Toxic remnants of the Manhattan Project are one step closer to being completely removed from a 19-acre storage site according to the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).
Phase 1 of the so-called Balance of Plant remediation at the Niagara Falls Storage Site has been completed.
Over the course of the last two years, more than 1,600 truckloads of material, totaling more than 26,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil have been removed from the storage site in Lewiston and transported to a facility in Texas.
The plan for Phase 1 included excavation of soil from 102 locations at the NFSS. According to the USACE, 101 sites have been excavated and restored.
So what exactly was removed? The USACE says that excavated soils included technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material (TENORM), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and chlorinated volatile organic compound (CVOC) contamination.
The sole remaining zone that still requires cleanup is mostly contaminated with CVOC waste.
Funding for Phase 1 was approved under the Biden administration and cost a little more than $44M.
However, remediation at the NFSS is not complete. Phase 2 and 3 of the project will focus on removing waste in the Interim Waste Containment Site, a 10-acre above ground storage cap that houses 193,230 cubic yards of radioactive waste and residues, mostly originating from the Manhattan Project work that was done in WNY.
“We’ve been actively working phases two and three while we’ve done phase one,” said Brent Laspada, project manager at the NFSS. “But now that we’ve opened up and cleaned that footprint, we’re in a position to where we could start building the facilities that will be needed to remediate the interim waste containment structure.”
USACE expect the design of that remediation work to be completed, and work on removing the material won’t begin until new funding is secured in Washington.
It is expected that full remediation of the site will cost somewhere between $500M and $1B. Previous estimates suggested that full remediation of the NFSS won’t be completed until at least 2038.