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SEFOR funding included in Senate bill Thursday, Jul 17, 2008 By Aaron Sadler Stephens Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - For the first time, a bill in Congress contains funding for cleanup of a defunct nuclear reactor site in Washington County. A spending bill pending in the Senate includes $2 million to start work to decommission the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor, called SEFOR. University of Arkansas officials, while pleased, weren't exuberant Wednesday over the funding level recommended by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The university has come up dry repeatedly in its 16-year bid to secure federal funding for the site it owns near Strickler. "I've had my heart broken a number of times on SEFOR, so I haven't counted this money either," said Collis Geren, UA graduate school dean. "It's a good start, though." The earmark sponsored by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., must still be approved by Congress and signed into law. If the SEFOR money survives, it will likely be well into 2009 before UA reaps the windfall. The $2 million would fund initial planning and study for deconstructing the 600-acre site once used for experiments with plutonium. The total cost for cleanup and decommissioning will be at least $16 million. Lincoln has tried to persuade colleagues to fund the project since she entered the Senate a decade ago. In 2005, Congress authorized $16 million for the Department of Energy to begin the work but never approved funding. There was no difference this year in how Lincoln made her funding request to colleagues on the Appropriations Committee, she said. She likened the funding process to waiting for a fruit tree to produce. "We have to tell our constituents we have to be patient, everybody has to be patient," Lincoln said. "Year after year, we make these requests and they kind of ripen. Over time, they ripen." Additional money should be forthcoming as the cleanup moves forward, she said. "I know these things are a process, and you have to take it one step at a time and you have to be patient and deliberate and stick with a timeline," Lincoln said. The reactor was constructed in the mid-1960s as a project of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and a consortium of investor-owned utilities. SEFOR was given to UA in 1975. Researchers stopped work there when they realized the environmental hazards of the site. Geren said the initial $2 million would pay for engineers and scientists to examine the site for environmental hazards like lead and asbestos and radiation at the reactor's core. The study will determine whether radioactive waste was disposed on the site, he said, adding that he is sure there was not. The university maintains that the federal government should be responsible for site cleanup because the government is responsible for building it. Lincoln agreed. "This property was initiated by a partnership with the federal government," she said. "The (government) had a large role to play in it and certainly carried that role with them through the life of this project and the facility." |
