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 Monitor.
“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.
Days later, another Piketon official hit back at Crabtree.
“The mayor and I, as well as other members of the Village Council, expressed concerns as early as 2010 when the issue of a nuclear waste landfill was being considered in Piketon,” Dennis Foreman, a Piketon Village Council member, wrote in a Feb. 24 letter shared with Weapons Complex Monitor.
Crabtree also miscast the study Piketon wants, Foreman said, pointing out that other sites in the DOE complex have asked for third-party reviews of official DOE assessments such as the one that determined Portsmouth should get the on-site disposal cell to which village officials have objected.
Finally, Foreman said, Crabtree might consider taking on Portsmouth’s cleanup waste in his own backyard: “If Commissioner Crabtree is so overjoyed to have it built, just let us know the location in Scioto County where we can send this nuclear waste and we will talk to DOE about shipping it down there.”
Spencer, Foreman and the rest of the council, 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 these plans.
At press time Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor, it appeared they had gotten their wish: the public comment period on the assessment, “Conveyance Of Real Property At The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant In Pike County, Ohio,” remains open until April 19.
