The commissioner of the Ohio county south of the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site has taken a local mayor to task for his resistance to the waste disposal facility DOE intends to build at the former uranium enrichment facility.
Earlier this month, Mayor Billy Spencer of Piketon, the village of 2,000 adjacent to the Portsmouth cleanup, petitioned DOE to turn the site into an energy technology hub after shuttered gaseous diffusion facilities there are cleaned up and demolished. Spencer framed that as an alternative to what he called DOE’s plan to abandon the facility and make it unpalatable to private developers by turning the part of the campus best suited for industrial or commercial use into a “nuclear dump.”
That caught the attention, and the ire, of Scioto County Commissioner Michael Crabtree, who fired off a letter to Portsmouth personnel and Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
“I have read your recent comments in the various papers referring to the cell as a ‘nuclear dump,’ and that you don’t know enough about it and you want to spend all kinds of money on a study that will only delay the progress and cost more money that could be going to other projects that actually bring jobs here,” Crabtree wrote in the blistering letter last week.
“Where the hell were you from 2010 to 2014 when us, God and all his cousins commented on the cell?” Crabtree asked in the letter.
Spencer, who is skeptical of DOE’s plan to lease or sell parts of the utility-rich Portsmouth Site to private developers, asked the agency to extend to April from February a public comment period on an environmental assessment regarding such plans. At press time Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, it appeared Spencer had gotten his wish: the public comment on the assessment titled “Conveyance Of Real Property At The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant In Pike County, Ohio,” remains open until April 19.
