More than eight months after holding a widely attended public session, federal officials still haven’t decided how extensive the cleanup of radioactive buildings on the campus of the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL) will be.
In a public meeting earlier this month, staff from the Department of Energy were met with skepticism by many in a crowd of more than 50 people when they said no decision will be made on the fate of the facility’s Separation Processing Unit (SPRU) until the federal government comes up with a plan for cleaning toxic chemicals out of the site’s sprawling landfill.
The delay marks a change in course from what federal officials said when they solicited input in the spring on three options for either containing or eliminating a string of radioactive buildings still standing at the research facility. The price tag for that cleanup could range anywhere from $60 million to $160 million depending on which option is chosen.
Steven Feinberg, a project engineer with the Department of Energy, said delaying could prove helpful by allowing better coordination of overall cleanup efforts at KAPL.
He also noted that, there is money for planning purposes, but funding has not yet been secured to pay for actual cleanup costs. That won’t come until departmental staff makes their recommendations.
The delay could put a crimp in the department’s ability to remove the radioactive buildings that used to house the SPRU, a facility used decades ago for work on nuclear weapons. In the spring, the Niskayuna town board unanimously approved a resolution sponsored by Councilman Bill Chapman that called on the federal government to complete the cleanup of radioactive material, a move that would cost an estimated $160 million.
On Jan. 18, Chapman spoke up at the latest meeting about the KAPL cleanup and backed a $57 million clean-up of toxic materials from the landfill.
For decades, the landfill has been home to at least 200 drums of toxic and hazardous waste according to Robert Stater, a vocal critic of the research lab’s environmental record.
`I think there’s a lot of hanky panky on the landfill,` said Stater, a 33-year veteran KAPL employee who left the research lab after `becoming disgusted` with its environmental record.
`They are only looking at cleaning up about three acres out of the site, that’s just a small fraction of the landfill,` he added. `Even back in the 1980s the landfill was a cesspool of radioactive waste, and there is still plenty of it in there. If it had been stored properly years ago, the whole thing would have become part of the federal Superfund program that cleans up hazardous waste dumps, and we wouldn’t be facing this problem today.`
No firm deadline has been set for the federal government to make a final decision on the extent of the landfill and SPRU building cleanup. “