A URANIUM AND MERCURY ANALYSIS OF SOIL CORES FROM NEAR POCKET PARK IN ALBANY, NY

In the Town of Colonie, NY, two industrial sites have been identified as primary sources of heavy metal pollution to the Patroon Creek, a six-mile long creek that is a tributary of the Hudson River. Mercury Refining, Inc., also known as Mereco, has recycled and stored mercury from the 1950’s to present day, while National Lead Industries, also known as NLI, used cadmium, uranium, and lead in their processing techniques from 1958 until their closure in 1984 (Arnason 2003). The hypothesis of this project is that since it has been proven that these heavy metals infiltrated the Patroon Creek (Arnason 2003) and that NLI created depleted uranium aerosol plumes during their combustion process (Parrish 2007), that some of these contaminants could have been transported by wind and deposited in the soil of the surrounding area. To test this hypothesis, three soil cores were taken from nearby Pocket Park and the top 1-2 centimeters were analyzed for uranium-238, by looking for it’s decay product, thorium-230, and cesium-137 via gamma spectroscopy and then put through a mercury analyzer. Our initial results showed negligible levels of thorium-230 and only background levels of mercury, indicating that an insignificant amount of contaminants were transported by wind to our core locations ~0.6-0.8 miles to the east of the NLI site. This means that there is very little chance that contaminants from these sites were transported outside a small area surrounding these sites. This is important, as it eliminates the more densely populated neighborhoods of Albany as potential victims of this pollution.