Friends, I'm sharing one small, relatively happy story amid the dark news of these days.

    I'm a longtime member of the Ohio Nuclear Free Network, a statewide group opposed to nuclear power and weapons. For 5 years a great retired chemistry prof has worked with us to verify with field sampling the presence of radiation in air, water and land (and plants) that has emanated as far out as 14 miles from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS), at Piketon in southern Ohio. PORTS is a 70 year old Cold War uranium enrichment plant that nowadays also is the site of a depleted uranium purification plant and may be the site in a few years of two new small modular reactors, the next-generation nuclear reactors being huckstered by the federal government and corrupt nuclear power and weapons industries.

    Five years ago when our scientist ally, Dr. Michael Ketterer, verified radioactive contamination of Zahn's School, a middle school located 1.5 miles from PORTS, the local board of education temporarily and then permanently closed down the school, because that radioactivity may have caused rare childhood cancers in students there, some of whom had died. 

    The US Dept of Energy quietly gave $20 million to the board of education to build a new middle school elsewhere. Ground will be broken on it this year.

    But disturbingly, the board of education a couple of weeks ago put the old, contaminated school up for public bid to sell it for any allowable use. Immediately, Pike Christian Academy, longtime religious school system in the area, announced plans to buy the school as the new location for their students, faculty and administration.

     Our group publicly opposed it. The Pike Christian Academy administrators declined to communicate with us. We went ahead and delivered a strong warning letter to them last Wednesday, coupled with a public demonstration at the old school, put on by concerned people from Piketon, Portsmouth and Columbus. Our message was that as people with a shared interest in seeing the children of the town prosper, we hoped the Pike Christian administration would follow the science and protect children.

    And thankfully, it worked; the below message appeared on Facebook today. Pike Christian isn't going to bid on the property after all. Our working together changed the personal health trajectory of many lives. 

    We'll continue to demand the demolition of Zahn's School, and quarantining of the school site. And we're gonna keep publicizing the realities about the true costs of allowing the federal government and its profiteering contractors to force poisoned power and nuclear war on us.

                Terry