HAMILTON, Ohio — This weekend, Fernald Preserve is celebrating 20 years since the completion of the site's cleanup, which once played a key role in building the country's nuclear arsenal.
The nature preserve, which is now open to the public 365 days a year with 7 miles of hiking trails and a visitor center, was once a uranium processing facility at the heart of America's Cold War nuclear weapons program.
WATCH: Here's how Fernald Preserve has grown since its years as a nuclear processing plant
Brian Zimmerman, who oversees the preserve, said the site operated from 1950 until 1989.
"It produced uranium metal products, high-purity uranium metal products for the nuclear weapons production process. So we took uranium ore from various parts of the country and put it through various chemical and metallurgical processes," Zimmerman said.
Those products were then shipped to other facilities across the country as one of the first steps in the nuclear weapons production process, Zimmerman said.
The scale of what was left behind when the plant shut down was staggering. The facility produced nearly a billion pounds of product over its lifetime — and for every pound of product, it generated 2 to 3 pounds of waste.
"So you're talking billions of pounds, right? 2 to 3 billion pounds of waste," Zimmerman said.
The cleanup, conducted under the federal Superfund program, carried a price tag to match.
"The site essentially was cleaned up under the Superfund program at a cost of about $4.4 billion in 2006, and all the high-level waste was shipped off-site, and the low-level waste is stored on site in our on-site disposal facility," Zimmerman said.
The process was not quick. Zimmerman said it took roughly a decade just to characterize the site and make decisions about how to handle everything, followed by a decade of actual remediation work.
Since opening to the public in 2008, the site has had an emphasis on wildlife. The visitor center is designed to connect with the local community and share the history, knowledge and education about what happened at the site.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the cleanup's completion, Fernald Preserve is hosting a free public open house Saturday, Sept. 19, from 2 to 4 p.m.
Zimmerman said visitors can expect a range of activities.
"They'll be able to get to tour inside our converted advanced wastewater treatment facility, which is how we use ion exchange technology to remove uranium contamination from water," he said.
The event will also feature stations focused on ecological restoration, showing how a former uranium processing facility was transformed into the preserve it is today, along with other activities for all members of the community, Zimmerman said.
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