Yesterday, I blogged about illegal disposal of radioactive waste from fracking at a landfill in Kentucky. Today I am going to blog about another problem with nuclear garbage. At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. about thirty two thousand nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union had about forty thousand nuclear warheads. Fortunately, the U.S. and Russia, which inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, came to their senses and signed treaties to reduce arsenals to their present size of about five thousand active warheads each. Still too much but much less than during the Cold War. The creation of those huge arsenals left behind a terrible legacy of radioactive pollution in both countries. The U.S. Hanford nuclear reservation still contains a great deal of dangerous radioactive materials left over from nuclear weapons production which I have blogged about. I have also been blogging about waste from nuclear weapons polluting residential area in around St. Louis. This blog is about a Cold War legacy problem in Ohio.
The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant is located near Piketon, Ohio. The locations was chosen because it had available electricity, water for cooling, transportation, labor and flat topography. The plant was built between 1952 and 1956 with the first enriched uranium being produced in 1954. It is a huge facility whose buildings had a combined ten million square feet of floor space. During maximum operation, it consumed over two thousand megawatts. The plant first enriched uranium ore to ninety percent U235 for use in nuclear weapons in the 1950s. In the mid-1960s, after the U.S. arsenal reached its maximum level around 1960, the plant switched to making nuclear fuel for power reactors. The gaseous diffusion facility was shut down in 2001 and decommissioning began. A new facility employing centrifuges to enrich uranium began construction in 2007.
People who worked at the plant now say that they are suffering from health effects of exposure to radiation. There are many cases of a particularly malignant form of prostate cancer among retired workers. This and other cancers constitute what is called a "cancer cluster" meaning that the rate of cancers is much higher than their average occurrence in the U.S. Workers are having a very difficult time getting their health insurance coverage to cover their claims for radiation related illnesses.
Ill workers also claim that the U.S. government is ignoring them although there is a federal program in place to handle such complaints. The Department of Energy evaluates radiation exposure with something called "dose reconstruction." Dose reconstruction tests for exposure to U235, the highly radioactive isotope of uranium which is needed for creation of nuclear weapons. Positive results of dose reconstruction are necessary to get workers compensation from the DoE.
Critics of the dose reconstruction method point out that the test does not cover U234, which is also highly radioactive and the isotope to which many of the workers at the plant were exposed. There is legal action against the DoE to get it to change its methodology and to seriously study the claims from workers that are currently being refused.
Sadly, it is not just the combat veterans that are being treated poorly by the U.S. Government. The veterans of nuclear weapons plants also have been denied the health care they deserve.
Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant:
