The village of Piketon, Ohio, has renewed calls for the Energy Department to cancel a planned nuclear waste disposal facility at the nearby Portsmouth Site, citing a new report that claims the agency plans to build the landfill on fractured bedrock.
Piketon Mayor Billy Spencer, who for years has opposed what is officially known as an On-Site Waste Disposal Facility (OSWDF) at Portsmouth, says the 10-page report the village commissioned from the Washington, D.C.-based Ferguson Group shows DOE has known for years that its preferred site sits atop fractured bedrock that could leak radiation into the surrounding land.
That, Spencer said, clashes with assurances the Piketon Council got last year from Vince Adams, then the deputy manager of DOE’s Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office, that the bedrock below the proposed site of the OSWDF was not fractured.
“They misled us,” Spencer told Weapons Complex Monitor last week in an interview. “They misled the public. They misled the village.”
“We have fractured bedrock,” Karl Kalbacher, the Ferguson Group geologist who wrote the report, told Weapons Complex Monitor in a phone interview last week. “There is more ability for groundwater or hazardous nuclear waste to be transmitted, if it leaks.”
For fluid, or anything else, to leak out of the planned OSWDF, the facility’s liner would have to fail, and its foundation itself would have to crack. Then, the fluid would have to find its way to cracks in the underlying shale bedrock and spread horizontally.
The waste facility will hold ” all waste materials generated from the cleanup of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant that meet the waste acceptance criteria approved by Ohio EPA for the facility,” according to DOE’s 2015 Record of Decision approving the facility.
Neither the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management nor site prime contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth replied to requests for comment this week.
The Ferguson Group did not discover the fractured bedrock itself. Rather, the group found the information in a 4,000-plus page Remedial Investigation and Feasibility Study (RI/FS) Fluor-BWXT published in 2014. The document was used to inform DOE’s 2015 record of decision, which made the decision to build the OSWDF official.
In the RI/FS report, Fluor-BWXT said it could still build the OSWDF at its chosen site by scooping out cracked bedrock and laying a foundation on solid ground beneath. That would require DOE to dig anywhere from 10 feet to 45 feet below the existing ground level to clear potentially fractured shale, according to the RI/FS report.
The problem, according to Kalbacher, is that the RI/FS report reveals fractures in the bedrock that run much deeper than that.
“There are fractures in the bedrock at least as deep as 77 feet below ground surface,” Kalbacher said. “There are at least nine boring locations at [the proposed OSWDF site] where there is documented bedrock fracturing deeper than 45 feet of ground surface.”
For the meantime, DOE is proceeding with its plan to build the OSWDF facility in the northeast corner of the nearly 4,000-acre Portsmouth site, about 5 miles south by road of Piketon. The facility would cost about $340 million to build and would open in the early 2020s, DOE and Fluor-BWXT estimate.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, which signed off on DOE’s decision to build an OSWDF in 2015, is likewise reviewing the plans for the landfill.
“Ohio EPA is currently focused on completing a review of the 90-percent design package for the On-site Waste Disposal Facility,” an Ohio EPA spokesperson wrote in a Thursday email. The spokesperson said the state agency “is working to schedule a July meeting with Piketon officials” about concerns raised by the Ferguson report.
The village of Piketon has requested that “DOE and Ohio EPA reopen the ROD and address through additional investigations all the concerns raised” in the Ferguson Group report.