In an apparent reversal of policy, the state Department of Environmental Protection issued a statement Friday asking BWX Technologies to pay for uranium-contaminated lagoon ash to be shipped from an Allegheny Township wastewater treatment plant to either a hazardous or low-level nuclear waste site.
DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty wants the company to contribute to the cleanup since it is the successor of companies that created the contamination at their nuclear fuels processing plants in Apollo and Parks in the 1970s and 1980s.
"The situation has festered long enough," McGinty wrote to the company. "Action on BWX's part finally to resolve this situation with special care and precaution is the right and proper course."
Previously, DEP had called for the ash to go to a municipal landfill. DEP officials repeatedly have told Kiski Valley residents that the ash is not dangerous and safely can be disposed of in an ordinary landfill.
The Kiski Valley Water Pollution Control Authority has 12,000 cubic yards of lagoon ash that was contaminated by uranium from the former Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC), Atlantic Richfield and Babcock & Wilcox plants. The authority expects disposal at a low-level nuclear waste site to cost $2.7 million to $3 million.
A spokeswoman for Lynchburg-based BWXT said the company would have no comment on the letter yesterday.
It was unclear what McGinty would do if the company ignored her request since the Pennsylvania agency has no authority to order a Virginia company to contribute to the cleanup.
"The department is investigating all options," said McGinty's spokeswoman, Susan Woods. "At this point, we'd like BWXT to cooperate."
Authority director Bob Kossak called McGinty's letter a positive development in the effort to clean up the lagoon ash.
"It's a step in the right direction," Kossak said. "It took us 12 years to get this step, but it's a step."
The contamination was discovered in early 1994 when the authority first proposed disposing the ash since the lagoon was no longer in use.
The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled that since the material was contaminated with as much as 3 curies of radioactive material, it couldn't be moved.
Last year, the NRC reversed that decision, saying the ash posed no unusual danger to people who were exposed to it. The DEP then ordered the authority to remove the ash and approved plans to send it to a municipal landfill. That plan was expected to cost about $900,000.
Two attempts to send the ash to landfills failed when public outcry prompted landfills in Westmoreland and Elk counties to rescind their bids to take the contaminated waste.
Leechburg resident Patty Ameno, who led activists opposing the landfill plan, agreed that McGinty's letter was a positive development. She believes BWXT should take financial responsibility for the decades-old contamination, rather than put the cost on KVWPCA's ratepayers in 13 Kiski Valley communities.
"Do the right thing," Ameno said. "Do the honorable thing, finally."
State Rep. Joe Petrarca, D-Oklahoma Borough, brokered a meeting between the activists and McGinty last month to discuss the cleanup plan. He said yesterday he believes McGinty's political clout will help push BWXT to contribute to the project.
"She's saying, 'You guys made this mess, you clean it up in the safest way possible," Petrarca said. "I do not think this company will ignore her and DEP."
