One Hundred Miles From Home
Reviews"100 Miles from Home: A Nuclear Narrative"
Amy Nordrum, Environmental & Science Journalism, April 16, 2009
http://esj09.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/100-miles-from-home-a-nuclear-narrative
Thanksgiving Day. My family crowds together for good company and warm food. After a few hours, an uncle stirs from his corner armchair and announces that he must be off to work. Overtime pays well, particularly on holidays.
Between three and five of my relatives have worked at the Porstmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant at any given time in the past fifty years. The A-plan (short for "Atomic") lies twenty minutes north of the town I grew up in, and my family's livelihood has been based in this work for half a century. Yet I managed to leave for college without really knowing, or caring, about the details of their work. A lot of equipment operating and button pushing, I heard. Technical stuff....
It wasn't until I read the research of a fellow Ohioan that I realized the relevance of my work as an environmentalist to this aspect of my family story. I turns out the story of the A-Plant and its neighboring nuclear facilites has quite a lot to say about the place of nuclear power in our future energy mix, and this is undoubtedly one of the most heated environmental debates of my time.....
Luckily for me, and anyone else interested in learning more about the nuclear story in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, Carol Rainey has published, One Hundred Miles from Home: Nuclear Contamination in the Communities of the Ohio River Valley. Rainey's book tracks these processes throughout the Ohio River Valley, where we find facilities from many stages of production with a history dating back to the earliest nuclear power generation in the United States.
Though data on nuclear facilities is often kept secret, Rainey shares an impressive wealth of information about each nuclear facility along the Ohio River. She uses newspaper articles, government reports, and independent scientific studies to trace the impact of the nuclear industry on this land and these communites. In her conclusions, Rainey acquaints us with the land and the research that has moved her to dedicate much of her adult life to denouncing nuclear as a responsible energy alternative....
from Amy Nordrum, "Review of One Hundred Miles from Home: Nuclear Contamination in the Communities of the Ohio River Valley." Ohioana Quarterly: Ohio's Book Review Journal (Summer, 2009), 78-80.
...Southern Ohio has been a center for nuclear experimentation since the late 1940s. Our demand for atomic bombs in World War II led to the quick construction of nuclear facilities that made only halfhearted attempts at environmental stewardship and worker safety. The alarming stories of this neglect are worth revisiting as we consider nuclear's place in our future energy mix.
Speaking as a Cincinnati native wary of a nuclear renaissance, Rainey tells of the convoluted relationship between six communities in the Ohio River Valley and the nuclear fuel cycle. The sites represent different stages of nuclear power and weapons production, and each offers a unique look into a region both emboldened with and burdened by an ultimately dirty investment.
Rainey begins her case studies at Mound Laboratory just north of Cincinnati. Built over an aquifer that supplies water to much of the region, this reseach facilty produced polonium for early atomic bombs and spacecraft generators. From Mound, we travel several hunded miles downriver to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant where the first of two steps in uranuim enrichment were completed. Next we follow the uranium to Piketon, Ohio, for its second phase of enrichment before it can be used in bombs, nuclear power stations, and submarines.
Fernald, Ohio is one of the few communities in Rainey's book that resisted the construction of a nuclear facility. Three farms were seized and others forced to sell to make room for the Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, a facility that produced uranium ingots used to make material for bombs.
Early planning mistakes at the Maxey Flats Low-Level Disposal Site in Kentucky led to groundwater contamination as heavy rainfall collected in trenches and mixed with waste on top of impermeable ground. Meanwhile, fifty years of weapons testing at Jefferson Proving Ground rattled the windows of citizens in southern Indiana.
There is no doubt that these plants provided work to many rural citiziens. Thers is also no doubt that these facilities manufactured America's military power. Rainey does not dispute these facts. But, she does ask, at what cost?
One Hundred Miles from Home is the saga of progess--it is the story of how getting ahead so often comes at too great a price. With extensive endnotes citing newspaper articles, history books, EPA reports and nonprofit studies, Rainey uncovers a tradition of mismanagement, contamination and health risks. Accounts of spills, explosions, and leaks inspire doubt that nuclear energy could ever be considered clean. Through these six case studies, Rainey makes us think twice about continuing the nuclear story....
Martha Stephens, "Ohio Valley's Nuclear History Detailed in New Book One Hundred Miles from Home.
Happenings: Miami Group Sierra Club. No. 230. March/April, 2009
www.miamigroup.org
We read [in this book] not only about the uranium foundry Fernald and the plant at Piketon for uranium enrichment, but the Mound Laboratory near Dayton, where nuclear research once employed 1800 workers; also the Jefferson Proving Ground in southern Indiana, and two plants in Kentucky--a huge and horrific waste dump at Maxey Flats to the east, and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant..
