Fernald’s Radioactive Rebirth: Casey A. Huegel on the Atomic Nature Preserve behind ‘Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory’

On March 25, I went for my first hike of spring 2024 at the Fernald Preserve, a Department of Energy (DOE)–owned park located about eighteen miles northwest of Cincinnati, Ohio. I have been visiting this place for nearly a decade in the process of researching and writing my new book Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory: Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest—so I was not expecting any surprises. After getting out of my car and approaching the Weapons-to-Wetlands Trail near the visitor center, however, I paused when I realized that I smelled something burning.

As I continued down the trail, I realized the landscape around me was scorched from what must have been a considerable fire. Forty years ago a fire at Fernald would have sent the community into a panic, and rightfully so, because at the time the site was operating as the Feed Materials Production Center, a uranium processing plant that served as a key facility in the sprawling Cold War nuclear weapons production complex. After a highly publicized uranium leak in 1984, the plant’s neighbors were perpetually on edge as they anticipated the next potential accident amid near daily newspaper coverage and government investigations that gradually revealed that Fernald was a dangerous place to work and the third most polluted nuclear wasteland in the country.

The aftermath of a prescribed burn at the Fernald Preserve, March 25, 2024. Photo by author.

With this history in mind, my surroundings looked a little apocalyptic, but I also knew better. Rather than a nuclear disaster, the scorched earth I experienced was the aftermath of a prescribed burn, which will strengthen and diversify the preserve’s prairies in the years ahead and continue the DOE’s commitment to protecting human and environmental health at Fernald. Over a ten-year period, a $4.4 billion DOE remediation project transformed the site from a nuclear wasteland into a public park in the wake of the Cold War. This surprising change in mission from producing uranium metal products, or “feed materials,” for plutonium reactors to environmental stewardship was what first inspired me to tell Fernald’s story. Grab a pair of binoculars and go for a walk there this summer. You will see what I mean.

As I argue in Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory, however, the greening of the DOE’s institutional culture was not a natural result of the Cold War’s end. During the 1980s, the department was better known as a secretive and notorious polluter. Through the protections of the Atomic Energy Act, it self-regulated its radioactive materials and fought tooth and nail to remain insulated from the nation’s environmental laws and denied any responsibility for harming human or environmental health. Only through a grueling, multi-decade campaign by grassroots activists Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH), unionized nuclear workers in the Fernald Atomic Trades and Labor Council, and their political allies in Ohio and Congress did the bombmakers budge and begin to adopt the tenets of environmentalism.

The 1980s was a difficult time to launch an environmental movement, especially one battling the federal government. The Reagan administration had worked to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency at the same time it waged the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. This process ramped up production in Fernald’s outdated factories during a period of renewed Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this challenging political environment, FRESH was determined to hold the DOE accountable for its negligent radioactive waste disposal. Led by Lisa Crawford, a self-described housewife who became an activist after discovering her family’s well water was contaminated with Fernald’s uranium, FRESH centered its movement around the interests of working people and never wavered from the community’s commitment to jobs and a clean environment. Through this inclusive approach, FRESH cultivated progressive and moderate allies and learned to fight the DOE locally and nationally.

Fernald’s environmental movement was ultimately successful, and they secured many notable achievements along the way: the firing of Fernald’s unpopular operating contractor National Lead of Ohio; securing a class-action settlement and medical monitoring program for community residents; passage of the Federal Facilities Compliance Act of 1992 that forced the DOE’s compliance with hazardous waste laws; and, of course, Fernald’s cleanup, which ensured that former production workers were retrained for remediation jobs. But FRESH also understood that in the politically partisan decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the results of their efforts were going to be mixed. The Fernald Citizens Task Force—a citizen advisory board formed as part of a national DOE public participation program to guide local cleanup efforts—ultimately accepted the onsite encapsulation of nearly three million cubic yards of low-level radioactive contaminated soil and building debris. This consensus, though difficult to achieve, was reached through two creative approaches to environmental compromise: a board game called FUTURESITE, which simulated the high costs, technological limitations, and political restraints of radioactive waste disposal, and dialogue between nuclear-contaminated communities that helped educate each other on the principles of environmental justice. If Fernald’s waste was not kept onsite, it was going to be dumped in somebody else’s backyard.

At the Fernald Preserve ponds fill the former foundations of uranium plants. The earthen mound in the background is the On-Site Disposal Facility, March 25, 2024. Photo by author.

Along the Weapons-to-Wetlands Trail, a platform looks out onto Fernald’s former production area. It is the perfect spot to reflect on the important transformations that have happened here and the challenges environmentalists face going forward. Waterfowl now congregate on ponds where uranium production plants once stood, which represents the downsizing of the nuclear weapons production complex and the DOE’s improved focus on environmental health and safety in the wake of Fernald’s movement. Looming on the site’s eastern boundary, however, is the massive on-site disposal facility, where the remnants from building demolition and contaminated soil from the production area are entombed. It is a stark reminder that this site must be continuously monitored for public health and environmental health, and despite the massive mobilization of resources and energy by federal and state governments, corporate contractors, organized labor, and grassroots activists, the Fernald Preserve cannot be made clean, only safer. The bomb’s environmental legacy is Fernald’s to keep indefinitely.

In a 1999 oral history interview with the Fernald Living History Project, Lisa Crawford reflected on Fernald’s complicated legacy. As a site of public history, Fernald’s contaminated landscape lives on as an indispensable warning so “something like this never happens again.” But its powerful environmental movement also offers hope. “One hundred years from now I really hope people will come back and say . . . ‘gosh, look what happened here, but they fixed it.’ Maybe not 100 percent but they did what they could at that point in time, and that will be our legacy.” For partisan times like ours, these are important lessons on how creativity, compromise, and environmental justice can help solve large-scale environmental problems, even if imperfectly. I invite you to read Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory and consider how these stories can help us build a safe and sustainable future.

Casey A. Huegel is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Cincinnati and a public historian with the National Park Service.