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Philip Spiess
Dale Gieringer and David Buchholz describe (and illustrate) a couple of posts above a horribly real series of environmental disasters that are going on right now (and this doesn't even include the two hurricanes which hit this past week in the Gulf of Mexico area). Herewith Part III of my "Along the Miami River" series, which describes yet another cataclysmic environmental disaster, this one very much manmade:
ALONG THE GREAT MIAMI III: INFERNAL FERNALD
Prelude: The Fires of Hooven: When I was a mere slip of a lad (call it 1952, because it was), my grandfather took me and my sister Barbara (a year older) fishing under the railway bridge which parallels U. S. Route 50 over the Great Miami River near Hooven, Ohio. It was a lovely summer day and the river sparkled in the sunlight, even in the shadows under the bridge, where sandbars made the river run somewhat shallow. Although my grandfather was an occasional fisherman, my sister and I had never been fishing before, so this was something of an adventure, and perhaps an educational experience as well. What we caught that day was small fry – crayfish, minnows, and something slightly larger (I forget what), but we were able to report back to the family in Clifton something of a success.
But that, as it turned out, was not what intrigued me that day. Across the plain stretching north of U. S. 50, on the western bank of the Great Miami River, near the small community of Hooven, Ohio, there was some sort of power plant, with several smokestacks emitting live flames that flared into the air, even on a sunlit summer day – fire! that eternal fascination of man. As a family, we often spent weekends at a cabin loaned to us near Brown County, Indiana, and so we would usually take this route westward (in the days before Interstate highways) past the ancient cylindrical stone post at Stateline Road that marks the boundary between Ohio and Indiana (it is also the 1st Principal Meridian, surveyed and marked by Israel Ludlow in 1798). On these trips I often looked northward to the fires at Hooven, which I later learned was the gasworks of the Gulf Oil Company.
The history of this refinery is instructive; it was but a harbinger of dangers to come. The Gulf Oil Company had established its refinery on this site in 1931, where it produced gasoline, diesel and (later) jet fuel, home-heating oil, and sulfur. It was acquired by the Chevron company in 1985, but it stopped operating in 1986. Why? Because environmental investigations began in 1985 as a result of fuel seepage into the Great Miami River, and the conclusion of this matter was that Chevron reached an agreement in 1993 with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up the site. It was estimated that from 1933 to 1986, during operation of the Gulf-Chevron refinery site, 5 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel had been released into the water aquifer under the site. There was also soil contamination from petroleum wastewater solids; a total of 674,030 tons of soil were eventually excavated and taken to off-site landfills (and what happens to those, may I ask?). But all this was nothing compared to what was going on upstream on the Great Miami River, at a place called Fernald.
The Land Across from New Baltimore: New Baltimore is a small, unostentatious community on the east bank of the Great Miami River across from the even smaller community of Fernald. This area on the west bank of the Miami covers the Great Miami Aquifer, one of the largest drinking water aquifers in the United States, which underlies the entire 1,050-acre site. Such a site could supply the copious water needed for the local communities’ water supply, or it could, say, provide the copious water needed for uranium processing – also the land here was level, making construction of a uranium plant easy; it was isolated, making safety and security at such a plant feasible; and it was a site which was between the uranium ore delivery ports of New York and New Orleans, thus being accessible to other main atomic energy production sites. It was also close to Cincinnati’s large labor force.
The Coming of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Age: World War II ended – and the Cold War started – with the creation of the atomic bomb, first dropped on Japan in 1945, thereupon precipitating a nuclear arms race by countries other than the United States to obtain the bomb for themselves. And so the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the predecessor of the Department of Energy (DOE), which took over in 1977, was created in 1946 to control all U. S. nuclear production. During the era of the Cold War, it produced our very own nuclear weapons, managing twenty-one major facilities in thirteen states (the so-called Nuclear Weapons Complex). Among these was one near at hand to where we grew up in that same era: in March, 1951, the AEC announced the construction of a uranium production facility on the 1,050 acres (over the Great Miami Aquifer) near the rural community of Fernald, Ohio, approximately eighteen miles northwest of Cincinnati.
