For four decades, from 1951 to 1989, this facility processed over 500 million pounds of uranium for America’s nuclear weapons program. The Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald, Ohio—one link in a chain of Cold War facilities stretching from Hanford to Savannah River—converted uranium ore into metal for reactor fuel and weapons components. The work was classified. The contamination was secret.

Uranium dust in the air. Radioactive wastewater discharged into the Great Miami Aquifer. Radon emissions. Thorium. Radium. Workers and nearby residents exposed for decades without knowing what they were breathing, drinking, absorbing. When the facility finally closed in 1989 and the truth emerged, Fernald became one of the most contaminated sites in the Department of Energy’s nuclear complex—and one of the most expensive cleanup projects in American history.

Masumi photographed it in 1991, during the liminal period after production ended but before remediation began. The facility stood frozen between identities: no longer making weapons, not yet a nature preserve (which it would eventually become after a multi-billion-dollar cleanup completed in 2006).

Unlike her other Superfund sites—which documented private companies illegally dumping industrial waste—Fernald represented something more troubling: contamination conducted by the government itself, hidden under national security classification, sacrificing the health of citizens for Cold War imperatives. The hidden cost of nuclear deterrence, finally made visible.