Great Lakes Nuclear Dump

(revised April 4, 2017)

More forgotten history that hides in plain sight: It's not a stop for the Japanese tourists who visit Niagara, but they might be interested to know. The shores of Lake Ontario and the Niagara River are the resting place for high-level radioactive waste left over from the project to build the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Who knew?

While growing up in Toronto, or visiting home as an adult, I have taken many day trips to Niagara Falls. It is a great place for getting lost in contemplations of geological time and the more recent history of human habitation. One can think about the Ice Age scraping out the Great Lakes, or imagine the first French explorers coming up the river with native guides in the 17th century. Later, slaves escaping from plantations took the Underground Railroad, and crossed the Niagara River to freedom. The N.A.A.C.P, at first called The Niagara Group, began in 1905 in a hotel on the Canadian side because hotels on the American side were segregated. A statue on the American side commemorates Nikola Tesla and the 1895 launch of the first large-scale AC power system in the world. This heralded the industrialization of the area on the American side.

In the early days of electricity, there was a cost advantage in setting up close to the source of power, so American investment in heavy industry flowed into the area. On the Canadian side, the power was sent to points farther away. Thus the difference between Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York: One is Canada’s front yard, welcoming visitors from the more populous south. On the Canadian side it is all resorts, wineries, casinos and tended gardens. On the other side is America’s backyard industrial zone, a day’s drive from the front entrance in New York City.

The Ice Age carved out the Great Lakes, and ten thousand years ago the falls were five kilometers farther north toward Lake Ontario. One can look forward the same length of time and wonder how the falls will be then, and what kind of civilization will exist. On a warm summer day you can meditate like a zen monk to the roar of the water, all that water set in motion by the eternal energy of the sun.

The industrial history of the area can also lead one to these thoughts of eternity because, in another astounding example of “secret” history hiding in plain sight, one of the world’s many intractable nuclear waste dumps can be found beside the Niagara River in Lewiston, New York. Hardly anyone is aware of it, even though it stopped being a state secret long ago.

The site is described in Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies [1] and more recently in Tom Zoellner’s Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World. [2], but there is surprisingly little about it to be found in mainstream journalism.

In the summer of 2011, I came across a report by WIVB, a Buffalo, NY television station, about a Niagara Falls road project that had been held up because of high radiation levels discovered by a contractor on the project. [3] The report is somewhat confusing because some of the people quoted seemed to be alarmed by the discovery, while the mayor said, “The project is not a remedial project for removing radioactive materials wherever they’re found. It’s a road construction project in which radioactive materials that are under the road are being removed, and so there are limits to the bounds of the project.”

In other words, everyone involved was supposed to know the contamination existed, and residents with contaminated properties were out of luck because the project focused only on the road. Strangely, the report failed to explain why the area was contaminated. This might be because the issue is so well-known to locals that it need not be mentioned. This is, after all, the home of Love Canal, one of the most famous cases of industrial pollution in the world. The area has been so damaged by industry that health studies of the radiation are inconclusive because the high rates of cancer are also caused by chemicals.

Another explanation for the lack of context in the news report is that the relevant information has just gone down the memory hole, and the journalists may not know or care to investigate why the road is radioactive. People who worry about the legacy of nuclear waste give a lot of thought to the possibility that people in the future may lose contact with the knowledge of the hazards left by their ancestors. This report is evidence that this change is already underway.

There is some hope to be found in the fact that a year before this TV report, two writers for a Buffalo arts weekly were up to the task of doing some real journalism. Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti made the connection to the debris left by the Manhattan Project, quoted precise figures of the radiation levels–which were astoundingly high–and pointed out that, just as we have seen in Fukushima, the contract went to a local company with no capabilities in radiological cleanup. Their work also covers the stories of Manhattan Project workers who suffered health consequences that went unrecognized and uncompensated. They reported on many instances of contaminated soils being moved about improperly, or lands being sold and developed without proper remediation. [4] (See notes [5] to [9] for additional articles by these writers and by other journalists who have reported on radioactive contamination in Niagara Falls.)