The Fernald Feed Materials Production Center: The new Fernald facility was named the Feed Materials Production Center. [Was this to create a cover for what actually went on there? I think so: its red-and-white-checkered water towers, reminiscent of the Purina logo, suggested to local residents that it produced cattle feed or pet food.] In reality, it began to produce high purity uranium metals for uranium fuel cores just seven months after the announcement of its creation. It also served as the country’s central repository for another radioactive metal, thorium. By 1954, the 136-acre production area was fully operational and went on to produce the majority of uranium used in the U. S. Nuclear Weapons program. At its peak in 1956 the Feed Materials Production Center employed more than 2,800 employees; these employees worked under a veil of secrecy with federal security restrictions (they actually had to sign a contract to this effect). When off-site, workers were told not to talk about their work at Fernald, and workers in one production area of the complex [see below for a description of these areas] were kept ignorant about classified operations in other areas [I’m sure there was speculation and gossip, maybe even information leaks]. For more than thirty years, the facility, which produced 170,000 metric tons of uranium metal products and 35,000 metric tons of uranium trioxide and uranium tetrafluoride during that time, operated relatively inconspicuously; the outside world, including greater Cincinnati, gave it little attention.
Production Facilities: The production process at the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, so-called because the uranium fuel cores it produced were the “feed” for the Atomic Energy Com-mission’s plutonium production reactors (these nuclear reactors were located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, South Carolina, and at Hanford, Washington), had nine production plants, as well as a pilot plant, involved in the operations at Fernald.
Plant 1: Sampling Plant: The principal function of the Sampling Plant was to obtain representative samples of the large quantities of incoming ore concentrates. There were two main processing lines: one for Q-11, radium-bearing ores mined mainly in the Belgian Congo (these ores also produce the invisible radioactive gas, radon), and one for INX, a non-radium concentrate.
Plant 2/3: Ore Refinery & Denitration Plant: It was called Plant 2/3 because two separate functions occurred in the same building. Here uranium ores, concentrates, and residues were extracted from feed materials and converted into concentrated uranium trioxide (orange salt or orange oxide), Plant 2 performing digestion and Plant 3 performing extraction and denitration. This refinery was also capable of extracting and purifying other materials besides uranium. The plant also performed nitric acid recovery, raffinate treatment, and refinery sump. Concrete shielding surrounded most equipment and “hot” areas.
Plant 4: Green Salt Plant: This plant produced “green salt” (uranium tetrafluoride), this being the key intermediate compound in the process of producing uranium metal. The plant contained twelve banks of furnaces for the conversion of uranium trioxide into uranium tetrafluoride.
Plant 5: Metals Production Plant: This plant’s main process equipment consisted of eleven jolters, five filling machines, forty-four reduction furnaces, and two breakout stations in the Reduction Area, and twenty-eight vacuum casting furnaces in the Recast Area. In short, the plant converted the processed chemicals into metal, which was eventually cast into ingots.
Plant 6: Metals Fabrication Plant: The ingots from Plant 5 were here bloomed into billets and then were rolled into rods that were straightened, cut into 22-foot (or other) lengths, and machined to finished reactor slug dimensions. These were either hollow or solid uranium slugs, designed for both internal and external cooling during atomic pile irradiation.
Plant 7: 6 to 4 Plant: This was known as the 6 to 4 Plant because UF6 was converted to UF4 here. It was basically a high-temperature gas-to-solid reactor system that only operated for two years (1954-1956).
Plant 8: Scrap Recovery Plant: The process in this plant primarily involved upgrading uranium recyclable materials to prepare residual feed materials for head-end processing in the refinery (Plant 2). Operations included drum washing, filtering refinery tailings, operation of rotary kiln, box, muffle, and oxidation furnaces, and screening of furnace products.
