Feds finally cleaning up radioactive remnants from Robert Oppenheimer’s A-bombs in NYC after covering it up for 80 years
The federal government is finally cleaning up Robert Oppenheimer’s mess on Staten Island – 80 years later.
The Army Corps of Engineers this month began removing radioactive remnants of the atomic bombs that ended World War II from a waterfront site after decades of delays, cover-ups, and buck-passing in Washington DC.
“I look at this site as being the alpha of the atomic age,” said Beryl Thurman, a Staten Island environmental activist who has lobbied for the clean-up since 2001.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the omega, but Staten Island, in my eyes, was the beginning.”
Recent soil samples taken at the one-acre plot at 2393 Richmond Terrace, the site of a long-demolished warehouse, show average radiation levels 25 times higher than normal, according to the Army Corps — enough to cause elevated cancer risk with regular exposure.
“Our community has been dumped on for decades,” said Mary Bullock of the Port Richmond North Shore Alliance, the working-class neighborhood where the dangerous debris has lurked since 1942.
“This is a victory for us,” Bullock said of the Army Corps’ $1.8 million, two-month project.
The atomic site — just 8 miles from the southern tip of Manhattan — was a well-kept secret for years, both during and long after the war.
In 1939, as Nazi Germany launched World War II in Europe, the head of an international mining company was warned by British scientists that the recent discovery of nuclear fission made his stock of uranium a potential power source for a theoretical, but terrifying, new weapon: the atomic bomb.
The alert prompted Edgar Sengier of the African Metals Corp. to ship 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore from his company’s mine in the Belgian Congo to New York City, according to the US Department of Energy’s official history.
“That was very rich ore,” said Stanford Professor Rodney Ewing, an expert in radiological science. With its 65% uranium content, compared to the 0.2% uranium ores mined in North America at the time, Sengier’s ore was ideal for weapons-making.
Agriculture giant, Archer Daniels Midland, agreed to store the ore in a warehouse that was part of a linseed oil manufacturing operation it owned on Staten Island, near the piers of the Bayonne Bridge.
In 1942, Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Engineer District — better known as the Manhattan Project — bought the entire stock of ore from Sengier, moved it from Staten Island, and began to refine it into fissile uranium and plutonium later used in the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For his contribution to the Allied victory, Sengier became the first non-American civilian to receive the Presidential Medal for Merit — based on the Top Secret-classified recommendation of Gen. Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s military director.
But on Staten Island, three years of storage in 2,007 unlined metal drums caused the invisible contamination of the warehouse — which was demolished in the mid-1940s — and the ground on which it stood.
“Eighty years later, that radiation still poses a danger,” Ewing said.
The US Department of Energy knew of the site’s high radiation levels since at least 1980 — but kept the risk under wraps as it and the federal Environmental Protection Agency squabbled over which bore the responsibility for fixing the damage.
In the meantime, scores of homes sprouted a stone’s throw from the weed-covered, trash-strewn toxic parcel on the shore of the Kill van Kull.
“I had no idea,” said Lydia Pride-Hamilton, whose home in Nicholas Avenue Estates, a new city-subsidized development of 78 two-family houses for middle-income buyers, sits just 500 feet from the contamination zone.
“My 13-year-old is like, ‘Cool! History in my backyard!’ But it’s scary to think about the radiation.”
Thurman uncovered the atomic backstory after hearing strange recollections from longtime residents of John Street, a residential block across the road from where the warehouse stood.
“People said they remembered being told by their parents and grandparents, ‘Stay away from the waterfront, there’s something bad there,’” Thurman told The Post.
Some said they had salvaged bluestone pavers and other remnants from the warehouse site, then experienced thyroid conditions and miscarriages — known effects of radiation damage.
“Other people said they had seen a group from the Japanese embassy come and hold a prayer vigil there in the 1980s,” Thurman recalled.
“Finally I said to myself, could this be a Manhattan Project site?”
Thurman’s research eventually revealed that in 1980, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory ran preliminary tests which discovered gamma radiation up to 20 times background levels on the surface of the empty lot, which by then was fenced off from the street but accessible to boaters and fishermen.
A decade later, in 1992, the state Department of Environmental Conservation ran a more extensive survey and found multiple areas of contamination, including a hot spot more than 160 times normal background levels.
(Naturally occurring uranium-238 present in the Earth’s crust has a half-life of almost 4.5 billion years.)
However, the reports were not made public until Thurman filed a Freedom of Information Act request and got the evidence in 2001.
“It turned out that the Energy Department had rejected the site for federal remediation on a technicality,” she said.
First, federal Energy Department bureaucrats claimed they could not find documents showing that the government took possession of Sengier’s uranium while it was at the Staten Island site.
Then, when the 1942 paperwork turned up, they required proof it was the same one used to make the bombs.
“The Environmental Protection Agency had to start from scratch,” Thurman said.
“They did a report that analyzed the DNA from the refined uranium and backtracked it all the way to the uranium ore that was on Staten Island.”
Finally, in 2021, the Energy Department added the Staten Island parcel to the Army Corps Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, which is tasked with remediating contamination linked to the Manhattan Project and other early atomic experiments.
On Nov. 9, workers began excavating the soil to a depth of 4 feet, based on test pit samples that found radioactive penetration well below the surface.
Pedestrians on the Bayonne Bridge walkway high above watched as they spread out a huge disposable tarp to catch any spills, backed a lidded shipping container into the contamination zone, and then used an excavator to scoop the soil into the container for disposal in an unidentified hazardous-materials landfill.
An Army Corps spokesman said the cleaned site will be covered with a synthetic membrane, crushed stone, and a thick layer of topsoil, then planted with trees and shrubs.
Some neighbors this week were shocked to learn of the hazard a few hundred yards from their homes.
“That’s really disturbing,” said Theresa, 39, whose Nicholas Avenue Estates house was built in 2016.
“We weren’t told that when we bought it.”
The developer equipped Theresa’s home, less than 1,000 feet from the toxic site, with a radon venting system, she said.
Most of her neighbors have them, too.
“Now that kind of makes sense,” she said.
“I feel so uneasy that this was kept so quiet.”
But other locals brushed off the potential danger.
“I’ve been working in this neighborhood off and on since the late 1970s,” said Jimmy Iosue, quality control expert at Island Redi-Mix, a cement company that occupies an uncontaminated chunk of the former ADM property.
“So if there was to be any exposure, I’m sure I’ve been exposed to it already.”
Workers at Redi-Mix, which has operated in that location for eight years, were never cautioned to avoid the former warehouse site, he said.
“It’s a real piece of history,” Iosue said.
“But I hope it doesn’t bite us in the you-know-what.”
