Army Corps says Parks Township nuke cleanup on way and a top priority nationally

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday night that resuming the $500 million cleanup of the nuclear waste dump in Parks Township is a top priority and they are getting ready.

“The time is right for it,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Col. Andrew J. “Coby” Short said in a virtual meeting. “We’re hot-and-heavy in the planning stages. We have the professional team and we have the money.”

The task: Excavate an estimated 36,000 tons of radiological waste, 8 to 16 feet thick, buried in 10 trenches that occupy about 1.2 acres of a 40-acre area along Route 66. Excavation is scheduled to start in 2023 and finish no later than 2031. The waste will be shipped off site.

The dump, formally known as the Shallow Land Disposal Area (SLDA), received radioactive and chemical waste from the former Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC), in Apollo and Parks Township from about 1960 to the early 1970s. NUMEC and its successors, the Atlantic Richfield Co. and BWX Technologies, produced nuclear fuels for Navy submarines and commercial nuclear power plants and other products.

Decades in the making, cleanup plans have been in the works since the 1990s.

Because of lack of progress and residents’ frustration, the Army Corps was authorized in 2002 by Congress to take over the cleanup from the jurisdiction of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In 2011, the Corps shut down the cleanup shortly after it started because a contractor allegedly mishandled some nuclear waste and pulled up greater amounts than expected of complex nuclear materials.

The Corps recalibrated and secured a new contractor.

“We will have more sophisticated equipment and instruments and better qualified people than the previous excavation,” said Tim Herald, Army Corps project manager.

The Parks site is the number one priority in the Corps national program for the clean-up of the nation’s early atomic weapons and energy programs, Short said. There are currently 20 sites undergoing cleanups in that Corps program known as Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program.

The Corps’ main contractor for the SLDA, Jacobs Field Services of Houston, Texas, is developing work plans to restart the cleanup project. Its contract with the Corps is $350 million.

The agency will continue to test the ground water and check for the potential migration of radiological waste from the site. Corps officials said Thursday night, so far, the radiological waste is not moving from the trench area.

The Corps plans to hold another meeting to update the public in November of 2021.