Thursday, September 16, 1999
New details surface on uranium in Ohio
Portsmouth plant handled hotter fuel than thought
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Federal reports collected by a watchdog group showed that a southern Ohio defense plant handled a more dangerous, un-
diluted type of plutonium-laced uranium than the government previously acknowledged.
Documents gathered by the organization Uranium Enrichment Project include a 1993 Department of Energy (DOE) report describing plutonium contamination at an unused building in the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant complex.
Another report, from 1985, described spent nuclear fuel going directly from a federal facility in Idaho to the Portsmouth Plant at Piketon, Ohio. Spent nuclear fuel would have a higher plutonium level than material that arrived at Piketon from its sister facility in Paducah, Ky., since some purification would have taken place in Kentucky.
Beginning in 1953, the spent nuclear fuel was converted to enriched uranium for reuse. That operation, known as oxide conversion, was halted around 1977 because of concerns about exposure, the DOE says.
Mary Byrd Davis, the Uranium Enrichment Project researcher who has been gathering data about the Piketon plant, said the reports were among stacks of unclassified material available for public inspection at DOE facilities.
The documents' existence was first reported Wednesday by the Columbus Dispatch.
The Energy Department is in the midst of a comprehensive study of how the nation's nuclear arsenal was handled during the Cold War years. One of that study's goals is to determine which plants handled spent nuclear fuel, in what quantities, and with what amount of plutonium contamination.
Last month, the government said that about 100,000 tons of plutonium-laced uranium was handled by the Paducah plant.
A congressional hearing into the Paducah contamination and the safety of that plant's workers had been scheduled for today, but the expectation of severe weather led House leaders to cancel all legislative business for the day. A Commerce Committee spokesman said no new date for the hearing had been selected.
Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, said he had been hoping to use the hearing to question DOE officials about the plant in his district. Even with limited opportunities to stray from the subject of Paducah, he said, “I think whatever we hear about Paducah could be relevant to Portsmouth because the problems were similar in nature.”
Mr. Strickland's questions are the same ones DOE is trying to answer nationwide: what material was there, is it still there, and if not, where did it go?
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