Nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project is being moved to Michigan

Hey, have you seen Oppenheimer? (OPY) last summer? Yes, that was a year ago. Time sure flies for peoplebut it moves much slower for nuclear waste. These things have eons of time on their hands, which is why the hazardous waste used in the development of the first atomic bombs still exists, and now, that waste is headed for the Motor City.

Well, not the Motor City, but the same county. Wayne County’s hazardous waste facility, Wayne Disposal, is accepting 6,000 cubic yards of radioactive soil and concrete and 4,000 gallons of radioactive groundwater from the Niagara Falls Disposal Site in Lewiston, New York. More than 250,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste is stored at the Niagara Falls site, a former TNT plant, and the US Army Corps of Engineers hopes to have the site cleaned up enough for industrial use… by 2038. It’s safe to say: the site is a mess of bad stuff from the 1940s to the 1970s. Hazardous waste began to emerge from the Manhattan Project in 1944, according to WGRZ:

Beginning in 1944, waste from the Manhattan Engineering District’s atomic bomb development began arriving at the former Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW) site.

K-65 uranium rods, in addition to radioactive sludges codenamed L-30 and L-50 were routinely transported to the LOOW site. Those sludges were deposited in a water treatment area at LOOW in 1944.

(…)

Eventually, LOOW became the repository for contaminated material from the Manhattan Project as far west as St. Louis, MO and as far east as Deepwater, NJ.

An open-air silo 165 was used to store barrels of K-65 uranium sludge, and that silo housed radioactive material until the 1980s.

As early as 1949, the US Army Corps of Engineers realized that radioactive material was leaking into the surrounding soil and groundwater. To begin remediating the decades-old contamination, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin sending the waste to the Wayne Disposal site in Van Buren Township, Michigan, with 25 trucks a week traveling on public roads by January 2025, according to Detroit Free Press:

Removing the waste from New York, transporting it to Michigan and disposing of it in Wayne County complies with all local, state and federal regulations for the handling of these materials, said Avery Schneider, deputy chief of public affairs for the Army Corps’ Buffalo District.

“The first thing we look at in all these projects is how we can do it safely – from the workers on site working around the material, excavating it and preparing it for removal, to the communities around the site, to people who will transport it to Belleville, Michigan, where it can be safely stored,” he said.

The Michigan Waste Disposal Facility is well known for taking the worst of the worst when it comes to chemical waste. The train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, while carrying deadly chemicals was heading to Wayne Disposal when it jumped the tracks, caught fire and poisoned the small town.

While radioactive material rolling into town sounds scary to those of us in the metro area, Wayne Disposal is well equipped to handle this type of hazardous waste. It’s just a chilling reminder that when it comes to radioactive materials, we’ll never really finish cleaning up the mess we make.

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.