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Update: 4:35 p.m. Monday -- Wayne County Executive Warren Evans expressed outrage over plans to transfer radioactive contaminated materials from a site in New York to a hazardous waste site in Wayne County.
"There has to be a better way of handling and disposing of hazardous waste and toxic chemicals that doesn't always involve those highly unwelcome materials finding their way into Wayne County," Evans said, according to the Detroit News. "While I understand that those materials have to go somewhere, and few if any public officials are willing to welcome toxic waste with open arms, there needs to be a solution, through new policy or legislation, that doesn't equal Wayne County as dumping ground for what no one else wants. Because that is an assignment we simply will not accept."
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Report From Monday Morning
Thousands of tons of soil, concrete and groundwater contaminated with elevated radiation from a site in New York where the Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb during and just after World War II, is expected to be shipped to a hazardous waste landfill in Wayne County, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Keith Mathany of the Freep reports:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working on remediation of the Niagara Falls Storage Site in Lewiston, New York, estimates that 25 semitrucks per week, into January 2025, will transport the elevated radioactive wastes along public roads and highways to the Wayne Disposal facility just off Interstate 94 in Van Buren Township.
T.R. Wentworth II, manager of the Radiological Protection Section of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy's Materials Management Division, tells the Freep that the Army Corps has committed that all materials will have limited radiation.
"As a regulator, the state doesn't have any concerns for this (Niagara site) material from a health and safety standpoint," Wentworth said.
