For almost five years, Kelli Thompson, a retired lawyer, nature photographer and member of the city of Oak Ridge’s Environmental Quality Advisory Board, has lived in The Preserve, a 1,400-acre, master-planned community and the fastest-growing housing development in Oak Ridge.
Until recently, she has enjoyed her location, partly because she is not far from a wetland with two ponds. It is home to native flowers and wildlife that are subjects of some of the most beautiful photographs she has taken. She sells them from a website.
“It’s the first place where I ever saw wood ducks in the wild,” she said, adding she has photographed waterfowl, red-winged blackbirds, cedar waxwings, yellow warblers and beavers.
A male wood duck is captured in the water at the wetlands at 350 Powerhouse Road, which is property being used by the Carbon Rivers company to recycle wind turbine blades. The photo was shot by Kelli Thompson, a wildlife photographer who lives at The Preserve. She is concerned about the wildlife and the wetlands.
The Preserve is located on the Clinch River at the city’s extreme west end across from the Powerhouse Site, where the wetland is located. On that site a power plant – called the Powerhouse – was built for the Manhattan Project and later torn down.
It provided power for the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant and heat for the thermal diffusion plant, both of which were demolished. Both enriched uranium fuel that was sent to the Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant for further enrichment. Y-12 produced bomb-grade fuel used in the first atomic bomb dropped during World War II, helping to end the war.
Since the winter of 2022-23, Thompson and some other residents of The Preserve have been complaining about a relatively new industry across the river on the Powerhouse Site. The company is called Carbon Rivers, and the residents can see the company’s stacks of decommissioned wind turbine blades.
Carbon Rivers was founded in 2017 by University of Tennessee employees and graduates. In 2022 it won a $25,000 cash prize for being selected by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a Dream Big Small Business of the Year. The company also received the Pinnacle Business Award in the Innovator category presented by the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and USCellular for the company’s success in reclaiming glass fiber from decommissioned wind turbine blades.
The names Powerhouse Land and Carbon Rivers are often used interchangeably. Powerhouse Land LLC owns the property and Carbon Rivers Inc. is operating on the land. Their attorney Sarah Johnson said they are basically the same company.
A great egret takes off from the wetlands at 350 Powerhouse Road in this photo by Kelli L. Thompson, a wildlife photographer and resident of The Preserve.
Eva Li, vice president of operations for the company, told The Oak Ridger the company gets the blades of wind turbines from states such as Indiana, Iowa and Texas. The firm has technology that allows them to recycle the glass fiber from the blades. She said they’re the only company that can do this. The blades are basically mulched into larger pieces than wood mulch, she said. That glass fiber mulch can be used for the creation of other products such as hot tubs or boats, she said, and the resin that is taken off the blades can also be used.
Across the river from The Preserve, residents occasionally hear the Carbon Rivers employees shredding and grinding the blades.
“I’m about as far away from the river as you can get in our subdivision,” Thompson said. “When I walk out my back door, sometimes I hear a constant noise coming from across the river. It sounds like they’re grinding up metal. It’s a huge, loud sound.”
She doesn’t hear the noise often, she said, but she is concerned Carbon Rivers could increase their shredding and grinding of long wind turbine blades.
Told about the complaints, Li said Thursday that the company was initially using the equipment from the log chipping operation that was there earlier. Now they’re using other equipment that doesn’t make noise, she said. Plus, she said, they haven’t taken on turbine jobs for months.
The state of Tennessee allows the company to store no more than 7,770 tons at the Powerhouse site and its site on Western Avenue in Knoxville. If that amount is exceeded, the company could be fined, according to Jeremy Hooper of the Division of Solid Waste Management in the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.
“If Carbon Rivers had to ramp up their shredding and grinding operation to quickly remove a lot of stored blades to the landfill, I think the noise from the grinding would become unbearable,” Thompson surmised.
Li said there had been a problem in the past of exceeding the tonnage, explaining that it’s hard to take on a recycling job and just say they’ll take a certain number of blades when the wind turbines are decommissioned, rather than all of them. But she said that was corrected and monitored.
Thompson has another complaint about Carbon Rivers. “Early last year when I visited the wetland,” she said, “I noticed lots of small chunks of fiberglass the size of tennis balls in the gravel parking lot where the Powerhouse Trail starts.
“I later picked up about five chunks of fiberglass and took them to the December 2024 meeting of the Oak Ridge Planning Commission, which was considering recommending a zoning change to the Oak Ridge City Council, as requested by Carbon Rivers. I told the commission that I was concerned that these chunks were close to the wetlands and a good distance away from where Carbon Rivers is doing their grinding operations.”
No scientific investigations by TDEC have shown Carbon Rivers poses an air or water pollution risk to people in the area, according to Hooper.
Li said the company found out trucks that were taking shredded blades off-site were doing a U-turn on the property and some of their load accidentally fell off. She said the drivers have been instructed to not do U-turns as they leave the property and now those trucks also have covers on their loads.
So, now that Carbon Rivers is operating on land transferred by DOE to the city of Oak Ridge, Carbon Rivers management has asked the city to rezone the acres it owns, which are adjacent to a wetland. (See Related Story).
Thompson said “no trespassing” signs have been seen along a road by the wetland, possibly placed there to prevent people from accessing Carbon Rivers property. “That’s wrong,” she added, noting that the signs discourage people from enjoying the wetland. “The wetland should still be accessible to people for bird watching.”
“We’re bird lovers, too,” Li said. She said there are “no trespassing” signs to stop people from going onto the company’s property where work is being done, but they want the public to visit the beautiful wetlands, birds and wildlife.
Donna Smith is The Oak Ridger’s news editor and Carolyn Krause is freelancer for The Oak Ridger. Krause is a longtime Oak Ridge resident and retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she was a scrience writer.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Concerns on Rivers operation explained; TDEC, company respond