Word: fernald
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ohio's Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, a uranium-processing plant, the innocent-sounding name and the red-and-white checkerboard design on a water tower led some nearby residents to think it produced cattle feed or pet food. They have learned, to their dismay, that not only was the facility fabricating uranium rods for nuclear-reactor fuel cores and components for warheads, but one of its even scarier outputs was radioactive pollution. Marvin Clawson, 59, who lives near the plant, blames its operators for the fact that his wife Doris has had surgery for cancer three times...
...strange happenings at Fernald illustrate the baffling ways officials, private or public, involved in the mismanagement seem able to escape legal and financial liability for their actions. Records released last month show that when the operation began in 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission told the contractor, National Lead of Ohio, to dump radioactive refuse into pits dug in the ground, then standard practice. When rainwater caused the pits to overflow, the AEC stonewalled the contractor's suggestions for fixing the problem. In 1958 National Lead warned that liquid was leaking through concrete storage tanks that had cracked. The commission...
Richard Shank, director of Ohio's environmental protection agency, estimates that the Fernald operation has released 298,000 lbs. of uranium wastes into the air since the plant started. Beyond that, he cites the deliberate discharge of 167,000 lbs. of wastes into the Great Miami River over 37 years. An additional 12.7 million lbs. were placed in pits, all of which may be leaking. Senator Glenn is still awaiting an analysis he requested three years ago from the Energy Department on whether such estimates are correct...
...department has admitted that the Government was aware of these hazardous events at Fernald all along. A class-action lawsuit was filed against National Lead in 1985 by some 14,000 Fernald area residents. All too aware that radiation exposure is difficult to link conclusively with specific health problems, the residents are seeking $300 million in damages from lowered property values and the emotional trauma created by living near the plant. Their problem now is that the Federal Government is largely immune from such lawsuits. A recent Supreme Court decision ruled that a contractor meeting specifications set by the Government...
Charles Zinser's concerns about the safety of the Fernald plant are understandable, even wrenchingly so, considering the cancers that his two boys have suffered. Yet he does not ask much of the weaponsmakers. "I would like to see, just like it was an individual, that they'd just admit they screwed up, that they were willing to right their wrongs," Zinser says of the bombmakers. "There is a lot of damage they can't undo. But if they deny responsibility, and you have a Government that is not accountable to its citizens, then you do not have a republic...