It looks like the setting for a post-apocalyptic summer thriller, though Newtown has been less than thrilled about having this blighted property sitting unused for decades in the heart of Botsford. The 30-acre former Batchelder site at 44 and 46a Swamp Road is a scary place, and not just because of its aspect of desolation and abandonment. It is environmentally scary.

In 2013, the federal Environmental Protection Agency cleaned up surface contaminants at the Batchelder property left over from 40 years of aluminum smelting operations predating the 1987 bankruptcy of the firm. The federal investment in this initial scrub of the parcel was pegged at roughly $2 million by the town’s economic development office. But the industrial contamination at the site is more than just a surface problem, and the unseen hazards have spooked potential investors.

In 2012, the State Department of Health reported concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, copper, chromium, lead, nickel, and PCBs in the soil there. At one point, in 1990, the Batchelder property was briefly considered as a possible radioactive waste storage site, back when the state was thinking about managing such material in-state.

Contaminated properties such as the Batchelder site, dubbed brownfields by bureaucrats, are eligible for various state and federal grants aimed at their cleanup and reclamation. Earlier this month, Newtown learned that it would get a small portion ($150,000) of $7 million in grants awarded by the state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) for the assessment and investigation of the property. DECD Commissioner Catherine Smith called brownfields redevelopment “one of the smartest ways to create jobs and invest in our urban centers.”

Despite the hopeful talk, it is a little premature to be counting the new jobs on Swamp Road. Many more and far deeper investments must follow this investigatory $150,000. Still, Newtown’s Economic Development Coordinator Betsy Payne believes things are looking up, quite literally, for the site. She reported to the selectmen last month that the parcel is under consideration as a “solar farm,” delivering energy to the power grid. It is quite a transformation of our expectations: from storing radioactivity to the clean conversion of the radiant energy of the sun.

Even if there were no jobs at stake, however, the imperative for a cleanup at the Batchelder site needs to remain a priority. It has been a generation since that polluting enterprise went bankrupt and left its legacy of hazardous contamination on, and in, the ground. Every successive generation that leaves it there shares in some measure culpability for the accumulating consequences of the environmental degradation and the increasing costs of its removal. Despite our summer appetite for scary fiction, we have a much greater desire to keep our environment safely pre-apocalyptic.