Nuclear civil war in Ohio

...At times National Lead tried to conceal its problems, once even going so far as to paint contaminated surfaces the same color as the hazardous materials that had leaked onto them...

...At times the government rewarded National Lead for meeting its responsibilities...

...This December, as a result of suits filed in 1986 and 1987, Celebrezze forced the DOE to pay Ohio a $1-million settlement and agree that in the future the DOE would obey Ohio hazardous waste laws as well as meet state air and water standards...

...Two years after the Zinsers rented a garden plot near FMPC, both their sons were diagnosed as having cancer...

...conservative...

...The joke reflects the bitterness people in this normally conservative part of Ohio feel over the radioactive waste exposure they have received from the plant...

...In Washington Congressman Thomas Luken and Senator and former astronaut John Glenn have spearheaded the drive to get the government to spend more money on nuclear cleanup...

...has been no less forceful...

...And local merchants, many of whom depended on sales generated by the $46.5-million payroll of FMPC's fifteen hundred workers, feared they would SPRING • 1989 • 261 Notebook be forced out of business if the plant's operations were cut...

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...Ohio Congressman Thomas Luken is not guilty of hyperbole when he charges the government with "waging a kind of chemical warfare against the community of Fernald...

...When bones from their younger son's amputated leg were tested, doctors found ten times the amount of uranium in them that an adult could be expected to accumulate over a lifetime...

...The Department of Energy (DOE), which has continually had to revise its estimates upward, has put the FMPC uranium dust releases as high as 530,000 pounds, and a recent Cincinnati Enquirer story, which described FMPC as an "atomic age trash pile," painted an even more horrifying picture...

...When FRESH began, it faced strong opposition...

...Governor Richard Celeste has compared the nuclear waste at FMPC to a time bomb and declared, "If a terrorist had buried it there, there would be an extraordinary and prompt reaction...

...If there is anything the nuclear civil war in Ohio proves, however, it is that the scandal DOE would like to have disappear will not...

...The Zinsers' story is just as horrifying...

...In the case of Fernald the government's problem is that neither its agencies, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy, nor National Lead of Ohio acted with enough consistency to establish which was the true villain...

...Now FRESH finds itself in a very different position...

...At times it censured National Lead for unsatisfactory safety performance...

...In Fernald it is a question that has been asked and answered quietly in living room after living room without anybody wondering who thought of it first...

...No off-site air monitoring for radioactivity was done at FMPC until 1959, and the air monitoring system that was put in place in 1959 and expanded in 1972 was insufficient to detect the majority of uranium releases...

...At times National Lead warned the government of safety problems at FMPC...

...Typical is the following letter, written in 1983 by Ronald Cochran, director of DOE's Office of Nuclear Materials Production...

...People here have, however, learned to look closely...

...By insisting that it was responsible for the radioactive contamination done by National Lead of Ohio during its management of FMPC, it was hoping to exempt National Lead from having to indemnify anybody and in turn itself from having to reimburse National Lead...

...Fernald's Atomic Trades Labor Council, which in 1988 struck FMPC for three months in a dispute that centered on safety conditions, worried that if FRESH were successful its workers would lose their jobs...

...At a time when the four biggest nuclear weapons plants in the country have all been shut down, what has made Fernald such a headline event are, however, more than revelations of mismanagement and lying...

...For the foreseeable future, citizen groups are the only politically reliable nuclear watchdogs...

...But the joke also reflects their willingness to fight a system that, as the Department of Energy's Joe LaGrone acknowledged, put production over everything...

...Army Corps of Engineers general observed, "There are no cemeteries to relocate, no schools to be affected...

...The result is a pro-FRESH political environment...

...The copilots heirs, alleging defects in the helicopter's escape hatch, brought suit against United Technologies under Virginia tort law, but the court, in an expanded ruling of a doctrine known as "the military contractor defense," said United Technologies could not be held liable when it had done work according to government specifications...

...Not only was funding for plant safety so inadequate that outdated equipment was constantly used, safety practices at FMPC were allowed to slide in order to keep production on schedule...

...Key is the manner in which the government has dealt with the revelations...

...The picture they paint is of a plant that was, in the words of one Fernald manager, "barely" functional with regard to 260 • DISSENT Notebook safety...

...What lies behind the Fernald scandal is a history that makes the much-publicized catastrophe of Three Mile Island pale by comparison...

...That case arose from the death of a Marine helicopter copilot, whose helicopter crashed off the Virginia coast...

...From a distance nothing looks more benign than the thirty-eight-year-old Fernald Feed Materials Production Center...

...Emissions from the site are extensively monitored and are within limits established by DOE and other governmental organizations...

...In 1981 the DOE knew that enriched uranium was seeping into the wells around Fernald, but only in 1985 did DOE officials warn residents of the danger to their health...

...At a time when the DOE's own estimates for cleaning up the nation's nuclear plants varies from $91 billion to $200 billion, Ohio's actions are of special significance...

...Even its water tower, which recently had its red and white checkerboard colors changed to blue and white, looks innocent...

...These estimates are, if anything...

...What did come up was the belief that here was a fight from which no retreat was possible...

...State attorney general Anthony Celebrezze, Jr...

...Worst of all, government officials and plant managers kept these problems hidden from the public and often from each other...

...Her list now totals fifty-seven...

...That sense of peacefulness still prevails...

...But in the fall of 1988, in response to a $300 million class-action suit filed on behalf of 14,000 Fernald residents, the government suddenly changed its position...

