nuclear powers that be

I saw a film tonight called "For my working Life", a documentary made in 1980 by a British film maker with the last name of Grigsby. The film was about the impacts of the Piketon, Ohio uranium enrichment facility on the health of its workers. At the time the film was made, the plant was operated by Goodyear Atomic for the US DoE. In the 70's and 80's the plant (and town) also had its own unit of FBI agents who made sure workers didn't ask too many questions at work and in the bars, restaurants and other places around town.

The movie was well done -- the stories were told exclusively by the workers themselves and the film included many scenes of life in rural Appalachia. One of the main narrators in the film, the President of the Oil, Chemical and ? Workers Union, was there tonight to watch the film and answer questions. He presided over several fairly militant strikes which gained real benefits for workers at Goodyear and even chartered buses in the late 70's to go to DC and protest, among other things, the "enslavement" of the workers to Goodyear Corp. He declined to talk much about his personal health, stating that we didn't really want to know and that the telling would take much too long.

A few facts about the facility (which is 2 counties west of the town I grew up in and 3 counties west of where I now live -- directly downwind):

1. though the facility has been inoperable for 6 years, absolutely no clean up effort has been undertaken
2. estimated clean up costs range from 30-40 BILLION dollars
3. clean up will be paid for with taxpayer money, with no input from any of the corporations who have called it "home"
4. a nickel berillium (?) plant from West Virginia that was too polluted to stay where it was, was dismantled, brought piece by piece to Piketon and buried in the ground
5. the waste from the clean-up of another Ohio Superfund site (Frenald) was brought to Piketon and buried in the ground
6. the Piketon facility is the single largest facility under roof IN THE ENTIRE WORLD
7. the facility sits on top of the Teays Acquifer, the largest acquifer in the US
8. no studies have been released in the last 10 years indicating when or how the facility is deteriorating or what might happen if there was a leak
9. the people within a 5 mile radius of the facility are among the poorest in the state and are the poorest of all the neighbors of uranium enrichment facilities in the US
10. more recently, the Bush Administration proposed under a plan called GNEP, to begin using the facility to store spent nuclear fuel rods from around the country and the world which would eventually be "re-processed" into viable nuclear fuel. there is no successful model for doing this reprocessing anywhere in the world.

The local group organizing to get the site cleaned up, to keep further nuclear waste out is a group called Southern Ohio Neighbors Group. Their info is here:

www.OhioNeighbors.org
PO Box 161
Piketon, OH 45661
SHIPPSONG@aol.com

sign a petition at www.progressohio.org/page/petition/DOEpetition