Massachusetts Campus, on Site of Former Weapons Facility, Will Be Checked for Uranium

March 16, 2011, 9:46 pm

Massachusetts public-health officials will be inspecting the campus of Springfield Technical Community College on Thursday to make sure no depleted uranium was left behind by the site’s previous occupant, the Springfield Armory, The Republican, a newspaper in Springfield, reported. The armory, which closed in 1968, was a federal weapons-testing facility that received munitions containing depleted uranium, but no records can be found showing what happened to most of those munitions. So state health officials decided to search the site to make sure it’s safe. Depleted uranium is considered a chemical hazard, not a radiological one, officials told the newspaper. The college’s president, Ira Rubenzahl, said in an e-mail to the campus that if any uranium had remained, it probably was removed during a lead-abatement cleanup in 1997.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

E-mail

jungianscholar

Per ton of soil, there are three grams of uranium, naturally occurring. So imagine the amount of uranium in most farmers’ fields or woodlands. EPA mandates for clean-up of closure sites, former weapons or other sites that used uranium or other heavy metals, require RCRA, CRLCA and other investigations and plans, as well as remedial field investigations (RIFS) that develop a plan of action for removal and remediation of land polluted by these elements. I suspect that the land in question has no more than naturally occurring percentages of uranium, and perhaps even less.