Radioactive soil from Ohio heads to Wayne County landfill next week

The soil and materials are headed for Wayne Disposal Inc., U.S. Ecology’s hazardous waste landfill off I-94 near Willow Run Airport in Van Buren Township. Once the soil disposal operation is fully underway, up to 11 tractor-trailers per day, each carrying about 15 tons of contaminated soil, are expected to head north on local freeways from the village south of Toledo to the Wayne County landfill, Army Corps officials said Thursday. There’s no indication the shipments would be every day. A U.S. Ecology spokesman said the remediation project could take 8 to 10 years.

It’s part of a major cleanup of what’s known as the Luckey site, a long-shuttered beryllium plant in Luckey, Ohio. The plant supplied the strong, light but highly toxic metal to the U.S. military and Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and 1950s.