American Nuclear cleanup complete
With buildings demolished and radioactive soil replaced, the American Nuclear site awaits future use. (photo:Ben Pounds )
That was the message presented at an event at The Pearl at Aspire Park on Tuesday, Aug. 18, attended by Anderson County, Environmental Protection Agency and Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation officials.
The site is at 147 Blockhouse Valley Road, next to a county recycling center and the county’s animal shelter.
Reporters toured the site after the event.
“This is the moment we have all dreamed and hoped for,” Anderson County Mayor Terry Frank said to the officials and reporters.
“Once the work here is finally wrapped up, this site will be safe for reuse, safe for the environment, safe for human health and basically the concerns of the past will be in the past,” said Steve Sanders director of the TDEC Division of Remediation during a tour of the site.
EPA Southeast Chief of Staff Leland Frost called the effort “one of the fastest cleanups of this kind that I’m aware of.”
At the same event, however, County Commissioner Tracy Wandell called it a “long ride.”
Officials said both statements are accurate, as the cleanup and preparation of the site for re-use started last April, but the site sat unused and polluted with toxic waste for 52 years.
The American Nuclear Company, created to develop medical isotopes, started business on the site in 1962, but abandoned it without warning later, causing the state of Tennessee to seize the site in 1973.
An earlier cleanup effort put some toxic material in a buried septic tank.
TDEC referred the site to the EPA’s Superfund program on July 15, 2022.
However, on April 1, the EPA and TDEC’s contractors began a new cleanup effort that involved demolishing buildings and removing radioactive soils and the septic tank. That was the work that wrapped up recently.
“This was a real-quick cleanup once we found the sources to do so,” said Sanders, regarding funding for the project, which was $13.5 million from the EPA.
Carter Owens, on-site coordinator for the EPA, said that the people working on the project managed to cut $4 million from the projected cleanup cost.
Frank said the county is looking to work with TDEC and make the site a nature preserve.
It is adjacent to the Anderson County Animal Shelter, which the county plans to move to Carden Farm Dog Park, and to the Blockhouse Valley Center for recycling.
Wandell in his speech at the event thanked the Anderson County Intergovernmental Relations Committee for helping move the project forward.
That committee recently merged with the Operations Committee.
Even if cleanup was relatively quick, it wasn’t easy due to lack of information about the site, Sanders said.
“Anytime you’re dealing with any sort of radiation source, the unknown is the worst-case scenario, and that’s what we had here,” he said.
Carter Owens, on-site coordinator for the EPA, said that workers had to fill the site back in with 6,000 yards of soil to make up for the radioactive soil they dug out.
He said the worst radiation on site came from hot cells, which produce considerably more radioactivity than is the allowable by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under today’s regulations.
Other waste on the site, however, was less radioactive, which required contractors to divide the waste by category.
