Lessons learned from an Army Corps radioactive waste disposal plan for Michigan that went South
Many communities across the United States are overburdened with poisonous substances placed in the environment by fossil fuel, agrochemical, and technology industries. Southeast Michigan, the most populated region of the state, is one of these places.
Without any forewarning or communication with local officials, the US Army Corps of Engineers in August 2023 awarded a $40 million contract to relocate radioactive Manhattan Project waste from a site near Niagara Falls in western New York to Southeast Michigan’s Wayne County. Michiganders, working with their elected representatives, were able to have the waste transported to Texas instead.
Regulators made it clear they believe Michigan was the most appropriate place for the waste to go. And because of a recent court case, shipments to Michigan may now resume. However, decisions like this cannot be made in a vacuum. Federal agencies must consider the cumulative environmental burdens communities face and clearly communicate their waste disposal plans before taking action or finalizing decisions. Otherwise, they are likely to encounter public resistance and costly alterations to plans. Because of the aborted attempt to move Manhattan Project waste to Wayne County, the Army Corps has learned a valuable lesson about the importance of transparency and has promised to do better by communities in the future.
A change of plans. In Lewiston, New York, where the radioactive waste was originally stored, waste was leaching into groundwater. The Army Corps detailed its plans for moving the waste in a September 2024 letter to Debbie Dingell, who represents Southeast Michigan in Congress. However, the plan was delayed and later scrapped in 2025, after pushback from Dingell and others in Michigan. The waste later went to Texas for storage at a commercial waste disposal facility that handles hazardous and low-level radioactive waste.
As a scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, I reached out to Josef Stephens, the public information officer for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, for information about the Michigan disposal plan. They said that Wayne Disposal was the closest hazardous waste landfill to where the radioactive materials were being stored and overseen by the Army Corps, and that the waste site should have been capable of handling the waste. “Wayne Disposal is the only designated hazardous waste landfill in the state and has a higher level of engineering and safety controls than other facilities,” Stephens said. Regulators insisted that the low-level radioactive waste was, in fact, nonhazardous and that storing it at a hazardous waste facility merely reflected an abundance of caution.
Wayne County is also the most populated county in Michigan, with nearly 1.8 million residents in Detroit and other cities. Yet not a single Michigan elected or appointed official knew about the waste disposal plan before the contract was awarded in 2023. Meanwhile, residents of less populated Lewiston, New York, were given the chance to provide input on the plans to ship the waste as early as November 2019.
Radioactive and hazardous waste are not new to Southeast Michigan. Michigan is home to the Great Lakes and a major freshwater aquifer system called the Lake Michigan Basin. The shores of the Great Lakes are already lined with sites where civilian uses of nuclear materials have resulted in radioactive waste being stored.
Michigan is also home to 19 waste sites associated with the Cold War and World War II. Overall, it has roughly 24,000 contaminated sites still awaiting cleanup of chemical, radioactive, biological, and other hazards. Wayne County also has multiple large bodies of water, including the Detroit River, Rouge River, and Belleville Lake, which is located in the same township as Wayne County Disposal.
These sites have not always been remediated with transparency in mind—but in the information era, the need for transparency is more critical than ever. While community feedback is not legally required for permitting nuclear waste storage sites, it is a common practice that many communities have come to expect as part of the democratic process. The Army Corps should heed the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future for informed consent and community engagement, as well as those of international policy organizations focused on hazardous waste. Perhaps if the Army Corps and its shippers had taken the time to chat with community members, local environmental experts, and elected officials, the Wayne County Commission would not have passed a moratorium on storing radioactive waste of any kind in the region.
What was the Army Corps proposing? The original plan would have moved roughly 6,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and concrete from the Niagara Falls Storage Site to the Wayne Disposal landfill. The Army Corps said the materials would contain radioisotopes, including uranium 235 and uranium 238, which have half-lives of roughly 700 million years and 4.5 billion years, respectively. Both the Army Corps and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy believed that the radioactivity was low enough for the waste to be safely placed in the Michigan landfill, but this was not made clear early on to the public.
The waste is estimated to contain 50 picocuries per gram of radioactivity, which according to the state agency is lower than average residential radon exposures in the area. However, picocuries are a measurement of radioactive decay, not of environmental exposure or human-absorbed dosage.
Communities should be asking how this dose conversion was made and by what agency, because the methods for creating dose conversion differ greatly from agency to agency. It’s difficult to build trust in numbers without deep transparency on methods and calculations.
What are the risks of exposure? The Army Corps stresses that there have never been accidents during similar waste shipments, and it is true that accidents are statistically rare. But mobilizing industrial waste can present risks, and even the mere act of digging up and placing waste into containers can result in new human or environmental exposures—although numerous safety precautions are taken to prevent this. Most hazardous waste accidents are caused by human error, which is almost unavoidable.
Republic Services operates the Wayne Disposal facility and has a history of violations at various facilities in Wayne County. Previous issues with leaking materials involved contaminated bodies of water, improper venting, improper monitoring of hazardous waste in underground storage, and disposal of hazardous waste in nonhazardous waste areas. In the last 10 years, at least nine fires have happened because of combustive interactions between different kinds of waste. Republic Services is still allowed to accept hazardous waste. However, lack of transparency leaves communities wondering whether Republic-run facilities are well equipped to handle hazardous waste, especially when public reports show so many accidents over the years.
Building trust through transparency. International organizations like the Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency have promoted and practiced transparency, but, traditionally, that hasn’t always been the case with the Army Corps. While it is not legally required, increased openness would be a positive step toward regaining the public’s trust in overburdened regions like Southeast Michigan.
The cumulative burdens many communities are facing do not typically get included in the process for determining the most appropriate places to store waste, but the Union of Concerned Scientists believes this should be considered in US regulatory science. At the very least, the Army Corps and other agencies should loop in local officials who represent the people living near proposed waste sites and along the route of planned waste shipments. Open communication, in the form of public forums and hearings, can help address public concerns and increase buy-in on future federal waste planning.
These concerns aren’t just about the possibility of nuclear waste getting into the environment or harming human health; they also reflect a broader fear of government neglect and secrecy. By collaborating with local government organizations and nonprofits, the Army Corps can begin to bridge this gap—even during a time of federal personnel and budget cuts. In Michigan, once local officials became aware of the radioactive waste disposal plans, the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy immediately began investigating and translating the science for the public—including responding to emails from me and other community members.
To address concerns about transparency, the Army Corps has promised that, moving forward, they will let the “appropriate persons” in Wayne County know of their plans. This is a good start toward gaining and maintaining community trust in the Corps’ plans for shipping and storing nuclear waste.
However, there is still lots of room for improvement in transparency. A trial in February 2026 of a lawsuit filed by communities near the proposed dumping ground ended with the lifting of the Wayne County radioactive waste moratorium, renewal of the Wayne Disposal license, and approval for the landfill to be expanded by 5.2 million cubic yards. This clears the way for Manhattan Project-era waste to be shipped to Wayne Disposal—not only from Lewiston but also from other sites in the Northeast and Midwest. When I asked whether new shipments have already been sent to Michigan, Stephens encouraged me to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
