Swoop down over Minneapolis-St. Paul, and in the midst of all the urb and suburb, you’ll see 2300 acres of scrubby land that was once the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (TCAAP). Built in 1941, the plant made munitions through World War II and the Korean War. The munitions included landmines, grenades, and cluster bombs that required Uranium-238 – depleted uranium. The plant was decommissioned some time between 1974 and 1985 (depending on who you ask). In the mid-1980s, under the Reagan administration, the government decided it was time to off-load the land.
Depleted uranium sounds really impotent but it really just means uranium waste “depleted” of one particular isotope of uranium. Of course, it’s not even completely depleted of anything.
It’s incredibly toxic and incredibly radioactive. If you were to breathe any bit of this stuff into your lungs, you’d be completely screwed. Lots of this stuff is made into ammunition.
Reclaiming the land sounds easy – remove the buildings, let the land go back to woodland scenery and blue lakes. End of story. But under the surface, things aren’t so idyllic.
Like active-duty soldiers, military installations rarely make seamless transitions back to civilian life. The TCAAP transition had quite a price tag: somewhere between $150- and $300- million dollars. It was the number-one Superfund project in Minneapolis, and one of the largest military site rehabilitation projects anywhere.
TCAAP had been a breeding ground for grenades, missiles, single-user armaments, and armor, and each left its own ugly afterbirth. The TCAAP site was littered with “disposal†sites for the materials left after the bombs and grenades rolled off the line: open burn and salvage pits, burn and burial areas, solvent burning areas, and a landfill and sludge containment area. Burning, burying or dissolving the materials used in ammunition production creates a host of nasty by-products.
Bottom line? “Disposal†released a wide variety of contaminants into the soil, water and atmosphere around TCAAP, including:
- Lead
- Chromium
- Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), like trichloroethylene (the solvent TCE)
- Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)
- Cyanide
- And, of course, depleted uranium (DU)
The effects of this stuff read like a “who’s who†of medical nightmares.
Cyanide keeps your body from getting oxygen, suffocating you from the inside out.
In kids, lead poisoning can cause mental retardation, seizures, and, in serious cases, coma and death (source). In adults? It trashes your kidneys.
Solvents like TCE can cause “neurological problems†– faulty vision, dizziness, and nerve damage. Eventually, it can give you liver and kidney cancer (source).
Large doses of chromium can damage any surface of your body it comes into contact with, and then cause lung cancer (source).
Depleted Uranium of course can make “dirty bombs†as well as bullets that shoot through tank armor.
The Clean-Up
When VOCs were found in the drinking water of the nearby city of New Brighton, the EPA launched an investigation on the impact of all the munitions by-product manufacturing. Contaminants were everywhere: the water, the soil, and the atmosphere. Both the Mississipi and Minnesota Rivers, which flow nearby, were at risk for contamination. Worse yet, a plume of groundwater containing TCE had spread as far as six miles outside of the TCAAP site and contaminated local water supplies.(source).
“Containment†was followed by trying to get the contaminated water out of the ground and processing it until drinkable, avoiding drainage into local lakes and rivers. Some wells had to be abandoned altogether.
Cleaning the water was just the beginning . Each toxin, in each different hiding-place, had to be removed in a different way. Tons of soil went through leaching and washing; unreclaimable soil went straight into landfills. All water sources in the area had to be tested; all topsoil had to be tested; even the ground around TCAAP sewage pipes had to be checked, since TCAAP personnel had used them for dumping everything from grease to organic toxins and put the surrounding soil at risk.
And coordinating clean-up techniques was nothing next to coordinating the people involved. The site was owned by the Department of Defense and run under the aegis of Alliant Techsystems, Inc, the largest supplier of munitions to the DoD. When the TCAAP was no longer needed, about half the acreage was turned over to the National Guard. The rest was slated to go to nearby cities and counties, but the DoD and Alliant were still supposed to be responsible for clean-up.
To complicate matters, the EPA had given a Superfund grant to foot part of the bill. And of course, the State of Minnesota has an interest in seeing the job done right, so Minnesota’s Department of Health and its Pollution Control Agency, among others, have joined what’s already a pretty packed party.
