A class-action lawsuit filed in federal court this week accuses current and former Energy Department contractors of failure to prevent radioactive contamination from spreading beyond the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
The case was initiated by two families in Pike County, where the former uranium enrichment complex is located. One of the families has a child in a middle school that closed May 13 after a university study turned up signs of on-site radiation contamination.
The two families are the only plaintiffs named so far in litigation billed as a class-action case to represent residents within a 7-mile radius of the Portsmouth Site, along with any students who attended Zahn’s Corner Middle School since 1993 and their parents.
The plaintiffs seek remediation of contaminants around their homes, medical monitoring, and a special fund for medical bills.
There are seven defendants listed, either individual companies or joint ventures involved over several decades in uranium enrichment, operations, and decommissioning at Portsmouth.
The child at Zahn’s Corner Middle School was “evacuated from the school after the detection of the enriched uranium,” according to the complaint filed May 26 in the District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
The two homes where the named plaintiffs live are located 2 miles and 4 miles, respectively, from what is now a major DOE nuclear cleanup site. The suit says the defendants’ actions spread radioactive, toxic materials off-site and contaminated the plaintiffs’ property.
The high degree of radionuclides surrounding the Portsmouth Site create “an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health,” according to the complaint.
“Defendants could not have prevented all risks from harm to humans from their operations, but they could have prevented or mitigated the offsite impact” through better precautions, regulatory compliance, and reasonable care, the lawsuit says.
Defendants, through “aggressive public relations efforts,” have assured the public their operations don’t spread contamination off-site, according to the suit.
Defendants in the case are:
- Centrus Energy, formerly USEC, which took over uranium enrichment operations at the 3,700-acre site from DOE in 1993 and ran the plant until 2001. The company then kept the plant in “cold standby.” In 2004, Centrus began trying out its American Centrifuge Lead Cascade as a prototype for a more modern means of uranium enrichment. The cascade was retired in 2016, after the Energy Department stopped funding the program, and subsequently decommissioned.
- Uranium Disposition Services LLC, which was hired by DOE in 2002 to build a depleted hexafluoride (DUF6) conversion plant at Portsmouth. The facility converts DUF6 into a more stable form for storage, transportation, and eventual disposal. UDC also ran the plant and a similar operation at DOE’s Paducah Site in Kentucky.
- BWXT Conversion Services was contracted in 2010 to run the DUF6 conversion plant. It held the business until 2016.
- Atkins-led Mid-America Conversion Services won the new contract for the DUF6 plant operation in 2016
- A Bechtel-Jacobs venture was in charge of Portsmouth environmental remediation between 1997 and 2005.
- LATA/Parallax Portsmouth then took over environmental remediation between 2005 and 2010, including decontamination and decommissioning.
- Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth has held the Portsmouth cleanup business from 2010 to the present. In addition to decommissioning, Fluor-BWXT also oversees construction, started in 2017, of an on-site waste disposal cell designed to handle more than 2 million cubic yards material from dismantled structures.
Spokespeople for three of the many defendants, Fluor, Bechtel and BWX Technologies, declined comment this week. The others could not be reached for comment.
Attorney Stuart Scott of the Cleveland law firm Spangenberg Shibley & Liber, which brought the case on behalf of the residents, could not be reached for comment by deadline.
