Published in the Asbury Park Press
by KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
Plans to haul several hundred truckloads of plutonium-tainted soil to a railroad siding in Lakehurst have angered borough officials, who say they were never consulted by the Air Force or contractors who will clean the dirt up from the Bomarc missile site in nearby Plumsted.
Some 8,600 cubic yards of material mostly sandy soil, along with some ground-up or broken concrete and asphalt would be removed from the Cold War air defense base, where a Bomarc missile caught fire and melted its nuclear warhead June 7, 1960.
The plan calls for trucking the dirt in sealed bags south on Route 539, east on Horicon Road and Route 70, and then down Union Avenue the main street of Lakehurst to a Conrail siding that's usually used to load sewage sludge onto rail cars. The soil will be shipped by rail to Utah for disposal in a low-level nuclear waste landfill, Air Force contractors said at a public briefing in New Hanover last night.
"No one has been really notified in the area that this is going through. No one has spoken to Lakehurst or Manchester," Lakehurst Mayor Steven Childers said at the briefing.
Project manager Thomas Schietinger of contractor Chem-Nuclear Systems of South Carolina was apologetic, and said the company will talk to municipal officials about their concerns.
An earlier public meeting on Chem-Nuclear's work plan was canceled Jan. 20 because of that day's heavy snows, and Schietinger explained that he tried to meet with municipal officials that week but they were busy with the snow emergency.
Schietinger said he was able to meet with Lakehurst police Chief Norbert B. MacLean Jr., who talked about concerns with traffic and the nearby school. But Childers and Borough Council member Thomas Conlon pointedly told Air Force officers and the contractors that they should have brought the rail-transport idea to the towns much sooner.
The soil is not classified as hazardous waste, and its radioactive potential is so low "that you could carry this in the back of F-150s (Ford pickup trucks) because it's not regulated," said David Ramineh, a construction manager with IT Corp., who will run the on-site operation.
But Childers and other area residents raised issues of traffic and security at the rail siding, where the soil will be kept for one or two days at a time in covered gondola cars before being shipped.
Plutonium, a heavy radioactive metal that was the main fuel of the Bomarc warhead, is toxic. But it's "only a significant hazard if the radioactive material is inside of us. We have to swallow it, or breathe it in," said Maj. Steven Rademacher, an Air Force environmental health specialist.
That's because plutonium emits alpha radiation, which has little penetrating power outside the body, Rademacher said. Weapons experts who analyzed residue from the 1960 fire estimated between 2 and 11 ounces of plutonium were unaccounted for. Rademacher said most of the plutonium detected by previous surveys is locked up under pavement the Air Force laid down around the burned-out missile shelter after the fire.
"The deepest penetration (underground) right in front of the bunker, is about 20 feet," Rademacher said.
But ongoing tests by both contractors and the civilian U.S. Geological Survey show contamination has not penetrated to the Cohansey aquifer water formation that underlies the Pinelands. Rademacher said: "To this date none of the sampling has shown any weapons-grade plutonium in the aquifer."
Work crews will wear protective clothing and use filtered vacuums and sprayed water to keep down dust as they handle the soil, Ramineh said.
Soil will be dug down in 2-foot intervals until testing shows radioactivity is within the Air Force's cleanup standards, which call for the cleaned-up site to expose people to no more than 4 millirems of radiation per year above natural background levels, about the same dose that anyone gets when taking a high-altitude airline flight that exposes them to more cosmic radiation from space, Rademacher said.
The excavated soil will be packed in fiber-reinforced polymer bags "practically bullet-proof," Ramineh said on flatbed trailer trucks, with two 10-ton bags per trip.
The bags have an inner plastic lining. At the railroad siding, the bags would be lowered into the rail cars, and opened to slip the soil into the cars.
The Air Force hopes to do the work this spring.
Copies of the work plan can be viewed at the Ocean County Library in Toms River, the branch in Plumsted, and at Burlington County College in Pemberton Township.
Air Force officials are also working to convert and format the work plan pages so they can be read over the Internet. That will take some days but the documents will be available at the McGuire base Web site: www.mcguire.af.mil.
Written comments will be accepted by mail through Feb. 25, and should be addressed to 305th Air Mobility Wing/Public Affairs, 2901 Falcon Lane, McGuire Air Force Base, NJ 08641-5002.
Published: February 3, 2000
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