Is there nuclear waste under the building?

Isabel de Fátima Alvim Braga

Cross-section of Avenida Miguel Yunes: shed 115 with a local pocket of water; the Sabesp mains on a different pipe; the regional solvent plume; GTAC pins 343 and 550. It is not the same liquid.

Someone looked at the street they live on and asked, at the bottom: is there nuclear waste under the building?

The short answer for a street in Interlagos is this. There is a radioactive-waste store on the same avenue. It is not under the condominium. It is in a shed belonging to the Union, to Indústrias Nucleares do Brasil (INB), at number 115.

The new buildings sit further along the same road.

The district still carries another liability: groundwater with industrial solvent — the polygon CETESB calls the Jurubatuba critical contaminated area. That is old factory chemistry. It is not an atomic bomb.The dirt dictionary — without talking downThe city register and the state register do not speak the same language as shed 115. Below is what each name means when it appears on the file. It is not “all poison.” Each one enters the body by a different route.

Cake II (thorium plus residual uranium).

What is left after the chemical treatment of monazite. Low-specific-activity radioactivity. The real hazard, on paper, is dust in the lung, ingestion or well water over years — not a ray on the sofa a block away, behind a wall.

Chlorinated solvents (PCE, TCE, DCE, vinyl chloride). Liquids industry used to degrease parts. Tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene sink through soil, become a plume in the aquifer and, as they degrade, can become vinyl chloride — more volatile and more toxic.

CETESB classed the Jurubatuba polygon as a critical contaminated area for that reason. Anyone who drills a well and drinks runs a risk. Anyone who drinks treated mains water is on another pipe.

TPH and liquid fuels.

Petroleum hydrocarbons: gasoline, diesel, oil. The smell of a petrol station. Across the city’s GTAC they are among the most common contaminants. Flammable underground; typical restriction: groundwater and, sometimes, an explosivity index.

PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). The family of pitch and incomplete-combustion smoke. Some are carcinogenic by chronic contact and by mouth. They turn up in workshop soil, yards and landfills.

Metals. Lead, chromium, cadmium, nickel and the rest, according to each lot’s report. They do not evaporate. They stay in soil and can reach a well.

At 550 Miguel Yunes the GTAC lists metal and orders soil and residue removed.Landfill gases. Methane and a decomposition mix. Explosion risk in a confined space, and asphyxia. At 343 Miguel Yunes the GTAC lists gases plus metals, isolates the site and bars construction. That is not radiation.Dioxins and furans. They appear at another public site in the same municipal report (Avenida do Estado, 300, Bom Retiro), not at 115.

Dirty-burn ash. They are here only so the reader does not think “contaminated area” is one substance.

Groundwater restriction.

The phrase that repeats most often in the GTAC. It means: do not use the well on that lot. Alone, it does not mean the Sabesp tap is dirty.

The GTAC report of January 2022 closes with 660 areas in the municipality — 33 of them public. The City’s later series shows the municipal register rising from 676 (September 2022) to 748 (December 2024). The champion restriction is not “nuclear.” It is the well.

The street, not the filmAvenida Miguel Yunes cuts the south zone between Interlagos and what the map still calls Campo Grande. It is not one address. It is a corridor. At 115 the federal state stores what is left of the dismantling of the old Interlagos plant — Nuclemon, USAM.

Ibama registered the site as the São Paulo Decommissioning Unit (UDSP), Operating Licence No. 1170/2013, file 02001.003133/2003-12: store of monazite sand and of the decommissioning of the Santo Amaro plant.

Renewal of the operating licence for decommissioning was applied for; the Senate, in 2022, already asked whether the paper was current.

Further along, at 343, the City GTAC Report on Contaminated and Rehabilitated Areas — January 2022 edition — describes a public site in a Special Environmental Protection Zone: classed “under monitoring for rehabilitation,” contaminants gases and metals, restrictions on groundwater, soil and any building, intervention by isolation of the area and environmental monitoring.

At 550 the same report marks another polygon: classed contaminated, ZEIS-1 zone, metals, removal of soil and residue. Three numbers on the same plate. Three regimes. 115 is not 343 and is not 550.

The municipal GTAC is not CNEN. The São Paulo card speaks of metal and landfill gas and of a factory; the federal card speaks of Cake II. The resident, though, does not buy a file number. They buy the street.

