Ohio EPA seeks land around former plant

Associated Press

MIAMISBURG, Ohio

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency plans to offer a total of about $13.7 million to property owners who promise not to develop land neighboring a Cold War-era nuclear production plant in southwest Ohio.

The money comes from a nearly 3-year-old settlement in which the U.S. Department of Energy paid the state to settle damages over contaminated ground water at the Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald, about 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati.

A goal is to conserve groundwater and a nearby stream, Ohio EPA spokeswoman Heather Lauer told The Columbus Dispatch for a Sunday report. The land is part of a 9,000-acre area north and west of Fernald, which is now a nature preserve with a Cold War exhibit. The agency, along with the Three Valley Conservation Trust, will meet with residents Wednesday to discuss its proposals. The trust would hold the easements and monitor the protected land.

“It is a natural resource that we want to protect for the future,” Lauer said.

Shrouded in secrecy for years, the Fernald facility processed uranium metal for nuclear weapons from 1952 to 1989. It gained national notoriety in the 1980s with media reports on site emissions and residents’ concerns over radioactive contamination of air, soil and groundwater.

The Department of Energy officially completed a $4.4 billion site cleanup in 2007. More than 1 million tons of radioactive waste was shipped to storage and disposal sites in Nevada, Utah and Texas. About 4.7 million tons of low-level waste remain in a fenced-off 110-acre pile encased in liners and caps. Fernald groundwater will be pumped and treated for several years until a drinking water standard is met.

Lauer said preservation efforts would help protect an aquifer that flows toward radioactive groundwater, also helping the government with costs of filtering tainted groundwater.

The Dispatch reports that it’s not clear how many neighboring property owners would be offered money for preservation agreements or how much land would be preserved.