WILLOW SPRINGS, Ill. — Like an eerie jungle ruin, the strange but remarkable legacy of the Palos Park Forest Preserve has been covered for decades in a tangle of weeds and underbrush.
To the unsuspecting eye, there is little to suggest that anything "Top Secret" or dangerous went on here. On any warm weekend day, the woods outside this southwest Chicago suburb are filled with hikers, cyclists, equestrians, picnicking church groups and young lovers out for a stroll and maybe a little bit more.
Beneath the soil, though, the Palos preserve is strikingly different from any other recreation area in the nation.
Just a few feet off some of the hiking paths, unprotected by so much as a fence and marked only by a few graffiti-stained stone signs, lies the nation's first nuclear waste dump. It is a graveyard for residue from the Manhattan Project, the crash World War II atomic bomb program, which moved here shortly after scientists first split the atom in a crude reactor under the football stands at the University of Chicago.
That first reactor was dismantled and rebuilt in the forest preserve, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had leased from Cook County. Soon a slightly more sophisticated reactor was added to the complex. Years later, the remains of both were buried in the woods, along with contaminated equipment, animal carcasses and hazardous chemicals used in early nuclear research.
Government experts insist that the dump poses no hazard, despite its primitive nature and minor ground-water contamination, which so far is local. Some environmental activists disagree and they want the waste removed, at a potential cost of tens of millions of dollars. "From any kind of public policy point of view, having radioactive material sitting around in a public forest preserve is a bad idea," said Carolyn Raffensperger, director of the Illinois Sierra Club.
State and federal inspectors regularly monitor the area, even though the reactors were decommissioned and the federal government relinquished the site decades ago. But serious radiation and toxic leaks at more sophisticated nuclear weapons plants have triggered a broad re-examination of the industry's overall environmental record. And that probe is now stretching back to the harried and mysterious dawn of the Atomic Age.
For the first time since the area was returned to county control in 1956, federal inspectors this summer will survey up to 200 acres of woodland in a search for radioactive litter.
