Hundreds of semitruck loads of radioactive waste are coming to a Wayne County landfill as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to remediate a site used to develop atomic bombs in World War II.
The trucks will haul a total of about 6,000 cubic yards of soil and concrete, along with 4,000 gallons of contaminated groundwater, along public roads and highways from the Niagara Falls Storage Site the Manhattan Project used to store radioactive waste to a Wayne Disposal hazardous waste facility near I-94, the Army Corps’ Avery Schneider confirmed to the Detroit Free Press.
“The first thing we look at in all of these projects is how we can do it safely – from the employees on-site who are working around the material, excavating it and preparing it for removal, to the communities around the site, to the folks who are going to transport it out to Belleville, Michigan, to where it can be safely stored,” said Schneider, the Corps’ deputy chief of public affairs.
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Wayne Disposal is one of the largest hazardous waste landfills in the country, and it’s next door to Michigan Disposal, the largest hazardous waste processing facility in North America, according to USA TODAY.
Between 2019 and mid-2023, the former landfilled 1.8 million tons of waste, while Michigan Disposal took in more than 1.2 million tons for processing, including dioxins; polychlorinated biphenyls, known as PCBs; cyanide; PFAS compounds; arsenic; asbestos, and other dangerous chemicals.
In total, Wayne Disposal is licensed to take in 722 different kinds of hazardous waste, earning it a reputation as “a dumping ground for America’s most dangerous substances,” the news site reports.
That’s become an issue for locals and state and federal lawmakers, who pressured the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2023 to end shipments of hazardous waste to the facility from a trail derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
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“It’s kind of an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing,” Nicholas Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, told USA TODAY last fall. “People don’t realize that Michigan is kind of a focal point for commercial hazardous waste facilities. It runs against what we bill ourselves as, the Great Lakes State, our water resources that are above all else.”
Yet despite the public pushback last year, the shipments keep coming, unbeknownst to both local residents who live near the site and the lawmakers who represent them.
“I was not aware of this, nor was I alerted. That’s frustrating,” Rep. Reggie Miller, D-Van Buren Township, told the Free Press. “I’m not happy about that, to say the very least.”
Miller is particularly concerned about transporting the hazardous materials on public roads, and the potential for catastrophe.
“That’s always been my issue – what happens if that semi overturns and it goes into water?” she said. “We have the largest lake in Wayne County (Belleville Lake) and that’s always been a concern.”
The new shipments will involve residue with elevated radioactivity left over from processing facilities that contracted with the Manhattan Engineering District during and after World War II to extract uranium from ore.
The waste has been stored at the 191-acre site in Tonawanda, New York since 1952, and a two-phase cleanup is expected to last until 2038. The waste coming to Michigan is part of the first phase, and will involve about 6,000 cubic yards of soil and concrete hauled by an estimated 25 semitrucks per week from July through January, according to the Free Press.
“Environmental remediation projects require facilities that are equipped to manage the material responsibly,” Melissa Quillard, spokesperson for Republic Services, the Arizona company that owns Wayne Disposal, told the news site. “Complex waste streams must go to the right site to ensure they are safely and compliantly managed, which means interstate shipments commonly occur.”
Wayne Disposal, she said, “is highly engineered with multiple safety measures in place, including frequent inspections and systems tests to ensure everything is operating as it should.”
T.R. Wentworth II, manager of the Radiological Protection Section at the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s Materials Management Division, said the materials heading to the Wayne County landfill will have radioactivity levels 50 times higher than the natural environment.
“As a regulator, the state doesn’t have any concerns for this (Niagara site) material from a health and safety standpoint,” he said, noting the radiation level falls below state and federal regulations.
Whether lawmakers will intervene as they did in 2023 to divert shipments from the East Palestine train derailment remains to be seen.
U.S. Reps. Debbie Dingell and Rashida Tlaib vowed during a 2023 press conference to ensure locals are aware when toxic waste comes in, according to MLive, and Miller made clear that didn’t happen.
“No one deserves this in their backyard,” Tlaib said at the time.
“Our job, and we will deliver on our job, is to ensure that those we represent are safe,” Dingell added. “And that no one ever, ever again blindsides everybody the way they did on the delivery of this material.”