NEWS

EPA weighs in on Army plan to leave toxic mess

Charlie White
@c_write

Federal environmental officials want the U.S. Army to analyze the costs and benefits of its plan to end its Nuclear Regulatory Commission license and halt monitoring at the old Jefferson Proving Ground in Southern Indiana.

The former firing range near Madison, Ind., is where the Army conducted ammunition tests from 1941 to 1995, leaving behind more than 160,000 pounds of depleted-uranium shell fragments plus millions of unexploded conventional shells, live detonators, primers or fuses.

Ken Westlake, a regional coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in a letter that the agency understands that it may not be feasible to clean up remaining unexploded ordnance due to safety and cost issues.

Still, the Army's required environmental-impact statement should examine alternatives including "benefit-costs analysis for each alternative, with special emphasis on modeled future health and environmental costs to society that may occur as a direct result of water and/or air pollution," Westlake wrote.

Westlake's letter states that each alternative also should explain who will be responsible for humans and wildlife at the site, which, according to a state inventory has been home to several species listed as either federally or state endangered, such as the Indiana bat, Henslow's sparrow and Sedge wren.

And if the Army continues proposing to stop environmental monitoring, Westlake said its plan should "provide rationale for the decision not to monitor, preferably using data from other, similar sites, and explain what plans are in place to ensure any future contaminant movement is remediated before migrating off-site."

It isn't clear when the NRC might issue a decision, but if it approves the Army's plan as proposed, it would mark the first time it has allowed a license to be terminated with restrictions, something critics have said would set a bad precedent for other nuclear waste sites across the country.

The restrictions proposed include placement of signs around the fenced-off, contaminated area reading: "CAUTION, RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL."

The EPA letter is part of the growing public record as the Army seeks the NRC's permission to end its license and testing at the 50,000-plus-acre property that spans portions of Jefferson, Jennings and Ripley counties. It also takes in what's now Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge, about 45 miles upriver from Louisville.

The Army used part of it to test radioactive, armor-piercing shells from 1984 to 1994. The Indiana Air National Guard currently uses a northern portion of the site for bombing practice.

Experts say radioactive levels of DU, a nuclear byproduct, are relatively low in comparison to enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons and energy. A study conducted by Materials and Chemistry Laboratory Inc. for the Army concluded it will take "many decades to corrode completely" due to the low-corrosion rates of DU material in the penetrating darts, which remain largely intact.

A report released March 9 describes the NRC's site visit earlier this year where officials talked with Army staff, contractors and representatives from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about decommissioning options and the Army's previous decommissioning requests for the site since 1999. The NRC rejected the 2001 plan, and others have been withdrawn.

"The only decommissioning option the Army had considered was to leave the DU in place at the DU Impact Area; cleanup of the (unexploded ordnance) and DU in the area was never considered," according to the latest NRC report.

Fish and Wildlife Service officials told the NRC they aren't concerned about the Army's plan to end monitoring. NRC officials also met earlier this year with local leaders and members of the local environmental advocacy group Save the Valley.

B.J. Gray and Richard Hill, members of Save the Valley, urged the NRC to wait until better unexploded-ordnance-cleanup technology emerges before making a decision.

It remains unclear what long-term health and environmental effects the uranium — which has a half-life of 4.5 billion years — could have on the area.

The Army told the NRC it currently spends about $150,000 a year conducting its environmental resource monitoring program at the site, including two sets of samples and reports analyzing the results, according to the March report.

"However, it was explained that the results of the Army's bi-annual ERM program since 1983 and of recent groundwater, surface water, and air pathway modeling, as documented ... do not indicate the need for continued environmental monitoring following license termination," the March NRC report states.

NRC and Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses staff noted in the report that while no other materials sites have been decommissioned under restricted conditions, other types of sites, such as waste ponds where uranium was milled, have had their NRC license terminated in conjunction with long-term agreements requiring ongoing monitoring.

Reporter Charlie White can be reached at (812) 949-4026 or on Twitter @c_write.