By Dan Klepal
The Cincinnati Enquirer

CROSBY TWP. - A treasure of gold and silver worth tens of millions of dollars is buried in a most unlikely spot, just 18 miles north of Cincinnati.

But don't even think about extracting it - that will take a biohazard suit and top government clearance.

That's because the loot is trapped inside 19 million pounds of radioactive gunk stored in two huge concrete silos at the defunct Fernald uranium processing plant.

Fernald once was a top-secret government facility, where raw ore from South Africa was boiled in acids or baked in superheated ovens to extract uranium that fueled the country's nuclear weapons program. Little thought was given to other precious materials inside the ore during the heat of the Cold War arms race.

That changed in the mid-1970s, when the government started looking at the value of the precious metals inside the waste.

A 1974 study found about $10 million in gold alone inside the Fernald silos, figuring its value at $400 per ounce. That study also found a hodge-podge of other precious goodies in the waste - such as silver, palladium, platinum, titanium and nickel - all of which has commercial value.

Bob Kispert, a Fernald historian who worked in the production facility from 1954 until 1992, said identifying what was inside the silo waste was the easy part. Separating the precious from the poisonous, he said, would have been a massive undertaking that cost many times more than the treasure is worth.

"The economics just didn't work - by a wide margin," Kispert said. "There just wasn't the payback to support the massive and complicated chemical processes that would have been necessary."

Although two reports were produced on the topic in the 1970s, neither says specifically how much the chemical process would cost to separate the gold, silver and other metals from the waste.

Today, simply removing the radioactive waste from the silos and shipping it to Nevada for permanent burial will cost taxpayers more than $400 million.

One report also said that while it is possible to get the gold out, the material would still be contaminated and therefore probably couldn't be sold for any commercial venture.

Diamonds in the dirt

Rudy Crawford, a 74-year-old Hamilton man who for 35 years worked in management for the company running Fernald, said it was common knowledge that the ore contained precious metals.

But the government only had the rights to mine uranium, and nothing else.

"There are other important things in that waste too, like (trace amounts of) diamonds and jewels," Crawford said. "But they're in a big glob of radioactive dirt, and the actual amounts are pretty thin. You don't go digging up an entire mountain to get one diamond.

"We only had rights to the uranium. Nothing else was ours. Everything else, we had to set aside, like your neighbor who piles stuff up over the back fence."

That was the situation until 1984, when the U.S. government negotiated with African Metals Corp. for the purchase of the silos' waste.

Department of Energy officials, who now oversee the $4 billion environmental cleanup at Fernald, were unable to find documents showing the exact amount of that payment. But several former employees remember it being between $1 million and $2 million.

By the early 1980s, the government was more interested in the immense amounts of radon gas the waste was producing than it was the gold and silver. A study was performed to look at the commercial value of the gas, which is used in nuclear medicine to fight cancer.

Kispert performed one such study in 1978, looking at the value of radon gas coming from several of the waste pits at Fernald, the silos, and waste at other sites around the country. Similar waste was stored in a facility at Niagara Falls, N.Y.

The government examined a plan to combine the Fernald waste with that in Niagara Falls, but found it too risky to move.

"This was prompted by growing demand for uranium in what was projected to be - prior to Three Mile Island - booming years ahead," Kispert said. "How much is in there and what is it worth against how much will cost you to get it out."

Again, cost outweighed the gain.

"There was very little payback," Kispert said.

Those studies sealed the silos' fate. After production of uranium ceased in 1989, the Department of Energy made Fernald the first nuclear site in the country focused on environmental cleanup.

The $4 billion job is expected to be finished in 2006. One of the last remaining projects is pumping the waste from the silos, enclosing it in steel containers and trucking it across country to the Nevada Test Site, where it will remain buried forever.

E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com