The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Tuesday began moving radioactively contaminated soil from a former beryllium production plant in Ohio to final disposal in Michigan.
The transport is a key step in cleanup of the Luckey Site property about 22 miles from Toledo under the Army Corps’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP).
The project formally began in April. Contractor North Wind-Portage at the time started digging up soil contaminated with beryllium, lead, radium-226, thorium-230, uranium-234, and uranium-238, according to an Army press release that month.
While 129,000 cubic yards of contaminated material is expected to be excavated over the course of the project, the amount to be shipped could be cut by employment of sorting technology at Luckey, Michael Izard-Carroll, spokesman for the Army Corps’ Buffalo District, said by email.
“Use of the soil sorter enables us to ensure that materials that are contaminated above our cleanup goals are being transported for disposal and ensure that materials that are at or below our cleanup goals are able to be used as place back or remain on site, thus transporting only contaminated materials and reducing the amount of excavated material that is being disposed,” Izard-Carroll wrote Friday.
Up to 11 trucks per day will roll out to a US Ecology disposal facility in Belleville, Mich. Shipments will run Monday through Thursday, timed to avoid periods of high traffic, Izard-Carroll said. As of Friday, eight truckloads of contaminated material had been shipped.
“Materials that are being transported for disposal are loaded into flexible bulk packages inside hard-sided roll-off containers. The flexible bulk packages will be sealed when full, and a tarp will be placed over the containers before they leave the site,” the Army Corps said in its announcement. “The exterior of the waste transportation vehicles and containers will be surveyed prior to leaving the site to ensure that they are not inadvertently spreading contaminated materials off-site. Trucks will be transporting one roll-off container each, which will contain 15 tons of contaminated soil.”
In FUSRAP, the Army Corps remediates and sustains properties contaminated by defense and civilian commercial programs managed by the Manhattan Engineer District and Atomic Energy Commission from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Brush Beryllium Co. (subsequently known as Brush Wellman) managed manufacturing of beryllium in various forms at the Luckey property from 1949 to 1958 via an Atomic Energy Commission contract. The site in 1951 also became home to about 1,000 tons of contaminated scrap steel, intended for magnesium manufacturing but never actually put to use.
The Army Corps in 2006 issued the record or decision for soil cleanup, identifying the contaminants and laying out excavation and off-site disposal as the means of remediation. The $100 million contract was issued in 2015 to Portage Inc., which in January 2017 was bought out by the North Wind Group.
Since the release of the record of decision, the total anticipated cost for the soils program has risen from $59.4 million to $244 million. That is due to a larger-than-anticipated amount of contaminated soil, the need to remove two additional buildings to complete soil extraction, and higher estimates for a number of projects based on lessons learned at other FUSRAP sites and revised cost data, according to the Army Corps.
Cleanup is expected to proceed in five phases over a decade, each encompassing digging up contaminated soil and debris from a specific area of the property. The material will then be sorted and shipped for permanent disposal.
For the current fiscal 2018, the Luckey project received $18.5 million in funding.