What is in shed 115

What is inside, in kitchen language: Brazilian industry, from the 1950s to the 1990s, processed monazite sand — heavy beach sand, common in Espírito Santo — to take out rare earths. What remained was a concentrate called Cake II: earth and sludge with thorium and a little uranium. INB describes the material as low-level radioactive waste. It is not Goiânia’s caesium-137. It is not reactor fuel. It is dangerous if someone eats it, inhales dust or drinks contaminated water for a long time — not if “the neighbourhood explodes.”G1, in 2025, published the number the State uses for the family as a whole: 11,334 tonnes of Cake II went to Caldas (Minas Gerais) in the 1990s; in 2021 INB considered sending another 1,179 tonnes from Interlagos; the transfer did not happen after the reaction in Minas.

Part of the same family sits in Botuxim, Itu — 3,500 tonnes in seven silos, according to Ibama’s answer to the Senate. Itu has already made a noise against receiving what is still in Interlagos.

In 2024–2026 INB tried to sell the Caldas, Interlagos and Itu stock; the public call was postponed and then cancelled for lack of a bid. São Paulo’s waste has nowhere to go while the country has no final national repository. That is why the shed is still there.

The question that remains, and it is not a developer’s question: why does a country with no destination for radioactive waste keep producing it — and leaving it in the middle of the city?T

Three queues of paper.

Mixing them is a mistake

Queue 1 — the nuclear shed. INB applies. CNEN licences the nuclear side. Ibama issued the federal environmental operating licence (LO 1170/2013).

The store has been there since the 1990s. The environmental licence came later. Renewal filed. In 2026 an easy PDF saying “renewed and valid until such a date” was not found. That is the State’s most serious hole: the waste is there; the paper may be in limbo.

Queue 2 — the lot that becomes a building. The developer applies for a permit at City Hall. If the lot is in a suspect area, CETESB may require a soil and water investigation of that lot. It is not the nuclear Ibama that releases an apartment.

Queue 3 — the bus corridor. The City commissioned an environmental study of the Miguel Yunes Corridor. It expropriates houses and shops.

Lot 115, being nuclear and federal, does not enter expropriation in the same way. A useful question: does the corridor EIA mention the shed? If it does not, the study pretended the most sensitive neighbour on the street does not exist. In 2005 the body that pressed INB to “clean and free” the land was the Santo Amaro sub-prefecture, because it wanted to widen the avenue — a public work, not a condominium.

The water: two liquids, one city pipeThe first liquid is the pocket under the shed. INB itself, in older pieces reproduced by groups such as ANTPEN, admitted a puddle in the ground under the store.

That is local. It is not “all of Interlagos drinks thorium.”

The second is the Jurubatuba aquifer. CETESB’s official page lists the substances of greatest relevance in the polygon: tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, cis-1,2-dichloroethylene and vinyl chloride — in soil, soil vapour and groundwater. In 2005 the company already sent well reports from the district to DAEE and the health secretariats. A mall, a factory and the Interlagos–João Dias–Sabará–Nações Unidas cut sit in the same mental map.

The Cake II drum did not invent the solvent.A new building in São Paulo, in practice, drinks Sabesp water — treated mains. Mains are not the condominium well.

One-sentence question to the building manager: “Is there a well on this lot?” If the answer is no, the radioactive-tap scare loses force. What remains is the debate over solvent vapour underground and the debate over disclosure at purchase.

What ANTPEN says and what the State says

ANTPEN has published, for years, that the Interlagos store pollutes groundwater and that licensing ran late. It uses newspaper pieces and INB’s own statements about the pocket. INB and CNEN repeat: low-activity material, a controlled shed, monitoring, no evidence of spread into the city’s drinking water.

Both can be partly right at the same time. There can be a problem under the shed and no problem in the tank of the building opposite. There can be solvent in the district that is not the fault of the thorium. Anyone who joins the lot into a single scare is selling fear. Anyone who says “there is nothing, you can build against it and not tell” is selling an apartment.