Then there are the people who will get the land. It’s being parceled out to different communities and groups: some to the city of New Brighton, some to Ramsey County, some to the nearby city of Arden Hills .
Integrating the needs of these groups requires aeons of meetings, tons of paperwork, and more than 20 years (to date) of negotiation.
The Future
If you’re looking for the happy ending, it’s that the land is returning to the community, and to the wildlife that originally depended on it. A 113-acre portion went to Ramsey County for use as a wildlife preserve and much-needed park space. The Vento Plan (named for its sponsor, Senator Bruce Vento) is creating a separate wildlife refuge.
But it’s not a perfect ending. . .The DoD and Alliant have been fined for environmental violations in the site since the clean-up started (source 1,source2). And the Restoration Advisory Board (the citizen’s group which provides local resident input) is still concerned about the transparency and completeness of the clean-up process (source).
The land reclamation is going to be a long, slow process – and a pretty pricey one. Not just that multi-million dollar price tag, but the fact that, even when the toxic stuff is contained, it won’t be gone. The lead goes to landfill, the DU heads to nuclear waste dumps or Iraq, the wells nearby have to be watched for years to make sure that the trace-level toxins aren’t oozing into the water people use every day. And no one knows yet what the long-term effects will be on the people who worked in and lived around that plant for the 30 years of its active duty.
So it’s less like a fairy-tale and more of an object lesson – the next time your community lobbies for a local munitions plant, don’t just think about whether you want it in your backyard. Think about what the makeover’s going to cost someday.
Just a quick correction. Bruce Vento was a the representative of 4th Congressional district in Minnesota for 24 years from 1976 to 2000. He died from lung cancer in October 2000.
Oh, good catch Patrick – thanks for the correction – ina
Great post!
It’s a pity that Alliant and the DoD, who created the problem in the first place, are in charge of the cleanup. Not that they have to pay for it, of course–that’s only fair–but that they seem to have a fair bit of control and decision-making power over the day-to-day operations. It’s hard to imagine they’ll do it right this time, since they made such a mess of things the first time around.
As a native Minnesotan who grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, thank you for writing this article! This sordid story needs to be told to the general public so they can raise their voices about this type of environmental disaster. Keep up the good work.
You are right and you are wrong. The depleted uranium and cyanide are the least of the problems. the solvents, PCB’s, and assorted halides are the stuff that would worry me. Regarding the depleted uranium, there are plenty of credible studies out there that show that it’s not a significant hazard, and cyanide is quickly degraded out in the open — consider that cloer releases free cyanide when it’s leaves are damaged (it is a natural insecticide — ever notice how unscathed clover leaves seem to be, or that the clover petioles are symettrically mishapen (a little bug took an unfortunate bite, only one, out of the tiny budding clover leaves, while they were all bunched together.
No, depleted urnaium, cyanide, they really aren’t trouble. What’s trouble is the other stuff. Big, big trouble.
Hi Timothy,
Could you post links to a few of those many credible studies that show that depleted uranium is safe? I’d love to read them for an article we have in the works.
Thanks for reading Sprol!
Mathew
Hi Timothy – Thanks – thoughtful post. I’m on the same page with you about the dangers of the TCE and other less “notorious” organics…nasty stuff. And those were indeed (and continue to be) the compounds of most concern when the TCAAP clean-up started.
Like Mathew, I’d be interested in seeing the studies on DU – the medical literature seems to be pretty consistent on seeing few short-term effects of DU (because of relatively low radiation levels) and many longer term effects (because of the density of the metal and because it doesn’t degrade quickly – has a much longer half-life than fissionable uranium).
About cyanide : it does degrade easily in open environments, assuming certain pH range in soil and water. So when it entered water near TCAAP, it shouldn’t even have remained detectable. However, the cyanide that has been released from TCAAP was often released in oily/hydrophobic mixtures that stabilize the cyanide and, incidentally, make it more bioavailable. The fact that it was still detectable as late as 1987 in a nearby lake suggests that the method in which disposal/dispersal occurred did not allow for sufficient contact with water to facilitate degradation.
