The Department of Energy just filed its 2025 Annual Project Status Report for the On-Site Waste Disposal Facility (OSWDF) at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant — a radioactive and hazardous waste landfill built to bury debris from demolishing a former uranium enrichment complex. Read past the reassuring executive summary, and the report itself documents a facility that blew through its own monitoring thresholds repeatedly, in nearly every category it tracks.
Here’s what DOE’s own numbers say happened in 2025:
- Groundwater: Administrative levels — DOE’s early-warning limits for chlorinated organics, metals, PCBs, radionuclides, and other indicator parameters — were exceeded at monitoring wells around the site in 2025.
- Surface water: Administrative levels for multiple chlorinated organics, PCBs, and radionuclides were also exceeded in surface water, including at a Little Beaver Creek sampling point that sits upstream of the facility.
- Storm water ponds: Two of five sedimentation/detention ponds exceeded the 100 mg/L benchmark for total suspended solids, with one reading hitting 181 mg/L — nearly double the limit. Three separate ponds exceeded the pH benchmark of 9 standard units, with readings as high as 9.53.
- Air: “Low action level” exceedances for metals and total VOCs showed up in numerous ambient air samples collected at the perimeter of the site.
- Radiation: One of five external radiation monitoring stations consistently read higher than the rest — 28 to 35 millirem per quarter, versus 21–28 mrem/quarter at the others.
And after every single one of these findings, the report’s conclusion is the same: no issue, no action needed. The chlorinated-organic and metals exceedances in groundwater? “No issues were identified that affect the operation or performance of the OSWDF.” The elevated radiation reading? Blamed on a nearby clay stockpile. The suspended-solids and pH exceedances in the ponds? Blamed on rain and algae. The VOC and metals exceedances in air? Called “expected.” Every red flag in this report is raised and then waved away by the same agency that operates the facility, using thresholds the same agency wrote for itself.
“Administrative levels” exist precisely to catch problems before they become formal regulatory violations — and this report shows those tripwires going off over and over, across groundwater, surface water, stormwater, and air, at a landfill for radioactive and hazardous waste sitting beside a public waterway. Every one of those findings was reviewed and cleared by the same party that operates the facility.
A facility that repeatedly exceeds its own early-warning system isn’t obviously “fine” just because the operator says so in its own report.
This pattern of self-clearing isn’t happening in a vacuum. Independent testing around PORTS by Dr. Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of analytical chemistry at Northern Arizona University, has repeatedly found offsite contamination that DOE’s own reporting missed or downplayed. In 2019, Ketterer reviewed DOE’s own Annual Site Environmental Report and identified PORTS — not atmospheric bomb testing, as DOE had claimed — as the source of neptunium detected in an air monitor near Zahn’s Corner Middle School, four miles from the plant; the school was later closed. He has since documented enriched uranium in the attics of homes miles from the site, radioactive contamination in air monitors, and, most recently, significant uptake of neptunium-237 by plants growing near the plant. In other words: DOE has a track record of underselling contamination at this exact site, and independent, credentialed analysis has caught it before. That history is the backdrop against which this year’s OSWDF report — full of exceedances that DOE reviews and clears using its own internal thresholds — should be read.
You can read the full report here: DOE REPORT
