Workers remove radioactive muck from waste pond (Oak Ridge)

[struggle4progress]

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. A radioactive pond kept frozen for seven years to protect the environment has been excavated, with the contaminated muck shipped to a nuclear landfill.

The project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory began earlier this summer, and officials say all of the radioactive materials have been removed.

Nuclear wastes from an old test reactor at the federal research and weapons reservation were put into the pond in the 1950s, and it was backfilled with clay and other materials and capped with asphalt about 20 years later.

Contamination from the pond threatened to leach into nearby streams, and officials decided in the 1990s to fix the problem by freezing the soil and groundwater in a plot 30 feet deep. <snip>

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