The Apocalypse Factory
Page 24
Later that year, the chair of World Citizens for Peace, Maurice Warner, was asked by his boss at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory to lead an environmental assessment of the proposed MX missile “rail garrison” system, which would have carried armed intercontinental ballistic missiles around the United States on railcars so that they would be harder for the Soviet Union to target. Warner, a Quaker, refused the assignment, resigned from his job, and moved to Seattle to become a career counselor. By January 1983, Stoffels was the new chair of the group.
World Citizens for Peace began holding monthly peace vigils in different locations around the Tri-Cities. A particular focus of their attention was the White Train, which carried nuclear weapons from the Pantex assembly plant in Texas to military bases around the country. One such destination was the Bangor submarine base 20 miles west of Seattle, which is the West Coast base of America’s Trident submarines and has one of the largest concentrations of nuclear weapons anywhere in the country. The military painted the railcars white to keep the weapons cool, but that made them an obvious target as the White Train wound its way through the Tri-Cities. On March 21, 1983, World Citizens for Peace held a candlelight vigil at the Pasco depot as a train believed to hold 100 nuclear weapons rolled by. Not long thereafter, the federal government painted the cars different colors to escape detection and subsequently used unmarked tractor-trailers to move warheads rather than railcars.
Two months later, World Citizens for Peace held a demonstration outside Hanford’s main gate to protest the restart of the PUREX Plant. “Plutonium Production Supports the Insane Nuclear Arms Race,” one sign read. “Stop Contaminating the Columbia River,” said another. Some people driving by in their cars flashed a thumbs-up as they passed. Others used a different finger, and one employee used his rear end to demonstrate an opinion. Still, Stoffels was surprised and encouraged that so many people in Richland supported the group’s message.
As the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombings approached in 1985, World Citizens for Peace adopted “reconciliation” as the permanent theme of its annual memorial ceremony in Richland. That summer, Stoffels wrote to the mayor of Nagasaki about the group’s plans for the ceremony, and the mayor wrote back to say that Nagasaki would like to cooperate in the memorial by presenting Richland with a model of the “Bell of Peace.” The original bell was recovered from the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral, the mayor wrote, and was rung every day during the city’s recovery to console the survivors of the bombing. The mayor pro tem of Richland, Bob Ellis, accepted the gift of the bell on behalf of the city, saying, “The desire for peace is universal in the hearts of mankind.” Every August since then, the ringing of the Bell of Peace has been the highlight of the Atomic Cities Peace Memorial ceremony held by World Citizens for Peace.
Even as the nuclear freeze movement was gathering steam, the dreams of a Nuplex at Hanford were fading. On March 28, 1979, Reactor Number 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, experienced the most serious nuclear accident in US history. Most power reactors in the United States do not use graphite to slow down neutrons and split atoms of uranium-235. Instead, they use ordinary water and “enriched” uranium, in which the percentage of uranium-235 is higher than its natural 0.7 percent, to compensate for the neutron-absorbing properties of the cooling water. The water in such a reactor not only moderates the reaction but transfers heat from the core of the reactor to the turbines that generate electricity. The problem is that if water stops flowing to the core, the nuclear fuel will heat to the melting point, even with all the control rods inserted into the reactor to absorb neutrons. Commercial power plants therefore need multiple backup systems to make sure their cores never run dry.
At Three Mile Island, a stuck valve, poor design, and human error led the operators to turn off the emergency cooling system even as water was draining away from the core. As the fuel elements were exposed to the air, they began to melt. Eventually the operators figured out what was going on and refilled the core with water, but not before the interior of the reactor was seriously damaged. The accident released only a small amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere, not enough to cause any health effects that could be tied to the accident. But as with the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State the following spring, television reporters had just begun using trucks outfitted with microwave transmitters, and their on-the-scene reports gave the accident a riveting immediacy. Coincidentally, the movie The China Syndrome had premiered two weeks before the partial meltdown, and its fictional account of a TV newswoman and her cameraman, played by Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, reporting from inside a nuclear power plant during a major accident seemed to provide a script for what had happened in Pennsylvania.
