nuclear-news

Parks Town USA still stuck with nuclear waste

Decision time yet again on whether to remove nuclear waste from Parks site, Trib Live Neighbourhoods, 19 Jan 14  By Mary Ann Thomas After more than 20 years of wrangling, the federal government has to decide — yet again — whether it will remove and ship out the buried nuclear waste at a dump on Route 66 in Parks.

The Pittsburgh District of the Army Corps of Engineers, the lead agency for a proposed 10-year cleanup that could cost up to $500 million, has not set a date for that decision. But before it does decide, the corps will hold a meeting in the spring to get public testimony on what it should do. The meeting has not been scheduled.

The project has grown much more complicated and expensive, causing the government to rethink what should be done. “People should be concerned that Congress has little appetite to clean up environmental messes and U.S. Rep. John Murtha is gone,” said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and former senior policy adviser to the secretary of the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration

When the cleanup plans sputtered and stalled in the 1990s, Murtha, the late congressman from Johnstown, initiated legislation in 2002 mandating the Army Corps take over the cleanup and remove the nuclear contamination from the site.

Although that agency is the first to put shovel to ground and remove nuclear contaminants, it had to rethink its role two years ago when workers unearthed greater-than-expected amounts of complex nuclear materials. The project price tag skyrocketed.

Originally estimated at between $21.5 million and $65.6 million in 2002, estimates rose to $170 million in 2010. Those have since ballooned to $250 million to $500 million.

U-235 AND U-233  Two volatile types of uranium — U-235 and U-233 — are present on the site. Known as “fissile materials,” they can cause a nuclear chain reaction or be used for an improvised explosive.

What’s not clear is how much of the material has been found. The corps refuses to release any information on the variety and quantities of isotopes found so far. The Army denied a Freedom Of Information Act request for documents from the Valley News Dispatch in 2012 regarding the materials…… http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourallekiskivalley/yourallekiskivalleymore/5270680-74/nuclear-corps-site#ixzz2qxatTfJA

January 20, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized