PIKETON — No one should have to live like this.
No parent should have to send their kids to a school where air monitors across the street picked up evidence of radioactive materials used to build nuclear weapons.
No school building should sit precisely 8,130 feet downwind from where the United States government will soon start burying radioactive and other hazardous debris and waste produced during nearly 50 years of enriching uranium.
No town of 2,200, located smack-dab in the middle of the state’s poorest region, should be told it’s no big deal that traces of uranium were found in that school’s air ducts and ceiling tiles.
News of the U.S. Department of Energy test findings, reported in 2019, was the final straw for residents and village leaders who believe they’ve been deceived by the government for nearly 70 years.
So at the end of the 2019 school year, they closed Zahn’s Corner Middle School, built a fence around the place, and crammed students into the village’s elementary and high school.
There has long been legitimate scientific debate over the danger to the community and its kids posed by the radioactive materials found inside and near the school, as well as the small amounts of radioactive isotopes found in air, soil and water samples over the years.
What’s beyond debate is that this wouldn’t happen in most parts of the country. Try selling the possibility of a radioactive graveyard to the people of Avon, Solon, Strongsville or Medina. See how they react to the promise of lots of good jobs in return for maybe just a little poison floating through the air.
Then watch how fast it takes to run the government’s peddlers of a uranium enrichment business out of town.
“We could debate the dangers of this forever, but the risk of young children being exposed to controversial chemicals is very real,” said Wes Hairston, superintendent of the Scioto Valley Local School District.
“Parents here want their kids to be educated in a safe environment. But the government did this to a poor rural community, where people don’t have a voice. And it’s just not right.”
We’re sitting in Hairston’s office, housed in part of Piketon High School. He’s a 64-year-old man with a friendly face and a difficult job, a 40-plus-year educator who came out of retirement in September of last year to take charge of the cash-strapped school district, a district where parents feel no one in Washington or Columbus cares about their kids.
Atop Hairston’s “to do” list is to convince the U.S. Department of Energy to pay the $30 million needed to build a new school. School officials also want the state to pitch in.
So far, governments in Columbus and Washington have turned their backs on these poor people.
“Not our problem,” they seem to say. “Live with it.”
Some small but determined voices in this community aren’t about to be silenced by politicians who want them to shut up, breathe whatever’s in the air, and take their chances.
“Just hearing the word ‘contamination’ should have led them to build us a new school,” complained Hairston. “But people here get treated differently.”
The benign neglect at work down here is as astonishing as it is infuriating.
Harry Truman was president when the U.S. government began searching for sites to enrich uranium using an energy-intensive process known as gaseous diffusion. The end product was used for the country’s nuclear defense system, and in later years, for nuclear power reactors.
In return for producing nuclear-weapons-grad¬e material in their community, the people of Piketon were promised jobs and protection. And in 1954, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, one of three such facilities in the country, began operation on a 3,777-acre site at the south end of town.
Nearly a half-century later, the Department of Energy decided it no longer needed to enrich uranium here, and in 2001 began the long process of winding down operations and deciding what to do with what could eventually be more than 2 million cubic yards of radioactive debris and waste and another 3 million cubic yards of other hazardous or partly contaminated debris and waste.
People who live here wanted the waste and debris shipped to some unoccupied territory out west, as has been done with hazardous materials produced in other towns. But the federal and state government signed off on a different idea:
That waste will be buried here, perhaps starting as early as next month. What the townspeople will never forgive or forget is that the U.S. Department of Energy knew when they chose the landfill location that Zahn’s Corner Middle School was directly downwind of it.
Meanwhile, soon after cleanup of the Department of Energy site started, two synthetic radioactive elements, Americium in 2018 and Neptunium-237 in 2019, were detected by an air monitor outside the then-still-operating middle school, the Chillicothe Gazette reported. Yet the Department of Energy delayed informing the community about those findings, according to the Gazette.
U.S. officials may have correctly suspected Piketon couldn’t afford the millions it would cost to fight the federal government’s decisions and actions. And some here have sadly surrendered.
Jennifer Chandler isn’t one of them.
This 46-year-old mother of three is many things. She’s an environmental scientist trained at Ohio University. She’s worked on and off at the plant, in various administrative positions for 25 years. She’s a popular village councilwoman.
And she is the Department of Energy’s worst nightmare, the town’s most articulate and outspoken critic of burying 47 years worth of radioactive waste and debris in a village that deserves better.
“I’m going to fight as long as I can,” she said, when I asked if this was a lifetime commitment.
“The government sees us as not deserving, not worthy. So they marginalize us. They make promises and then pull the rug out from under us.”
Born in Portsmouth, 22 miles to the south, Chandler has lived in the area her whole life. It’s a part of Ohio with enormous problems. As she explained, “We are a poor place. We have an opioid problem. We had a mass murder here. Now we have this mess.”
Chandler took Hairston and I on a tour of the plant’s perimeter, past well-kept homes on picture-perfect lots and dilapidated ones that appeared on the verge of collapse.
We stopped outside the house where Luke Hiett was raised, across the street from the Department of Energy property. Hiett was Chandler’s cousin. He died in 1990 at the age of 7, a victim of sporadic neuroblastoma, a rare cancer sometimes associated with environmental causes.
Zach Farmer, a star pitcher on the Piketon High School baseball team, died six years ago at age 21. Cause of death was acute myeloid leukemia, a blood disease often linked to exposure to radiation. Farmer attended Zahn’s Corner Middle School.
Asked about the community’s relations with the Department of Energy, Chandler said, “When we began dealing with the future of this dirty site, they walked us through a process that was fake.” She said the DOE gave the community inaccurate or incomplete information regarding its plan to dispose of the plant’s hazardous and radioactive waste nearby.
“They get their way by making promises they never intend to keep,” she added. “If this was Shaker Heights, not 24 hours would go by before everyone in government would be mobilized to fix this. We get crickets, nothing.”
A telephone call made to the Energy Department’s media relations office in Washington was not returned.
In October 2018, Chandler and Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer wrote a letter to Gov. John Kasich, urging him to lobby the U.S. Department of Energy and to get the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency involved on Piketon’s behalf.
“We beg you Governor Kasich, to please intervene on behalf of your constituents, the residents of southern Ohio, and stop this injustice. Otherwise, the largest nuclear dump east of the Mississippi will be built on your watch,” the letter read in part.
Chandler said the letter went unanswered. Meanwhile, the “nuclear dump” is on a fast track, with no regulatory or legal restrictions preventing burial of the waste from beginning immediately. Because of the pandemic, the exact start date remains uncertain.
In early September, a lawsuit filed by former workers at the uranium plant and their families accused various contractors who operated the facility for the Department of Energy (DOE) of “poisoning workers” and village residents. The lawsuit alleges cancer rates in some areas around the facility are 700% higher than the national average. The DOE was not named as a defendant.
“In 10 years, when things are going bad here, I hope people remember this village fought to the bitter end,” Chandler says.
Teresa Cuckler and her husband live with two of their three children on a 100-acre farm a half mile from the DOE property. Teresa, a teacher assistant in the high school’s special education department, is a petite woman of 48 with blond hair and a world of worry.
“My 13-year-old and his friends played on the ground outside the middle school for two years,” said Cuckler, sitting at a table in Wes Hairston’s office. “He wants to be a productive citizen. He wants to work with his dad on the farm. He wants a normal life.”
She pauses, eyes filled with tears, then finishes. “Around here, your word means something. But these people have trampled our trust.”
Government has failed the people of Piketon in the worst way imaginable.
Find where this place is on a map, and it’ll help you understand why.
