Metalworking firm agrees to vacate site

Small metalworking operations at Starmet Corp.'s Superfund site in West Concord will vacate buildings on the 46-acre property no later than Oct. 31, according to a recently signed consent agreement between the state Department of Public Health and Starmet.

Don Nagle, a Plymouth lawyer representing Starmet, said affiliated operations of Starmet, called Advanced Specialty Metals, will relocate to North Andover at some point before the deadline. He said he does not know how many people work in the Starmet buildings.

Starmet's predecessor company, Nuclear Metals Inc., made uranium-tipped bullets for the US Army from 1970 to 1999. The property off Route 62 was placed on the US Environmental Protection Agency's list of the nation's most contaminated sites in June 2001.

The agreement to shut down the metalworking enterprise was hailed by state and federal environmental officials and Concord residents monitoring the Starmet site. They all said they are looking forward to when investigators will be able to fully determine the amount of radioactive material in five interconnected buildings and five other structures.

In late 2005 and early 2006, contractors removed 3,846 drums of depleted uranium and 322 tons of depleted uranium metal from the site. "We now need to get in those buildings and get on with remediation," said Suzanne Condon, director of the Department of Public Health's Bureau of Environmental Health.

Last fall, the department's radiation control section conducted a three-day inspection of the building's interiors. The results showed varying levels of radioactivity in the buildings, Condon said.

These levels do not pose a threat to Concord residents, Condon and others emphasized.

"However, we have to move forward with a disposition of those buildings," said Melissa Taylor, the EPA's project manager for the Starmet property.

James West of Concord said the Citizens Research and Environmental Watch group, of which he is technical assistance coordinator, "believes that the Starmet buildings are not redeemable and thus should be torn down. Also, a fire that broke out in two buildings is troubling."

West was referring to a fire in the early evening of June 26. Concord Deputy Fire Chief Chris Kelley said sprinklers in buildings C and D controlled the blaze. No one was hurt and the cause of the fire is still under investigation, Kelley said.

In the meantime, a Connecticut firm, de maximis inc., is working on a final draft of an engineering study and cost analysis of the buildings, Taylor said, adding that the results will be unveiled at a public community meeting, probably later this year.

De maximis is evaluating air, soil, and ground-water data on behalf of the Army and four other parties cited by the EPA in 2003 for contaminating the Starmet site.

De maximis project manager Bruce Thompson said last week that "most of the contamination is found on the factory floors and walls. It's called 'fixed' [contamination], which means it won't come off on people."

Also on his firm's agenda, Thompson said, is a study "to complete the delineation of a uranium plume and an ecological risk assessment of bogs." He said the study will involve "toxicity tests using frogs."

A final cleanup plan for the property is probably several years away, he said.

Besides the Army, the other parties cited by the EPA for their association with the Starmet site are the US Department of Energy, Whittaker Corp. of Simi Valley, Calif., Textron Inc. of Providence, and MONY Life Insurance Co. of New York.