Allan Appel Photo
The site viewed from Mansfield.
The catch basins will be covered and surrounded by hay bales. Trucks will remain only on paved areas. They will have their tires carefully checked so any soil is removed before they begin to roll over city streets. There will be no “dust gravitation.”
Those are some of the protective measures the City Plan Commission approved as it gave permission for a spot clean-up, technically known as a “soil remediation project,” on a location where the United Nuclear Corporation manufactured nuclear fuel rods until 1976.
The site in question is 300 – 320 Mansfield St., currently a parking lot at One Science Park, in “tract D” in the east-central portion of the development. The Science Park technology complex arose from the grave of the old Olin-Winchester manufacturing complex that once kept tens of thousands of people working around the clock in the mid-20th century; the transition has required lots of cleaning up.
Click here for a 2006 article in the New Haven Advocate by Carole Bass on the original license issued by the Atomic Energy Commission to the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation in 1961.
The license was for the handling of enriched uranium. Olin transferred the license to the United Nuclear Corporation for the manufacture of nuclear fuel rods, according to the City Plan staff report.
Science Park hired the SCE Environmental Group to supervise the work, which in turn hired Groundwater & Environmental Services, Inc. of Windsor to implement the work.
Allan Appel PHoto
GES’s Lore and SCE’s Bill Bradican tell commissioners no nuclear waste is involved in the clean-up.
It involves digging down in three locations all within the current parking lot, to depth of about 5 feet and removing up to 1,800 tons of contaminated material.
At last Wednesday night’s City Plan meeting, City Engineer Dick Miller asked for reassurance that the contaminating material being removed is non-nuclear.
“You’re confident that whatever’s there, you’re going to eliminate it and make it clean?”
“Yes,” said GES’s Jill Lore.
She said soil borings confirmed that what is being removed are non-nuclear hydro-carbons, and that’s all. They would be eliminated.
A fence currently prevents access from Mansfield.
In other words, no nuclear hot spots are involved.
City Plan Director Karyn Gilvarg asked if the project has the approval of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
The answer was again yes.
Miller appeared satisfied.
In an email following the meeting, Lore wrote the site was used for welding parts into fuel bearing components to be shipped elsewhere. “No exposed fuel was stored at Tract,” she stated.
According to a City Plan Commission staff report, One Science Park was originally part of the Winchester Arms complex. In 1961 portions of Winchester Tracts H and D, including the site under discussion, were transferred to United Nuclear Corporation (UNC).
UNC manufactured rods there for a decade. It remained vacant until 1991 when Southern New England Telephone (SNET) bought it. SNET was purchased by SBC (known now as AT&T) in 1999.
The environmental remediation being undertaken now was a state-required condition of an environmental assessment that was part of the 1999 purchase.
“It is important to note that AT&T did not cause or contribute to the contamination, but as current owner of the property, they are required to address the contamination,” Lore wrote.
GES filed a remediation action plan with the state in October last year, and the work is scheduled to begin before the end of May.
Access to the site is off Winchester Avenue, from which all the trucks involved will be entering and leaving.
The bad stuff is going to be trucked to a location in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and clean fill brought to the site to fill the excavations.
According to the report, “The site will be restored to better than it was to start.”
GES’s Lore said the work will begin on May 25.