To look deeper into the truth of such matters one can’t expect much from local media which is always hesitant to publish news that will tarnish the reputation of the town and damage the economy. One has to turn to a local, concerned expert who has fought the battle and recorded details on a personal blog or journal. James Rauch, author of Tonawanda Nuclear Site Info (TNSI), seems to be just such a local hero. [10] His extensive site gives this summary of the Manhattan Project nuclear waste dumped in the Niagara Falls area:

[The term] K-65 residues [refers to] the uranium mill tailings resulting from a uniquely concentrated uranium ore discovered before WW II in Katanga province (Shinkolobwe) of the former Belgian Congo, now Democratic Republic of Congo… This ore, dubbed “K-65”, had a record 65% uranium content. It also held very high concentrations of thorium and radium, and their decay products, including radon gas, which are retained in the tailings (residues). The very high concentrations of these extremely toxic, long-lived radionuclides present in these wastes prompted the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council to categorize them as indistinguishable in hazard from High-Level Waste in its 1995 report. The K-65 ores were refined as a key part of the Manhattan Project during World War II at the Linde Ceramics Plant at Tonawanda, NY, and at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis… The Linde “K-65 residues” were transported to a storage silo built at the federally-appropriated Lake Ontario Ordnance Works site outside of Lewiston, NY, a short distance from Niagara Falls. [9]

The report by the National Academy of Science concluded with the points below (among others not cited here):

1.  There is no immediate hazard to the off-site public from the residues in their present configuration.

2.  The high-level residues pose a potential long-term risk to the public, given the existing environmental conditions and future unpredictability, if they are left permanently at the NFSS.

3.  The proposed actions of replacing the interim cap with a “permanent” cap and of long-term site maintenance and monitoring do not address the potential risks to the public for the long periods of time commensurate with the duration of that potential risk.

4.  The present and potential future interactions between the NFSS and disposal sites adjacent to the NFSS, where non-radioactive toxic chemical and landfill wastes are currently disposed, have not been addressed adequately.

5.  Current site monitoring activities are inadequate for the determination of long-term site integrity and potential future risks to the public… [11]

What this means is that the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) poses the same risk that the infamous Hanford facility in Washington inflicts on the Columbia River. Unless a better solution is built, soon or sometime within a century, and for a long time afterward, a plume of radionuclides will flow through the groundwater into Lake Ontario. Nothing is being done about this, and considering present conditions in the USA, it is doubtful that the country will have the competence for the task in 2085.

Sixty kilometers across the lake in my hometown, I suspect very few of Toronto’s four million residents know anything about this blowback from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that has been dumped on their Great Lakes border. Ironically, there is a campaign now underway called Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, but it is focused on opposing the proposal to create a permanent storage site near Lake Huron for low-level waste from Canada’s nuclear power plants. The people behind this campaign may not realize the full extent of the problem they have taken up.

International Institute of Concern for Public Health
(IICPH) released the Great Lakes Nuclear Hot Spots Map

Notes

[1] Ginger Strand, Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies (Simon and Schuster, 2008).

[2] Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World (Penguin 2010).

[3] Luke Moretti, “Concerns over Falls Road Fill Radiation,” WIVB Television, Buffalo, NY. August 31, 2011.

[4] Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti, “The Cult of Nuclearists,” Artvoice, May 12, 2010.

[5] Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti, “The Bomb that Fell on Niagara,” Artvoice, September 24, 2008.

[6] Geoff Kelly and Louis Ricciuti, “Greenpac Reveals Radioactive Waste Issue at Niagara Falls Mill,” Artvoice, August 1, 2013.

[7] John R. Emshweller and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “A Nuclear Cleanup Effort Leaves Questions Lingering at Scores of Old Sites,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2013.

[8] Ralph Blumenthal, “Big Atomic Waste Site Reported Found Near Buffalo,” New York Times, February 1, 1981.

[9] Libbe Halevy, “Nuclear Hotseat #270: Niagara Falls’ Dirty Nuke Secrets w/Lou Ricciuti...” Nuclear Hotseat #270, August 24, 2016.

[10] James Rauch, Tonawanda Nuclear Site Info.

[11] Safety of the High-Level Uranium Ore Residues at the Niagara Falls Storage Site, Lewiston, New York (National Academy of Sciences. Commission on Geosciences, Environment and Resources, 1995).