...At no time, moreover, did the AEC or DOE have a compelling legal reason to ask National Lead to violate the governmental safety regulations it was required by contract to obey...

...But merely remembering them was not enough either...

...The cancer FMPC had produced and the fears it had caused (of having a deformed child in the case of FRESH spokeswoman Lisa Crawford) could not be forgotten...

...Doris Clawson, who like her mother has had multiple cancer operations, has kept a list for the last twenty years of Fernald area residents who have died of cancer...

...You have to drive slowly to notice the yellow warning signs posted on FMPC's fences, and you have to know what you are looking for to pick out the leaking K-65 concrete silos that contain waste from the World War II Manhattan Project...

...Just as important, within Ohio there has been an equally aggressive stance toward the DOE...

...But for the plant's neighbors the standing joke is that pumpkins are the crop to raise: "They don't need a candle at Halloween...

...FMPC seems almost lost in the rolling Ohio countryside...

...In shouldering blame for damage done at FMPC, the government was seeking a similar catch-22 immunity...

...The most damning revelations about FMPC's history come, however, not from outside critics but from the government's own records and the testimony of FMPC plant managers...

...In its long-awaited "2010 Report" on ways to manage America's nuclear-bomb industry through the year 2010, the DOE advocates spending just $52 billion to renovate and $29 billion to clean up the country's nuclear-bomb plants...

...It showed FMPC with 1,066,336,462 pounds of nuclear garbage, with special problems for 550.000 tons of sludge buried in six pits, 54,000 steel drums holding uranium waste, and 1,195 tons of the nation's entire stock of thorium (with a half-life of fourteen billion years...

...We can assure you that the safety and welfare of our employees at the site and our neighbors in the area surrounding the plant is given high priority in our operations," Cochran wrote a worried Fernald resident...

...The land around the Fernald uranium processing plant in southwestern Ohio is rich enough to grow most anything...

...Back in 1951, when the government paid nine local farmers $500,000 for the land, a U.S...

...There is nothing formidable about the low, flat buildings that make up most of FMPC...

...It is not surprising that local residents often rented land near FMPC for garden plots or that newcomers to the area thought FMPC produced pet food...

...What good does it do to protect ourselves from the Soviets by building nuclear weapons, if we poison ourselves in the process...

...Ohio is ReaganBush territory, but on nuclear matters, it has become the model for what a state can do to fight nuclear contamination by a government facility...

...This fall the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency estimated that FMPC had released 298,000 pounds of uranium dust into the air since the plant started, deliberately discharged 167,000 more pounds of uranium waste into the Great Miami River, and has 12.7 million pounds of uranium waste stored in pits, many of which are leaking...

...Senator Glenn would ask in the wake of government revelations about FMPC...

...Senior scientists at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research point out that it is no accident that FMPC has become such a danger...

...To avoid the liability it would ultimately have to assume if the suit against National Lead of Ohio (NLO), which managed FMPC until 1986, succeeded, the government took the position that it had willfully and consistently condoned NLO's violations of environmental law...

...Its monthly meetings at the Venice Presbyterian Church, which rarely drew more than sixty, now draw two and three times that number, and instead of a skeptical Cincinnati press, FRESH fmds local reporters vying for new Fernald material...

...In 1958 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) members knew that concrete storage tanks at FMPC had cracks...

...That FMPC should be responsible for such a toll on Fernald residents (in the absence of epidemiological studies the precise damage is impossible to assess) is hardly surprising...

...In 1962 AEC officials were told that runoff from FMPC's wastepits could contaminate Fernald groundwater, but again they took no steps to correct the problem, choosing instead to ignore warnings...

...On Feburary 13 a Federal District Court in Ohio ruled that the government-contractor defense did not apply to Fernald...

...The federal government, already feeling pressed to meet its nuclear defense requirements, is in no rush to spend scarce tax dollars on the nuclear mess it has left behind...

...Committees they serve on, particularly the Senate Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation, and Governmental Processes, have given the DOE some of its worst moments and been instrumental in eliciting acknowledgment of administrative wrongdoing from government officials once reluctant to speak...

...It's like A Tale of Two Cities, except there's not a great deal of honor in pointing the finger," Stanley Chesley, the Cincinnati attorney leading the class-action suit against the government, has said of the DOE's Sydney Carton-like posturing...

...The money from the class-action suit, which some day may help with hospital bills or declining land values, was a subject that rarely came up...

...There was skepticism from the press in view of DOE assurances that everything was all right at FMPC...

...They had to be stopped so that another generation would not grow up with another FMPC...

...The government's position was based on its reading of the Supreme Court's June 1988 decision in the case of Boyle v. United Technologies...

...Rather than have the tanks replaced, however, they allowed the radioactive liquid in them to leak out until it fell below the crack line...

...The political backfire from the government's catch-22 strategy has produced even greater fallout...

...Right now, the government's strategy seems to have backfired...

...In the Boyle case United Technologies was excused from liability because it had followed government standards...

...To the plant's neighbors, especially FRESH (Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health), it was a source of pride when last year the Environmental Policy Institute announced that the government had spent more money on cleanup at Fernald than at any other site in the country...

...Driving through the snowy Ohio countryside with members of FRESH in the days after Christmas, I was struck by how prepared they were for a long struggle...

...The ruling reflects FMPC's tangled history...

...The DOE in particular seems to have learned nothing from 1988...

...In the past the government's official position has always been that it was doing its best to safeguard the health of anybody living around a nuclear plant...