HISTORY
The history presented here follows the movement of uranium and radioactive waste through a network of factories, storage areas, disposal sites, rail corridors, waterways, and communities. Each industrial process produced a different waste stream, leaving behind chemical and radiological signatures that may help identify where contaminated material originated.
High-grade uranium ore from the Shinkolobwe region was shipped to the United States for processing during the Manhattan Project. Some of this material entered a regional production chain connecting Tonawanda, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Lockport, Lackawanna, Lewiston, and other industrial locations across Western New York.
The Linde Air Products Division of Union Carbide refined uranium ore into uranium oxides and uranium tetrafluoride, commonly known as “green salt.” The work generated solid tailings, contaminated building materials, and enormous quantities of radioactive liquid waste.
Government records document liquid waste being discharged through onsite injection wells, storm sewers, and sanitary sewers. A 1981 New York State investigation reported that approximately 37 million gallons of radioactively contaminated chemical waste were placed into shallow wells beneath the property. Records also describe overflows and releases into drainage pathways connected to Two Mile Creek and the public sewer system.
Linde processing residues were also transported to nearby disposal areas, including the former Haist property—later known as Ashland 1—and material was subsequently relocated to Ashland 2, Seaway, and the Tonawanda Landfill.
Electromet, another Union Carbide operation, received uranium tetrafluoride from Linde and converted it into uranium metal by mixing the green salt with magnesium inside dolomite-lined metal vessels known as “bombs.” Heating initiated a powerful thermite reduction reaction.
This was not gaseous diffusion. Electromet’s high-temperature process produced uranium metal along with radioactive C-2 slag, contaminated liners, crucible dross, uranium chips, furnace scale, and other uranium-bearing residues. Materials believed to contain recoverable uranium were separated and shipped for recovery, storage, or disposal.
Electromet shipped uranium-bearing C-2 slag to Hooker Chemical in approximately 500-pound wooden barrels. Hooker treated the slag with hydrochloric acid to recover uranium that remained trapped in the waste.
After digestion, the material was neutralized, filtered, washed, and rebarreled. Historical process descriptions state that liquid filtrate was discharged into the sewer while concentrated solid residue was shipped out by rail, creating another pathway through which uranium-bearing industrial waste entered Niagara Falls infrastructure.
Beginning in 1944, the federal government used the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works—LOOW—for the storage, handling, burial, and disposal of radioactive residues, contaminated equipment, and other materials generated by Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission operations.
Waste arrived from multiple sites, including the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, and was stored and managed across the vast federal property under early-era standards and inadequate controls, allowing contamination to spread beyond the boundaries of the present-day Niagara Falls Storage Site.
A New York State Assembly investigation conducted after the Love Canal disaster also uncovered accounts that workers associated with the LOOW removed radioactive waste from the property and used it as fill for driveways and home foundations.
Radioactive waste from Union Carbide’s Linde and Electromet operations was transported to the LOOW/NFSS. Union Carbide also operated its own landfill on Niagara Falls Boulevard. Records uncovered by a private investigator tracing radioactive slag found at a Niagara Falls bowling alley showed that truckers hauling Union Carbide waste sometimes diverted the material, dumped it locally, or sold it as inexpensive fill for driveways, foundations, and construction projects throughout the region.
Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna developed rolling procedures and rolled uranium billets into rods for reactor-fuel production. Simonds Saw and Steel in Lockport—later Guterl Specialty Steel processed natural, depleted, and enriched uranium, as well as thorium, through rolling and fabrication operations. Bliss & Laughlin Steel in Buffalo rolled, straightened, and machined uranium rods and slugs under Atomic Energy Commission contracts. These operations generated radioactive dust, scale, metal chips, contaminated oils, equipment, furnace residues, and building contamination—additional waste streams whose movement and disposal must be traced separately.
The Carborundum Company conducted experimental grinding of uranium metal in 1943. From 1959 through 1967, its research operations also fabricated uranium and plutonium carbide fuel materials for an Atomic Energy Commission reactor-fuel development program.
Bell Aircraft’s Wheatfield complex developed the XGAM-63 Rascal, an early supersonic, nuclear-armed stand-off missile. Carborundum maintained an office within the Bell complex, operated nearby facilities, and separately conducted nuclear-fuel research involving uranium- and plutonium-bearing materials. Together, these operations show how weapons development and nuclear-material research overlapped across the Niagara region.
Attribution may depend on the material’s isotopic composition, uranium decay-chain patterns, associated chemicals and metals, slag mineralogy, manufacturing methods, and historical transportation and disposal records. Each industrial method left a different combination of radiological and chemical evidence. Comparing those signatures with factory records and shipment histories may be the only reliable way to determine which operation produced a particular waste material.
Union Carbide Corporation is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company. Hooker Chemical became part of Occidental Chemical Corporation, commonly known as OxyChem. Federal and state agencies continue investigating, containing, and remediating portions of the contamination left behind by this regional network. To date, this project has found no public record of comprehensive corporate or government accountability for Niagara’s full radiological legacy.