Low-grade uranium ore dumped in North Woburn

(There was an apparent elevated level of childhood leukemia in the city of Woburn that, up to this point, had not been confirmed. There were only two known causes of leukemia at the time: Benzene -- at industrial exposure levels at certain leather factories; and radiation -- as the surviving victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki so horribly proved. Thus it was very chilling when a member of Woburn's City Council claimed that radioactive material had been dumped in the city by a bunch of soldiers. This was a story that, even though it was mentioned at a public meeting, couldn't be printed without some kind of hard confirmation or a real hysteria could have erupted in the city. But if it proved true, then it might also provide an explanation for the elevated levels of leukemia. There was bad news ... and good news.)

By CHARLES C. RYAN

WOBURN - Sometime in 1960, about fifty 55-gallon drums of low-grade uranium ore were disposed of in the old Woburn dump off New Boston Street, according to an employee of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Experts at the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Food and Drug Administration, however, indicate that the uranium ore should not constitute any health hazards, as it is normally no more radioactive than New England granite.

Even so, Lee Keller, Director of Technical Services at the Department of Energy's Nuclear office in Oakridge, Tenn., told the Daily Times they will inspect the site where the ore may have been dumped within a month.

It will not be all that easy to identify where the material was dumped for several reasons.

According to Edward Bernat of the U.S. FDA Health Lab on Holton Street at the Woburn-Winchester line, when the ore was disposed of, it was taken out of the 55-gallon drums in which it had been stored and placed into the back of a dump truck and then hauled up to the New Boston Street dump.

"We were dumping all of our stuff up there," he recalls.

But, even if the uranium ore was dumped at the old dump - operated by Allstate Sand and Gravel Co. under a lease to the city of Woburn at the time - it may not still be there.

In the 1960's the land in question, along with a great deal more land in the same area, was acquired by the Woburn Redevelopment Authority (WRA) to create the Woburn Industrial Park.

According to WRA Executive Director Ralph Bergman the old landfill material was excavated and hauled off the old dump site in October and early November of 1973 in order to bring the land down to the grade level of the B&M railroad line which runs along the easterly side of the Woburn Industrial Park.

"All of the fill material they used to burn rubbish back when the dump was operating was hauled up to the new dump on Merrimac Street," Bergman recalls.

The fill material was transferred to the new city dump site around the same time that the new dump road was being constructed and some of the fill may have gone into that, he believes.

"At no time was anyone in city government or anyone with the WRA aware that uranium ore had been disposed of at the Woburn dump.

Atomic Energy Commission

As far as the Daily Times has been able to determine the facility in nearby Winchester which is now operated by the FDA was originally built by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) around 1950 to 1951.

The facility was then occupied by American Cynamid Corporation which, under a contract with the AEC, attempted to devise more efficient methods of extracting uranium from low-grade American and Canadian ore. (American and Canadian ores are not high grade ores. It is the high-grade ore, called pitchblende, which is largely mined to extract reactor and weapons grade uranium).

A subsidiary assignment of the contract the AEC gave American Cynamid was to determine the health hazard - if any - which might exist in the ore tailings (the material left after the uranium is extracted).

Sometime in the 1950s the contract was passed from American Cynamid Corporation to National Lead Laboratories (which among other things, makes Dutch Boy paint).

Until 1960, National Lead conducted the same kind of research as American Cynamid did, experimenting with methods of extracting uranium from the low-grade ores available in this country.

According to Carl Eifert, of the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, National Lead's contract was phased out, and in 1961, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare took over the facility and operated a public health service there which was assigned to monitor and detect minute amounts of background radiation occurring in the atmosphere, food, water and milk as a result of the testing of atomic bombs.

Around 1971, public health moved out and the FDA took over the operation, conducting similar testing and samplings of food, water, atmosphere and suspected materials.

According to Paul Bolin, current Director of the FDA facility, the lab in Winchester was one of those responsible for monitoring the background radiation during the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania.

Bolin explained that each year, on a routine basis, the lab takes dietary samples of average citizens from 12 test points in the country and measures the residual radiation counts.

The facility also regularly looks at manufactured items such as microwave ovens, X-ray machines, color televisions and other goods which could possibly emit radiation and conducts tests to make sure they work correctly.

According to Dr. Eifert at the Department of Energy, a government survey team visited the Winchester facility in 1977 and gave it a clean bill of health, except for one or two laboratory hoods, which were taken out and disposed of.

How safe is it?

