Roskam: Feds may help fund W. Chicago thorium cleanup
U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam says progress has been made to find funding for the removal of thorium waste from a former factory site in West Chicago.
The U.S. Department of Energy, he said, has agreed to consider paying claims for remediation of radioactive contamination stemming from federal atomic energy programs in the 1970s.
Roskam learned of the department's decision this week in a letter from Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz.
“I was very pleased to receive Secretary Moniz's letter ... which represents an important step forward in the fight to finish the long-standing contamination cleanup project in West Chicago,” Roskam said in a statement.
While Moniz's letter doesn't promise money for specific projects, Roskam said he and U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk are “working with our colleagues to secure adequate funding for these important environmental cleanup activities.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. House approved legislation that provides $20 million to reimburse work at cleanup projects nationwide.
Kirk is hoping to get the measure approved by the Senate. If that happens, nearly $6 million could be used in West Chicago.
Before the former Kerr-McGee factory closed in 1973, it spent years producing thorium as part of its gaslight mantle production process and the early development of the atomic bomb.
Some of the thorium waste created during the process ended up in hundreds of residential properties, Reed-Keppler Park and a wastewater treatment plant when the factory made the sandlike material available to residents for landscaping and building projects before it was determined thorium causes an increased risk of cancer.
In addition, a storm sewer from the factory site carried thorium waste to nearby Kress Creek and the West Branch of the DuPage River.
The result was an environmental mess that's taken decades and roughly $1.2 billion to fix. Most of the cost for the massive cleanup was paid by Kerr-McGee Corp. and its spinoff, Tronox Inc., which filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009.
The environmental response trust overseeing the work used to get money from the Department of Energy's Title X program, which reimburses communities that participated in the atomic energy program. But the West Chicago Environmental Response Trust hasn't received federal funding since fiscal 2008.
And with the entire cleanup about $40 million away from completion, the trust is running out of money.
According to trust officials, all that remains is to remediate part of the former factory site, which is vacant and surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire.
City officials say they want the cleanup done so the roughly 60-acre site someday can be turned into a park.
“We're so close,” Roskam said this week during a visit to the site. “Let's just get this done and get it cleaned up.”