Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) held a town hall-style meeting Saturday in Piketon, Ohio, to discuss local concerns over open-air demolition of the X-326 Process Building at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site and radioactive contamination discovered around a local school.
Ryan and Zack Space, former congressman for Ohio’s 18th district, were scheduled to participate in the Saturday afternoon meeting between the public officials and the Scioto Valley – Piketon Area Council of Governments.
“Hopefully Congressman Ryan can help us make some progress,” Pike County General Health District Commissioner Matt Brewster, who attended the meeting, said in a Thursday email.
In announcing the meeting in a notice to reporters, Ryan’s office said DOE’s acting assistant secretary for environmental management William (Ike) White is visiting the community this week to meet with local officials.
The same notice also said longtime DOE manager, Candice Robertson, a senior adviser to deputy secretary of energy David Turk, is now serving as the agency’s newly-created community liaison on Portsmouth Site cleanup issues. White and Robertson did not attend the Portsmouth meeting, according to DOE.
During a May hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Ryan pressed Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to have the agency take a more active role in addressing community concerns about discovery of evidence of americium and neptunium at Zahn’s Corner Middle School. The school has been effectively “quarantined” or unused for two years since discovery of the contaminants, which DOE has previously concluded to be too minimal to pose a threat to human health.
Nevertheless, discovery of the contamination outside the fence from Portsmouth would eventually lead to the resignation of the last Senate-confirmed boss of the DOE environmental management office, Anne Marie White, who faced displeasure from her superiors over her handling of the issue. Likewise, since the contaminants were cited by analysis from Northern Arizona University researchers, federal lawsuits have been filed against current and former federal contractors at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
