Not everyone in Eunice is overjoyed by these developments.

Rose Gardner, 50, a florist, has been fighting the landfill and the uranium enrichment plant for years, but she says it has been hard to get others to rally to the cause. Local business leaders and politicians on both sides of the state line fully support the projects, and some residents are afraid to speak out against the authorities, Ms. Gardner said.

“I’m all for economic development, but why do we have to sacrifice our health and the environment?” she said.

Image Rose Gardner has been fighting the landfill and a uranium enrichment plant for years. Credit... Erich Schlegel for The New York Times

Nellie Franco, a school librarian, said she and her husband, George, were considering moving after having spent their entire lives here. She can see the landfill from her front yard, past a corral with horses in it. “I don’t want my grandchildren to grow up here,” she said as she watered her front lawn. “They say, ‘It’s safe, it’s safe.’ What if they have a spill?”

Some residents complained that there had been no public hearings on the plan to haul the toxic sludge to the site. Eddie Joe Harper cursed when he was told the sludge would travel on railroad tracks running next to his property. “I hadn’t heard that,” he said. “They keep it all hush-hush.”

But like many residents here, Mr. Harper, who works for a company that does environmental cleanups in oil fields, worries more about leaks from the uranium plant than from the landfill. “It don’t take but one leak and, boom, it would be over with,” he said.

Still, many people in Eunice say the landfill and the enrichment plant were bringing new jobs into a local economy that used to be buffeted by the rise and fall of oil prices. Some even said they considered it a patriotic duty to accept the Hudson River waste, to help clean up America.