A federal district court in Ohio has said attorneys involved in a lawsuit over off-site radioactive contamination from the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio should explore potential mediation soon.
A notice published Friday by Richard Nagel, the federal clerk for the U.S. District Court in Southern Ohio, listed a case brought by Ursula McGlone and other plaintiffs living within a few miles of the shuttered Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant against current and former DOE contractors at the site as a dispute ripe for a mediation conference. The conference could take place as soon as September, according to the notice.
The case was listed as one suited for settlement outside of court.
“Recently, the Court has been forced to vacate or continue more than half of the cases initially set for settlement conferences. In order to avoid the administrative costs associated with vacating a case after it has been set, the Court is making this inquiry to determine if any of the above cases should not be set for a Settlement Conference,” Nagel said in the document.
The clerk’s notice says If all the parties involved in a case conclude a settlement conference cannot be set, their attorneys should email the federal court by 4 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday Aug. 2 at [email protected]. “Counsel should include in such advice whether the case should be continued to another month and, if so, which month,” according to the notice.
Days before the Friday notice by the district court, a motion by Centrus Energy, Fluor-BWXT-Portsmouth and the other contractors urged the court to reject what they call overly-broad discovery requests. McGlone and the plaintiffs have sought “every single piece of correspondence between every Defendant and the regulatory agencies with which they corresponded on a regular basis during their entire tenures at the Site,” according to the defendants’ motion.
“Such a broad request is clearly no more than a fishing expedition by Plaintiffs, who have thus far provided no data to suggest that there is any contamination on their properties in excess of applicable standards,” the contractors go on to say in the filing.
McGlone and fellow plaintiffs point to the May 2019 closure of the Zahn’s Corner Middle School, following findings of enriched uranium and neptunium-237 there by a Northern Arizona University analysis, as evidence of contamination spreading beyond the fence. Although it has previously said contamination at the school does not pose a threat to human health, the DOE more recently has agreed to appoint a special liaison to hear local concerns.
