(Note: Come one, come all, to the new, glow-in-the-dark, treated-but-formerly-contaminated-drinking-water "wildlife refuge!" Yeah, right... These folks must think a sucker truly is born every minute. We're talking uranium here.)

April 23, 2006

By Steve Bennish, staff writer sbennish@daytondailynews.com or 937-225-7407

The Dayton Daily News

Dayton, Ohio

http://www.daytondaily.news.com

To submit a Letter to the Editor:

Hamilton County, Ohio - Later this year, Fernald will appear to be like many other wildlife refuges -- if you overlook the 120-acre, 55-foot-tall fenced-in sarcophagus.

A 10-year, $4.4 billion cleanup of the former uranium refinery in western Hamilton County, marked by lawsuits and controversy, is winding to a close. With it goes a Cold War legacy and a key link in the atomic bomb industry, a place so secret for 37 years that loose talk -- even among facility co-workers -- was banned. Uranium purification was once among America's most closely held secrets.

The largest remaining symbol of those secrets is the on-site disposal sarcophagus, an above-ground pile of 3 million cubic yards of low-level waste -- uranium-contaminated soil and debris from demolished concrete buildings, covered with three feet of limestone rocks and another six feet of other materials.

That nine-foot cap is meant to discourage prying animals or curious humans into the far-flung future. Soil and debris with higher levels of radioactivity -- including leftover refining material from waste pits and silos -- was sent to Utah.

Tainted groundwater will continue to be pumped from the aquifer and purified for a decade until it is drinkable, said Johnny Reising, the Energy Department's closure project director.

Fernald, he said, one day will become a place of unique habitats offering a series of self-guided walking trails and overlooks. An education facility will guide visitors.

Some 16,000 trees are being planted, and in the past three years, 90,000 cubic yards of compost was used to restore soils, Reising said.

In the past two years, Fernald has used the entire organic compost output of Rumpke Waste Collection & Disposal Systems. Visitors should be impressed, he added.

"What they are going to see is a tremendous diversity of wildlife habitat within that one square mile," he said.

Reising, whose education is in wildlife biology, had good background for his work.

He once worked for the Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining, where he oversaw mine reclamation.

Lest taxpayers bemoan the new park as the most expensive playground in the known universe for critters and nature lovers, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has an answer.

The Ohio EPA is using Fernald as a laboratory that could help experts engineer wetland restorations elsewhere.

It's a harder task than just digging up contaminated soil, leaving a hole, and filling it with water, as Dayton-based OEPA employees Joe Bartoszek, a biologist, and Tom Schneider, Fernald project manager, can attest.

Both work in an advisory capacity with Fluor Daniel, the company cleaning up the site and trying to create the wetlands.

OEPA is the official regulator. The state has an interest in Fernald.

In 1986, Ohio filed a $206 million claim against the Department of Energy for environmental damage caused by uranium production.

Twenty years later, Bartoszek and Schneider are trying to figure out how manmade wetlands can best be created to work just as well as nature intended to support populations of threatened creatures.

They're having success, but it's become clear that real progress takes years.

The two have seeded wetlands at Fernald with muck from natural wetlands, hoping that organisms and seeds transfer and prosper. Ultimately, Schneider wants amphibians like salamanders to call the place home in large numbers.

"It's very difficult to create high-quality wetlands -- that's what we realized," Schneider said. "We have wetlands that have the potential to be high-quality, but some that have been in the ground five years aren't there yet."

A series of cascading wetlands that flow into each other and ultimately to the Great Miami River were built here seven years ago. They feature bullfrogs and cricket frogs, dragonflies, fingernail clams, and mayflies -- all good signs.

In one wetland adjacent to a woods, tiger salamanders have turned up, Schneider said.

Said Reising: "We hope this will be a learning lab. The re-establishment of wetlands that have been disturbed is a fairly new science. We are learning a lot about how to do it right."

Copyright 2006, Dayton Daily News.

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