Plant 9: Special Products Plant: The purpose of this plant was to process slightly enriched uranium, and to cast larger ingots than those produced in Plant 5. Construction of the plant as a thorium metal production process was begun in 1954. However, the process used to start the plant was not able to produce a pure metal. But eventually the development of an oxalate precipitation process resulted in the production of pure thorium metal. Nevertheless, interest in this development declined in 1956-1957, and the plant converted into casting enriched uranium ingots larger than those processed in Plants 5 and 6.
Pilot Plant: This plant consisted of small size equipment for piloting refinery operations, hexafluoride reduction, derby pickling, ingot casting, and other equipment for special purposes. It was also used for numerous process testing and experimental operations. Among the specialized equipment available at this plant were the following: oxidation furnace; vacuum furnaces; two systems representing reduction to metal size reduction; a heat treating salt-bath; a shot-blast cleaning unit; a machining chips recovery system; a solvent extraction system; a dry preparation system; a UF6 Hydrolysis – UO2 Precipitation System; a calciner; a UF5 to UF4 Production Facility; and a decladding tank.
Contamination of the Fernald Site: But in 1984 all hell broke loose. The Department of Energy (DOE) reported that a faulty dust collector in one of its plants had released nearly 300 pounds of enriched uranium oxide and millions of pounds of uranium dust into the atmosphere, causing major radioactive contamination of the surrounding environment. This was followed by the DOE confirming that contamination by uranium of three off-site wells had been found in 1981. And here our story turns grim: you will recall that this series is about the lower reaches of the Great Miami River near Cincinnati. The numerous small local communities surrounding the site, which draw their water from its major underlying aquifer [see above], were not only outraged, but contaminated! [You may recall that Madame Marie Curie, the famed French pioneer in radium physics, died from aplastic anemia, brought on by prolonged exposure to radiation (she regularly carried test tubes of radium around in the pockets of her lab coat, for heaven’s sake!).] Community residents were exposed, via ground water saturation, soil contamination, and air dispersion of emissions, to ionizing radiation and soluble and insoluble forms of uranium; workers at the site were exposed as well to non-radiological toxic substances, such as chlorinated and non-chlorinated solvents, metals and metal salts, and nuisance dusts. The nearby (across the river) Fort Scott Camp (two camps actually, one for boys and one for girls), then the oldest Roman Catholic camp in the country (which I attended with Donald Dahmann in 1957 and 1958), had to close in 1989 because of this contamination. The whole thing blew up in the publicity of national media coverage – newspapers, magazines, radio stories, and television news stations, as well as the international media, reported on the Fernald contamination. A class action lawsuit was filed against the Department of Energy; it was settled five years later for $73 million (less than asked for). But the State of Ohio also filed suits against the DOE and National Lead of Ohio (NLO), the company which had been awarded the contract in 1951 to operate the site, for the multiple environmental problems that they had created; that suit was settled in 1988. (Westinghouse was hired in 1986 to replace National Lead of Ohio to operate the site.)
Was It Murder?: In June, 1984, a 39-year-old pipe fitter at Fernald, Dave Bocks, disappeared during his shift and was reported missing. He had been seen at 4:00 a.m. on a hot night inside a vehicle with the windows rolled up having a serious discussion with a supervisor. At 5:00 a.m., a fellow worker spoke with Bocks, who was quitting work but headed for Plant 4 [see above]. Bocks’ remains (such as they were) were later discovered inside a uranium processing furnace located in Plant 6 [cf. Lafcadio Hearn’s 1874 “A Violent Cremation” (a.k.a. “The Great Tan Yard Murder”); Ambrose Bierce’s 1890s “Oil of Dog”; H. G. Wells’ 1895 “The Cone”; and possibly Robert Service’s 1907 “The Cremation of Sam McGee” for other such cases of misadventure by furnace]; two sudden 28-degree drops in the furnace’s temperature (ordinarily kept at 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit!) had been recorded around 5:15 a.m., suggesting that a foreign substance had gone into the furnace (one theory intimated that Bocks had been murdered, cut in half, and his two pieces were pushed into the molten metal one after the other). The investigation failed to uncover sufficient evidence that foul play was involved, the main investigating detective maintaining a theory of suicide, but this was preposterous under the circumstances [look it up online if you want to know more]. Many, however, including Bocks’ family, believed that he was murdered by one or more coworkers who suspected him of being a whistleblower in the 1984 contamination exposures.
