statement, saying that reducing Paducah cleanup money "would be completely unacceptable to me." He cautioned, however, that "it's a bit early to get all up in arms about these reports."
LAMB, A MEMBER of the Site Specific Advisory Board, a citizen's group that monitors cleanup activities at the Paducah plant, said he wasn't surprised by talk of cutbacks in cleanup funding.
"Basically the people (Bush) put in place I don't think will see the same standards of clean up as the Clinton administration had. They don't seem to be that environmentally inclined," Lamb said.
But Al Puckett, a Western Kentucky farmer who worked at the plant for 12 years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, said he doesn't think the amount of money is the issue.
"I don't think that plant can be cleaned up. I think it's so contaminated," said Puckett, who lives about a mile from the site. "I think what they ought to do is put a fence around that place and just leave it, because any money they spend will be wasted money."
But Tom FitzGerald, who heads the Kentucky Resources Council, an environmental group that lobbies primarily at the state legislature, said Paducah's problems aren't hopeless. He warned, though, that a cut in cleanup money now would inflict long-lasting damage on the DOE's standing with the public.
"They could undercut and erode overnight whatever modicum of credibility they started to reestablish with communities," he said. "It is not only unwise, but is a slap in the faces of these communities who have already paid more than their share for the defense effort."
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