Published in the Asbury Park Press
By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
PLUMSTED -- A South Carolina company has landed a nearly $3.6 million contract to clean up the BOMARC missile site, here -- a Cold War ruin contaminated with deadly plutonium nearly 40 years ago in one of the most serious nuclear accidents on American soil.
The Air Force awarded the cleanup contract to the environmental services company Chem-Nuclear Systems of Columbia, S.C., which will remove hundreds of tons of sandy soil and old concrete believed to contain particles of plutonium-239, a toxic radioactive metal.
Pu-239 was one of the nuclear fuels in the warhead of a BOMARC air defense missile that caught fire on June 7, 1960. The warhead melted in the intense fire, and some plutonium -- between 2 ounces and 11 ounces according to one estimate -- was carried out of the missile shelter by fire-fighting water during the 15 hours it took to bring the blaze under control, Air Force documents say.
The BOMARC site is on Fort Dix property along Route 539 in the Pinelands, and environmental workers have found the plutonium remained bound up in spoils and pavement at the fenced-off site. It remains the only site in New Jersey known to be contaminated with deadly plutonium.
Plutonium remains highly radioactive -- it takes 24,000 years for the element to lose half its radioactive energy -- so Air Force work plan documents for the BOMARC site call for removal of the contaminated dirt.
Some 8,000 cubic yards of soil and 500 to 600 cubic yards of pavement and concrete will be removed, put in containers and shipped to the privately operated Envirocare Inc. landfill in Utah, according to the Air Force plan.
An Arizona-based contractor was prepared to start work last year, but "their work plan didn't meet Air Force requirements," said Sgt. Patrick Murphy, a spokesman for McGuire Air Force Base, whose civil engineers are overseeing the BOMARC project. The work will start sometime after the federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1, he said.
Contractors will rig containment structures around the work areas, chiefly the missile shelter, the concrete pad in front, and nearby drainage ditches where firefighting water flowed and plutonium has been detected in the soil, Air Force officials have said.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has agreed to the Air Force work plan and the cleanup level it proposes, said Gwen Zervas, a case manager with the DEP Site Reclamation Program. The excavated area will be capped and fenced, and remain under Air Force control, she said.
Plumsted residents have waited a long time for a final cleanup of the missile site. Yesterday, Mayor Ronald Dancer said he hadn't heard of the contract award and couldn't comment until he learns more about how the project will proceed.
Ground water under and around the BOMARC site has been monitored for years by the military's environmental consultants and the U.S. Geological Survey. The 1960 fire was re-examined as part of an ongoing investigation into elevated levels of certain childhood cancers in the Toms River area, but environmental workers say there has been no sign of plutonium migrating off the site since the fire.
When it opened in September 1959, the Plumsted base held 56 liquid-fueled BOMARC-A missiles, designed to intercept and destroy bombers from the Soviet Union before they could reach New York City or Philadelphia.
BOMARCs -- the acronym stands for Boeing and Michigan Aeronautical Research Corp., the joint venture that developed the weapons -- were armed with the W-40 nuclear warhead, a plutonium bomb that got a thermonuclear boost from a bottle of tritium. With an explosive yield equal to 12,000 tons of high explosive, the W-40 was nearly as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
The 1960 fire started when a high-pressure helium tank burst inside one missile, rupturing tanks of volatile fuel and oxidizer. But newly redesigned safety interlocks kept the warhead's high explosive initiators from detonating -- a potential accident that would have blasted plutonium for hundreds of yards through the forest, according to Air Force documents and independent weapons analysts.
The liquid fuel version was replaced by solid fuel BOMARC-B models in the early 1960s, after this accident and other problems. The missiles remained at the site until 1972.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: July 17, 1999
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