GE Details Radioactive Trucking Plan

General Electric plans to demolish a former nuclear manufacturing facility in Newhallville and truck hundreds of containers of uranium-contaminated dirt through Dixwell and downtown New Haven as part of a year-long environmental remediation and site-clearing project.

The City Plan Commission heard those plans for the demolition and clean-up of the former United Nuclear Corporation site at 71 Shelton Ave. Wednesday night during its regular monthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.

The commissioners voted unanimously in support of the soil erosion and sediment control application presented by James Van Nortwick, the manager of GE’s Corporate Brownfields program, and by Debbie Hoye of the Netherlands-headquartered engineering and design consulting firm Arcadis.

They did so only after receiving assurance from a state environmental protection official that the exact trucking route for GE’s planned route for briging the contaminated soil to a rail yard on the New Haven-North Haven border would have to comply with all state and federal hazardous material transport regulations, and would have to be signed off on by the state Department of Transportation.

This is not the first time that radioactive material has been transported through New Haven to get to the rail yard to then be shipped and disposed of out of state, state Supervising Radiation Control Physicist Michael Firsick told the commissioners in an attempt to ease their concerns about the planned trucking route.

“I can appreciate that,” City Plan Commission Vice-Chair Leslie Radcliffe said. ​“But this might be the first one that I have to vote on.”

The building itself is no longer owned by General Electric, which acquired it from the United Nuclear Corporation in 1997, but rather by Schneur Katz of Zsy Development LLC.

Per Hoyes’s presentation and the City Plan department’s staff report, the U.S. Department of Energy conducted research and made nuclear fuel components at the Shelton Avenue site for the U.S. Navy from the mid-1950s until 1974.

“The applicant proposes to demolish the existing building and remove the contaminated soil at the site,” the staff report reads. ​“No contaminated soil will be piled on the site. Rather, the site will be actively remediated when shipping containers are available. Site work will stop when waiting for containers to return from their destinations.” The project is being monitored not just by the city Health Department, but also by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

GE, which will oversee the environmental remediation, promised it will implement a community air-monitoring plan, and will install a six-foot high, locked fence around the site and noise-control measures.

“We are proposing a deconstruction of the building,” Hoyes said. ​“We’re going to demolish the building, remove the concrete slab and any contaminated soil underneath.”

Wednesday’s presentation and application did not address what might ultimately be built on that lot. It concerned how GE and Arcadis plan to clear the site of its current building and contamination and convert it into a space where any kind of development can be built.

The contaminated soil itself will be excavated and placed in fully enclosed containers, called intermodal containers, Hoye said. They will then be trucked 4.6 miles to a rail yard at 256 Middletown Ave.

From there, the soil will be taken by train out to Utah and disposed of. It’s a roughly 60-day round trip for each container, Van Nortwick said, and GE will be using around 150 containers, with up to 20 traveling per day through New Haven between when remediation begins later this month and when the site is completely cleaned, cleared and finished next September. There won’t be 20 trucks on city roads every day, he said, but that will be the maximum on any given day.

The 4.6‑mile route these trucks will take, Hoye said, will start at 71 Shelton, go down Shelton Avenue and Dixwell Avenue, across Broadway and Elm Street, up State Street and then up I‑91.

“Right through Dixwell and Downtown,” Radcliffe said.

That’s right, Hoye and Van Nortwick said. Any other route would require going through even more densely residential neighborhoods. At least this one uses major city roads and not side streets, to the extent available, Van Nortwick said, and gets to the highway as quickly as possible. These trucks will be traveling between 7 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. on travel days.

What kind of contamination is there? Westville Alder and City Plan Commissioner Adam Marchand asked.

Low-level uranium impact, Van Nortwick said, mostly fixed into the building structure itself.

“The benefit to the community is that this current building with radioactive contamination will be gone and so will all the contamination,” Marchand said, leaving this current brownfield open for future development.

Yes, Radcliffe said. But that contamination will be trucked through city neighborhoods over the course of that cleaning.

“That’s the moment of risk,” Marchad said.

“My concern is the containment,” Radcliffe said. ​“My concern is the safety features that are in place.”

“My concern is just the containment and the safety features that are in place in case of accident,” Radcliffe said. Right now this material is contained in one place, and everyone knows where it is. What happens if something goes wrong during the trucking?

“The containers that we’re shipping this material in are fully contained,” Van Nortwick said. ​“They could fall over, and they’re not going to leak.” They’re ​“hard containers,” he said, like shopping containers.

And even if one did fall and there was a leak, he said, that contaminated material is solid, and can be put right back into the container. ​“No one’s going to be exposed.” But, he assured, ​“that won’t occur.

“We’ve looked at all the safeguards,” he said. ​“From air monitoring to dust to water runoff control to protective equipment for everyone on site.” And once the material is gone, neighbors won’t have to live next door to a facility still contaminated with uranium.