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| | | published Thursday, July 09, 2009 | 1666 Views :: 0 Comments | |  |
By Karen Dillon
The Kansas City Star
7/9/09
Kansas City is on the short list to become the Yucca Mountain for mercury.
And that’s not a list some officials want to be on.
A new law requires that all of the nation’s waste mercury — now estimated at about 10,000 tons — must be stored in one facility, or at most, just a few facilities by 2013.
So the Department of Energy has selected seven potential sites to be the national facility for mercury just as Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was once designated to become the storage location for radioactive waste.
The Energy Department has pinpointed the Kansas City Plant, formerly AlliedSignal, on Bannister Road. The massive plant, with its thick concrete walls and floors and 500-year flood protections, has manufactured non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons for half a century.
The site will be empty in a few years because the government agencies there now are moving out.
Although at least one health official said the facility would present no health hazards, not everyone is happy that the plant is a candidate.
“To even propose that it could be used for the storage of toxic metals is mind-boggling,” said Kansas City Councilman John Sharp. “It would certainly cause irreparable harm or kill our economic development efforts for that area.”
Danny Rotert, spokesman for U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat, said Cleaver was “vehemently” opposed.
“We don’t want any toxic waste stored in Missouri’s 5th District for sure,” Rotert said.
Rotert and many local, state and federal officials did not know Kansas City was on the list until contacted this week by a reporter.
The press secretary for U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said her office was looking into the situation.
Notice of the Energy Department’s intent was posted July 2 in the Federal Register. The department is required to prepare an environmental impact statement for each of the seven sites.
Besides Kansas City, those sites are the Grand Junction Disposal Site in Colorado, Hanford Site in Washington state, Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada, Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho, Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
Energy officials will hold a meeting near each of the candidate sites. Kansas City’s meeting will be July 23.
David Levenstein, a manager in the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management, said the Kansas City Plant met the criteria for a national storage facility.
Levenstein, who will conduct the Kansas City meeting, said Congress passed the Mercury Export Ban Act of 2008 to control and limit the world supplies of mercury.
“Mercury is no longer used for much; it’s being phased out,” he said.
Mercury has long been considered highly toxic to humans, plants and animals.
It is still used in chlorine and caustic soda manufacturing, but Congress is trying to eliminate that, Levenstein said. Mercury also is recouped through recycling and waste recovery, and it is generated as a by-product of gold mining.
Mercury is heavy. A single gallon weighs about 113 pounds, so it requires sturdy containers and sturdy floors.
That makes the Kansas City Plant an ideal candidate, said Gale Carlson, environmental public health epidemiologist for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
Carlson said transporting and storing mercury should not be a hazard to the public.
“I don’t think it is a safety issue to the public at all,” Carlson said. “There might be more danger to a worker getting hurt handling this stuff from the container’s weight.”
David Caughey, environmental manager for the Kansas City office of the National Nuclear Security Administration, located in the Kansas City Plant, said mercury storage would only use about 150,000 square feet of the building, leaving plenty of room for other development.
The Bannister complex is looking for new residents because it is expected to be vacated in a couple of years when the nuclear security agency moves to a new building near Richards-Gebaur Memorial Airport and other government agencies housed there also move.
The plant is polluted with cancer-causing materials such as petroleum products, beryllium, radiation waste and PCBs. It could eventually cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the site.
Over the years, the pollution has seeped into groundwater and has washed into the Blue River and Indian Creek. It is under constant monitoring to keep the pollution from migrating.
“The Kansas City Plant has an abysmal track record of safely storing materials that have been used at the facility,” said Scott Dye, national director of the Sierra Club’s Water Sentinels program. “In their own documents they say the site will be polluted into perpetuity. They ought to be more interested in working on cleaning up the mess that is already there instead of adding to it.”
The federal government has promised that the vacated plant would be sold to a private developer.
But Councilman Ed Ford said businesses would not want to set up shop next to a mercury storage room in a facility sitting on massive amounts of other pollutants.
“Your initial reaction, it’s like a landfill,” Ford said. “There would be a stigma.”
Rotert said Cleaver was concerned that the federal government’s promise to sell the Bannister complex to a private developer “would be significantly thwarted. Storing any toxic waste there really foils the plan. It would really gum up the works.
“I believe we will be successful in fighting any idea of using the Bannister complex in this way.”
KC MEETING SET
The federal government will hold a public meeting July 23 to discuss the proposed mercury storage facility at the Kansas City Plant. The meeting will be from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. at the Embassy Suites, 220 W. 43rd St.
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