Western PA Towns: A Nuclear Wasteland

APOLLO

Back in the 1970s Cindee Virostek of Apollo discovered that NUMEC (Nuclear Materials & Equipment Corp) had been processing thousands of pounds of bomb grade uranium and plutonium right in the center of town since 1957.

In 1963 a fire in a vault containing bomb grade uranium caused a release in which a 1966 report by Atomic Energy Commission estimated that three kilograms were released.

NUMEC had denied harming the public but government and company records indicated improper handling of nuclear material and raised questions about radiation releases from rooftop stacks.

The plant, then run by Babcock & Wilcox, was closed in 1983. They left behind a deadly legacy: ten unlined fifty-foot trenches of highly radioactive waste. Records of their contents were incomplete or missing.

Cindee began fourteen years of research, compiling voluminous files that led to a quarter-century crusade to force government to take action to clean up the mess in Apollo. The government estimated it would cost up to $500 million in taxpayer dollars.

Around 1988 Cindee contacted the Merton Center and on January 15, 1989 I joined in a protest outside of the plant and was shocked to see it right in the middle of Apollo.

In 2009, after long-running legal battle, Babcock & Wilcox agreed to a settlement of $52.5 million with 365 local claimants for injury, wrongful death and property damage. Co-defendant Atlantic Richfield Co. settled for $27.5 million.

Cindee commented, “I’m glad the lawsuit came to an end—that’s a good thing. But the lawsuit doesn’t fully compensate people for their losses….it does not bring closure…There a still a lot of unanswered questions.”

For example, in 2012 cleanup crews discovered greater than expected quantities of “complex materials,” including plutonium. Also found were several hundred drums of Pluto Project waste from ramjet engines used in cruise missiles. Waste from Westinghouse Astronuclear National Lab and from other facilities were also dumped on the site.

That May the government classified its records. Federal regulators said the waste could safely stay buried in the field, a field that for years was used by residents for informal recreation. Babcock & Wilcox has denied harming the public.

Cindee credits a persistent Leechburg environmental activist Patty Ameno with continuing the struggle.

“It will take a few people to stay involved in the fight to find out what actually took place.” Residents still don’t know what emissions came out of the plant.

“We’ll live with it forever…the three of them, destroyed our town,” commented Helen Hutchison, widow of the late mayor Jim Hutchison. They were the first to complain, in 1958. “We were activists before any of this came to fruition,” reported Trib Live.

STRABANE & CANONSBURG PA.

From 1911-22 Standard Chemical Co. ran a radium refining mill that Marie Curie visited in 1921. It produced more radium in a year than all the plants in the rest of the world.

In 1930 it became a uranium refining mill. Between 1942-1957 Vitro Manufacturing Co. produced uranium, including for the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb.

Radioactive waste was left uncovered, making Strabane, 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, America’s most radioactive community. The plant and waste site was then covered by a huge 25-foot clay mound.

There are stories about local people using the material in concrete for sidewalks and walls and even a public swimming pool.

It had been called “the most radioactive town in America.”

In the 1980s the federal government began cleanup of radioactive uranium tailings.

Between 1911 and 1957 both companies produced over 200,000 pounds of radioactive waste. In 1977 the U.S. Department of Energy found radioactivity two to three times higher than normal up to a third of a mile away.

In 1978 the department designated the site and 24 others in the U.S. for immediate cleanup. It removed contaminated dirt and other materials from 155 private properties around the park and buried in a clay-lined “encapsulation cell” designed to last at least 200 years. In the 1980s the federal government began cleanup of radioactive uranium tailings.

8000 of the town’s 11,000 residents lived within a mile of the dirt mound. “If you were to walk around the cell, you couldn’t tell there was anything there,” James Yusko, a PA Dept. of Environmental Resources health physicist commented. “The radiation levels are at background” [level].

However Isabella Spinosa, who lived 500 feet from the site, commented in 1986 that the wastes should have been removed. “Every house on this street has cancer. In every house someone has died. That kind of preys on your mind all the time.”

Urine samples were sent to the International Institute of Public Health in Toronto at that time. Sister Rosalie Bertell commented then that tests completed so far had shown traces of radioactive lead and polonium.

Molly Rush is a board member for the Thomas Merton Center and a member of the NewPeople editorial collective.

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