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USA scandal of Uranium Center of Excellence taxpayer ripoff

The “excellence” of this facility was that the radioactive garbage was green-washed as “recyclable,” and Ohio voters were also duped by the promise that it would bring hundreds of jobs, when the final tally was only two full-time inventory managers. I suppose that if spent fuel storage had been added, it would have been called the Center for Real Awesomeness with Plutonium.

Many of the same contractors who had been paid to haul the excellent garbage in were then paid a second time to haul the excellent garbage out in a less-than-excellent shell game that meant lucre for an elite group of crappy corporations. 

Uranium Titan Tumbles  EcoWatch July 12, 2013  By Geoffrey Sea“…….Excellent Extortion Recent developments at Piketon and Paducah make no sense at all without understanding that the working national plan for how to deal with the outmoded gaseous diffusion plants and their massively contaminated sites has been to convert both into “national sacrifice” waste repositories. But you won’t find that plan in any Federal Register notices or Environmental Impact Reports. Rather, it’s the subtext of a hundred different records of decision and formal notifications. The new way to evade those nuisance environmental compliance requirements is for federal agencies and funded corporations to simply not announce what they intend to do.

Exploiting exclusive lease provisions arising from the USEC Privatization Act, aided by exceptionally lousy government negotiating under the Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations, the anticipated waste enterprises at Piketon and Paducah were to be operated at a profit by USEC and its subsidiaries as they “diversified” away from the overly-competitive enrichment business back toward lucrative federal contract work. In accord with this master plan, a “Uranium Center of Excellence” or UCE was established at Piketon in the early 2000s, which collected uranium scrap waste from all over the country, including large shipments from the “cleanup” projects at Paducah, KY; Fernald, OH; and Hanford, WA.

The “excellence” of this facility was that the radioactive garbage was green-washed as “recyclable,” and Ohio voters were also duped by the promise that it would bring hundreds of jobs, when the final tally was only two full-time inventory managers. I suppose that if spent fuel storage had been added, it would have been called the Center for Real Awesomeness with Plutonium.

But when the spent fuel storage plan was ditched quietly by the Obama Administration as an impediment to future electoral success in the Buckeye State, the Uranium Center of Excellence stuck out like a radioactive thumb. Many of the same contractors who had been paid to haul the excellent garbage in were then paid a second time to haul the excellent garbage out in a less-than-excellent shell game that meant lucre for an elite group of crappy corporations. Some of the uranium that had been trucked from Paducah to Piketon has been trucked back to Paducah, just as that facility was being readied for closure and alleged “cleanup.” The mother-lode of excellent uranium trash has been moved en masse to a new UCE at Oak Ridge, TN, which curiously seems to have not much going on in the way of human activity…….http://ecowatch.com/2013/uranium-titan-tumbles/

July 16, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Uranium, USA, wastes