[CPEO-MEF] Cleaning up the powder plant

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Virginia
THE ROANOKE TIMES
Cleaning up the powder plant
By MIKE GANGLOFF

The Radford arsenal has spent years and lots of money to clean up its
environs, but still unknown is whether explosive residues, metals and
organic chemicals are escaping from old waste pits and former production
facilities.

RADFORD - The landscape of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant: old
buildings hunkered behind wood and earth bulwarks, forested river banks
and grassy meadows, and lingering questions about the pollution left by
more than 60 years of munitions-making.

This is a plant billed as the largest propellant manufacturer in North
America, a place whose workers could turn on televisions during the
recent war in Iraq and see the ammunition they had made being fired from
Bradley fighting vehicles, Apache helicopters and Warthog warplanes.

As at many other military facilities across the country, a legacy of
decades of defense work is a list of still-unreckoned environmental
problems.

Tara Thornton, executive director of the Military Toxics Project, a
Maine-based group that works on pollution issues at bases and defense
plants around the country, noted that it will take decades and billions
of dollars to clean Cold War-era waste from military facilities. Some
areas, she said, "are never going to get cleaned up."

At the arsenal, there has been a years-long effort to clean contaminated
sites that dot the 6,900 acres that make up the arsenal's main plant on
the Montgomery-Pulaski county line and its bag loading plant near
Dublin. Use of these sites largely predates modern environmental
regulation, and cleanup has cost $22.7 million since the first
assessments in 1977.

Still unknown, however, is whether explosive residues, metals like lead
and organic chemicals from solvents are escaping from old waste pits and
former production facilities.

This article can be viewed at:
http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story151624.html

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