The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced this week that it is nearly complete with its first cleanup phase of the Niagara Falls Storage Site in Lewiston.
As of August, 101 of the 102 target areas across the Lewiston facility have been successfully excavated and restored. More than 26,000 cubic yards of waste have been moved to two other offsite facilities, taking up 1,624 truckloads. Roughly 294,500 gallons of water have been taken offsite for treatment.
Project Manager Brent LaSpada said that all of the radiological goals have been met, with the excavated areas having been backfilled. Substances that have been excavated from the areas include technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and chlorinated volatile organic compounds.
“We still monitor the area and make sure nothing is migrating offsite,” LaSpada said.
The 191-acre site at 1397 Pletcher Road has been used to store radioactive waste from uranium ore processing for the Manhattan Project. It is one of many sites nationwide that are part of the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, established in 1974 to clean up contamination from early United States Atomic Energy Commission activities.
The original planned disposal site, Wayne Disposal in Van Buren Township, Michigan, about 25 miles west of Detroit, caused Michigan officials to sue in order to stop the waste from being transported there. The waste has since been transferred to the Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews, Texas, near its border with New Mexico and 68 miles northwest of the Midland-Odessa metro area. The CVOC waste instead is going to an Indiana facility run by Arcwood Environmental.
The last target area that needs to be cleaned, referred to as EU-4 on the northern part of the site, found higher quantities of CVOC waste that were deeper and wider than anticipated. The contracts in place for the first cleanup phase had expired, so another one would have to be awarded in 2027 to carry the work out.
An Army Corps statement said there is no immediate risk to public health or the environment from this subsurface material, and that they continue to monitor air, groundwater, surface water, and sediments at the site.
The next two phases of site cleanup would be focused on the Interim Waste Containment Structure, which holds 280,000 square feet of high-level radioactive waste, mainly uranium, radium and thorium. That structure near the site’s center was built from 1982 to 1986 to consolidate all the radioactive waste across the land, with the contaminated materials put inside there in 1991.
LaSpada said that design work for the infrastructure needed to remediate the IWCS is 90% complete and looks to have the final designs by Summer 2027.
Plans involve a new processing facility being built to blend the waste with fly ash to create concrete monoliths, which are sealed inside steel casks and safe for transport. Other infrastructure built would prevent any radon gas from getting into the atmosphere.
Total cleanup costs were previously reported as around half a billion dollars, with funding coming from the federal government.
Full cleanup is expected to be finished by 2040, after which the U.S. Department of Energy will decide the site’s fate.