The Fernald Feed Materials Production Center (commonly referred to simply as Fernald) is a Superfund site located within Crosby Township in Hamilton County, Ohio, and Ross Township in Butler County, Ohio, in the United States. The plant was located near the rural town of Fernald, about northwest of Cincinnati, Ohio, and occupied .
Fernald was a facility which refined uranium for the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex from 1951 to 1989. During that time, the plant produced 170,000 metric tons of metal products and 35,000 metric tons of compounds, such as uranium trioxide and uranium tetrafluoride. Annual production rates ranged from a high in 1960 of 10,000 metric tons to a low in 1975 of 1,230 metric tons. Refining uranium metal required chemical and metallurgical processes that occurred in nine specialized plants at the site.
Fernald came under criticism in 1984 when it was learned that the plant was releasing millions of pounds of uranium dust into the atmosphere, causing radioactive contamination of the surrounding areas. It was listed as a Superfund site in 1989. Cleanup of the surface areas was completed in October 2006, and the site became the Fernald Preserve in 2007.
Background
On 1 January 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) assumed responsibility for the research and production facilities the Army's Manhattan Project had created during World War II to make the first atomic bombs. The AEC's gaseous diffusion plants at Oak Ridge produced enriched uranium and its production reactors at the Hanford Site irradiated uranium to breed plutonium for nuclear weapons.
During the war, the Manhattan Project feed materials program had employed different companies in widely separated cities to produce the feed materials for the production processes. In the early post-war period, the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis turned uranium ore into uranium dioxide (, known as "brown oxide"); the Harshaw Chemical Company in Cleveland turned brown oxide into uranium tetrafluoride (, known as "green salt") and uranium hexafluoride (); and Union Carbide's Electro-Metallurgical Division plant in Niagara Falls, New York, turned green salt into uranium metal. The AEC also operated storage facilities in Cleveland and at the Middlesex Sampling Plant in Middlesex, New Jersey.
In 1949, the AEC commissioners gave some thought to consolidating these feed materials facilities. Aside from the practical issues of moving material about the country, there were security concerns that the Union Carbide plant was too close to the Atlantic Ocean and the border with Canada. The Mallinckrodt facility in St. Louis was better situated from a security point of view, but there were already many defense plants in the vicinity, and too many could make an inviting target for enemy bombers. There were similar concerns about Hanford and Oak Ridge, but the AEC decided to proceed with expansion of their facilities. However, when Mallinckrodt opened a new plant in 1949, the AEC decided to cease using the Niagara Falls plant to produce uranium metal.
In response to the Soviet Union's detonation of an atomic bomb on 29 August 1949, and the outbreak of war in Korea on 25 June 1950, the AEC embarked on a major expansion program. New facilities included a lithium-6 enrichment plant at Oak Ridge; gaseous diffusion plants at Oak Ridge, Paducah, Kentucky and Portsmouth, Ohio; weapons component plants at Rocky Flats and Amarillo; two "Jumbo" production reactors at the Hanford Site; and five new production reactors at Savannah River Site. To relieve the burden of increased production on Mallinckrodt, and aware that its aging facilities might become less efficient and more unhealthy in the future, Walter J. Williams, the AEC's Director of Production, revived the idea of a consolidated feed materials plant. In October 1950, he authorized the AEC's New York Operations Office to design a new feed materials plant that would carry out all phases of uranium processing work. The new plant was to be up and running by 1 January 1953.
Site selection The New York Operations Office delegated the task of finding a suitable location for the new feed materials plant to the Catalytic Construction Company, its engineering contractor. A series of selection criteria was drawn up. At least of flat land was required, preferably already owned by the government, serviced by good road and rail connections. The plant needed 30,000 kW of electric power and a stream with a flow of at least to remove effluent. Ideally, the local area would have sufficient skilled tradesmen to avoid having to build a camp for the construction workers and sufficient accommodation to avoid having to build a new housing development for the plant workers. The preferred zone was the Ohio valley and the southeastern states.
The United States Army Corps of Engineers nominated twenty inactive ordnance or chemical works sites, but almost all were liable to be reactivated in response to the Korean War emergency. The only one that was not was the AEC-owned Lake Ontario Ordnance Works in Niagara County, New York, which was outside the preferred zone. The criteria were reconsidered. The recent development of a new ion-exchange process for the treatment of radioactive waste water allowed the water flow requirement to be halved, but in the interim the AEC had become more concerned about the housing situation, and expressed a strong preference for a site near a major city. In January 1951, another thirty-four sites were considered, most of which were recommended by ten railroads in the region. The following month, the water flow criterion was further reduced to , and another eight sites were nominated by railroads. Catalytic Construction Company engineers physically inspected the sites. This reduced the candidates to four in the Ohio-Indiana area. After consideration of freight costs, labor costs and property values, the New York Operations Office manager, W. E. Kelley, chose a site near Fernald, Ohio.
