The residents were very conscious of the fact that they wanted the radioactive waste out of their backyards, but were about to send it into other's. I think, honestly, a little more space would have been a good idea." You're trying to tear down buildings, dig up the waste pits. "You didn't have a lot of working room," Powell says. More troubling, the plant sat atop the Great Miami Aquifer, which provides drinking water for nearly 2 million people. When the trucks began to carry waste away from the facility, they had to travel two-lane state routes where houses sit mere yards from the road. There's a private amusement park, available for weddings and family reunions, about 2 miles away. A small dairy farm sits just outside the property's boundaries. Just eight are operational now - they maintain the existing bombs and do not build new ones - and most of the others are far from being considered safe for the public.Īt Fernald, the contamination and clean-up were complicated by the plant's proximity to the community. "We're responsible for maintaining the decisions made by the community - the long-term surveillance and maintenance," said Jane Powell, the DOE's representative at the Fernald Preserve from 2006, the year it opened, to 2013.įernald was part of a chain of more than a dozen sites that helped to build nuclear bombs during the Cold War. LM, as it's called, comes on the scene after the regulators and the community have decided what is to be done with the once-contaminated site. underground nuclear test in 1971 to the Acid/Pueblo Canyon site in New Mexico, still contaminated by leftovers from the Manhattan Project. They range from a World War II-era military base in Alaska that was the site of the largest U.S. Between 50 and 60 sites in 28 states and Puerto Rico are in the program. Local schoolchildren visit the preserve on field trips, learning about Ohio wildlife.īoth are part of the Department of Energy's Legacy Management Program, which is in charge of the long-term management of sites that have been cleaned up. When I toured the place as a reporter in the early 1990s, I wasn't allowed to get out of the official van because it wasn't quite safe to walk around unprotected.īut in 2014, the former Feed Materials Production Center, which processed low-level uranium for use in nuclear bombs from 1951 to 1989, is a place where birders and photographers and casual hikers roam 7-plus miles of trails on the 1,050 acres 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati. I am at the Fernald Preserve, walking on gravel paths through wintry wetlands that, the last time I was here, were part of a closed and contaminated nuclear weapons plant. The K-65 silos were here, I think, staring at three smallish ponds with ice around their edges, and the barrels of radioactive waste were over there, by that deer. CROSBY TOWNSHIP, Ohio - The mind's eye insists on placing a sprawling, weathered industrial site where there is only rolling, wheat-colored Ohio prairie.
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