By Matthew Cimitile, cimitile@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
Ohio, New York and Illinois are among a dozen states just awarded funds from the federal Department of Energy for environmental clean up.
The three Great Lakes states along with nine others are getting $6 billion in new funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The investment is expected to create thousands of jobs, federal officials announced Tuesday.
Funding will speed the cleanup of soil and groundwater, help transport and dispose of waste and clean and demolish former weapons facilities.
“These investments will put Americans to work while cleaning up contamination from the cold war era,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a news release.
Out of the Great Lakes states, New York receives the most – $148 million. The money will be used to demolish structures associated with a nuclear research reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory and remove contaminated soil and buried pipelines surrounding the Long Island facility.
Funding will also cleanup contaminated soil at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory outside of Albany and help construct a new storage system for high-level waste canisters at the West Valley Demonstration project near Buffalo.
Ohio will get $138 million. Part of it will be used to remove radioactive and chemical contamination from an atomic plant landfill in Miamisburg. The rest will be used to demolish unused facilities, cleanup contaminated soils and prevent further groundwater contamination at a uranium enrichment plant in Portsmouth.
Illinois will garner $99 million to speed the demolition of contaminated facilities and quicken the pace of cleanup activities at Argonne National Lab near Chicago.
The other states receiving money are Washington, Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, Kentucky, California and Nevada.