The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a license for construction of a low-level nuclear disposal facility in Utah that could provide the final resting place for waste from two New Jersey Superfund sites.
It could be operating by spring, said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., chairman of the Senate Superfund subcommittee.With Envirocare of Utah Inc. licensed to build and operate a waste treatment plant near Clive, Tooele County, New Jersey officials are seeking permission to ship the stockpiles of radioactively contaminated soil from the Maywood Chemical Co. site and the Wayne Interim Storage site.
All that's left now is for the Department of Energy to present to the Environmental Protection Agency a list of options for how to handle the New Jersey Superfund waste, Lautenberg spokesman Steve Schlein said Monday.
The two federal agencies had been disagreeing on the level of cleanup required at the two sites.
Lautenberg and Rep. Herb Klein, D-N.J., whose district is home to the Wayne site, received word about the license late last week.
For several years, uranium and thorium waste from the Maywood and Wayne sites, both in residential areas, had nowhere to go.
The Maywood site, on Super-fund's priority list, contains radioactive residues from thorium ore production that occurred there from 1916 to 1955. The residues turned up in adjacent properties in Maywood, Lodi and Rochelle Park, where they contaminated local groundwater. The Energy Department directed excavation and stockpiling of contaminated soil in the mid-1980s.
Operators of the Wayne site extracted thorium and rare earths from monazite ore from 1948 to 1971. The Energy Department removed contaminated soil and stockpiled it there in the mid-1980s.
Envirocare had been working since 1989 on a proposal to handle low-level radioactive byproducts known as mill tailings at a new facility adjacent to a federal disposal site and the company's existing waste site.