A Middle American Town is Being Sacrificed to the Cold War
Posted by M. C. on April 27, 2023
Ohio is taking it on the chin.
Just shows government cares for the little guy as much as they do soldiers.
What next? Disposing of building materials in Iraq style burn pits?
by Ken Silva

The Department of Energy uses words such as “remediation,” “decommission,” and “deactivation” to describe what’s going on in the tiny Appalachian town of Piketon, Ohio—the home of a facility that was used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs during the Cold War.
But Piketon residents say that the DOE is actively poisoning them. That’s because the DOE is conducting open-air demolitions of buildings tainted with enriched uranium, plutonium and other radioactive material, according to the residents.
Vina Colley, the president of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety, or PRESS, shared a letter with Headline USA that she wrote to President Joe Biden about the matter.
“Mr. President, while the world celebrates Earth Day this April, we in southern Ohio are struggling with fear and living with a deadly and invisible threat to our families and our lives. The plant is scheduled for open-air demolition, posing inevitable and undeniably hazardous consequences to our community,” Colley told Biden in her April 7 letter.
“In addition, while the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory received a negative pressure tent and enclosed demolition, those in charge here are charging recklessly ahead with an open-air demolition of the Piketon plant, where plutonium has been proved to pass through the plant since 1955.”
The DOE, for its part, disagrees with Colley’s claims. The department did not respond to Headline USA questions about the matter, but its website color-codes the Piketon facility “green”—a marker for supposed environmental safety.
However, other people who lived and worked at Piketon’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, or PORTS, agree with Colley—including Jeff Walburn, Charles Lawson, Dr. David Manuta and Dr. Michael Ketterer. Walburn and Lawson have investigated the matter for years—Lawson also recently discovered nuclear contamination in his house miles away from the Piketon facility—and Manuta was a former chief scientist there.
Be seeing you
Leave a Reply