The FALLOUT investigation reveals concerns surrounding the On-Site Waste Disposal Facility (OSWDF) at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS), a low-level radioactive and hazardous waste landfill. Despite the DOE's assurances about its safety, community activists, elected officials, and former DOE officials raise concerns about potential contamination of the Teays Aquifer, a major drinking water source, due to the site's location in a wet environment.
For more than four years, our FALLOUT investigation has uncovered radioactive contamination, cancer, and death in communities that surround the Ports mouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant ( PORTS ), a Cold War-era facility that enriched uranium for America’s atomic weapons and nuclear power plants. We focused on the massive facility that’s now being dismantled.
But tucked away in a corner of the property, earth moving equipment, dump trucks, and loaders are busy building and filling the On-Site Waste Disposal Facility (OSWDF), a $650 million low-level radioactive and hazardous waste landfill. ‘The Dump,’ as people in nearby Piketon simply refer to it, broke ground in 2016, after many years of study by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees the plant and other nuclear sites across the country. While shipping radioactive and hazardous waste from PORTS to other landfills was considered, DOE decided on-site disposal was the best way to handle millions of cubic feet of debris from radioactive buildings and equipment it’s demolishing and dismantling, as well as contaminated soil across the site that it’s digging up and burying, part of a multi-billion-dollar clean-up of the PORTS site.The DOE insists the OSWDF is a state-of-the-art facility that, when filled, completed, and capped in 2030, will seal in the toxic threat it holds inside for a thousand years. Others disagree, including community activists and elected leaders in nearby Piketon. Doyle’s group, “Don’t Dump on Us,” protested the landfill. Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer and the village council tried to stop the landfill after the project began. The mayor still worries about the consequences it could have. Even former DOE Assistant Secretary of Environmental Management Anne White, who oversaw cleanup at PORTS and other nuclear sites across the country, told Local 12 in a recent interview that PORTS is simply the wrong place for a radioactive landfill. The reason for White’s concern and others’ worries is directly connected to water. Pike County, where PORTS is located, receives an average rainfall of nearly four feet a year. In this wet environment, White says, ‘You’re managing water all the time.’ White said that the contaminated material from PORTS should have been shipped to a low-level radioactive waste landfill already operating near Utah and Texas. While the DOE insists its highly engineered OSWDF at PORTS will keep the radioactive and hazardous contamination from seeping into water supplies, the Utah and Texas landfills, White says, are much better suited because they’re located in arid environments, receiving just a fraction of the rainfall the PORTS site receives. Because rain ultimately soaks into the ground and percolates into aquifers, White says the DOE will constantly be battling to prevent seepage and contamination. “Putting a landfill east of the Mississippi in a wetter environment, where the groundwater level is higher, is demonstrably less safe than putting waste into a commercial landfill in an arid environment where the groundwater is very deep,” said White. One of the biggest concerns about potential contamination is centered on the Teays Aquifer, a vestige of an ancient river that predates the Ohio River. The Teays River was carved out, then buried by glaciers, forming an important aquifer system that flows north from Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky to and through Ohio, cutting under Indiana and Illinois. While the DOE contends the main channel of the Teays Aquifer is three miles north of PORTS, a U.S. Geological Survey revealed that water under the PORTS site is connected to it, which has led to worry that this important source of drinking water for countless homes and communities could eventually be contaminated. Mayor Spencer said that it’s just a matter of time before radiation and chemicals contained in the PORTS landfill spill out, creating a catastrophe. White steers clear of such dire warnings but agrees the landfill at PORTS could be a recipe for trouble. Yet, White said that she could do little to stop the project because work had already begun when she took office at the DOE in 2018
RADIOACTIVE WASTE PORTS DOE CONTAMINATION GROUNDWATER TEAYS AQUIFER LANDFILL OHIO
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