The scale of these operations was vast. Piketon and Paducah reigned over thousands of acres and raised over a hundred buildings. The Jefferson Proving Ground had sixty-four miles of railroad track alone. An entire contaminated railroad car was once buried at Maxey Flats, a whole nickel factory at Piketon.
In recent years all these plants have closed except Paducah, as military agendas changed and new sites opened, but the attempts at their remediation will go on for hundreds, even thousands of years. Barrels of depleted uranium remain at Paducah an Piketon, many tons of low-level radioactive waste at Fernald. Depleted uranium rods are scattered throughout the soil of the Jefferson Proving Ground, and the high level radioactive waste at Maxey Flats is so potent that no site has been willing to help process and store it.
In short, the weapons production cycle was itself incredibly destructive of the environment, not only the radioactive materials themselves but the chemicals that cleaned the equipment and the exhaust from the coal-fired power plants which generated the enormous wattage of electricity needed for gaseous diffusion. The result of all this contamination was worker illness and death, and violence to plants and wildlife.
[Authors in Our Midst]
More than a Paycheck: News from the War Tax Resistance Movement.
February, 2009.
www.nwtrcc.org
One Hundred Miles from Home: Nuclear Contamination in the Communities of the Ohio River Valley covers the history of six nuclear installations from the Cold War era that are sill causing environmental and health problems today. The book was written by Carol Rainey, an anti-nuclear activist from Cincinnati who dedicates it in part to her friend and WTR legend Marion Bromley.
Greg Flannery, "Our Radioactive Homeland: New Book is a Guide to the Region's Toxic Link to Nuclear Weapons.
Streetvibes: Cincinnati's Alternative News Source. December, 2008.
www.cincihomeless.org
The Ohio River Valley is a victim of nuclear war--and the aggressor is our own government. The area hasn't suffered bomb blasts, but more than half a century of preparations for a nuclear attack on other countries has poisoned the soil, the water and the air in communities surrounding Greater Cincinnati. That's the startling conclusion of One Hundred Miles from Home: Nuclear Contamination in the Communities of the Ohio River Valley, a comprehensive study of the region's role in the development of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Local author Carol Rainey has meticulously documented the reckless yet quite deliberate process by which the Tri-state has been ringed by the toxic and radioactive byproducts of the U.S. pursuit of global military superiority..
As early as 1955--before the term "nuclear" had entered the common parlance--a reporter for The New York Times referred to the region as "Atom Valley." That moniker might once have implied a patriotic pride and trust in a promising new technology, but the legacy of 50 years on is one of ecological devastation..
The nuclear technology promoted as essential to national defense was developed not only in secrecy but with brute force, with farmers in Fernald and in Madison County, Indiana, given just 30 days to accept government compensation before being forced off their land. Nor did the promise of jobs come without a cost. Illness blossomed among workers subject to exposure to radioactive chemicals, only to be denied by federal agencies..
As a whole the book is an unsettling and necessary reminder of what we have done, and more important, what remains unfinished, as noted in the preface by Bluegrass poet and environmental advocate Wendell Berry.."When great, undisputable quantities of lethal waste are accumulated, at ecological and human and economic costs that are unimaginable, must we not account the whole enterprise a waste and a tragic mistake?"
Terri Cole
Clearing the Air [Newsletter of ECO] Summer/Fall, 2008.
www.env-comm.org
The body of the book is composed of six sections, one for each of the facilities named in the title, plus two appendices. Rainey gives concise historical background on each region before delving into its nuclear story. Although each community's story is unique and the facilities are different, a common threat runs through the book. In every case, Rainey writes about radioactive and chemical contamination of air, water and soil and the illnesses in the plant workers and the residents that live nearby. She details the refusal of both public and private officials to recognize and acknowledge the environmental harm being done, as well as covering the other side of the story: the outraged community members who fought, and are still fighting, for the cleanup of their towns. Reading their stories, I was shocked, saddened and horrified to learn of the lengths these citizens were forced to go to in order to achieve justice for their homes, their land and their lives.
Sister Mary Evelyn Jegen, S.N.D.
Intercommunity Justice and Peace Newsletter. Cincinnati, Ohio. Summer, 2008.
www.ijpc-cincinnati.org
In 1962 Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring, "No threat has struck so directly and so forcefully [at life] as the mid-20th century threat of man-made radiation and man-made and man-disseminated chemicals." One Hundred Miles from Home is a detailed account of the consequences of radiation in the production of nuclear weapons within a hundred mile radius of Cincinnati. It is an account of since and policy-making gone mad. It is a heartbreaking story of government deception and corporate greed at the cost of early death from cancer and other work-related illnesses. Thousands of workers were recruited to do work that those who deceived them would never had done themselves. For more than sixty years, national politices have given us genocidal nuclear weapons and carcinogenic nuclear waste without adequate protection in transporting and storing it. This book is a tool for bringing about a change in those policies. For all its dreadful facts, One Hundred Miles from Home is above all a book of hope and a call to action."
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