Workers at Former Huntington Plants Exposed to Plutonium, Neptunium

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http://www.huntingtonnews.net/local/100201-rutherford-localplutonium.html

Huntington, WV (HNN) – HNN has confirmed through publicly available, unclassified documents that the workers at the formerly ‘secret’ Huntington Pilot Plant/Reduction Pilot Plant (HPP/RPP) on the INCO campus were exposed to “trace quantities” of Neptunium and Plutonium. The Huntington facility received nickel from reactors at Hansford and Savannah River, as well as the Paducah and Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plants. The Portsmouth, Ohio, plant is located in Piketon, Ohio.

Vina Colley, a compensated Portsmouth (Piketon) Diffusion Plant former atomic worker and activist for compensation of workers, believes that plutonium and other residue on materials sent to Huntington for recycling and decontamination eventually made the Huntington plant contaminated beyond clean up.

The material that the Huntington plant received had been used at these various atomic energy plants as part of the chemical flow. Huntington’s job was to reduce/remove the radioactivity and separate the compounds. For instance, once process separated nickel carbonyl and enriched uranium.

In the early periods of attempting to attain an economic and safe recycling, HNN has seen documents that show still partially radioactive materials went to a second Huntington manufacturer for reuse. The workers at that plant have not yet been deemed eligible for atomic worker benefits, but they have petitioned for that status, HNN has learned.

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