Three Mile Island - Webster, Texas

Ugh.

<i>Cleanup could cost millions, but officials see no health threat
By TONY FREEMANTLE
Copyright 2002 2002, Houston Chronicle

A local company in bankruptcy abandoned two industrial buildings full of highly radioactive materials, leaving the federal government and taxpayers with a $8.5 million tab for cleaning up a virtually unprecedented and dangerous nuclear mess.

For more than 20 years, Gulf Nuclear of Louisiana Inc. manufactured radioactive materials in a nondescript building in the heart of Webster's medical center and in an equally unremarkable facility near Hobby Airport.

When the company filed for bankruptcy in 1992, it essentially closed the doors and walked away from the Webster location without cleaning its mess, and conducted a cursory cleanup at the other site.

Last year, because Gulf Nuclear still had not done anything to clean the heavily contaminated Webster site, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was called to tackle the difficult and dangerous task, using emergency Superfund money.

Some material from the Webster building is so radioactive it cannot legally be disposed of at any existing facility in the United States. It will have to be stored and most likely deposited in the government's proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

Moreover, while it poses no immediate threat to public health and safety, the contamination at both sites is bad enough to warrant the destruction of the buildings, which have a combined appraised value of more than $620,000.

Michael Dunn, chief of industrial licensing for the Texas Department of Health's Bureau of Radiation, said there was no indication that any radiation had escaped the building and threatened the surrounding communities.

He said for 15 years the department has monitored the perimeter of the Webster building, but despite occasional readings higher than "ambient levels, we do not have reason to believe that there has been a large" amount of radiation that has made it off-site.

On Wednesday, cleanup operations at the Webster site continued with a team comprising workers from the EPA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a private environmental cleanup company. Temporary offices have been established on site, where security is now present 24 hours a day.

Greg Fife, an EPA veteran who is the on-site coordinator for the cleanup, said when he and other federal officials first entered the Webster building in January, they expected to find most of the contamination confined to the "hot room," a sealed, lead-lined area where the radioactive materials were kept and handled. They also expected to find the radiation was coming from about 12 sources.

Instead, they found more than 360 sources, and contamination so widespread that workers almost certainly were exposed to very high, very dangerous levels of radioactivity.

In one area outside the "hot room," Fife said workers would have been exposed to one year's worth of acceptable radiation in 38 minutes.

"Anybody that's been in there would have no reluctance to call the operation sloppy and unprofessional," Fife said.

Gulf Nuclear began operations at the two sites in 1971, initially supplying radioactive tracers for the oil industry. Over time it began making devices using Americium-241, beryllium, cesium-137, irridium-192 and other isotopes that were used for a variety of purposes -- medical diagnostic devices, aircraft fuel gauges, fluid-density gauges.

Americium-241 is by far the worst isotope, with a half-life of 432.7 years, meaning that it takes that long for the substance to lose half its radioactivity.

Fife said Americium contamination in the Webster building is widespread. About $10,000 of it was found lying in an open box. Glove boxes (the devices used by workers standing outside of the hot room to manipulate chemicals inside) are coated with radioactive powder. Raw materials were spilled on the floor. There was evidence that workers used plastic coffee cups to mix radioactive chemicals, which were stored in plastic ice trays.

Investigators even found a sealed room with fake walls in which was entombed thousands of dollars worth of contaminated equipment, Fife said.

"I've done this for 15 years," the veteran federal environmental regulator said. "I've seen nasty sites where things fell apart because of a lack of money. I've seen cases where the owners of a facility couldn't cope with the problem. But I have never seen such total disregard for the neighbors or the workers."

Virtually all the contamination at both sites occurred between 1971 and 1992 -- the year that Gulf Nuclear filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, seeking protection from its creditors while it reorganized. The company then filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2000, seeking to liquidate and close.

From 1992 to 2000, little was done to clean up the Webster facility, Fife said.

"Basically they just walked off," he said. "They got their money during the oil boom and then they just walked off."

The company made an effort to clean up the Hobby Airport site, located in the 9300 block of Tavenor, Fife said. It erected a building to store the hazardous waste from the facility and partially demolished the existing buildings.

Through the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Texas Department of Health regulates and licenses companies that handle nuclear materials.

Dunn said department inspectors visited the facilities once or twice a year. The reason nothing alerted inspectors to problems that according to Fife were evident, could be that "they weren't told some things," Dunn said.

The Gulf Nuclear operation is one of only two of its kind in the state licensed by the health department, Dunn said.

"This is a rare one," he said. Carl Shaw, president and CEO of The GNI Group, the parent company of Gulf Nuclear, did not return a phone call to his home seeking comment. Neither did two attorneys representing him. But in an affidavit filed in support of his company's 2000 bankruptcy petition, he states GNI has five wholly owned subsidiaries, including Gulf Nuclear of Louisiana Inc.

On Sept. 12, 2000, a year before any regulatory agencies were involved in the cleanup, Shaw states under oath, that Gulf Nuclear's properties are "currently undergoing decontamination" and that once that is completed they will be "released for sale by the appropriate regulatory authorities."

The EPA's Fife said nothing of any substance had been done to decontaminate the Webster facility before the EPA's involvement in October 2001.

Bill Reeves is a former officer at Gulf Nuclear who now works as vice president for regulatory affairs at Texas Molecular, a Deer Park-based company that bought some of the Gulf Nuclear's assets. During the eight years the company was in Chapter 11, he said, "for whatever reason, they couldn't sell that building."

"Those two buildings are not glow-in-the-dark buildings," Reeves said. "They're not a danger to the community. But there is no doubt they need to be cleaned up. And I'm real glad I never had anything to do with that part of the business." </i>

 

What pisses me off about this is that the company just freakin' bailed! They filed for bankrupsy so they didn't have to pay their bills, pocketed whatever cash they made and left taxpayers to clean up after them.