Hey did you see Oppenheimer last summer? Yeah, that was a year ago. Time sure does fly for humans, but it moves a lot slower for nuclear waste. That stuff has eons of time on its hands, which is why dangerous waste used in the development of the first atomic bombs still exist, and now, that waste is making its way to the Motor City.
Well, not the Motor City, but the same county. Wayne County’s hazardous waste landfill, Wayne Disposal, is accepting 6,000 of radioactive cubic yards of soil and concrete and 4,000 gallons of radioactive groundwater from the Niagara Falls Storage Site in Lewiston, New York. Over 250,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste are stored at the Niagara Falls site, a former TNT factory, and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers are hoping to have the site cleaned up enough for industrial use…by 2038. It’s safe to say, the site is a mess of bad stuff from the ’40s all the way until the 1970s. Dangerous waste began showing up from the Manhattan Project in 1944, according to WGRZ:
Beginning in 1944 waste from the development of the atomic bomb by the Manhattan Engineering District began arriving at the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) site.
K-65 uranium rods, in addition to radioactive sludges code-named L-30 and L-50 were routinely transported the LOOW site. Those sludges were stored in a water treatment area of LOOW in 1944.
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Eventually LOOW became the storage site of contaminated Manhattan Project material as far west as St. Louis, MO, and as far east as Deepwater, NJ.
A 165 open-air silo was used to store barrels of K-65 uranium sludge, and that silo housed radioactive material until 1980’s.
As early as 1949, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers realized that radioactive material was seeping into the surrounding soil and groundwater. To begin to remedy the decades-long contamination, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will start shipping the waste to the Wayne Disposal landfill in Van Buren Township, Michigan via 25 trucks a week traveling public roads until well into January 2025, according to the Detroit Free Press:
The New York waste removal, its trucking to Michigan and disposal in Wayne County comply with all local, state and federal regulations for the handling of such materials, said Avery Schneider, deputy chief of public affairs for the Army Corps’ Buffalo District.
“The first thing we look at in all of these projects is how we can do it safely — from the employees on-site who are working around the material, excavating it and preparing it for removal, to the communities around the site, to the folks who are going to transport it out to Belleville, Michigan, to where it can be safely stored,” he said.
Michigan’s waste disposal facility is well-known for taking the worst of the worst when it comes to chemical waste. The train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, while carrying deadly chemicals was heading for Wayne Disposal when it jumped the tracks, caught fire and poisoned the small town.
While radioactive material rolling into town sounds scary to those of us in the metro region, Wayne Disposal is well equipped to deal with this kind of dangerous garbage. It’s just a chilling reminder that, when it comes to radioactive materials, we’ll never be truly done cleaning up the messes we make.