Dear RECA Folks,
This is why I am so concerned also about DOE's RESL Lab at INL. They audit the labs used for DOE, Dod, NRC sites around the country, to insure they are doing the rad analysis correctly - that was dear Dave Sill's job, heading up that aspect prior, to his passing away in 2021 at age 62.
Again, in around 2005, the Bush/Cheney Admin. tried to privatize RESL, but we fought back, with evidence that there were NO private sector companies that could do " comparable work", as the scientists found at at DOE's RESL, who individually each had at least 20 years' worth of experience I was told....
Sill fought to make sure the Plutonium was collected correctly (preserved immediately in the field, not filtered etc.), and then counted long enough, at least 16 hours for good certainty.
Based upon all our dealings with USEPA's rad division counterpart, "NAREL", NAREL has demonstrated that they will not make polluters do what DOE does - at a minimum, count the Pu 16 hours - IF it's a Superfund Site like Uniontown IEL...Then, EPA plays a quite malicious game ,pretending nuclear waste ONLY went to designated places and never got illegally dumped like it was here, where our people then drank it in their well water living in close proximity...To seal the deal , they use the "EPA Finished Drinking Water 900 Method at sites like IEL, which whistleblowers inside EPA told us was never meant for Untreated, "raw" dump water...biasing the crucial test results in various ways.
Hopefully, St. Louis is listening, given the radium there, as well as folks dealing with Fracking wastes laden with radium and elsewhere!...Dear Dr. Julie W. Rice , who passed away a few weeks ago, and I have done our darndest to share what all we have learned from DOE's Sill and others, given our decades' experience working on IEL, where many GOOD sincere Federal agency folks at US EPA . NRC and DOE did try to help us. The problem appeared to be the higher ups, appointees and political hacks, not the scientists doing the hard work.
Cheers,
Chris for CCLT/IEL in OH
Saturday, February 15, 2025 at 06:22:04 PM EST, <mkhunt@libertyandjusticewv.org> wrote: