Voinovich School brings real world experiences to STEM students in Southeast Ohio

On May 7, students from Waverly High School in Pike County and Valley High School in Scioto County were featured presenters at the PORTSfuture Program ASER Student Summary Project Student Expo in Pike County.

The Expo was the capstone to their year-long focus on learning about environmental monitoring and cleanup efforts being conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management at the former DOE Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, commonly referred to as PORTS. Before the DOE initiated a deactivation and decommissioning process that is ongoing, the plant was used to enrich uranium for national defense and energy purposes from 1954 to 2001.

Annually, the DOE is required by law to produce the Annual Site Environmental Report (ASER), a critical document that tracks environmental monitoring, deactivation, and decommissioning efforts at the PORTS facility. However, the technical nature and length of the ASER report may hinder the ability for the public to fully understand the findings.

For the past 14 years, the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service‘s PORTSfuture Program has collaborated with high school students near the PORTS site to produce the ASER Student Summary, which helps distill complex data into simplified, visual summaries, making the report more accessible to their communities.

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This year’s project was run throughout the academic year. Students heard presentations from PORTS site cleanup experts, participated in a site tour, attended the Ohio University Student Expo in Athens, Ohio, and received other educational information related to the site history, site cleanup activities, and STEM careers. The project culminated in student designed posters highlighting students’ areas of study, focusing on topics such as groundwater monitoring and waste management.

“We allow the students to present their research to community members and engage in conversation about what they’ve learned,” says Jacob White, a project manager at the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service. “Often, this is the first type of public speaking experience for these high school students.”

“Working on the summary helps high school students with research skills so they can share with their peers and their friends and family,” says Laurianne Diatley, a senior at Valley High School. “I think it also shows how important it is for everybody to know what's going on at the plant.”

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While the DOE continues its decommissioning work, other areas of the approximately 3,300-acre site are already under transformation. Centrus Energy Corp. has restarted the uranium enrichment process of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) for fuel production for use in advanced nuclear small modular reactors, while other energy and technology companies are poised to move in.

The goal of the PORTS redevelopment is to transform the site into an “all-of-the-above” energy generation complex co-located with high-volume industrial electricity users and manufacturing. As those plans take shape, a skilled workforce will be needed, and White says that is one aspect of the ASER Student Summary Project programming they’ll look to bolster in the coming years as these high school students are the potential future workforce for incoming developments.

“We’ll be improving and tailoring the program accordingly to show what jobs students could consider at the plant site and what likely future jobs may be,” White said.

That’s music to the ears of Trevor Arnett, a biology and environmental science teacher at Waverly High School.

“There’s going to be an opportunity here,” he says. “The ASER program shows my students that post-high school and college, they can find a good job here, that they can make good money, and they can be a part of the economic development of this community moving forward.”

The PORTSfuture Program is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office.

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