Update--August 2007:

CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION UPDATE:
The Investigations and Oversight (I&O) and Energy and Environment Subcommittees of the House Committee on Science and Technology conducted their initial hearing on the SREL funding situation on Tuesday, 17 July 2007. A second hearing was held on August 1st. Witnesses included: Mr. Clay Sell (Deputy Secretary of Energy), Dr. Paul Bertsch (former SREL Director), Ms. Karen Patterson (Chair, SR Citizens Advisory Board), Mr. Jeffrey Allison (DOE Manager, Savannah River Site), Ms. Yvette Collazo (SRS Assistant Manager for Closure Projects), Mr. Mark Gilbertson (DOE Deputy Assistant Manager for Engineering and Technology, EM), and Mr. Charlie Anderson (DOE Principal Deputy Assistant Manager, EM). Click here for information on the second hearing, including the hearing charter and testimony of the witnesses.

UGA's DECISION:
The future of SREL is uncertain no longer. In a 15 June 2007 letter from UGA President Adams to DOE Secretary Bodman, Adams committed to closing SREL within about one year. Approximately 40 SREL employees were terminated on 30 June and the appointments of six UGA-tenured faculty are being transferred to the Athens campus. The few employees who remain at SREL will work toward completing outstanding commitments on the Lab's 40+ active external grants, and then will close the facility.

Interestingly, just as UGA was moving to close SREL, they announced the opening of the Eugene P. Odum School of Ecology on the University's Athens campus. UGA President Adams stated “The creation of the School of Ecology is a historic commitment by the university to this essential field of study. Environmental issues are key as we think about economic success and sustainability for our children and grandchildren." There was no mention in the press release about the closure of SREL, which was one of Gene Odum's greatest legacies, or about how UGA can rationalize closure of SREL with President Adams' statement above.

Summary of how SREL got to this point:

The Savannah River Ecology Laboratory’s (SREL) funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was exhausted on May 31, 2007. The DOE or its predecessor had supported SREL for ecological research and environmental education for 56 years.

During 2006, SREL has worked with Savannah River Site (SRS) representatives to implement a new 5-year cooperative agreement with task-based funding, similar to what has been used for the past 20+ years. According to written and verbal communications from DOE, the funds to complete these tasks were available at the SRS. However, these funds have not been released to SREL. Instead, DOE officials in Washington DC have required SRS managers to route everything concerning SREL to Washington DC, where all requests for SREL funding are rejected as being unnecessary to the DOE or SRS missions.

Some Friends of SREL believe that lack of DOE funding for SREL is entirely politically motivated (see Our perspective). Over several months in 2006, SREL worked in good faith with SRS DOE managers and contractor personnel to identify research tasks that are needed on the SRS. SREL was required to submit one to two-sentence descriptions of these projects to DOE-HQ in Washington, DC for approval. These tasks were then subjected to a sham “scientific technical review” in DC and summarily rejected. SREL tasks included some projects that other organizations on the SRS had approval to do, but simply didn’t have the time or personnel to complete. They also included many projects that address "knowledge gaps" identified in the recently released draft "DOE-EM Engineering & Technology Roadmap" document (see Talking points for detailed information). Apparently these tasks were only worthy of funding if some group other than SREL performed them.

SREL was notified on May 7th, 2007 that no additional funding would be provided to SREL in FY2007, despite the fact that the research tasks proposed for funding were approved and requested by SRS managers, and that it was already more than two-thirds of the way through the 2007 fiscal year.

SREL programs are more important than ever. Independent environmental evaluation is critical for SRS programs that will process new nuclear materials brought to the SRS and current SRS processes that will leave residual high-level waste in place forever. Citizens of South Carolina and Georgia have every right to be concerned about wastes on the SRS that have leaked into the environment. Independent scientific investigations of these wastes are critical to understanding their long-term effects on citizens who are exposed to them as well as the environment.

If YOU contact your congressional representatives and tell them that SREL is important to you, then SREL still has a chance to survive. Contact with the South Carolina representatives is especially important. A phone call to Secretary of Energy Bodman will also reinforce the importance of SREL to a variety of constituents (see What YOU Can Do).

Please, cc your letters to: friends@savesrel.org