Health

No published, peer-reviewed cancer study of the area around 115 turned up in what is public. Absence of a study does not prove the site is safe. It proves no one measured it properly in public. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

What the physics helps with: radiation from a closed drum falls fast with distance. At a kilometre, behind a wall, the “ray on the sofa” risk is city background. The risk that exists on paper is ingestion, inhalation, well water or an accident in the yard.How to check yourself — before you call it fake newsFifteen minutes. GeoSampa: search Miguel Yunes 115, 343, 550 and the building number; link lot and contaminated area; note the SQL. CETESB / SIGAM map: the same points. CETESB page for the Jurubatuba critical area. Registry office: the title. An access-to-information request.INB / Ibama (Fala.BR): “I request the status of Operating Licence No. 1170/2013 of the UDSP, Avenida Miguel Yunes, 115, São Paulo, and of the renewal application. I request the current Cake II inventory on the site, the date of the last monitoring-well campaign and the timetable for removal of the material.”CETESB (São Paulo e-SIC): “Please state whether the INB site at Avenida Miguel Yunes, 115, and properties 343 and 550 on the same avenue, listed in the GTAC Report, appear on the state register, with file number and classification.”SVMA / GTAC (SEI): “Prior consultation on contaminated area for the SQLs of Avenida Miguel Yunes 115, 343 and 550, and of the residential lot under review.”

You do not need film panic. You also do not need to accept “it is only location marketing.” Do the three cheap things: a print of the map, the water question, and an access request on INB’s licence. The shed came from the 1990s; the buildings came later; the environmental licence for the store arrived late; the national repository never arrived.

ReferencesCity of São Paulo / SVMA / GTAC. Report on Contaminated and Rehabilitated Areas in the Municipality of São Paulo. Editions consulted: Jan/2017, Apr and Oct/2016, Jan–Apr–Oct/2018, Jan–Apr–Jul/2021, Jan/2022. Totals printed in the Jan/2022 edition: 660 areas, 33 public. Files Avenida Miguel Yunes 343 (gases, metals; isolation; restriction of water, soil and building) and 550 (metals; ZEIS-1; soil/residue removal).City of São Paulo / SVMA. Institutional page on Contaminated Areas and GTAC duties; Municipal Decree No. 51.436/2010 and Municipal Law No. 15.098/2010; svmagtac@prefeitura.sp.gov.br. https://prefeitura.sp.gov.br/web/meio_ambiente/w/servicos/areas_contaminadas/3386SMUL/GEOINFO – City of São Paulo. Series of contaminated and rehabilitated areas by territorial unit, 2006–2024 (MSP: 676 in Sep/2022; 748 in Dec/2024).CETESB. Jurubatuba Critical Contaminated Area. Substances of greatest relevance: tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, cis-1,2-dichloroethylene and vinyl chloride, in soil, soil vapour and groundwater. https://www.cetesb.sp.gov.br/cetesb/qualidade_ambiental/areas_contaminadas/areas_contaminadas_criticas/jurubatubaCETESB. List of Contaminated and Rehabilitated Areas in the State of São Paulo (SIGAM register / public query). https://cetesb.sp.gov.br/areas-contaminadas/relacao-de-areas-contaminadas/CETESB. Contaminated Areas Management Manual. 3rd ed. rev. enl. São Paulo: CETESB, 2025.CETESB. Disclosure of water-analysis results for the Jurubatuba district (industrial wells; tetrachloroethene above Ministry of Health Ordinance 518/2004). October 2005.Ibama / Federal Senate. Information No. 5/2022/Cenef/CGTef/Dilic-IBAMA, in reply to RI No. 38/2022-CMA/SF. UDSP — Avenida Miguel Yunes No. 115, Jurubatuba/Santo Amaro, São Paulo. LO No. 1170/2013; file 02001.003133/2003-12; renewal of the decommissioning LO applied for. Botuxim/Itu: 3,500 t of Cake II in seven silos (file 02001.003142/2003-03).INB. Note on Cake II: by-product of the chemical processing of monazite at the Santo Amaro plant (USAM), 1950s–1990s; low-level radioactive waste. https://www.inb.gov.brG1 Sul de Minas. “Radioactive waste taken from São Paulo to Minas Gerais is a deadlock for dismantling the mine.” 23 Nov. 2025. 11,334 t of Cake II in Caldas; 1,179 t from Interlagos considered in 2021 and not transferred.G1 Sorocaba e Jundiaí. “Sale of Itu ‘atomic waste’ fails after 6 postponements.” 8 Apr. 2026. INB public call (Caldas, Interlagos and Itu) cancelled for lack of a bid; Itu’s reaction against receiving Interlagos material in 2021.GeoSampa – City of São Paulo. Lot map and contaminated-area layer. https://geosampa.prefeitura.sp.gov.brIsabel de Fátima Alvim BragaPhysician. Revista Pàhnorama.