I’d be very interested in hearing more of your thoughts – ina
I have the impression from some desultory reading over the years, that depleted uranium is considered safe only for a given value of “safe“. That is, it is safer than enriched, let alone bomb-grade uranium. It can be loaded and handled as an armor-penetrator without killing the handlers, at least not at a rate the military is required to take notice of. The fact that its safety is relative is often misused by politicians and their ilk, who act like it’s safe the way concrete or ice are safe.
Some of the complex, nitrogenated, organic compounds that can result from modern munitions manufacture, however, are immediately heinous, and travel well through the water, soil, and food chain.
I have been reading with interest the developments over the last couple of decades in bioremediation, particularly the ability of some plants to sequester several heavy metals, to the extent that some of them are actually like a low-mid grade ore in terms of percentage of dry mass. Has anyone studied this technique for d.u.? There are a lot of places around the world that could use this.
d.s.
All persons in governmental positions dealing with construction of plants dealing with toxic materials– or responsible for the disposing of toxic waste should read this article. It’s a terrifying aspect of our era.
David – Thanks for your comment and question. In fact one type of bioremediation was used at the site – but for the lead in the area rather than DU. TCAAP included a test site of about 2 acres for phytoremediation.
ina
I worked for about two years at this site. Let me give you my thoughts:
“It’s a pity that Alliant and the DoD, who created the problem in the first place, are in charge of the cleanup. Not that they have to pay for it, of course–that’s only fair–but that they seem to have a fair bit of control and decision-making power over the day-to-day operations. It’s hard to imagine they’ll do it right this time, since they made such a mess of things the first time around.”
The MPCA and EPA are in charge of the cleanup. I had to submit reports monthly and quarterly to these agencies and to the Army. There is a great deal of oversight involved, I talked to the MPCA rep every day when I worked there.
“All persons in governmental positions dealing with construction of plants dealing with toxic materials– or responsible for the disposing of toxic waste should read this article. It’s a terrifying aspect of our era.”
The pollution occurred before we really knew what we were doing, i.e. pre-1960′s environmental movement. The problem with the groundwater from TCE was from burn pits from the 40′s to the 50′s. We know better know. But your point is valid.
“I have been reading with interest the developments over the last couple of decades in bioremediation, particularly the ability of some plants to sequester several heavy metals, to the extent that some of them are actually like a low-mid grade ore in terms of percentage of dry mass. Has anyone studied this technique for d.u.? There are a lot of places around the world that could use this.”
AND
“In fact one type of bioremediation was used at the site – but for the lead in the area rather than DU. TCAAP included a test site of about 2 acres for phytoremediation.”
This experiment worked on one site, failed miserably on another. The technology is most likely sound in most cases but the problem on the failed site was the groundwater was only about 5 feet below the surface. So, the lead bonded (as it was supposed to do) with the kealate agent but instead of being absorbed by the plant material it leached into the groundwater. Getting lead out of groundwater is not difficult, but when it is bonded to something else it is a pain. I found a pump-and-treat solution that from my knowledge is still being used.
The site in question that I worked on is not really a problem unless someone wanted to put a well on site. It may take years to completely remediate the site (depending on what standards developers/government wants), but it may not be worth the money since I don’t see how any lead from this groundwater would impact Rice Creek. We tested for over a year, groundwater moves slowly but it can be quantified that there was no negative impact.
[...] The Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (TCAAP) was listed in 2005 as one of the worst places on earth by SPROL.com. Construction on Twin Cities AAP began in August 1941, and production started in February 1942. During WW II, the plant produced more than 4 billion rounds of ammunition. From 1950 to 1957, 3.5 billion rounds of small arms ammunition, 3.2 million 195-mm artillery shell metal parts, and 715,000 155-mm shell metal parts were produced. The plant was placed on layaway status in several stages from 1971 to 1974. It is now inactive. Decontamination of the site began in 2001. [...]
I grew up and lived nearby. It really isn’t one of the worst places on earth. One of the priciest/highest income communities in the entire United States is nearby (North Oaks) and it is a beautiful tract of land. People purchased and built houses in the area in the 1980s, and there really aren’t any issues with children who grew up in the area.
I drove by it every single day for 20 years, drank well water, and am fit as a fiddle with no issues whatsoever. A good job has been done keeping any contaminants out, and it really is a beautiful piece of land. I say that we let nature continue to restore the land.