Nov. 15, 2009
NEWS ANALYSIS: 'Cleaning' Formerly Secret Nuclear Weapon Material Manufacturing Facilities in Portsmouth, Paducah and Elsewhere (Huntington’s Buried Nickel Plant?) Prepares the Environment for the 22nd Century and Beyond
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter
Portsmouth, OH (HNN) - What does the cleanup and disposal of the former Portsmouth / Piketon nuclear plant mean for residents of other nearby cities, such as Huntington, WV or even Athens, Ohio, the home of Ohio University?
Although the Portsmouth plant has a fancy, convoluted formal name (Gaseous Diffusion Plant), the facility opened in 1954. Its mission was a Cold War secret for both workers and residents. While the film “China Syndrome” focused on the dangers of an accident (melt down) at a nuclear electrical generating plant (coincidentally the film came out around the same time as the Three Mile Island incident), the Portsmouth plant hails from an era where plants constructed components as part of the nuclear arms race against the U.S.S.R.
Charleston residents live with the presence of the chemical industry and the worst case scenario that a toxic leak could occur. The furor over the Bayer plant at Institute, WV reached a peak when two workers died at the plant in 2008 following an accident, near the storage of MIC (a chemical used in pesticides that killed thousands in India following a leak).
Ohio contained more than one venue ran by the Atomic Energy Commission. The Los Angeles Times in a lengthy October 2009 article by Ralph Vartabedian examined the cleanup of the Fernald plant which had been located in the midst of farmland outside Dayton, Ohio. While a 55-foot high mound dominates a half mile long preserve of prairie grasses and swampy ponds, $4.4 billion dollars transformed the former uranium foundry (where parts for the nuclear weapons industry were made) from a “dangerously contaminated” complex into an environmental showcase.
The “Not Gone, But Forgotten” report emphasized that across the country similar clean ups must balance “a mess” which has already cost taxpayers $100 billion and will eventually add $330 billion to Uncle Sam’s budget over the next 30-50 years.
Hidden in plain sight (or buried) are radioactive byproducts which remain hazardous for thousands of years. Scientists must make “no easy decisions,” according to Victor Gilinsky, a member of the nuclear regulatory commission. In most cases, the sites remain too hazardous for occupancy and the term ‘safe’ comes from definitions in legal documents.
During discussions this week in Portsmouth, a team from the University of Kentucky made a Power Point presentation illustrating some of the potential community decisions. At Paducah, Ky., a wildlife preserve has been proposed, similar to the one at Fernald. There 9,000 visitors a year, flock to see woodpeckers, , mallards, and juncos mask the acreage formerly used to manufacture uranium rods for plutonium cores of nuclear bombs. Why a wildlife reserve? At Fernald, an Ohio EPA official stated the reserve was established in an area unsafe for housing where groundwater must be pumped and treated until 2025.
Listening between the lines, you must surmise that Paducah, Fernald, and Portsmouth have similar hazards simply based on the “choices” offered by cleanup leaders, one of which spurs community lightning --- potential construction of an allegedly safer nuclear facility, which would once again jobs in often poorer regions. Left unsaid, how the atomic plant workers of the past resemble the well know Appalachian coal mining money machines, which also have more environmentally friendly options than those of the past which harmed workers and natural resources.
Previously, HNN has referred to a contaminated parcel of Huntington Alloys (a.k.a. Nickel Plant and Special Metals), which were hauled from Huntington to Portsmouth. Buried alongside other hazardous and “classified” items, internal documents from the Goodyear Corporation that previously operated the Portsmouth plant state the waste from Huntington was “contaminated with nickel carbonyl and uranium,” according to a 1999 press release by activist and former atomic worker, Vina Colley.
SIX MONTH LONG HUNTINGTON BURIAL AT ONE TIME ALLEGEDLY DID NOT HAPPEN DESPITE ARRIVAL OF TWO TRUCKS A DAY....
The correspondence from July and December 1977, describes the material to be buried as 26,000 cubic feet of equipment and 10,000 cubic feet of pipe. It was to arrive in approximately thirty trucks at the rate of two trucks a day and to be placed in a ditch approximately 24 feet wide, 150 feet long, and 12 feet deep. Because " classified material" was involved, the scrape was to go into a " classified burial ground" on site. A former worker at the Portsmouth plant who witnessed the operation said that it actually took six months and that 'all kind of stuff" went into the ditch, which was located near the site's administrative headquarters.
The remains from the Huntington facility ranged from “slightly enriched” items just requiring the burial under two feet of cover to equipment that requires continuous monitoring. Since the burial occurred in 1977 --- at the beginning of environmental consciousness and in the midst of mushroom cloud fallout anxieties --- workers did not know what they were entombing.
