The current COVID-19 public health emergency, which has laid waste to scheduled events great and small, is delaying plans to sample for potential radiological contamination around a Pike County, Ohio, middle school near the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site.
Officials from the DOE Office of Environmental Management said during a March industry conference in Phoenix they expected sampling to start by now around the Zahn’s Corner Middle School, located a couple miles from the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. But over the last month there has been a steady drumbeat of federal and state actions restricting business travel and suspending most “nonessential” business during the pandemic.
Permission from property owners has already been granted for staff from Ohio-based Solutient Technologies to come onto private land to collect air and soil samples, “and this study will proceed as soon as travel is permitted for this purpose,” Pike County General Health District Commissioner Matt Brewster said in a Tuesday email. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has issued a stay-at-home order that forbids most nonemergency travel that does not involve securing food and other necessary supplies, or obtaining medical care.
Zahn’s Corner Middle School has been closed since May 2019, after analysis by Northern Arizona University researchers determined that samples collected in the area contained enriched uranium and neptunium-237. Subsequent DOE sampling detected only trace amounts of radioactive contaminants, which the agency says are far too minimal to pose a risk to human health.
Solutient Technologies will collect and analyze air and dust samples at the school and other areas within 6 miles of the Portsmouth Site. The firm, the county health district, and local officials have worked to develop the data quality objectives for the independent assessment, Brewster said.
The Energy Department is footing the bill for the analysis through a $4 million grant to Ohio University.
