As Trump calls for more nuclear power, Piketon, the site of an enrichment facility, knows first hand its ill effects
Three years after starting work as an electrician at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Vina Colley started getting sick.
The huge facility in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio was opened in 1954 to enrich weapons-grade uranium for the military as America’s cold war with the Soviet Union ramped up, and later, for commercial purposes.
But in the decades since, Colley, her fellow former workers and the wider Pike county community find themselves paying a terrible price.
Colley, who advocates as president of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (Press), says she was exposed to uranium hexafluoride and a host of other dangerous chemicals while working at the facility in the early 1980s.
