Published: November 08, 2007 09:58 pm      

ENVIRONMENT: CWM addresses radiation concerns

Discussion turns to walkover survey CWM is conducting at the site

Radioactivity is all around us.

That was the main message at a meeting Thursday night at CWM Chemical Services, the Town of Porter hazardous waste landfill currently surveying its property for radioactive materials.

The meeting was a response to concerns in the community about radiation exposure to people who work at the site, said Lori Caso, a CWM spokesperson.

Among the most significant forms of radiation humans receive per year are naturally occurring radon, medical X-rays, the food we eat and radiation from space, said Dr. Mike Ryan, a longtime CWM consultant and editor-in-chief of Health Physics journal. It’s also regulated by states, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

As the nearly two-hour presentation concluded, discussion turned to CWM’s site survey and officials from the landfill responded to questions about that survey’s scope and effectiveness.

CWM employees are walking up and down the roughly 400 acres of the site which have industrial zoning — including the section in which CWM has applied to expand its landfill operations — measuring to see if there are radioactive materials within the first six inches of the ground, said Jill Banaszak, the site’s technical manager.

A number of spots were found to have elevated levels of radiation, but so far those have only been rocks which are considered safe enough to double-bag and Federal Express to a lab, said A. Hunt Thornhill of URS Corp., the worldwide engineering firm hired by CWM to make sure its practices are safe.

In the coming weeks and months, more spots which have been found with elevated radiation levels will be investigated, and results will start to come back from the lab as to the rocks which have been identified, Thornhill said.

“We have seen no sign of contamination at all through our sampling program,” he said.

CWM officials also answered other questions of concern, including those posed recently by members of the Citizens Advisory Committee which acts as a community liaison to the company that there is no testing for plutonium. Remains from experiments involving plutonium in the 1940s and ’50s at the University of Rochester could be in the landfill, CAC members have said.

Banaszak said a section of the site did have items buried from the university, but they had been cleaned in 2001 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The central drainage ditch, which is not part of the site survey plans, is not being tested because it is outside the scope of landfill operations and is not used by the landfill, Banaszak said. CAC members have publicly wondered why the ditch isn’t being tested.

About six members of the interested public, not including reporters and CWM officials, attended the meeting. None of them were from the CAC. Amy Witryol, a vocal critic of CWM, was not in attendance. She’s said in the past that she will not attend meetings at the site because of concerns about the hazardous wastes buried there.

Similarly, no officials from CWM were at the last CAC meeting.