The superintendent for the Scioto Valley Local School District in Pike County, Ohio, is asking the U.S. Department of Energy to help underwrite the cost of a new building to replace a middle school adjacent to the Portsmouth Site.
Zahn’s Corner Middle School has been closed since May 2019, after Northern Arizona University researchers concluded air and soil samples collected around the campus contained enriched uranium and neptunium-237. Later sampling performed by DOE detected only trace amounts of contaminants, which the agency said are far too limited to endanger human health.
That position, however, is proving to be a tough sell to parents and local health and education officials around Pike County. Zahn’s Corner Middle School “is no longer suitable” for classroom education, District Superintendent Wes Hairston said in an undated letter to Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. “The public will not accept sending their children to a school building they believe posts a risk of waste exposure.”
As a result, the school district favors construction of a new school farther away from the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant to replace Zahn’s Corner Middle.
Community organizations, such as the Pike County Health Department, have contended that at least trace elements of radioactive contamination around Zahn’s Corner are linked to dust generated by excavation and construction for an on-site disposal cell for waste at the neighboring DOE facility. “The DOE’s decision to continue the construction and disposal means that the middle school building will forever be within two miles of radioactive waste,” Hairston said in the letter to Brouillette, first reported this week by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper. The letter does not offer a cost estimate for a new school building or how much the education board wants DOE to contribute.
Starting in the 2019-2020 academic year, the school district relocated all Zahn’s Corner students and staff to other local schools. But this situation is not sustainable over the long term, Hairston said, adding that former closets are now being used as makeshift offices.
