Note: Please see commentary below this articleWayne, at last, gets good news about thorium
Friday, July 7, 2000By JUSTO BAUTISTA
Staff Writer
The Bergen RecordWAYNE -- Finally. The cleanup of radioactive-waste-tainted soil from the infamous W. R. Grace & Co. site is entering its final phase, federal and local officials told anxious residents at a town hall meeting on thorium Thursday night.
"Would you believe the final phase?" acting Mayor Judy Orson told two dozen residents at the meeting.
Residents who have been living the cleanup nightmare since 1984, when the federal Department of Energy took over the site, seemed relieved, but they still expressed concern, especially over the risk of cancer.
"I have cancer. There is a lot [of cancer] on the street. You start raising questions," said Robert Kehoe of Tilghman Drive. Kehoe's street is less than a quarter-mile from the 6.5-acre cleanup site on former Grace property at Black Oak Ridge and Pompton Plains Cross roads.
Kehoe later said his doctors told him his cancer was not caused by the Grace site.
Councilman Joseph DiDonato Jr. said it is time for a thorough cancer survey. If high rates are found, he said, "these people have the right to sue the government."
The township had a "limited' cancer study done in the early 1990s near the site. Its consultant concluded that there may have been some increases in cancer, but that was during the 1970s, when Grace was still operating the thorium-extracting plant, said Heather Vitz-Delrio, the township engineer.
Radiation expert David Hays of the Army Corps of Engineers said the air, water, and soil are being monitored during the cleanup.
No contaminants "are leaving via the water or the air," Hays said.
Corps and environmental officials working on the project were assembled by Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, whose cleanup efforts drew the applause of residents and township officials.
"We are not going to hand this property over to the township of Wayne until it is up to residential standards," Pascrell said.
In the final phase, workers will remove 17,000 cubic yards of subsurface soil and demolish a two-story masonry building on the property. The demolition, to begin in August, will take eight weeks, he said.
There will be a five-year monitoring phase after that, Pascrell added.
So far, the cleanup has cost an estimated $92 million. The final tab may be $107 million to $130 million.
The Energy Department took over the site in 1984, and the Corps of Engineers now oversees contractors who are excavating, monitoring, and cleaning the property. Much of the contaminated soil has been hauled to a radioactive waste site in Utah.
Pascrell said the Wayne site is the only cleanup project in which the combined efforts of local and federal officials have forced a company to contribute. In this case, Grace has paid $31.7 million, supplementing federal funding.
The cleanup is expected to be completed by November 2001, Pascrell said.
Corps project manager Joe Forcina assured residents that there is no contamination of township drinking water.
Staff Writer Justo Bautista's e-mail address is bautista@bergen.com
Commentary by J Truman, Director, Downwinders:
07/09/2000The clean up of this dreadful site has up until recently all been going to Envirocare for disposal. But since the Army Corp has taken over the job of saving us all from the Fusrap waste sites and started speeding their clean up, other sites are getting waste -- and as in this case unlicensed sites.
Now a good share of the waste will be sent to Blanding, Utah and the IUC White Mesa Uranium Mill for recycling. Previous contracts will still be also sending waste to EC. Goes to show you that it doesn't matter right now WHO gets the damned disposal contract, it will still most certainly end up in Utah, up north, or down south.
And what waste being sent by the Army Corp to "new" unlicensed sites in Utah end up at similar unlicensed and out of sight out of mind, un-sexy to organize opposition to, sites in Idaho, Texas, and wantabe's out there craving their own cut in Washington State and New Mexico. But Utah remains the number one chosen graveyard.
This latest bunch which IUC has asked for a license amendment from the NRC to accept as alternative feed is an interesting case. Up until now IUC has been using the excuse of recycling the waste it gets to extract sellable uranium. Well this is thorium wastes. Very low uranium - far too low to peddle the profitable sale of recovered uranium. So has IUC now gone into the recycled thorium business too? And does anybody but a few noisy folks from southeast Utah give a damn?
Doesn't matter who gets it, or where they are located, though as Utah will still get the waste. Fighting disposal of nuke waste in Utah must always keep this fact in mind. It isn't just a northern Utah problem and dealing with issues there won't stop the flow, especially when Blanding is getting more and more waste, is unlicensed and is not a dedicated disposal site, designed to be used only for such purposes. And right there with IUC sits the mill at Ticaboo ready to grab its share as soon as it can slide through the process. So to stop waste dumping in Utah, all such dumping has to be stopped, or it will only migrate to the opposite end of the state, regardless of which disposal facilities we are bitching about.
Sadly few pay any attention to what is rapidly becoming Utah's biggest dump problem -- the covert, defacto dumps down south.
As always,
J Truman
Letter to Justo Bautista, Staff Writer of The Bergen Record
By So. Utah Resident Duke Hayduk
Justo,
As I, and my unsuspecting, obedient, and trusting neighbors are on the receiving end of the "good news about thorium" being removed from your area, it's BAD NEWS to us.
I recommend that if you are assigned to do more stories on the subject you cover the story from the standpoint of the folks who, in spite of repeated objections to state and federal agency personnel "in charge" of such commercial, money-making activities, are having nuclear mixed toxic waste dumped on us after it's "cleaned up" at places like yours.
I've noticed that in every case I've run across where nuclear waste is being removed from someplace, there is never any concern about where it's going to, and how the people there feel about having it dumped on them.
We hate it here, but we can't seem to do anything about it.
In our case, a Canadian/Swiss-owned company, International Uranium Corporation, is being paid handsomely to take thousands of tons of mixed waste from all over the United States and dump it here--about 2.5 miles south (downwind) of a strict Mormon (LDS) town, Blanding, Utah, where people are well trained not to question authority, and about 2.5 miles north of a small village of White Mesa Ute Indians (downstream), where they strongly oppose the dumping, which is, or will likely contaminate their wells, and which is being, and has been done on top of ancestral gravesites.
Theoretically, this foreign-owned company operates a Uranium Mill and removes residual Uranium and by-products and sells it to make money. In reality, the company is making profits on the approximate ratio of $7 for receiving and storing the nuclear toxic mixed waste here (upstream of my home, directly over the aquifer our town of Bluff uses for culinary water, and exactly on the edge of Cottonwood Wash, which drains directly through the middle of our town into the San Juan River) for every $1 it obtains through milling and selling residual amounts of Uranium and by-products.
Further, as you may or may not know, this company is required to provide a surety bond to cover the inevitable clean-up of the dump once the company receives all the nuclear toxic mixed waste it can be paid handsomely to take and then closes up shop and walks off into the sunset counting our money. It is a commonly accepted fact that the surety bond amount will prove woefully inadequate and U.S. taxpayers (you, Mr. Batista, and all the rest of us suckers) will end up paying, in ill health and its relatives--sadness, unnecessary financial/psychological costs, premature death--and monetary costs, for whatever kind of slipshod-if-well-meaning, temporary "clean up" can be effected.
That, at least in my view, is the other side of the coin you chose not to flip over.
Duke Hayduk
Concerned Citizen
Downhill and downplume from the de-facto Nuclear Toxic Mixed Waste Dump at White Mesa.