First Nuclear Dump Reveals Ugly Secrets

CHICAGO - Some time ago, the Earth began disgorging some of the things scientists had buried in Red Gate Woods, a historic forest preserve near Willow Springs, a suburb southwest of Chicago.

In a clearing among oak and hickory trees, erosion and time have pushed jars of chemicals, broken dinner plates and cracked laboratory glassware to the surface decades after they had been buried.

Among the trash was one amazing find: A hockey-puck-size piece of uranium, low-level nuclear waste that had been buried with regular garbage.

Scientists haven't much knowledge about what is buried in Red Gate Woods. High atop a wooded mound of earth there, Enrico Fermi built two nuclear reactors - Chicago Pile 2 and Chicago Pile 3 - as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb.

As the site of the world's first experimental nuclear reactors, Red Gate Woods also became one of the earliest, crudest dumping grounds for low-level nuclear waste.

After years of monitoring the site's surface and water radiation (which officials contend is so low that it poses no danger to those nearby), scientists this spring will begin to look underground.

The U.S. Energy Department is spending $3.4 million on the two-year project, which will take hundreds of samples of dirt and test them for radiation and hazardous chemicals.

In some ways, the project resembles archeology. Scientists know so little about how nuclear pioneers that they might as well be digging into Inca ruins.

Although it was just 50 years ago that Fermi moved his Manhattan Project from Chicago to Red Gate Woods, records of what is buried are incomplete, and standards about what is dangerous have changed dramatically.

Researchers have learned, for example, that the carcasses of animals exposed to radiation were tossed into trenches and covered with dirt.

The Energy Department has long acknowledged the presence of radioactive materials on the site, including tritium, plutonium and strontium.

Tritium, a type of radioactive water molecule, was found in wells in the 1970s, but at levels below those set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Because of dilution and nuclear decay, tritium levels have continued to fall. They are at 1.5 percent of the EPA standards for drinking water.

But environmental groups hold the government standards and findings in some distrust. In December, groups ran their own studies and called for the site to be cleaned up.

Sarah Jane Knoy, regional director for the environmental watchdog Greenpeace, called the testing "a good first step. Is it the solution? No."

Knoy said various "pathways" of radiation, ranging from underground water to berries, have to be brought under tighter control.

Since 1979, governmental agencies have annually reconsidered the decision to leave the waste on the site. Each year, they determine it would be more dangerous to dig it out and move it than to leave it where it is.

The current underground tests might change that. Or they might not.

"Once we understand what is there, we will have to draw engineering studies to determine what to do with it," said Brian Quirke, a spokesman for the Energy Department. "It may be removed; it may not be."