Uranium Burial Lost Worker Confidence

Feb. 4, 2010

Huntington Uranium Burial Lost Worker Confidence with Portsmouth Contractor

By Tony Rutherford
Huntingtonnews.net Reporter

Portsmouth, OH (HNN) – Can you imagine digging a hole and dumping rail cars, trucks, machines, bricks and everything else in, then cover it up? That’s what happened in Piketon when the Huntington Pilot Plant/Reduction Pilot Plant was entombed in 1979.

According to a November 1999 release by Vina Colley, President of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS) and co-founder of National Nuclear Workers for Justice (NNWJ)

Internal Goodyear Corporation correspondence from July and December 1977 described the material to be buried as 26,000 cubic feet of equipment and 10,000 cubic feet of pipe. The material was contaminated with nickel carbonyl and uranium. (At least?)

The disassembled plant arrived for placement in a ditch approximately 24 feet wide, 150 feet long and 12 feet deep. A former worker and eyewitness said it took six months and that “all kinds of stuff went into the ditch.”

The project has not been public knowledge Workers at Portsmouth were apparently informed only on a need-to-know basis. Geoffrey Sea in his thesis for Harvard University states that Goodyear "eventually lost credibility when an entire dismantled uranium processing plant from West Virginia was buried at the Portsmouth classified nuclear waste site and the workers were told it hadn't happened."

A July 11, 1977, memo discusses the contaminants: 1) Nickel Carbonyl-NI (CO)4- Nickel Tetra Carbonyl, a colorless, volatile, flammable, poisonous residue soluble only in alcohol and con nitric acid" and 2) Uranium: Uranium found in most process piping is in PPM range, "slightly enriched", and will present no health protection problems. However, some equipment may contain larger quantities and as such will have to be monitored. "This memo calls for the scrap to be covered with two feet of earth. A December 14, 1977 memo states that toxic and radioactive contaminated had been found to low enough no to require the two feet of cover.

This raised questions:

"To what extent have the buried materials contaminated the groundwater at Portsmouth?' Vina Colley of PRESS wanted to know. The Department of Energy (DOE) acknowledged that nickel and uranium are contaminates of the underground water at the site.

What took place at the plant in West Virginia? The cover of the official preliminary proposal for the burial, dated September 26, 1977,described the plant as a "reduction pilot plant." DOE was to award the contract for the plant's demolition. What did the Portsmouth workers that took care of the burial actually handle?

"Did the workers at the Inco facility know that they handling toxic and radioactive material.? Were they adequately protected,” asked Mary Byrd Davis of the Uranium Enrichment Project?.

The 1999 news release continued, “The buried plant appears to have been an early instance of what some in the Portsmouth area fear- the transformation of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant into the a waste storage site.

"The project of the nickel plant is just one more example of the urgent need for a thorough investigation of what has taken place at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant," Colley stated.

QUESTIONS FOLLOWING HNN ARTICLE:

Following the HNN article on nickel dust, several activist readers sent a letter to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Ohio Congressman John Boccieri. Here’s An edited portion of the concerns shared with the Congressional representative and Senator:

“Yesterday we copied your offices on a news article from the Huntington paper regarding reported associations between nickel and Plutonium in the nuclear fuel cycle processes/ and centrifuge development. Because the Wingfoot Lake site near Uniontown Industrial Excess Landfill (I.E.L.) , was the precursor to the Portsmouth, Ohio centrifuge site discussed in the story, and, because, according to the NRC, both Portsmouth and Wingfoot were operated by what was called the Goodyear Atomic division, we have a keen interest in this new information for obvious reasons.

“First of all, you need to know that our citizens' group, Cuyahoga Community Land Trust ( CCLT), wrote the Ohio Attorney General's Office a letter citing a statement made to us back in around 1994 by a radiation expert from the Ohio Dept. of Health (ODH) in Columbus, Ruth Vandegrift.

“The following words [in 1994] from this top radiation ODH official are close to verbatim, when she called our attention specifically to the Wingfoot Lake operation/ Goodyear:

“...I'll probably get shot for saying this, but let's presume it's Goodyear's UF 6 . Tell me what kinds of things you are seeing in both the valid and invalid (IEL) data....(CCLT response): Plutonium 238/239, 241; tritium, thorium, uranium, radium etc. etc. Vandegrift's response: Yes, yes, they would all be there. It's called "crapped up fuel, crapped up nasties.' ....

The letter continues that radiation testing was geared toward “manmade” radiation, even though the plutonium’s existence had been on the table for a decade.

Paraphrasing, the letter stressed that ,“acceptance of the consultant’s spin on plutonium from these rounds of testing was appalling, especially since especially since an Akron lawyer had been told by a former ODH lawyer that ODH had documentation of barreled radiation at Uniontown IEL....

Well, we know something went radically wrong at Uniontown… We believe local officials were pressured/ coerced into not supporting a proper clean up at IEL … Some of the clues are found in the Kittinger depositions on the Plutonium, where local soils expert, James Bauder, who worked for the Stark H.D. and County Commission, told us that “"directives" had been issued from ODH to Stark ordering /allowing the "additional" chemical to be brought in!

…..

Senator Brown and Congressman Boccieri, Will such severe politics be allowed to prevail here, without regard to the health and welfare of our community?