First, Nickel Carbonyl NI (CO) 4, a colorless, volatile, flammable , poisonous residue soluble only in alcohol and con nitric acid. However, slightly enriched uranium had been found in the piping. The July 11, 1977 memorandum states the “scrap “ must be covered with two feet of earth , although a December 14, 1977 memorandum stated that “the toxic and radioactive contaminated [remains of the Huntington, WV plant] had been found to be low enough to not require the two feet of cover.”
Ultimately, the massive burial blew the whistle on the secretive Portsmouth Goodyear operations about which workers did not speak. Geoffrey Sea, in a Harvard University thesis, stated that Huntington burial trampled the credibility of the “need to know” classification of work in Portsmouth. The thesis refers to the former Huntington facility as “an entire dismantled uranium processing plant from West Virginia” buried at a “classified nuclear waste site” which supervisors told workers “ didn’t happen.”
But, as the community struggles with the past and future, as late as 2002, 9.1 million net pounds of nuclear waste was taken from the Fernald site to Portsmouth for “interim storage,” under the Department of Energy’s Uranium Management Group.
A website describing the Fernald cleanup contains insight into possible Portsmouth decommissioning scenarios:
During most of Fernald’s production era, the general public paid little attention to what was happening inside the secured fence line, and site workers were focused on one thing: producing high quality uranium metal better, faster, cheaper and safer than its competition. Fernald was on the leading edge of manufacturing improvements and innovative technologies. The workforce, a unique combination of highly skilled tradesmen and professionals with expertise in chemical and metallurgical processes, took pride in the quality of their products and their service to the nation’s defense program.
One contributing factor to the controversy surrounding Fernald and other weapons complex facilities was the lack of environmental, safety and health regulations. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that environmental concerns raised national consciousness, and consequently the U.S. government and general populace began to understand the industrial revolution’s effect on the environment. Federal and state regulators began investigating reports of serious environmental and safety problems at nuclear weapons facilities, including the Fernald site.
At Fernald, the era of quiet operations and minimal public interest ended abruptly in 1984, when the Department of Energy (DOE) reported that nearly 300 pounds of enriched uranium oxide had been released to the environment from a Plant 9 dust collector system. That same year, DOE also reported that in 1981, three off-property wells south of the site were contaminated with uranium. The impact of nearly four decades of uranium metal production suddenly became the center of public controversy.
Two events in early 1986 attracted further media scrutiny: the unauthorized venting of two waste storage silos and a crack in the Pilot Plant vessel. Suddenly, reporters from popular national news programs such as 60 Minutes and 20/20, as well as Britain, Canada, Japan and Germany, were interested in the Fernald site. http://www.lm.doe.gov/land/sites/oh/fernald_orig/50th/secr.htm.
Although the live with Fernald closure project, contained silos belching radon gas, prevented further spewing of uranium powder into the air, and prevents the usage of well water containing 180 times the federally accepted safety standard, the compromise legal decree hinged on a maligned definition of “clean” and an agreement to limit future uses of the property.
Demolished building debris and top soil sets encapsulated inside the innocent looking mound, which contains liners preventing rain from seeping inside and a complex underground pope labyrinth monitors leakage.
Even as it stands the Portsmouth plant is labeled a Hazard Category 2 facility. In 2002-2003, a Documented Safety Analysis studied “possible accident scenarios that could result from operation of the Portsmouth and Paducah Cylinder Yards… to determine whether the consequences could be mitigated without undue risk to the health and safety of the public, site personnel or to the environment.” http://www.hss.energy.gov/csa/csp/sqa/assessments/officesoftwareqa_PPPO_01_645_04.pdf
Records for these cleanups and others throughout the country will be stored at a West Virginia facility. According to the L.A. Times article, the contents will tell location(s) of radioactive mounds, detail basements of former manufacturing buildings, and how for hundreds (perhaps thousands of years) groundwater must be trapped to prevent radioactive materials from contaminating current groundwater.
A 1985 resident of a place across from the Fernald plant, Lisa Crawford, has stated, “I worry about people forgetting about this site,” as she strolled the preserve. “It is our job now to make future generations know what happened here.”
And, those same words illustrate the responsibilities of citizen board members dueling about destruction, decommissioning and future uses of the ground in Piketon, Ohio. But, it’s only one, of nearly two dozen sites dotted across the country. Some allegedly cleaned up, some in the process, and others about to enter the clean up phase.
They may be gone and not forgotten, but those making determinations in the 21st Century will impact the lives of those who walk the planet in the 22nd Century and beyond.
