#superfund

This toxic hole is 7,000 feet long, 5,600 feet wide, and 1,600 feet deep, and it will be with us now for the next 10,000 years, at least.

In an adapted excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Way Around: A Field Guide to Going Nowhere, Nicholas Triolo details a 20-mile hike around America's largest Superfund site.

Law Holds Fossil Fuel Companies Responsible for Impact of Pollution on New York Communities

Bill Signed to Broaden State Ban on Hydraulic Fracturing

Actions are Latest Move to Strengthen State’s Climate Actions and Environmental Protection Laws to Prevent Harmful Impacts to New Yorkers

Governor Kathy Hochul today signed landmark legislation to bolster New York’s efforts to protect and restore the environment by requiring large fossil fuel companies to pay for critical projects that protect New Yorkers. Legislation S.2129-B/A.3351-B creates a ‘Climate Superfund’ to support New York-based projects that bolster New York’s resiliency to dangerous climate impacts like flooding and extreme heat.

“With nearly every record rainfall, heatwave, and coastal storm, New Yorkers are increasingly burdened with billions of dollars in health, safety, and environmental consequences due to polluters that have historically harmed our environment,” Governor Hochul said. “Establishing the Climate Superfund is the latest example of my administration taking action to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment and requiring major investments in infrastructure and other projects critical to protecting our communities and economy.”

So, stopped to see how things were looking at the UMTRA site. I've posted about it before, a few years back.

But the short story is... Moab, Utah was a major area for uranium mining in the 50s through much of the Cold War era. There were uranium mines all over the place out here and this site, sitting directly on the bank of the Colorado River (a river that provides drinking water to nearly 30 million people downstream), was where the uranium ore was processed.

The mill ceased operations in the 80s. And when the company that owned it folded in the 90s, the structures were just demolished and buried on the property.

They left behind 16 million tons of radioactive mining tailings (tailings are the materials left over after processing minerals) on the site.

The cleanup became a federal Superfund project. Work began (at taxpayer expense, since the company who made this mess had long gone out of business) about 15 years ago removing the radioactive contamination.

And they're making progress on it. Sounds like they've got about 93% of the tailings removed (ie: relocated to the new holding site in Green River).

I was curious, though, so I whipped out the geiger counter and approached the fence.

Not a huge number, but definitely more than the background level readings taken farther from the site.

Not next to the Superfund site. C'mon.

The specific issue being the Superfund site is now closed and contained. There's underground arsenic contamination, but it's stable in the rock. It's there, but safely contained and the state environmental agency is monitoring. Sometimes that's the way these go, contain and stabilize rather than try to dig them up and possibly contaminate a bigger area.

But this project on the lot next to it needs to level the ground to get that many apartments in. Estimate is removing 800-1000 dump trucks worth of rock. That's so much blasting. so much.

[SUBMISSION] Some good news! Tl;dr- SWO has been found to break down about 99% of PFAS chemicals and is super viable as a technology to help clean up superfund sites like the Hudson River! We've been trying to figure out how to efficiently clean up PFAS for a while now so this is a big deal.

"The findings of all three demonstration studies showed a greater than 99% reduction of the total PFAS [...] As a destructive technology, SCWO may be an alternative to incineration and could be a permanent solution for PFAS-laden waters rather than disposal by injection into a deep well or landfilling."

This is one of those technological breakthroughs that doesn't sound very exciting on paper but could make a huge difference in cleaning up polluted waterways and improving the surrounding ecosystems.

Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, United States, infamous as the location of a 0.28 km2 (0.11 sq mi) landfill that became the site of an environmental disaster in the 1970s. Decades of dumping toxic chemicals killed residents and harmed the health of hundreds, often profoundly.[1] The area was cleaned up over the course of 21 years in a Superfund operation.

In 1890, Love Canal was created as a model planned community, but was only partially developed. In the 1920s, the canal became a dump site for municipal refuse for the city of Niagara Falls. During the 1940s, the canal was purchased by Hooker Chemical Company, which used the site to dump 19,800 t (19,500 long tons; 21,800 short tons) of chemical byproducts from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, and solvents for rubber and synthetic resins.