Draft2:Kentucky Research Consortium for Energy and Environment
The Kentucky Research Consortium for Energy and Environment (KRCEE) was created in 2003 through the efforts of Senator Mitch McConnell and the Kentucky Congressional Delegation to offer innovative & technically sound solutions to problems facing the environmental restoration and continued economic use of the PGDP and its surrounding areas KRCEE is administered by the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER) and managed by professional staff and faculty at the University of Kentucky.
Background
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP), located in far Western Kentucky, was the last operating government owned uranium enrichment facility in the country. Plant enrichment operations began in the early 1950s as the initial uranium enrichment step for Cold-War weapons development and a growing nuclear power industry.
The now-antiquated gaseous diffusion process was used to produce low-enriched uranium at the PGDP and required extensive water, power, and cooling infrastructure. Site process operations utilized up to 32 million gallons of water per day and reportedly consumed as much electricity as the cities of St. Louis or New York City. The byproduct of the enrichment process, depleted uranium feedstock, is stored at the PGDP for re-enrichment, recycling or disposal and comprises the largest stockpile of mined uranium in the world.
When industrial enrichment operations ceased in May 2014, the PGDP continued to employ more than 1,400 skilled workers and scientists to address the complex tasks of de-activating plant facilities, implementing plant decontamination and decommissioning, and continuing environmental restoration activities.
Mission
The Consortium’s mission is to provide technical support regarding non-consensus issues associated with clean-up efforts at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP), a National Priority List (NPL) Superfund site to the following organizations
- Department of Energy (US DOE)
- Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA)
- Kentucky Division of Waste Management
Paducah vision
In 2009, KRCEE was asked to develop a community-based future vision for the PGPD that would identify the range of community perspectives and preferences for the site’s future after US DOE closes the facility. paducahvision.org was constructed to document the project, as well as to provide important information relevant to potential future uses of the PGDP facility.
Objectives
The Kentucky Research Consortium for Energy and the Environment (KRCEE) at the University of Kentucky has been charged with soliciting and integrating public, regulatory, and technical community input to produce a publicly approved End State Vision Report for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP) and surrounding impacted areas. To this end, KRCEE personnel will:
- Identify community, regulatory, and technical stakeholders Solicit stakeholder input regarding potential end states for the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant
- Provide technical support to foster stakeholder understanding of technical issues
- Facilitate multiple public meetings to further develop and integrate end state visions
- Provide document support and facilitation for the development of a “PGDP End State Vision Document” that, while not decisional, will be available to inform future Department of Energy decisions related to the disposition of the PGDP
Guiding principles
The Paducah Future Vision Project was guided by four underlying principles:
- The project was designed to incorporate the recommendations of a report entitled “The Politics of Cleanup” (ECA, 2007) that reviewed past US DOE community involvement strategies at three major DOE facilities: Rocky Flats, Mound, and Oak Ridge.
- The project was designed to maximize citizen control, as defined in the "Ladder of Citizen Participation” (Arnstein, 1969). Not only did the ladder provide a guideline for use by the team, it served as a way to gauge public perceptions about past and current levels of community involvement, as well as preferences for future involvement.
- A key to the potential success of the project was to involve as large and diverse a group of stakeholders as possible. Consequently, a community engagement process known as “Community-Based Participatory Communication” (CBPC) was used. CBPC has been described as “a process of raising consciousness and deep understanding about social reality, problems and solutions, rather than persuasion for short-term behavioral changes that are only sustainable with continuous campaigns” (Dagron, 2001). In particular, an attempt was made both to solicit stakeholders’ values about their local community and preferences for future uses of the PGDP property and to actively involve stakeholders in developing the overall decision-making process and scenarios for consideration.
- Finally, the “Structured Public Involvement” (SPI) engagement process was selected to further maximize stakeholder participation, as well as to insure that the final set of possible future vision scenarios included the full range of stakeholder suggestions During the implementation of SPI, each public meeting participant is given a small keypad transmitter (about the size of a credit card) that provides the opportunity to respond anonymously to different questions. The collective feedback can be displayed instantly to all participants. The data also can provide more detailed information for analysis through something called the “Casewise Preference Model” (Bailey et. al., 2001), helping to identify clusters of stakeholder likes and dislikes, and even more importantly, predicting preferences and aversions for possible scenarios not explicitly considered. The latter capability becomes increasingly important as the complexity of land use possibilities increases, making it unrealistic for the public to evaluate all possible scenarios.
Contact
- 2540 RESEARCH PARK DRIVE
- LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY 40511
- tpinkerton@uky.edu
- PHONE: 859-257-0224[1]
Related
External links
- https://ukrcee.org/
- https://paducahvision.org - Former site