Enriched uranium was discovered inside a classroom of a middle school in Pike County, Ohio. On Monday, the district’s board of education closed the middle school for the remainder of the school year in the interest of student and faculty safety.

The school is just over a mile from the property line of the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant -- a former uranium enrichment facility now undergoing decommissioning. An on-site landfill is under construction and will contain low-level radioactive waste.

The Department of Energy asserts the landfill is safe and poses no threat to Pike County’s residents or environment, however a deep seeded mistrust between residents and the department has continually worsened since the Village of Piketon independently confirmed the department misstated key information about fractures in bedrock below the site of the disposal cell.

Tuesday, it was announced that a third party will begin further studies of the middle school, but a definite timeline has yet to be announced.

President Trump’s 2020 budget requests $31.7 billion for the Department of Energy, of which $6.5 billion is allocated for environmental clean up, distributed between 16 active sites across the country. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2020 total request is $6.1 billion.