Fernald Feed Materials Production Center - History

History

In 1948 the Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor to the U.S. Department of Energy, established “a large scale integrated facility for the production of fabricated uranium fuel cores by chemical and metallurgical techniques." The plant was known as the Feed Materials Production Center since the uranium fuel cores it produced were the ‘feed’ for the AEC’s plutonium production reactors.

These nuclear reactors were located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and at Hanford in the state of Washington. The uranium metal produced was in the form of derbies, ingots, billets and fuel cores. The FMPC also served as the country’s central repository for another radioactive metal, thorium.

The plant was located in the rural town of Fernald which is about 20 miles (32 km) northwest of Cincinnati, Ohio, and occupies 1,050 acres (425 hectares). This location was chosen because it was between the uranium ore delivery ports of New York and New Orleans, and it was accessible to the other main AEC sites. In addition, the site was close to Cincinnati’s large labor force, the landscape was level making the site’s construction easy, it was isolated which provided safety and security, and it was located 30 to 50 feet above a large water aquifer which supplied the water needed for uranium metal processing.

From 1951 to 1989 Fernald converted uranium ore into metal, and then fabricated this metal into target elements for nuclear reactors. Annual production rates ranged from a high in 1960 of 10,000 metric tons to a low in 1975 of 1,230 metric tons.2 Refining uranium metal was a process requiring a series of chemical and metallurgical conversions that occurred in nine specialized plants at the site.