After a decade of negotiations, radioactive thorium will be removed from the DuPage River and a tributary in the West Chicago area under an agreement with Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp., a lawyer for DuPage County said Monday.
The agreement, which must be put in a written plan, says thorium deposits in Kress Creek and the west branch of the DuPage River will be excavated and shipped to a licensed site in Utah, said Joseph Karaganis, the lawyer working on behalf of the county, West Chicago and others.
In addition to the river system, thorium contaminated more than 600 residential properties in West Chicago, a park and a former factory. Most of those sites have been excavated, though work continues on the factory site and some homes, he said.
“Basically, [this latest agreement] is a permanent solution to any residual radioactive material associated with Kerr-McGee, anywhere that it has been found,” Karaganis said.
The cleanup is expected to take about four years, and total restoration of the river system will likely take 10 years, said Brook McDonald, executive director of the Naperville-based Conservation Foundation.
“During removal, it’s going to be messy,” McDonald said. “But when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be beautiful.”
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Kerr-McGee spokeswoman Tracy Senat said she could not comment on the preliminary agreement or the likely content of a final agreement.
“We’re still in the process of developing the final written agreement, but we are making progress,” Senat said. “We are confident we will reach that final agreement without having to go to court.”
The conceptual agreement was reached in the last couple of weeks, and the final pact should be written this summer, Karaganis said.
McDonald said Kerr-McGee will restore the stream bed, reshape the banks and replacevegetation and trees even though the company had wanted more relaxed standards on cleaning the river bed.
Karaganis credited a local citizens group and local politicians with not backing down in their demand that the most effective clean-up procedures be used.
“They didn’t capitulate,” he said. The cleanup could start this fall under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency oversight.
Kerr-McGee already has spent more than $400 million to remove sand and soil from about 660 sites in West Chicago that were contaminated with thorium, a radioactive material linked to cancer.Kerr-McGee acquired a company that manufactured gaslight mantles in 1967. One by-product of the process was a sand-like material containing thorium. For decades, the material was spread around West Chicago as landscaping fill.
Wastewater from the plant was discharged into the river, eventually settling into the sands and soils, Karaganis said.