A federal judge decided against a Mansfield, Ohio, scrap yard owner who was seeking compensation from the federal government for radioactive contamination on his land.
Allen Hogan said he took the decision in stride, but he also questioned the situation on a larger scale.
"It's pretty sad when you go to Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction and (the U.S. government) can't even keep track of our own," he said.
Hogan contested that the U.S. Department of Defense owes him compensation for mistakenly selling him about 2,200 pounds of scrap metal from a Minuteman nuclear missile in 1994.
Hogan did not discover the mislabeled material was radioactive until years later.
Federal officials spent more than $80,000 searching for and removing the radioactive magnesium from Hogan's land,but small pieces remain.
U.S. Department of Justice Senior Attorney Steven Talson argued in his closing arguments that those remaining scraps emit very low levels of radiation, representing no real health threat, and the one-time contamination has not damaged the property's value.
But Hogan and his lawyers have disputed the safety of the land and argued the perception of contamination has ruined any chance of selling the property.
Hogan's suit asked for $10 million, but under federal law the most he could have collected is the fair market value of his land. His attorneys estimated that at about $750,000, including more than $435,000 in mineral rights for sandstone deposits.
Experts for the government argued Hogan's property is worth no more than $110,000, and because of its use as a scrap yard may be worth as little as $26,000. Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal