RE: Scarborough, Tenn

["Mark A. Smith" <web25@charweb.org>]

This is old information, but since I haven't seen many responses from 
actual Oak Ridge people, I thought I'd chip in.

In 1987, I worked with DOE ORO in the environmental program.  During that 
Spring, we established an air monitoring station in the Scarboro area of 
Oak Ridge, which incidentally is just over the ridge from the Y-12 plant 
(there are also channels in the ridge between Y-12 and Scarboro, which 
made the air dispersion modeling interesting).  We had a series of 
meetings in the community at that time regarding the environmental 
monitoring program, as well as additional meetings later when we started 
getting results from the air monitor.  I also recall driving over there 
several times to post the new air monitoring results on the COmmunity 
Center bulletin board.

This air monitoring station was tied into upgrades in the Y-12 stack 
sampling system (e.g., continuous monitors on release points).  We did 
quite a bit of work on modeling and  correlating the data from the release 
points at the site to the air monitoring data from the surrounding stations.

So, for what this is worth, the environmental monitoring program is 
inplace and has been operating in that particular community for about ten 
years.  I do not know anything about recent news from there, having left 
Tennessee a few years ago.

One side note, though - I was always more worried about the water 
treatment plant that sat on top of the ridge between Y-12 and Scarboro 
than uranium releases from the plant.  They used rather large chlorine 
storage tanks for water treatment, which presented a much more dangerous 
scenario, but one with a lower probability of occurrence.

Mark Smith
web25@charweb.org