Nuclear Site Nears End of Its Conversion to a Park (Published 2006) (2024)

Correction Appended

FERNALD, Ohio, Sept. 19 — In about two weeks, the final trainload of radioactive waste is to leave the Fernald nuclear site.

The train will carry 5,800 tons of contaminated soil in 60 railcars, just like the 196 trains before it, which have run for seven years to a Utah dump from this scarred, cratered patch of land in the hills of southern Ohio.

“I never thought I’d live to see this day,” said Johnny Reising, who directs activity at the site for the Department of Energy.

This fall, the site will open to the public as a natural, undeveloped park following a 13-year, $4.4-billion cleanup. That is actually a bargain. Experts had originally estimated that cleanup would cost $12 billion and take until 2025.

“I remember touring the site in the 80’s and thinking, ‘My golly, how are we ever going to clean this up?’ ” said Graham Mitchell, who oversaw the site for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency for 21 years until he retired this month.

From the time it opened in 1951 until it closed in 1989, the Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald enriched 500 million pounds of uranium, 67 percent of all the uranium used in the nation’s cold war nuclear weapons program.

The center also created 1.5 billion pounds of radioactive waste, Mr. Reising said. It operated in obscurity until 1985, when neighbors discovered that the plant’s waste had polluted their air, soil and drinking water.

The neighbors sued, and the resulting news coverage prompted similar revelations at nuclear facilities around the country.

The site originally included a leaky silo filled with highly radioactive uranium sludge. At the time it was the largest concentration of poisonous radon gas in the world, Mr. Reising said. Officials at the Fernald center dumped radioactive waste into pits just 20 yards from a creek that sits directly atop the Great Miami Aquifer, one of the biggest and cleanest aquifers east of the Mississippi, Mr. Mitchell said.

Rainwater carried uranium into the creek, where it sank and contaminated 225 acres, or about 0.062 percent of the aquifer, according to figures on the Web site of the Fernald Citizens Advisory Board, which represented the center’s neighbors through the cleanup process.

When the Department of Energy ran out of room to bury waste at the 1,050-acre Fernald site, officials ordered it packed into 100,000 metal drums, which were left outside, exposed to the elements. Accidental releases covered 11 square miles of surrounding farmland in radioactive dust.

“When we first visited the site, I saw workers walking around in short-sleeve shirts, and their arms were covered with radioactive yellowcake,” said Lisa Crawford, president of Fresh, a citizen’s group that fought for cleanup at Fernald.

The original plan called for moving all the radioactive waste from Fernald to Nevada. Citizens and regulators gradually decided the plan was so expensive that it might never happen. “It took us years to realize how much dirt we were actually talking about,” said Jim Bierer, chairman of the citizens board.

In the final compromise, the federal government agreed to move 1.3 million tons of the most contaminated waste to storage sites in Texas, Nevada and Arizona. Citizens agreed to place the rest — 4.7 million tons — in a landfill at Fernald.

Today, the waste site resembles a long, fat worm. Filled with uranium-laced soil, building parts and shreds of clothing, the landfill is 30 feet deep, with another 65 feet above ground, and is three-quarters of a mile long.

The landfill’s outer wall of rock, plastic and clay is nine feet thick and sits 30 feet above the aquifer. It is designed to last at least 1,000 years.

At its peak, the cleanup effort employed 2,000 workers, as many people as worked at the center during the height of uranium production, Mr. Reising said.

The Department of Energy spent $216 million on buildings just to clean the site. When the buildings were no longer needed, each one had to be demolished, decontaminated and placed in the landfill. The department also built a pumping system to suck contaminated water out of the aquifer and purify it. That process will continue until the entire aquifer is clean, in about 2023, Mr. Reising said.

When the site opens as a park, the landfill will be off-limits to the public. The remaining 930 acres will include hardwood forest, prairie and wetlands intended to recreate the area’s natural environment before European settlers arrived in the early 1800’s, Mr. Reising said.

Native bird species not seen in the area for decades, including bobolinks and dickcissels, have been spotted at Fernald, as have endangered species including the Indiana brown bat and Sloan’s crayfish. Deer wander the roads, and great blue herons stand motionless in ponds.

Humans have started to return, too. For decades, home values around Fernald stagnated because no one wanted to live near a nuclear waste dump, Mr. Bierer said.

Now two subdivisions are under construction within a mile of Fernald.

“It seemed to take forever,” Mr. Bierer said. “Basically we started with a huge environmental disaster and ended up with an environmental asset.”