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!

The Niagara Gazette’s Dan Miner wrote a column on Friday about the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), which the US Army Corps of Engineers is trying to dissolve. Miner got a lot of things wrong—some minor, some major.

To wit:

Bill Boeck is not a chemist; Walter Garrow has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Both were hand-selected for this incarnation of the RAB and are directly associated with Niagara University and/or the contracting company that built the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) radiological “containment structure.”

The original and most previous RAB was disbanded immediately after an US Army officer grabbed and shoved a member of the public at a RAB meeting on March 13, 2002. A police report is on file.

The Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (or LOOW site—see the US Army Corps of Engineers map to the left) is actually a 7,500-acre parcel of properties that were allegedly used for TNT production during only a nine-month period of the Second World War in 1942-1943. This site did not produce TNT for the “nation’s armed forces during and after World War II.” The 191-acre piece of real estate being mentioned here in this article is formally called the Niagara Falls Storage Site (NFSS) and is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Energy.

No silo is associated, or ever was, with the current subsurface (read: within watertable) “containment structure” burial. The basements of old military buildings on site are now being used to store these high-level radioactive materials and are considered to constitute the NFSS “interim containment structure.” At the time this project was explained to the public more than two decades ago, it was stated that this “temporary solution” was to be an “interim measure.” The silo being mentioned in this article is where the Radium-226 (between 1/3 and 1/2 of the world’s supply) was previously stored above ground for 40 years. It has since been demolished (1980s), and that structure was also buried with the remaining wastes that were known as being scattered around the LOOW site during that time frame.

Plutonium, an extremely dangerous radioactive element created for the most part in a fission reactor, was found by Environment Canada and was reported as being detected in the mouth of the Niagara River at Youngstown, New York. It can be easily assumed to have leached/traveled/migrated through the ditches and groundwater from the LOOW site only a couple of miles away. No testing has ever been conducted to find the source and origin of this plutonium. In fact, it was never even admitted that plutonium had even been on this site until the Rochester Human Radiation Experiments (HREX) lab wastes (see The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome) Dell-Random House, 1999) were mentioned as being located there at Lewiston-Porter in a series of Artvoice articles (”The Bomb That Fell on Niagara” by G. Kelly, L. Ricciuti, 2001-2002). The US Army Corps of Engineers found these particular HREX wastes buried at the legacy LOOW site in 2002-2003 after the series of articles was published. Other sources of plutonium, in addition to the HREX materials, have been identified as being on the LOOW site.

The suggestion that the site presents “no imminent health risks” is misleading. There has never been a “safe condition” at this site. The cavalier waste disposal practices of the previous military “caretakers” of the LOOW led to leaks and that spread radioactive materials into the surrounding landscape during the entire time (decades) that it has been located there. It is still leaking. “Abatement” is not removal.

No mention is made by either Miner or the RAB committee members of the recent change to federal Law (2003’s House Resolution 2754) that will allow the radium-226 and other slurried radioactive elements to remain buried in this landscape and within the water table forever.