37-Year Leak at Nuclear Arms Plant Disclosed

A uranium-processing plant in Ohio has been spewing radioactivity into the air and water since 1951 because the Energy Department did not want to spend money on safety measures, lawmakers said Friday.

For decades, “DOE sat on its hands and did nothing to fix the situation at that plant,” Rep. Thomas A. Luken (D-Ohio) said at a hearing on the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center near Cincinnati.

The plant has processed uranium for use in nuclear weapons since 1951 and discharged that and other radioactive minerals into the air and the nearby Great Miami River. Sprawling waste pits on the site contain millions of pounds of uranium and radioactive thorium and are believed to be leaking.

The Energy Department said in a recent court filing that at first there was no technology to stop the discharges and in recent years that the money to do so has not been available. Agency officials at the hearing Friday said the situation was under study.

Luken told a House Energy and Commerce Committee panel that the Energy Department “admits that it knew for over 20 years that its waste pits were leaking.”

“It now admits that it knew that the plant’s air pollution control system was obsolete and deteriorated before it was refurbished,” he said. “And it now admits that it knew that heavy rains swept uranium-contaminated water into a nearby stream and thence into the ground water.”

Ohio’s environmental protection chief, Richard Shank, told the transportation, tourism and hazardous materials subcommittee that the plant has discharged 298,000 pounds of uranium into the air and 167,000 pounds of uranium into the Great Miami River since 1951.

Joe Carvitti, whose father, Joseph Carvitti, died of liver cancer after working at the plant from 1952 to 1974, told the subcommittee that the death was ruled work-related by the Ohio Workers’ Compensation Bureau--a ruling now being appealed a second time by the company that operated the plant.

NLO Inc., which operated the plant from the early 1950s until 1986, contends that Carvitti’s problem was not work-related.

The company is being sued for $300 million by 14,000 people who live or work near the plant. The Energy Department is trying to shield the contractor from liability on grounds that the company was following government orders.

Documents filed by the department Sept. 30 in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati said all actions by the contractor were required or approved by the government.

A former assistant manager of the plant, Weldon Adams, told the subcommittee that safety improvements were not made and leaking drums of stored waste were ignored for lack of money.

But Luken, who ordered the hearing, and Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) rejected that argument.

“I have known of no instance when Congress has refused money when a health and safety problem is at stake,” Cooper said.

Luken called the plant “a witch’s brew of chemical wastes” and said the court documents amount to “a statement that DOE was waging a kind of chemical warfare against the community of Fernald.”

The Fernald foundry, 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati, is the only plant of its kind in the United States. It turns uranium into ingots needed to make nuclear weapons.