The Trucks Haven't Stopped: Superfund Soil Is Still Leaving the Site

ProtectMcCrackenCounty
Aug 29
4 min read

This is the exact thing we've been worried about. It is not a risk somewhere down the road. It is happening as you read this.

Soil is being dug out of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a federal Superfund site, and hauled onto agricultural land. About 144,000 cubic yards have gone out so far. More is still moving. This is not old history from 60 years ago. It is an active operation, running today, in our county.

Picture how much dirt that is

144,000 cubic yards is roughly 12,000 dump-truck loads, and the trucks are still running. Parked bumper to bumper, that line would stretch about 50 miles.

Spread it across a football field, end zone to end zone, and it would bury the field about 67 feet deep. Picture a six-story building covering the whole field, made of solid dirt. That is what has already left the site. The hauling has not stopped.

Tested for a factory, not a farm

Here is the core problem. DOE's own report checked whether this soil was safe for one thing: factory workers, with the dirt left where it sat. It never checked whether the soil is safe for a farm, where families live, kids play, and food gets grown.

Those are completely different tests. A level that is fine for a worker in boots for eight hours can be far too high for a family that lives on the land year-round and eats what grows there.

What background cannot explain

Fair is fair. Some of what is in this soil, DOE calls 'natural background' for western Kentucky. Arsenic is a good example. Although, it shows up at about 20 times the level EPA considers safe for a home or yard, arsenic is naturally high in soil across our region, and that argument holds some water. So set arsenic aside for a moment.

Here is what nature does not explain:

PCBs. The soil contains PCBs (Aroclor-1254). PCBs are man-made industrial chemicals. They do not occur in nature. Finding them at all means they came from plant activity, and they came in over the level considered safe for a home. PCBs are exactly the kind of chemical that builds up in garden vegetables, in field crops, and in the animals raised on that land.

Technetium-99. The soil also carries technetium-99, a man-made byproduct of uranium processing. It does not exist in nature either. There is no "it was always here" explanation for it.

Uranium and thorium above background. On top of that, the radioactive metals uranium and thorium show up above natural background levels.

What's in the soil	Amount Detected	EPA home limit	The catch
PCBs (Aroclor-1254)	0.3 mg/kg	~0.24 mg/kg	Man-made. Over the home limit. Builds up in food.
Technetium-99	Detected	Man-made	A uranium-processing byproduct. Not natural.
Uranium & thorium	Above background	Naturally low	Radioactive metals, elevated above normal.
Arsenic	13.6 mg/kg	~0.68 mg/kg	~20x over the limit for residential, though DOE calls it natural background.
Chromium	33.9 mg/kg	0.30 mg/kg (toxic form)	Its form was never tested (see below).

What about our wells?

Chromium deserves its own hard question, because chromium comes in two very different forms. One is fairly harmless. The other, chromium-6, is the cancer-causing form made famous by the Erin Brockovich case, and it is a known drinking-water hazard.

DOE never tested which form is in this soil. They assumed the worst for their math, then set it aside. So the honest situation is this: they do not actually know, and neither do we.

That matters because of where the soil is going. On the federal site, groundwater use is banned and the whole area sits behind a formal control boundary. On a farm, people drink from private wells, and none of those protections follow the dirt. If contaminants leach down into the shallow groundwater a well taps, a family could be drinking them and never know, because no one is testing those wells.

This is DOE's own data

None of this is a rumor, and it is not our math alone.

It comes straight from DOE's own document, the Leasing Data Package for Leasing Parcel A, released in 2025 and recently made public through McCracken County. The soil testing behind it was done during DOE's own investigations from 2000 through 2024. We are simply holding their numbers up against the standards that protect homes and farms, the comparison DOE chose not to make.

What we are asking for

Trucks are moving this soil today, so the first ask is the simplest one: stop the hauling until these questions are answered.

Where is it going? Exactly which parcels have received it, and how much has gone to each.
What is really in it? Full testing of the soil being moved, measured against farm and residential limits, not factory-worker limits. That includes testing which form the chromium is.
Are the wells safe? Test the private wells and the groundwater on and around the land receiving this soil.
Has the food chain been considered? DOE's report does not study whether any of this gets into crops or livestock. For a farm, that is the whole ballgame, and right now it is a blank page.

Safe to leave alone on a federal site is not the same as safe to spread on a farm. This is happening right now, in our county, to our land. Our community deserves straight answers before one more truckload goes out.