On April 7, a process 20 years in the making began. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started excavation at a Parks Township nuclear waste site.

This isn’t like other abandoned industrial sites. In Western Pennsylvania, those are familiar — old factories, mine sites, places with lingering chemicals or unstable ground. The Parks Township site was identified in federal legislation as requiring remediation.

The 44-acre site dates to the 1960s, when Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. handled work tied to nuclear fuel and submarine production. What remains is buried — including enriched uranium — in tens of thousands of cubic yards of radioactive waste spread across a series of trenches.

Cleanup will take six years and cost more than $500 million. It is not like cleaning up a strip mine site or chemical-tainted industrial ground. It is more complicated than a simple shoveling away of what is bad and making things look pretty again. It is a controlled excavation with the waste removed to specific locations, including the Nevada National Security Site in the Mojave Desert.

Projects like this cannot happen overnight. They require careful and strategic planning. The work must be methodical and precise. But the length of time for the cleanup makes it all the more important to move without delay.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Army Corps was directed to do the cleanup in 2002.

While some excavation took place starting in August 2011, that stopped in September 2011 because “exhumed material was complex and beyond the scope of (the Army Corps’) established procedures.”

In 2012, the situation was reviewed for “growing concerns about the cost for management and disposal of exhumed material.”

It took another 14 years to get to this month’s excavation.

Perhaps it’s the bureaucracy of it all that makes it feel like poison was buried in Western Pennsylvania while people debated how to handle it. But it’s not. It has been decades of red tape with uranium continuing its slow decay.

Time doesn’t make contamination safer. It gives it more opportunity to grow.

Even if nothing appeared to change in those years, no one could know that for sure. For the people who live nearby, that meant living with uncertainty — about the ground beneath them, about what might shift or change over time, about what it could mean in the long run.

And uncertainty is not a place anyone should live while government takes its time moving from legislation requiring action to action itself — more than 20 years later.

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