"We had to test the facility too, before we came in here," explains FDA Lab Director Bolin. "We do tests for very low level radiation and if the background count was anything beyond normal we couldn't conduct those tests."

Woburn Board of Health member, Dr. David Fitzpatrick agrees. Before taking up practice as a doctor of internal medicine in Woburn, he worked for the Public Health Service for two years at the Winchester Laboratory.

"I remember learning that when they had to make a whole body counter, they had to take the iron from the Battleship Arizona, which was sunk at Pearl Harbor, to make sure the refined iron was free of radiation."

Dr. Fitzpatrick explained and other federal experts confirmed that since the dropping of the A-bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the A-bomb tests conducted in the late '40s and early '50s, most metals have a higher radiation count than desired for such sensitive tests.

Most of the experts consulted by the Daily Times have indicated that the uranium ore does not constitute much of a health hazard, if any.

In terms of direct radiation, it is safe, as safe as much of the granite in this area of New England.

But it is not the direct radiation which might pose a problem. Uranium breaks down. It is not a stable element. The next step down from uranium is radium and radium, itself is also unstable. Radium emits radon gas as it breaks down and radon gas can, in high enough concentrations, constitute a health hazard.

Dr. Bolin at the Winchester FDA facility believes that any radon gas given off by the uranium ore would disperse and be safe.

Arthur Whitman, with the Department of Energy in Washington agrees that is normally the case, but not always.

In Canonsburg, Pa., an industrial park has been built on top of a disposal site for uranium ore tailings and recent tests there show a higher than normal radon count, he said.

The uranium ore there, however, was a much higher-grade ore than the ore which was experimented on in Winchester.

Sitting on uranium?

The problem arises, Whitman said, when a building is constructed on top of the ore because it then traps the radon gas in much higher concentrations than would occur if the landfill were open to the weather.

Even then, the levels or radon gas from the kind of ore used in Winchester is likely to be very low, if detectable.

If the ore was not moved from the location of the old dump on New Boston Street, there is a very slight chance that an industrial building may be sitting on top of it.

According to the Woburn Redevelopment Authority, several buildings have been built around the old dumpsite, though the major, central section of the dump is not yet covered.

At the north end of the dump site, Continental Chemical & Coating Co. constructed a building at 219 New Boston St. in 1972, about a year before the rest of the dump material was excavated in 1973.

In 1976 Insul-tab was built on a medium sized hill in the middle of the old dumpsite.

In 1976 and 1977, two buildings were erected by William Cummings on either side of Roessler Road, located along the northwesterly side of the old dump.

In 1978 Usen Corporation built a facility on top of a ledge outcropping in the middle of the old dump, and also in 1978 Grillco Company constructed a building on the old dumpsite.

Presently, Mansco Corporation is constructing a building for Atlantic Plywood Co. in the middle of where the old dump was formerly located before the fill material was excavated.

How many millirems?

What few people realize is that we are all exposed to various forms of radiation each year from various sources.

In fact, the average person breathes in about 50 millirems a year from radioactive radon and other, daughter gases, emitted from the earth's crust. We each pick up another 50 millirems a year from solar radiation, and ingest another 20 millirems from the food and water we eat and drink.

In some areas of the country, the radiation levels are much higher than others. Colorado, for instance, receives much higher radiation from cosmic rays than New England. New England granite, on the other hand, gives off more radiation than other soil and rock samples, according to Dr. Kenneth Skrable at the University of Lowell's Nuclear Office.

Oddly enough, Skrable explained that persons who are turning to solar power and tightly insulating their homes may be exposing themselves to much higher radiation by doing so than persons living near a nuclear power plant.

He said a recent study done in Chicago showed some tightly insulated homes with no seals on their cellar floors, had radioactive gas levels as high as the maximum allowed uranium miners, as high as 50,000 to 100,000 millirems a year.

Without proper ventilation in a house, the naturally occurring radioactive gases given off by the earth's crust tend to collect.

Those gases, he said, are also water-soluble and wells in Maine have been found to contain very high concentrations of radon gas -- higher than the levels allowed by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).

The uranium ore in question, particularly if it is spread out over an area of either the old dump site or the new dump in North Woburn, is not likely to approach those levels of exposure at all.

Paul Bolin at the Winchester Lab, in fact, feels that the millirem levels may only be around 50 a year.

(Statistically a person whose entire body is exposed to 1,000 millirems in a year will increase the likelihood he or she may contract cancer by one in 10,000 in their lifetime, according to Lowell University's Dr. Skrable, who is considered an expert in the area of naturally occurring radiation.