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NEWS ANALYSIS: 'Cleaning' Formerly Secret Nuclear Weapon Material Manufacturing Facilities in Portsmouth, Paducah and Elsewhere (Huntington’s Buried Nickel Plant?) Prepares the Environment for the 22nd Century and Beyond
By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter
Portsmouth, OH (HNN) - What does the cleanup and disposal of the former Portsmouth / Piketon nuclear plant mean for residents of other nearby cities, such as Huntington, WV or even Athens, Ohio, the home of Ohio University?
Although the Portsmouth plant has a fancy, convoluted formal name (Gaseous Diffusion Plant), the facility opened in 1954. Its mission was a Cold War secret for both workers and residents. While the film “China Syndrome” focused on the dangers of an accident (melt down) at a nuclear electrical generating plant (coincidentally the film came out around the same time as the Three Mile Island incident), the Portsmouth plant hails from an era where plants constructed components as part of the nuclear arms race against the U.S.S.R.
Charleston residents live with the presence of the chemical industry and the worst case scenario that a toxic leak could occur. The furor over the Bayer plant at Institute, WV reached a peak when two workers died at the plant in 2008 following an accident, near the storage of MIC (a chemical used in pesticides that killed thousands in India following a leak).
Ohio contained more than one venue ran by the Atomic Energy Commission. The Los Angeles Times in a lengthy October 2009 article by Ralph Vartabedian examined the cleanup of the Fernald plant which had been located in the midst of farmland outside Dayton, Ohio. While a 55-foot high mound dominates a half mile long preserve of prairie grasses and swampy ponds, $4.4 billion dollars transformed the former uranium foundry (where parts for the nuclear weapons industry were made) from a “dangerously contaminated” complex into an environmental showcase.
The “Not Gone, But Forgotten” report emphasized that across the country similar clean ups must balance “a mess” which has already cost taxpayers $100 billion and will eventually add $330 billion to Uncle Sam’s budget over the next 30-50 years.
Hidden in plain sight (or buried) are radioactive byproducts which remain hazardous for thousands of years. Scientists must make “no easy decisions,” according to Victor Gilinsky, a member of the nuclear regulatory commission. In most cases, the sites remain too hazardous for occupancy and the term ‘safe’ comes from definitions in legal documents.
During discussions this week in Portsmouth, a team from the University of Kentucky made a Power Point presentation illustrating some of the potential community decisions. At Paducah, Ky., a wildlife preserve has been proposed, similar to the one at Fernald. There 9,000 visitors a year, flock to see woodpeckers, , mallards, and juncos mask the acreage formerly used to manufacture uranium rods for plutonium cores of nuclear bombs. Why a wildlife reserve? At Fernald, an Ohio EPA official stated the reserve was established in an area unsafe for housing where groundwater must be pumped and treated until 2025.
Listening between the lines, you must surmise that Paducah, Fernald, and Portsmouth have similar hazards simply based on the “choices” offered by cleanup leaders, one of which spurs community lightning --- potential construction of an allegedly safer nuclear facility, which would once again jobs in often poorer regions. Left unsaid, how the atomic plant workers of the past resemble the well know Appalachian coal mining money machines, which also have more environmentally friendly options than those of the past which harmed workers and natural resources.
Previously, HNN has referred to a contaminated parcel of Huntington Alloys (a.k.a. Nickel Plant and Special Metals), which were hauled from Huntington to Portsmouth. Buried alongside other hazardous and “classified” items, internal documents from the Goodyear Corporation that previously operated the Portsmouth plant state the waste from Huntington was “contaminated with nickel carbonyl and uranium,” according to a 1999 press release by activist and former atomic worker, Vina Colley.
SIX MONTH LONG HUNTINGTON BURIAL AT ONE TIME ALLEGEDLY DID NOT HAPPEN DESPITE ARRIVAL OF TWO TRUCKS A DAY....
The correspondence from July and December 1977, describes the material to be buried as 26,000 cubic feet of equipment and 10,000 cubic feet of pipe. It was to arrive in approximately thirty trucks at the rate of two trucks a day and to be placed in a ditch approximately 24 feet wide, 150 feet long, and 12 feet deep. Because " classified material" was involved, the scrape was to go into a " classified burial ground" on site. A former worker at the Portsmouth plant who witnessed the operation said that it actually took six months and that 'all kind of stuff" went into the ditch, which was located near the site's administrative headquarters.
The remains from the Huntington facility ranged from “slightly enriched” items just requiring the burial under two feet of cover to equipment that requires continuous monitoring. Since the burial occurred in 1977 --- at the beginning of environmental consciousness and in the midst of mushroom cloud fallout anxieties --- workers did not know what they were entombing.