Medical Surveillance: In 1984, one Charles Zinser rented a vegetable garden near the Fernald plant. He often took his two young sons along to help him work there. Two years later, both boys were found to have cancer: Samuel, then eight, had leukemia, and Louis, two, had to have part of his leg amputated. Tests of the garden soil showed that it was contaminated with enriched Uranium 235. The doctor who tested Louis’s leg said that it contained ten times more uranium than would be expected to accumulate naturally over a lifetime. The doctor said Louis could have eaten dirt and not gotten that much; the only way he could have gotten that much would have been to breathe it in. As the late Senator (and astronaut) John Glenn of Ohio put it, “We are poisoning our people in the name of national security.”
As a result of the exposure of the Fernald plant’s contamination, two separate medical “surveillance” programs were set up for both former workers and residents of adjacent communities; these were funded by the settlements of the class-action suits against National Lead of Ohio [see above]. Such Fernald Settlement Funds are administered by the U. S. Federal Court which maintains oversight of the Fernald Medical Monitoring Programs. These are two: the Fernald Workers Medical Monitoring Program (FWMMP), covering former workers at Fernald who were employed by National Lead of Ohio when it was the on-site contractor; and the Fernald (Residents) Medical Monitoring Program (FMMP), a voluntary ongoing medical surveillance program for community residents living within five miles of the perimeter of the Fernald site. These monitoring programs include both periodic medical examinations and diagnostic testing, with a yearly questionnaire collecting essential data (how bureaucratic of them!). By 2007, there were 2,716 former workers enrolled in the FWMMP, and 9,764 residents enrolled in the FMMP. At the time of the initial examination, samples of whole blood, serum, plasma, and urine were obtained from all those enrolled in the FMMP residents’ program.
The Fernald Closure Project: The Fernald Closure Project is a program run by the U. S. Depart-ment of Energy (DOE) to clean up the former Fernald Feed Materials Production Center uranium processing site. In 1990, Congress approved closure of the facility and its environmental cleanup. In 1992, Fluor Fernald, part of the Fluor Corporation, was awarded the contract to carry out the cleanup. Thousands of tons of contaminated concrete, sludge, liquid waste, and soil were removed from the site. Fluor completed its portion of the cleanup in 2006, twelve years ahead of schedule and $7.8 billion below the original cost estimate. The removed toxic waste was permanently buried at Waste Control Specialists, a firm which provides “the most comprehensive, full service, and complete radioactive and hazardous waste services in the nation.” Located on a 600-foot thick nearly impermeable [!] red-clay formation, the site “ensures the safe and permanent disposal of radioactive waste by taking advantage of this unique natural barrier.” The company operates its 1,338-acre facility on its 14,900-acre site in western Andrews County, Texas.
But the case is far different back at Fernald, Ohio: ongoing cleanup operations include routine monitoring of environmental conditions with test wells (including the uranium groundwater plume extending south of the plant area), storage of residual waste on-site [see Part IV], and filtering of uranium contamination from the Great Miami River aquifer. These cleanup operations, which include restrictions on establishing new wells in the area, continue for the foreseeable future. In short, according to federal scientists, the site is permanently unfit for human habitation; it “will have to be closely monitored essentially forever” [!].
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