Over the years, the plant released radioactive and chemical hazards into the environment that, according to government officials, gave some workers cancer. The releases also contaminated the air, soil, surface water and groundwater, necessitating a $1 billion environmental cleanup.
At an event set for Monday, local officials plan to kick off a new phase in the Mound story: They’re declaring the site clean and ready for redevelopment as an industrial park catering to high-tech businesses.
“The event is structured to kind of put closure on the defense production heritage of the site and celebrate that the cleanup has been accomplished,” said Mike Grauwelman, president of the Miamisburg Mound Community Improvement Corp., the organization in charge of the redevelopment. He said it also will acknowledge the innovative work of Mound employees who were never properly honored when the Department of Energy shuttered most of the plant in 1994.
Local leaders began redeveloping Mound even before it closed — it is home to a dozen businesses and the Montgomery County Dispatch Center. But reuse of much of the 306-acre site has been hampered by two decades of environmental cleanup. About 350 people work there, but officials hope it eventually employs the same number — 2,500 — as Mound did at its peak. Six of the current businesses were founded by former Mound employees.
Only a handful of Mound’s 116 buildings are still standing, and some of them are to be demolished. Of the serviceable buildings remaining, seven are occupied, but two of them — which now house Thaler Machine Co. and Energy Department officials — may be on the market soon. Thaler, at Mound since 1994, has outgrown the site and plans to move to Springboro. Arthur Kleinrath of the Energy Department said his operations will wind down in a year or two now that the cleanup is over.
But even as Mound is marking the end of DOE cleanup operations, officials are courting the department in hopes it will establish a research presence there. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has been talking to Energy Secretary Steven Chu about using Mound as a research lab for renewable energy sources.
“Yes, they’re interested. No, they haven’t committed,” Brown told the Dayton Daily News last week. “I’m optimistic we have an opportunity there.”
Grauwelman said “Mound could serve as a focal point for the clustering of energy-related businesses” which could secure DOE contracts or grants. “We’re very excited about what it could mean for the community, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Meanwhile, officials are marketing the site to a variety of potential users as they work on a 10-year, $59 million final plan to complete road and parking improvements, demolish obsolete buildings and finish subdividing the complex into lots. “It’s been a difficult struggle to get to this point,” Grauwelman said.
Mound was an outgrowth of Dayton-based work on the Manhattan Project that resulted in the first atomic bombs and the fall of Japan in 1945. Mound, the first permanent Atomic Energy Commission nuclear weapons research site, was operational by 1949.
“Mound was always one of the Big 12 of the nuclear weapons complex,” said Cindy Kelly, who heads the Atomic Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. “The whole country was turned into a manufacturing plant for nuclear weapons. It was deliberately disbursed” at different locations to thwart saboteurs.
Mound was built on a fairly remote spot on defensible high ground. It also was built atop the buried valley aquifer that provides drinking water for the region.
The plant sent most of its radioactive wastes off-site for disposal, according to the nonprofit Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, but there were many toxic releases into the environment over the years, both accidental and intentional. A report by the alliance said Mound released tritium into the air from 1960 to 1970 and dumped radioactive material into the Great Miami River. In 1969, a pipe broke, causing soil to be contaminated with plutonium-238, and contaminated sediment was carried off-site and into the Miami-Erie Canal by heavy rains. Thousands of contaminated 55-gallon drums were crushed and buried in a Mound landfill.
Problems like these led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to place Mound on its National Priorities List in 1989, and cleanup commenced under the Superfund act. Ultimately, it cost $1 billion to haul away radioactively contaminated soil and other solids by train and to chemically treat groundwater tainted by volatile organic compounds that were leaching into the drinking water aquifer. The main “contaminant of concern” was the degreaser trichloroethene, a suspected carcinogen that can harm the central nervous system if ingested.
In December 1991, Miamisburg got the news that the Energy Department planned to close its largest employer and biggest income tax source. “We were devastated,” said Mayor Dick Church, who had been elected to his first term the previous month. “We didn’t know what to do.”
For nearly two years, local officials campaigned to save the Mound, but the Clinton administration in 1993 affirmed the closure decision. “We took a 180-degree turn. We worked with DOE to get it cleaned up,” Church said.
He said the relationship initially wasn’t friendly, and DOE officials were dismissive of local people working on reuse plans and pushing for cleanup. “We fought tooth and nail to get it where we wanted it, which was cleaned up to industrial standards,” Church said. “Otherwise, they could’ve just padlocked it and we would’ve had a brownfield in the middle of Miamisburg.”
As the redevelopment continued alongside the cleanup, contractors took down guardposts, removed more than a mile of razor-wire fencc, reconfigured parking lots and decentralized the utility system. Remnants of the old Mound remain, including roads and parking lots shot through with weeds and decrepit, empty buildings.
In 2005, DOE and EPA officials said the cleanup was completed to their satisfaction, although contamination remained in a landfill near the center of the site. Groundwater under the landfill was being treated to prevent volatile organic compounds from getting into drinking water, but federal officials said it would be impractical to excavate the landfill.
Church and Grauwelman credit U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, and former U.S. Rep. David Hobson, R-Springfield, with obtaining a $30 million earmark to revive the stalled cleanup. The $30 million proved insufficient and another $20 million was obtained after the excavation revealed more contamination than officials expected.
DOE will monitor the groundwater “perhaps into perpetuity,” said the department’s Mound site manager, Arthur Kleinrath. Groundwater is still being treated for residual contaminants, but Kleinrath said “we expect that will clean up quickly” now that the source of the chemical toxins has been removed from the landfill.
Officials acknowledged the Great Recession may stall redevelopment efforts, as demand is lagging and the region is still absorbing vacant industrial space after major plant closings. Grauwelman said the new Austin Boulevard interchange at Interstate 75 will improve access to the site, but corporate relocations to the interchange are dumping additional vacant industrial space on the market. Deed restrictions also prevent any reuse that would regularly bring minor children to the site.
“It may take them a longer time to achieve their goals,” said Dave Dickerson, president of Gem City Real Estate Group. But “I think they have a unique product that has pulled a lot of interest in the marketplace.”
For Church, the down economy is another of the “bumps in the road” that have characterized the Mound odyssey. “I’m confident that once the recession is over, we’re going to come out of this a winner.”
“Nineteen years ago, I said, ‘They handed us a lemon and we’re going to make lemonade,’” Church said. “On Monday, we’re going to be drinking lemonade.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2264 or tbeyerlein@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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