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I don’t know about this specific situation but there are lots of others where the effort to clean up a hazard makes it worse, so capping it makes more sense.

This is the best practice with asbestos for instance.

As opposed to the European solution, where you know there's explosives in that field over there but you only deal with the stuff that floats to the surface each year.

Europeans know that there are a couple thousand unexploded bombs "somewhere" under their cities. Too bad the allies didn't leave GPS traces for each of them, because if they did, I'm quite sure they would all be removed by now.

If you don't know where the bomb is, you can't remove it. However, if you know where soil/ground/earth is polluted, it is getting cleaned up. At least in my part of Europe. Yes, it might take a few years but it happens.

Maybe then we can charge admission too !