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For sale: A nuclear weapons plant in south Kansas City with plentiful space, easy access to transportation and acres of pollution.
That’s the deal for any buyer of the Kansas City Plant once it begins moving in 2010 to a location near Richards-Gebaur Memorial Airport.
For 50 years, the plant on Bannister Road has manufactured non-nuclear components for the country’s nuclear weapons, housing millions of tons of cancer-causing materials such as petroleum products, beryllium, radiation waste and PCBs. And some of those pollutants spilled or were buried on the site.
The federal government has spent $65 million so far to clean up the site and has begun the search for buyers. But the next tenant will need to buy the site “as-is,” because federal officials have no plans to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to remove most of the pollution.
And that worries concerned groups and elected officials who fear the plant will become a polluted 300-acre site that will sit abandoned for decades.
“It is a real concern that it is not left blighted,” said Danny Rotert, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat.
“We are going to make sure we stay on top of the site to make sure it has a future use that is not contaminated and is not a health risk to the neighborhood and to the Blue River.”
The plant sits at the confluence of Indian Creek and the Blue River.
Scott Dye, national director of the Sierra Club’s Water Sentinels program, said the hope that a buyer can be found without a bigger cleanup is “poppycock.”
“Unless they were told everything was hunky-dory, no one is going to touch that, not if they still have one brain cell that still works,” said Dye, who has been “bird-dogging” the pollution for years.
Brad Scott of the federal General Services Administration, however, is confident that he can sell the property, noting that he has “redeployed federal property” all over the Midwest.
“It is not going to sit vacant,” Scott said, pointing out that both the state and the federal governments are overseeing environmental hazards.
Also, he said, you have a “prime piece of real estate that the mayor, the City Council, the chamber of commerce and the entire Kansas City congressional delegation want to see put back to good use. It is not going to sit vacant.”
There are a few options for the site:
• Sell it as-is.
That’s the current plan.
But the pollution in the subsurface soil and groundwater must be monitored forever. Missouri regulatory officials say plumes of pollution have seeped deep into the ground, from 40 to 50 feet in some places. Under the 3 million-square-foot building lurks a mass of toxic goo, the state says.
That means the government or future owners will have to ensure that the property is maintained for hundreds of years, federal officials acknowledged. The estimated cost just for maintenance through 2070 is $80 million.
If the ground is disturbed in any way, it could cause chemicals to migrate.
• Some cleanup.
National Nuclear Safety Administration officials said in an interview that if they cannot sell it as is, they hope to move the property by spending $52 million to tear down a few outbuildings, clean up the main building and do some additional environmental cleanup. That does not include the “in perpetuity” maintenance costs that still will be required.
• Extensive cleanup.
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