Millstone Nuke Plant is in CT, not on Long Island, and the Shoreham facility never went on line and has now been decommissioned. The only Nuclear facility is the Brookhaven National Labratory near the eastern end of Long Island in Suffolk County.
Where is Hicksville? and is Sylvania nuclear fuel plant different from a power plant?
http://www.newsday.com/business/printedition/ny-bzhick0509,0,1033837.story Key Evidence in Nuclear Plant Case Missing
By Mark Harrington
Staff Writer
May 9, 2003
Lawyers for Verizon Communications Inc. told a judge they can’t find about 200,000 pages of documents that Hicksville residents say are crucial evidence in lawsuits that claim a former Sylvania nuclear fuel plant in their neighborhood operated secretly and unsafely and caused chronic illnesses.
In a May 7 letter to U.S. Magistrate Judge Arlene Lindsay in Central Islip, Verizon and its predecessor companies acknowledged they couldn’t find the records even though the 97 boxes were methodically cataloged in 1992, and had been stored for 30 years.
Lawyers for 200 former and current residents asserted many of the documents were labeled "permanent," meaning that they should never have been destroyed or required approvals in triplicate to do so. They called for a delay of the trial and an investigation.
Verizon is footing the unspecified bill for a cleanup that began in earnest this month at the site next to Cantiague State Park. Sylvania and its successor, GTE, which merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon in 2000, acknowledge the plant produced nuclear fuel rods in the 1950s and 1960s, but they say there are no current health risks. Residents filed suit in 2002 after the Department of Energy released studies outlining the extent of the nuclear fuel work, including that in Hicksville. Hundreds of homes are near the site in surrounding residential neighborhoods.
William Pratt, a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis in Manhattan who represents Verizon and other Sylvania-successor companies, including GTE, called the request to delay the trial to investigate the loss a "meritless diversion." He noted the company had already provided 200,000 pages of documents to the residents’ lawyers, and he rebuffed their suggestions that the documents disappeared as state and federal authorities were preparing to investigate the site in the mid 1990s.
Pratt wrote "... As time passes and circumstances change, the likelihood increases of old documents being misplaced."
Lawyers for residents pointed out that the documents were known to exist in 1992 but disappeared sometime before investigators began asking for them in 1996. Pratt confirmed that the New York Department of Environmental Conservation during a 1996 probe of the facility requested documents related to Sylvania from GTE Corp. . The agency was told "that GTE either had not been able to locate documents or did not find the requested information in the documents available at that time."
Sylvania, which was acquired by General Telephone to become GTE in 1959, operated the plant from 1952 to 1966.
James Bogard, the nuclear material specialist at Oak Ridge National Lab who conducted a federal review of the site in 1994 to clear it for occupancy, said radiation levels were high but posed little risk, except if particles were breathed. Sylvania routinely incinerated uranium shavings in the open air behind the plant, according to a Stuart Opdahl, a former worker who testified in the case.
Matt Burns, a spokesman for the DEC, said Wednesday that the department was "not aware of any evidence to support the claim of any missing documents" during the DEC’s probe. He didn’t return calls yesterday.
NRC spokesman Dave McIntyre said that agency’s probe was done using files the NRC had in its own records and "would not have involved documents from the company."
Verizon and the DEC said there are no current health risks at the site, and that the residents’ lawsuits seeking $1.5 billion in damages are without merit. "We have found nothing to support the allegations in the lawsuits," said Sharon Hagar-Cohen, Verizon’s spokeswoman.
According to the DEC, around 90 cubic yards of contaminated soil were removed from the site in 1986. It’s unknown whether the DEC required that the previous excavation underwent the same procedures surrounding the current soil removal, which is being done inside large plastic tents with soil transferred to Utah by train in special sealed cars.