Fernald was a rural town about northwest of Cincinnati, Ohio. The site straddled the border between Hamilton and Butler counties; most of the site was in the former but about was in the latter. The majority of residents relied upon wells or cisterns for their water, many farms lacked electricity, and numerous roads were narrow and unsealed. The site was chosen because it was between the uranium ore delivery ports of New York and New Orleans, and it was accessible to the other main AEC sites via the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which passed through Fernald on the way to Chicago, and multiple highways. It was close to Cincinnati, where there was a sizeable labor force and ample housing for the technical personnel, who would have to be drawn from other parts of the country. Electricity was available from Cincinnati Gas & Electric. The landscape was level, making the site's construction easy, and its isolation provided safety and security. It was located above the Great Miami aquifer, which supplied the water needed for uranium metal processing.
Construction James F. Chandler, an Army Corps of Engineers officer, was recruited as the AEC area manager, and established his office in downtown Cincinnati. The Corps of Engineers set about acquiring the land in March 1951. Seven parcels were purchased outright. The government offered the owners between $375 and $652 per acre (equivalent to $ to $ in ). Allowances were made for crops that had already been planted. Three owners refused, arguing that the government's offer was too low, considering the rich soil and easy access to markets. The AEC then instituted condemnation proceedings. On 24 April, Justice John H. Druffel of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in Cincinnati signed a decree granting the AEC immediate possession of their properties. The owners were given thirty to sixty days notice to vacate. The project was not a secret; the front page of the 31 March 1951 edition of The Cincinnati Times-Star announced that the AEC was planning to "build a $3 million uranium ore refining plant near Fernald."
The construction contract for the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center (FMPC) was awarded to the George A. Fuller Company, with the Catalytic Construction Company acting as engineer/architects. To expedite the process Fuller was instructed to commence when the design reached the 70% complete stage. Ground was broken in May 1951. The production area encompassed , of which was under cover. Works included moving of earth, laying of railroad tracks and building of paved roads and storage areas.
Startup and testing operations processes began as soon as each plant was completed. The first was the Pilot Plant, which commenced operation in October 1951. It was followed by the Plant 6 in the summer of 1952, Plant 5 in May 1953, Plants 1, 2/3 and 4 in the fall of 1953, and finally Plants 7 and 9 by the fall of 1954. The contract for operation of the plant was awarded to the National Lead Company of Ohio in 1951, which was best known for its Dutch Boy Paint brand. It remained the operator until 1 January 1986, when the Westinghouse Electric Corporation took over. In 1991, Westinghouse renamed the subsidiary that operated Fernald as the Westinghouse Environmental Management Company of Ohio (WEMCO). On 1 December 1992, the Fernald Environmental Restoration Management Corporation (FERMCO) assumed responsibility for the site.
Production
From 1951 to 1989, Fernald converted uranium ore into metal, and then fabricated this metal into target elements for nuclear reactors. Annual production rates ranged from a high in 1960 of 10,000 metric tons to a low in 1975 of 1,230 metric tons. Refining uranium metal required chemical and metallurgical processes that occurred in nine specialized plants on the site. The FMPC also served as the country's central repository for another radioactive metal, thorium. Between 1954 and 1975, the FMPC occasionally produced small quantities of thorium metal in Plant 8, Plant 9 and the Pilot Plant. Plant 1 The production process at the FMPC began at Plant 1, also known as the Sampling Plant. The Sampling Plant weighed, sampled, classified and sorted representative samples of the incoming ore concentrates. Ore suppliers were paid based on the ore's uranium content. The Sampling Plant had over of storage space, of which was under cover.
The plant was divided into two main processing lines, one for Q-11 and one for INX. Q-11 was the term used to refer to radium-bearing ores primarily mined in the Belgian Congo while INX was a non-radium concentrate. The problem with handling radium bearing ores was that one of radium's daughter particles is radon, an invisible radioactive gas. Materials were dried, crushed and milled. The Sampling Plant had a capacity of 9.1 metric tons per hour.
In addition to sampling incoming ores the plant reconditioned drums used to transport and store radioactive materials onsite. Reconditioned drums were inspected for holes or dents that could cause failure, and those that failed inspection were scrapped.
Plant 2/3
Plant 2/3 was known as the Ore Refinery & Denitration Plant. It was called Plant 2/3 because the two separate functions occur in the same building. Here uranium was recovered from feed materials (i.e., ores, concentrates and residues) and converted to concentrated uranium trioxide (), also called "orange salt". In addition to uranium, the Ore Refinery was capable of extracting and purifying other materials. The Ore Refinery consisted of three major process stages: digestion (Plant 2), extraction and denitration (Plant 3).