Radioactive soil from Ohio heads to Wayne County landfill next week

Keith Matheny | Detroit Free Press

Up to 124,000 tons of low-level radioactive soil and other materials from a contaminated former military supplier in Ohio will begin arriving at a Wayne County landfill next week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has announced.

The soil and materials are headed for Wayne Disposal Inc., U.S. Ecology's hazardous waste landfill off I-94 near Willow Run Airport in Van Buren Township. Once the soil disposal operation is fully underway, up to 11 tractor-trailers per day, each carrying about 15 tons of contaminated soil, are expected to head north on local freeways from the village south of Toledo to the Wayne County landfill, Army Corps officials said Thursday. There's no indication the shipments would be every day. A U.S. Ecology spokesman said the remediation project could take 8 to 10 years.

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It's part of a major cleanup of what's known as the Luckey site, a long-shuttered beryllium plant in Luckey, Ohio. The plant supplied the strong, light but highly toxic metal to the U.S. military and Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and 1950s.

In addition to beryllium, the soil contains lead and radioactive elements of thorium, radium and uranium. All are linked to increased cancer risk, particularly when inhaled or ingested.

But both U.S. Ecology and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials said the materials do not pose a health or environmental hazard.

"This is stuff that could go into any landfill, basically anyplace," said Robert Skowronek, supervisor of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's Radioactive Materials Unit.

But because it's material from the Army Corps' program to clean up former Atomic Energy Commission sites, "the Army Corps has it in their policies that it needs to go to a licensed landfill or a hazardous waste disposal site," he said.

Officials with the Army Corps' Buffalo District, which is overseeing the Luckey site cleanup, did not respond to messages seeking comment Thursday and Friday. But Stephen Buechi, the Army Corps' project manager for the cleanup, told the Free Press last year that the on-site waste results from the extraction of beryllium over many years, leaving behind low-level radioactive material that's naturally occurring in soils and rock — radioactivity that became more concentrated as the leftover materials accumulated, and is now at levels that exceed federal regulatory limits.

The Army Corps believes approximately 124,000 cubic yards of contaminated soils will require excavation and disposal from the Luckey site as part of a $244-million federal cleanup. A cubic yard of soil weighs about one ton.

Additionally, about 1,000 tons of radioactive scrap metal was shipped to the Luckey site in the early 1950s, in anticipation of converting the plant back to its original magnesium processing activities. The metal was ultimately stored and never used for magnesium production and must also be removed, he said.

Soils with "more complicated contamination" would head to Wayne Disposal under the Army Corps' plan, Buechi said last year.

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David Crumrine, spokesman for US Ecology, which operates the Wayne Disposal landfill, responded to Free Press inquiries with an emailed statement.

"The waste from this site contains very low concentrations of radioactivity that is barely above normal background levels," he said. "The waste is not regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a result of its low radioactivity."

The Army Corps approves of Wayne Disposal for the material due to the high level of environmental protection the facility offers, Crumrine said.

"Employing state-of-the-art waste management practices, safety processes, protocols and equipment, the facility was designed and engineered to safely manage this type of waste," he said.

At the Luckey site, excavated soils will be placed on a conveyor belt that includes a soil sorting system that detects radioactivity. Soils that contain radioactivity greater than cleanup goals are diverted and loaded directly from the conveyor belt into containers for shipment to Wayne Disposal, Skowronek said. Soils below those levels are placed in other stockpiles, and further tested for beryllium and lead levels. Soils above cleanup criteria levels for those metals are also diverted to the Wayne landfill, and those with metals below the clean-up threshold may remain on-site for use as backfill.

"They're going to package it in a big sack, and close the sack up, and that's going to be inside of a roll-off container with a cover," he said.

Hazardous waste requires processing to render it inert before disposal, but because this material isn't considered hazardous, it can be directly disposed of at the landfill, Skowronek said.

The assurances of safety aren't particularly comforting to Sandra Anderson, who lives in a residential neighborhood less than a quarter-mile from the landfill. She says she wasn't notified of the incoming Luckey site material.

"If you're living this close and you don't know, that doesn't seem right," she said.

As Wayne Disposal has continued to expand over the years, both in size and in what hazardous wastes it takes in, Anderson says it leaves her uneasy being its neighbor.

"You don’t know, could it explode? Could something leak? Could something happen?" she said. "Down the road, if they put so much, is something going to happen later on to make everybody sick?

"It's an eerie feeling."

Contact Keith Matheny: (313) 222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow on Twitter @keithmatheny.