On Wednesday, March 4, Governor David Paterson visited Niagara Falls for a “town hall meeting” at the Doris Jones Family Resource Center on Ninth Street, just around the corner from the Highland Avenue industrial corridor and down Hyde Park Boulevard from the federally designated atomic weapons employer  Titanium Alloys Manufacturing.

As a gift, Mayor Paul Dyster gave Governor Paterson a bag of tomatoes from the H2 Grow hydroponic tomato facility on Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter, operated by Modern Disposal, Inc., whose waste stream generates a portion of the hot-house heat through the recycling of gasses generated at their adjacent landfill.

The seven-acre, glass-enclosed complex is located directly across the road (100 yards or so—see images below) from the US Department of Energy’s “temporarily-permanent, good-enough-for-now and for 200+ years with plumes” radioactive waste storage facility, called the Niagara Falls Storage Site. The NFSS is located within a 12-square-mile piece of land once secretly known as the LOOW—the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works, a location with an eerie and checkered past of military-industrial projects that fill filing cabinets and boxes at the US Army Corps of Engineers offices in Buffalo and whose nasty byproducts fill holes on the Lewiston lake plain.

Discoveries of past “black” or not fully documented projects, activities and wastes at the site seem to happen with some regularity in what are known as “data gaps.”

H2 Grow in foreground.

*Note: Original Manhattan Project era split roadways designed to keep trucks carrying explosives and or radioactive substances separated by one-way lanes to lessen the chance of an accident, critical or otherwise. The underground utility and supply lines for this hydroponics facility were dug across legacy Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission lands (among other historic past .mil users).

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The NFSS (shown on the map above and below) is one of the world’s largest single-source repositories containing the cancer-causing radioactive isotope radium-226—a prodigious generator of other radioactive substances along its decay chain half-life of 1,600 years, including the Nobel gas radon-222, a strong alpha-particle emitter and known cause of lung cancer. In just a few short days, radon-222 changes back to a solid substance and falls back to the ground in what’s called a radioactive daughter or progeny. And that’s only a part of the decay process involved in just that one isotope of radium.

These radioactive decay cycles, producing numerous progeny, have been going on continuously since the 1940s at the Lewiston Porter military dumps. That’s simply a physics fact.

There are many other isotopes at the site that decay and have produced hundreds of radioactive daughters and progeny ,including the “products of fission” and “hot particles” mentioned by Army Corps of Engineers personnel in this September 2008 Army interview, each isotope having its own chemical, physical, and environmental properties, half-lives, characteristics, affinities, and “habits.”

Even though being raised in a artificial root-laden hydroponic medium, tomatoes are well known to take a part of their nutrients/moisture from the surrounding atmosphere and to be receptive to absorption through their outer skin, leaf and vine structures.

Landmarks, legends, and landfills

Out in the desert of Nevada north of Las Vegas, on a desolate stretch of road, sits the infamous “black mailbox” (actually painted white), the only landmark leading into an area of the highly secure base known as the Nevada Test Site–(NTS)–the location of past U.S. above and below ground atomic tests (not-so secret because of sound and flash), Tenopah Test Range (flight and munitions), and the supposedly nonexistent and controversial “Area-51.”

Here in Niagara County, a lone white mailbox (pictured below) marks the main entrance to the once top secret, 12-square-mile, Lake Ontario Ordnance Works complex, on its own desolate stretch of Pletcher Road in Lewiston Porter;  now it marks the 191 acres designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as the Niagara Falls Storage Site (just out of view to the left).

WNY's own "secret mailbox."

Building 401 of the Niagara Falls Storage Site, across road.

Gate closed, restricted access leading into the 191-acre NFSS.

The NFSS is the fat-bottomed, T-topped rectangular shape on the government radiation survey map below. The dots/spots represent historic and remaining radioactive and chemical contamination.

See 2008 chemical/radiological analysis diagrams below.

*Note - Incomplete listing

Please also see:

Niagara Gazette front page tomato story day of Governor Paterson visit.

Audiocast and slideshow of town hall meeting from Niagara Gazette.

See the end below about the gift of H2 Grow (LOOW) tomatoes from Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster to Governor David Paterson [POLITICAL NOTEBOOK: We hear the words, we need more action.]

What others have said.

Enjoy  that  salad,  Governor!