The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a $17.6 million contract to install approximately 23 acres of non-permeable caps at the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, Seaway Site in Tonawanda, N.Y. (US Army Corps of Engineers Buffalo District/Facebook)
(Tribune News Service) — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will start staging equipment for capping a nuclear waste disposal site in Tonawanda.
Niagara Falls contractor Mark Corrine, Inc. will install 23 acres of non-permeable caps at the River Road site, which limits exposure of remaining radioactive material at the site.
Air monitoring will take place for 30 days prior to site work starting in mid-March. Construction of an engineered cap will begin in April and conclude in spring 2025.
Work includes grading access roads, stormwater management, erosion control, gas monitoring, planting vegetative soils and installing cap materials.
The Seaway Site is within the 100-acre Seaway Industrial Park, originally a Browning-Ferris Industries landfill from 1930 to 1993. The nearby Linde Air Products Division of Union Carbide processed uranium ore as part of the Manhattan Project, with some waste materials moved to the site.
Excavation and disposing of contaminated soil beyond the leachate containment system lasted from 2015 to 2016, with 1,121 cubic yards of material excavated and shipped offsite.
The Army Corps awarded a $17.6 million contract to Mark Corrine in September for this work.
Further project details will be shared at a public information session in March.
The Tonawanda site is one of three in Western New York currently undergoing remediation work to remove nuclear waste that was part of the Manhattan Project. The other two are the Niagara Falls Storage Site on Pletcher Road in Lewiston and the Guterl Steel Site on Ohio Street in Lockport.
The Army Corps showed off its cleanup efforts to the public this past October, with the whole process of removing radioactive materials and site cleanup taking at least 10 years. It was used for storing the waste from uranium ore processing from 1944 to 1952, with cleanup costs around $500 million.
More than 25 million pounds of uranium and thorium were turned into rods for the United States government’s post-WWII atomic defense efforts. The Army Corps received $103 million for this cleanup effort.
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