A Radioactive Nightmare in Massachusetts

[Santa Cruz Peace Coalition <scpc@onebox.com>]

_

Massachusetts
EMAGAZINE.COM
Dumping on History
A Radioactive Nightmare in Concord, Massachusetts
Jan/Feb 2004
By Ed Ericson, Jr.

The waitress at the ice cream shop in Concord, Massachusetts was
surprised.
"A Superfund site?" she asked, incredulous, "on Main Street?" Not just a
Superfund site--a Superfund site that a cleanup contractor has dubbed
"near
the tip of the peak in terms of [cleanup] difficulty." A radioactive
Superfund site.

Concord, the crucible of the American Revolution, where the "shot heard
'round the world" rang out on April 19, 1775, is a Boston suburb filled
with professionals and stately homes. Tourists still come to see the war
sites, and to visit the bucolic Walden Pond that Thoreau celebrated.

Few know about the nuclear waste dump at 2229 Main Street. But this
shady
burg of 15,000 residents quietly struggles with its legacy as the maker
of
depleted uranium slugs for the U.S. military's latest wars. The soil
more
than a mile from the nuclear dump is radioactive. A 1993 epidemiological
study found the town's residents suffered higher rates of cancer than
the
state average.

Today, atop and buried beneath a low hill above a cranberry bog, more
than
3,800 barrels of radioactive and toxic waste lie, subject to a
government-paid cleanup estimated to take 10 years and cost at least $50
million.

The company responsible for most of the waste, Starmet, declared
bankruptcy
in 2002. Massachusetts has sued Starmet and several related companies to
enforce state laws against radioactive dumping, but so far has had
little
success on the legal front. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
hastily concluded that Starmet was broke and has made no move to charge
it
for the pending cleanup.

"All of the people who benefited and made millions from the process are
not
being tagged at all with the cleanup process," says Mark Roberts, an
environmental lawyer and member of Citizens Research and Environmental
Watch (CREW), a citizens group that has fought to get the site cleaned
up
for more than 20 years.

[This article can be viewed at:
http://www.emagazine.com/january-february_2004/0104curr_concord.html ]

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