PIKE COUNTY, Ohio — Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Pike County will be replaced with federal funding from the recently passed $1.7 trillion spending package signed by President Joe Biden.
In May 2019, Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Pike County was closed after radiation testing of the facility revealed radioactive contamination believed to have come from the nearby plant. At the time, Scioto Valley Local School District Superintendent Wes Hairston, in a letter to the DOE, said, “While the levels are debatable, there is very little question that the presence of these dangerous contaminants is not ’natural’.” Students were moved to another building, and the contaminated school had a fence erected around it.
Officials in the small southern Ohio community have been waiting for the U.S. government to allot funds to help the district build a new school. Recently, Congressman Tim Ryan and Senator Joe Manchin visited the former school. Ryan, a Democrat from Youngstown, has pushed for the new construction for more than two years.
The DOE says, that a team sampled the school, and found no evidence of any contaminants above background levels. Activists and others in the community disagree with the Department of Energy’s findings.
Homeowners who live around the atomic plant and former school have expressed serious concerns over the years for the health and safety of the community. Many residents purchased their own air monitoring devices to test the air; they have reported to local news media throughout the years that their personal nuclear level readings are higher than what the federal government publishes or claims to be true. The residents have long claimed that the federal government is not being transparent about the facility and that numbers are changed to keep work progressing.
In November the DOE announced that operations at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (Atomic Plant) would resume. DOE projects that more than 40 metric tons of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) — a material needed to develop and deploy advanced reactors in the United States — will be needed before the end of the decade, with additional amounts required each year, to deploy a new fleet of advanced reactors. The cascade demonstration program is intended to address near-term HALEU needs and will be used to support fuel qualification testing and DOE-supported advanced reactor demonstration projects.
Sources within the DOE told the Guardian that the new operations are an “important step in demonstrating the nation’s ability to produce HALEU and sets the stage for larger, commercial-scale production in the U.S.” The program, the DOE said, is part of President Joe Biden’s “goal of having a 100% clean electric grid by 2035.”
The plant, which started making nuclear energy in the 1950s, has been met with health concerns. The plant ceased gaseous enrichment operations in May 2001 after it consolidated operations at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky. The following year, transfer and shipping operations were also consolidated in Paducah. Until recently, the plant has been undergoing “decontamination” and “deconstruction” to the tune of billions of dollars.
The announcement to restart production at the facility comes on the heels of a study by Northern Arizona University and an investigative report from local TV station WKRC in Cincinnati that revealed radioactive contaminants inside a Lucasville home, approximately 10 miles from the plant. The study released by the university regarding a home in the 200 block of Brookside Drive showed elevated levels of enriched uranium. Given the distance from the plant and that operations ceased two decades ago, the readings caused concerns.
Ketterer Report by Local12WKRC
When asked about the recent findings in Lucasville, the DOE did not comment on that particular study. Only saying that a third-party sampling effort at the school (Zahn’s Corner Middle School), was being administered through a grant from Ohio University and managed by the Pike County United Health District. That project, sources said, should be completed by the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023.