After months of delay, the U.S. Department of Energy released its annual environmental report for the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant on Friday.
“More than 10,000 environmental samples, including air, surface, flora and fauna″ in and around the site “show results significantly below regulatory safety limits and no radioactivity detected above naturally occurring levels,” said Jessica Szymanski, a DOE spokeswoman.
The release of the Annual Site Environmental Report comes after The Dispatch repeatedly asked the agency about its status and questioned Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette about its delay during his recent visit to Columbus.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that. I don’t know the answer off the top of my head,” he said.
More than a week later, the agency cited COVID-19 as the reason for the holdup. Records show the report often is released in March.
The timing is important because the Scioto Valley Local School District has petitioned the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission to replace Zahn’s Corner Middle School with a new school. The middle school was shuttered by the district in May 2019 after neptunium-237, which is radioactive and poisonous, was detected by DOE air monitors across the street from the school. Enriched uranium was detected
inside the school during an inspection.
The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, less than 2 miles from the middle school, operated from 1954 until 2001. The monitors began detecting contamination when disposal of radioactive materials at the plant began in 2017, according to the district’s letter.
“The Department of Energy did not inform the district of detections in 2017 until two years later, and only recently disclosed a 2018 detection of americium, another radioactive isotope,” the letter states.
Even with the release of the federal report on Friday, a third-party assessment, funded by the DOE, remains pending.
