Timothy Chipp in the Niagara Gazette writes about a NY State radioactive waste site on November 12, 2011:
The LOOW site was established after the federal government seized 7,200 acres of land in 1941, in the area now occupied partially by the Lewiston-Porter School District, for the purposes of creating the explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT). Production lasted only nine months in 1942, and the site was abandoned. In 1982, the U.S. Department of Energy turned the site into a radioactive waste storage facility.
Among the radioactive elements on site are radium and radon, while RAB member Amy H. Witryol said other, more dangerous materials have been shown through paperwork to have been there in the past with no record of them leaving, including plutonium.
Those hazardous materials have been capped with cement, according to Witryol, who serves as RAB secretary. But she added cement has a tendency to crack and break down over the course of decades.
Meanwhile, the half-life of these compounds stored at the facility, or the amount of time it takes for the radioactivity of any element to be reduced in half, can be upwards of several tens of thousands of years, according to RAB member Tim Henderson.
“Cleaning up the site is really important to the long-term health and welfare of this community,” Witryol said. “This community has been discriminated against for many, many years by many different regulators. This is a community with a small population where the federal government made a mistake 70 years ago.”
