Manhattan ? Faculty and staff members at Kansas State University for a quarter-century dumped boxes, buckets and barrels of low-level radioactive waste into trenches in a pasture on the north side of campus.

As many as 175 chemicals of varying concentration and toxicity were tossed into the university’s landfill cocktail.

“Whatever people had to pack things in,” Steven Galitzer, director of the Department of Environmental Health and Safety at K-State, said in an interview this week.

Remediation of soil and groundwater contamination linked to the landfill’s contents may cost the university $4 million.

Tritium, carbon-14 and other radioactive elements were placed into the “Atomic Waste Burial Plot” adjacent to the Wildcats’ football stadium from 1961 to 1987, according to a consultant’s report prepared for K-State and submitted to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment in August.

Acids, solvents and other hazardous chemical waste, including the carcinogen 1,4-dioxane that blends easily with water, were added to the landfill during an undetermined period of years that ended in the 1980s.

Buried under tons of dirt and topped by a metal building, toxins packed into the pits were out of sight but not completely out of mind for public safety administrators on the Manhattan campus. Over the years, university officials concluded techniques once thought proper for handling scientific and occupational waste no longer held up to modern standards enforced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Back in the day, they told you to bury them,” Galitzer said. “We’re finding out it was less than OK. I wish we had never started.”

The landfill was closed in 1987, and testing for the spread of pollutants was initiated in 1990. Water samples from 31 test wells bored 20, 40 and 60 feet beneath the surface indicate toxins are migrating underground. The radioactive tritium was detected in groundwater collected from a monitoring well close to the landfill. The 1,4-dioxane was discovered outside the fenced enclosure in a drainage creek on campus that flows toward the northeast and contributes to the Big Blue River several miles away.

Kelly Phillips, hazardous waste manager in the university’s environmental health and safety department, said none of the leeching had carried harmful substances off K-State property. She is convinced no drinking water supply has been compromised by the plume.

No above-ground contamination has been detected in 20 years of testing at what is now referred to as the “Old Chemical Waste Landfill,” Galitzer said.

The university’s plan is to spend as much as $4 million on the cleanup project. Intercepting and treating tainted water in the underground plume is to begin by the end of 2010.