Newhallville Nuclear Clean-Up Completed

One year and four months later, General Electric finished cleaning up the site of a former nuclear manufacturing facility in Newhallville and handed the 2.7‑acre lot — formerly contaminated, now open for ​“unrestricted use” — back to its landlord.

The site in question is 71 Shelton Ave.

Starting in October 2019, General Electric, the Middletown-based contractor Arcadis, and the subcontractor Stamford Wrecking — under the supervision of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal Department of Energy (DOE), and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP)—deconstructed a former dilapidated building that used to house a United Nuclear Corporation factory.

That work involved taking the building apart piece by piece, trucking hundreds of containers of asbestos, lead dust, and uranium-contaminated debris out of Newhallville and to disposal sites in Utah and Alabama, and then backfilling the excavated site with clean fill material.

On Feb. 18, the NRC decomissioning chief Anthony Dimitriadis sent a letter to GE Corporate Brownfields Program Manager James Van Nortwick (pictured) letting him know that the federal agency had completed its review of the final status report related to the cleanup of that former United Nuclear Corporation Naval Products site.

Click here to read that letter in full.

Citing an October 2020 inspection by staff from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) alongside a federal inspector, Dimitriadis wrote that ORISE’s site data ​“support the conclusion that the residual activity levels satisfy the Derived Concentration Guideline Levels (DCGLs). …

“Based on the NRC staff’s evaluation of material disposal records, Remedial Action Completion Reports, your FSS report, the NRC and ORISE confirmatory analysis, and comparison with the June 23, 2008 DCGLs for UNC [ADAMS Accession Number ML081790514], the NRC staff confirms that the former United Nuclear Corporation Products site meets the criteria for unrestricted use in accordance with the radiological criteria for license termination in Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR), Part 20, subpart E.”

Interesting. What does all that mean? In layman’s terms?

“It means that from the NRC’s perspective, radiation levels at the site are within allowable levels and the land can be used without any restrictions,” NRC spokesperson Neil Sheehan told the Independent.

Van Nortwick confirmed for the Independent in a Tuesday email that, indeed, the NRC letter represented the final sign-off needed to recognize the site as officially, finally, cleaned up.

“As a result, we terminated our access agreement with Mr. Katz [that is, Schneur Katz, the local landlord who owns 71 Shelton] and returned the property to him last week.”

Van Nortwick also said that the DOE-funded cleanup cost roughly $14 million to complete.

Katz, who also owns the adjacent office building at 91 Shelton Ave., could not be reached for comment on how he plans to use the site now that it’s cleaned up and back under his company’s control. The site currently sits in a Heavy Industry (IH) zone.

No More Than 3X ​“3.43 Picocuries Per Gram”

And what exactly does ​“cleaned up” mean when it comes to a former nuclear site like 71 Shelton Ave.?

Sheehan, the NRC spokesperson, told the Independent by email that the federal limit for unrestricted use is that ​“a member of the public cannot be exposed to more than 25 millirems of radiation on an annual basis from any residual radiological contamination at a facility. The average American is exposed to about 620 millirems radiation on a yearly basis from natural and manmade sources.

“To put this number in perspective, the average radiation dose from a single chest x‑ray is about 10 millirems.”

And so what type of radiation exposure does a post-cleanup 71 Shelton Ave. provide?

“A site is remediated to a Derived Concentration Guideline Limit (DCGL), which is the derived radionuclide activity concentration that corresponds to a dose-based release criteria. At UNC, the state limit of 19 millirems per year, was used,” Sheehan wrote.

“The DCGL that corresponds to that is 435 picocuries per gram. The background DCGLs — the amount of radioactivity already present in the area — is 3.43 picocuries per gram. UNC remediated the site to no more than three times background. This is considered to indicate that there are no elevated readings, therefore no residual radioactive contamination of concern.

“The isotope of concern for the UNC site was uranium and the DCGLs are for uranium.”

A Contamination History

On Jan. 8, ORISE provided a final report to the NRC detailing its inspectors’ activities and findings when trying to determine whether or not 71 Shelton Ave. had indeed been properly, safely cleaned up.

While the resulting 57-page ​“independent confirmatory survey summary” report is a highly technical document, well above this report’s paygrade, it does provide a detailed and layman-legible narrative describing the history of the industrial site over the past 61 years.

According to the report, in 1960, the Atomic Energy Commission (later called the NRC) issued a special nuclear material license to Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation — Winchester Western Division for the fabrication and manufacturing of reactor fuel components for the Naval Reactors Program in New Haven.

One year later, Olin transferred the facility and license to United Nuclear — Fuels Division, which later became United Nuclear Corporation.

“The SNM license authorized possession and use of highly-enriched uranium and later source material, including natural uranium, depleted uranium, and thorium for research and nuclear fuel fabrication. UNC operated the facility from 1961 to 1976. Buildings 3H and 6H were part of a larger nuclear fuel complex, referred to as the H‑Tract.”

In 1974, UNC decided to close the H‑Tract facility. It transferred its equipment and inventory of radioactive materials from the New Haven location to a Montville, Connecticut location.

In 1976, the NRC signed off on final surveys of the New Haven facility and released the site for unrestricted use ​“in accordance with the existing release criteria at the time.”

In 1989 and 1990, the NRC initiated a Terminated Sites Review Project to ​“ensure that formerly licensed facilities were terminated in accordance with current NRC criteria for release for unrestricted use.”

Over a decade after initially signing off on the site’s safety, the NRC determined in 1990 that the Shelton Avenue site ​“required additional review since final radiological survey records were either incomplete or inadequate.”

A 1996 radiological survey of the site’s subsurface soils indicated that the site still held ​“residual enriched uranium” in certain ​“subsurface/subfloor soil samples collected from inside the building and connected inactive sewer system.” That residual enriched uranium exceeded the release criteria established in the NRC’s 1981 release guidelines.

In 1997, GE acquired the Shelton Avenue site.

“A characterization report was completed in 2003 followed by a decontamination and decommissioning plan in 2005. A final status survey (FSS) plan was developed and submitted to NRC in 2006 to describe the surveys performed to confirm the removal of soil with total uranium concentrations greater than 30 pCi/g (Cabrera 2018).”

After adopting dose-based based release criteria that corresponded with state standards, the NRC found in 2013 that remaining soil under the 3H/6H building did not suffer from ​“widespread contamination.”

“It was determined that contamination most likely was present under drainage holes in the south trench and in a utility trench that runs the length of the building. A survey of the floor surfaces, portions of the walls, and other interior building surfaces (e.g., lamps, crossbeams) was conducted and reported in 2018 (Arcadis 2019).”

“Based on the history and characterization studies,” the ORISE report continued, ​“it was decided to raze the 3H/6H tract building and remove the debris and a portion of the underlying soil. A cleanup plan was submitted in 2019 for the work (Arcadis 2019).”