First, Nickel Carbonyl NI (CO) 4, a colorless, volatile, flammable , poisonous residue soluble only in alcohol and con nitric acid. However, slightly enriched uranium had been found in the piping. The July 11, 1977 memorandum states the “scrap “ must be covered with two feet of earth , although a December 14, 1977 memorandum stated that “the toxic and radioactive contaminated [remains of the Huntington, WV plant] had been found to be low enough to not require the two feet of cover.”
Ultimately, the massive burial blew the whistle on the secretive Portsmouth Goodyear operations about which workers did not speak. Geoffrey Sea, in a Harvard University thesis, stated that Huntington burial trampled the credibility of the “need to know” classification of work in Portsmouth. The thesis refers to the former Huntington facility as “an entire dismantled uranium processing plant from West Virginia” buried at a “classified nuclear waste site” which supervisors told workers “ didn’t happen.”
But, as the community struggles with the past and future, as late as 2002, 9.1 million net pounds of nuclear waste was taken from the Fernald site to Portsmouth for “interim storage,” under the Department of Energy’s Uranium Management Group.
A website describing the Fernald cleanup contains insight into possible Portsmouth decommissioning scenarios:
During most of Fernald’s production era, the general public paid little attention to what was happening inside the secured fence line, and site workers were focused on one thing: producing high quality uranium metal better, faster, cheaper and safer than its competition. Fernald was on the leading edge of manufacturing improvements and innovative technologies. The workforce, a unique combination of highly skilled tradesmen and professionals with expertise in chemical and metallurgical processes, took pride in the quality of their products and their service to the nation’s defense program.
One contributing factor to the controversy surrounding Fernald and other weapons complex facilities was the lack of environmental, safety and health regulations. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that environmental concerns raised national consciousness, and consequently the U.S. government and general populace began to understand the industrial revolution’s effect on the environment. Federal and state regulators began investigating reports of serious environmental and safety problems at nuclear weapons facilities, including the Fernald site.
At Fernald, the era of quiet operations and minimal public interest ended abruptly in 1984, when the Department of Energy (DOE) reported that nearly 300 pounds of enriched uranium oxide had been released to the environment from a Plant 9 dust collector system. That same year, DOE also reported that in 1981, three off-property wells south of the site were contaminated with uranium. The impact of nearly four decades of uranium metal production suddenly became the center of public controversy.
Two events in early 1986 attracted further media scrutiny: the unauthorized venting of two waste storage silos and a crack in the Pilot Plant vessel. Suddenly, reporters from popular national news programs such as 60 Minutes and 20/20, as well as Britain, Canada, Japan and Germany, were interested in the Fernald site. http://www.lm.doe.gov/land/sites/oh/fernald_orig/50th/secr.htm.
Although the live with Fernald closure project, contained silos belching radon gas, prevented further spewing of uranium powder into the air, and prevents the usage of well water containing 180 times the federally accepted safety standard, the compromise legal decree hinged on a maligned definition of “clean” and an agreement to limit future uses of the property.
Demolished building debris and top soil sets encapsulated inside the innocent looking mound, which contains liners preventing rain from seeping inside and a complex underground pope labyrinth monitors leakage.
Even as it stands the Portsmouth plant is labeled a Hazard Category 2 facility. In 2002-2003, a Documented Safety Analysis studied “possible accident scenarios that could result from operation of the Portsmouth and Paducah Cylinder Yards… to determine whether the consequences could be mitigated without undue risk to the health and safety of the public, site personnel or to the environment.” http://www.hss.energy.gov/csa/csp/sqa/assessments/officesoftwareqa_PPPO_01_645_04.pdf
Records for these cleanups and others throughout the country will be stored at a West Virginia facility. According to the L.A. Times article, the contents will tell location(s) of radioactive mounds, detail basements of former manufacturing buildings, and how for hundreds (perhaps thousands of years) groundwater must be trapped to prevent radioactive materials from contaminating current groundwater.
A 1985 resident of a place across from the Fernald plant, Lisa Crawford, has stated, “I worry about people forgetting about this site,” as she strolled the preserve. “It is our job now to make future generations know what happened here.”
And, those same words illustrate the responsibilities of citizen board members dueling about destruction, decommissioning and future uses of the ground in Piketon, Ohio. But, it’s only one, of nearly two dozen sites dotted across the country. Some allegedly cleaned up, some in the process, and others about to enter the clean up phase.
They may be gone and not forgotten, but those making determinations in the 21st Century will impact the lives of those who walk the planet in the 22nd Century and beyond.
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