ABSTRACT
FERNALD RESIDENTS FOR SAFETY AND HEALTH In the mid-1980s, Lisa Crawford was a self-described "average person" living and working in Fernald, a small community in rural Ohio, 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati. 2 She and her family lived in a rented farmhouse across the road from a "Feed Materials Production Center," a facility to which she had not paid much attention, and which she and many others in the community assumed was a factory producing animal feed. Lisa thought this was a great place to raise her son - fresh well water, fresh air, clean living. This
bucolic vision changed in January 1985 when Lisa learned that the facility across the road was one of the US government's military nuclear production facilities, run by the Department of Energy (DoE), producing nuclear materials for weapons. It was called a "feed materials" plant because it processed various uranium compounds into uranium metal to "feed" into the other various nuclear weapons complexes across the country. Fernald also served as one of the major storage facilities for nuclear wastes from around the country, including "hot" material from the Manhattan bomb project.
