For more than 70 years, nothing stood between the public and the creeks that drain from the Piketon Atomic Plant in southern Ohio. People fished them. Kids waded in them. Families were baptized in them. For more than 70 years, the U.S. Department of Energy said everything was safe.
That has now changed. According to a newly recorded legal covenant, DOE has moved to post warning signage at 112 locations along the creek network that runs through the former uranium enrichment site — the first time in the plant’s history that the federal government has physically marked these waters as off-limits.
(Note: The new signs are being placed on current PORTS reserve property. No off-site signage!)
The Covenant
The action is documented in a Sitewide Environmental Covenant for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS), recorded with the Pike County Recorder’s Office on August 18, 2026. The thirteen-page legal instrument, executed by DOE and Ohio EPA under Ohio’s environmental covenant statute, locks in a set of binding restrictions across the roughly 3,425-acre site — including, for the first time in a recorded, enforceable document, a signage requirement tied specifically to the creeks that not only flow across the PORTS reserve, but also into the community.
Paragraph 5.D states that at the water bodies identified in the covenant’s Attachment 3, signs have been mounted reading: “Posted: Private Property, trespassing for any purpose is strictly forbidden.” DOE’s cover letter to Ohio EPA, dated July 28, 2026, states the agency began that installation on February 28, 2026.
The document lists precise coordinates for all 112 signs, tracing a corridor that runs largely along the historic path of Little Beaver Creek and its tributaries on the north and east side of the property.
The signage was selected as the official corrective measure in a 2023 Ohio EPA ruling — the “Decision Document for Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Deferred Units at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant” — which found that sediment in these waters exceeds recreational exposure limits for hazardous substances. In plain terms: state regulators determined the creek sediment is contaminated enough that unrestricted public access, including fishing, wading, and swimming, poses a health risk.
(DOE has long contested that no radioactive contamination ever left the site.)
Why It Took This Long
The contamination itself is not new information. Concern about these specific creeks goes back decades before this covenant.
Vina Colley, co-founder of Piketon/Portsmouth Residents for Environmental Safety and Security (PRESS), first raised the alarm about contamination in Little Beaver Creek in 1992. Plutonium had already been detected at the plant by its own scientists as far back as the mid-1970s. Testing in the 1990s turned up radioactive material in the water and fish of Big Beaver Creek.
For most of that time, DOE’s public position was that radiation levels at the site were within acceptable limits. Independent scientists disagreed. Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, later conducted testing on soil, sediment, water, and plant samples collected at the confluence of Little Beaver and Big Beaver Creeks. His research concluded the neptunium and plutonium signatures in the sediment could not be explained by nuclear weapons testing fallout — the explanation DOE had offered publicly — and that soil concentrations of neptunium in the area ran roughly one hundred times higher than fallout-attributable levels.
In 2023, while reporting on the site, I photographed a pipe discharging blue liquid directly into Little Beaver Creek along Wakefield Mound Road. I reported it to Ohio EPA that same day. DOE’s characterization of the pipe was that it carried raw water; the visible color of the discharge in my photographs suggests otherwise.
So when this covenant states that DOE has posted the creeks, it’s arriving at the end of a documented line: a 1992 whistleblower report, decades of DOE assurances that contamination was within limits, independent science that repeatedly contradicted those assurances, and a 2023 pipe investigation that produced several formal violations against the plant’s own contractor. The 2023 Ohio EPA decision that finally mandated signage, and DOE’s 2026 installation of it, is the regulatory system catching up — not DOE discovering a new problem.
The problem, though, is that the signs are not being placed off-site, warning the public of what is upstream.
What the Signs Cover, and What They Don’t
The signage requirement applies specifically to on-site surface water bodies where sediment contamination has been documented to exceed recreational safety thresholds — it is narrower than the sitewide restrictions elsewhere in the covenant. DOE and any future property owner are required to maintain the signs going forward, with one carve-out: signage at drainage ditches and ponds tied to plant infrastructure will be removed once those features are eliminated during the site’s ongoing decontamination and demolition work.
The covenant also restricts the broader 3,425-acre property to industrial use only, bars any use of groundwater beneath the site, and requires vapor intrusion controls before new buildings can be constructed in a specific 376-acre zone at the center of the plant — restrictions that exist because the underlying land, unlike the sediment in the creeks, has been judged safe enough for continued industrial development, including the 10-gigawatt AI data center campus SoftBank Group broke ground on in March 2026, Centrus Energy’s expanding HALEU enrichment operation, and Oklo Inc.’s planned small modular reactor project with Meta Platforms.
The creek signage, by contrast, is an acknowledgment that at least this part of the site — the water leaving the property — has not been cleaned up.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The signs are only posted on land owned or being repurposed by the United States Department of Energy. These signs will not be placed further downstream. The public is still left in the dark. We hope that this article acts as a warning to residents. STAY OUT OF THE WATER!