Actually, the nuclear power industry was in trouble well before the body blows of Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome. Despite their efficiency, large commercial nuclear power plants were very expensive to build and operate, largely because of the safety systems and regulations required to protect the public in case of an accident. By 1979 the environmental movement had turned resolutely against nuclear power, and antinuclear advocates had increasing success emphasizing the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
The combination of antinuclear sentiment, the recession, escalating costs, construction delays, and poor management was too much for the Washington Public Power Supply System. In 1981, it halted construction on two of the five reactors it was building—one in western Washington and one at Hanford. In 1983, it mothballed two more half-finished reactors. Finally, later that year, it defaulted on the billions of dollars of bonds it had sold against the promise of future electricity—still the largest bond failure in US history. In the end, only one reactor was completed, leading people to pronounce the acronym for the organization—WPPSS—as “whoops.” Today, the Columbia Generating Station north of Richland continues to produce about 10 percent of the electricity generated in Washington State.
Worse was yet to come. In 1986, plant operators at reactor number four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine tried to conduct a test that involved turning off the plant’s safety systems. During the test, the chain reaction got out of control and an explosion in the core tore open the reactor. Commercial power reactors in the United States are required to have heavy steel and concrete containment structures around the core to keep radioactivity from escaping during accidents. Chernobyl had no such containment vessel, partly because its operators thought an accident could not happen and partly because it was designed to produce both electricity and plutonium for weapons, which made a containment vessel inconvenient. When the graphite in the core caught fire from the heat of the nuclear fuel, it burned like a bonfire. Fission products and transuranic elements rose into the atmosphere and settled across broad swaths of Europe.
In 1986 the United States had just a single operating reactor that used graphite as a moderator and generated both electricity and plutonium: the N Reactor, on the right bank of the Columbia River, 30 miles north of Richland. N Reactor was different in several key ways from the Chernobyl reactors, but it, too, like the other military reactors at Hanford, did not have a containment vessel. Denied access to Chernobyl, reporters flocked to Richland to draw comparisons with what was happening in the Soviet Union. A few months later the N Reactor shut down for safety upgrades. It never operated again.
The Chernobyl accident made a powerful impression on the newly installed Soviet general secretary. If a nuclear accident could cause this much physical damage and health risk, thought Mikhail Gorbachev, what would a nuclear war do? “The accident at Chernobyl showed again what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind,” he said in a speech 18 days after the accident. “The stockpiled nuclear arsenals are fraught with thousands upon thousands of disasters far more horrible than the one at Chernobyl.”
Even before the Chernobyl accident, Gorbachev, who was desperately trying to reform the Soviet eco
nomy and military, had proposed in a letter to Reagan that their two countries “agree on a stage-by-stage program” so that “by the end of 1999 no more nuclear weapons remain on Earth.” Now he repeated his proposal. “Global nuclear war can no longer be the continuation of national politics, as it would bring the end of all life, and therefore of all politics,” he told the Politburo a few months after Chernobyl.
Gorbachev’s proposals resonated with Reagan, despite his earlier belligerence toward the Soviet Union. Since his days as California governor, Reagan had talked about reducing the threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. As he said in his 1984 State of the Union address, “The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” He eagerly accepted Gorbachev’s invitation to meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 to discuss arms reduction.
The summit between Reagan and Gorbachev would make a marvelous movie someday, though whether it would be a comedy or a tragedy is uncertain. They met in Hofdi House, the former residence of the French consulate, which sits on a broad expanse of treeless lawn overlooking Reykjavik Harbor. Sometimes they talked just with their translators and notetakers, sometimes with their top aides. Over the course of two days, the two men were in turn belligerent, hopeful, obtuse, and dismissive. Reagan told the same story so often that Gorbachev would block his ears when he saw it coming. Gorbachev let his anger flash when Reagan refused to acknowledge or concede a point. Nevertheless, over the course of their discussions, the two made progress. They agreed to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. Gorbachev said that the Soviet Union would reduce the number of its missiles targeting Asia to one hundred if the United States would deploy no more than that in Alaska. Finally, in their last session together, as they were arguing over which categories of missiles should be slated for reductions, Reagan said, “It would be fine with me if we got rid of them all.”
“We can do that,” Gorbachev replied. “We can eliminate them all.”
It was an electrifying moment in world history—the first time the leaders of the world’s two nuclear superpowers, meeting face to face, had contemplated ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
But there was a hitch. Reagan had become convinced that a space-based defensive system could be built that would use satellites and interceptors to shoot down missiles kept hidden by the Soviets or launched by a rogue nation. Gorbachev refused to let the United States extend the arms race into space. He proposed that the United States be allowed to work on the Strategic Defense Initiative—or Star Wars, as it was called after the 1977 George Lucas movie—only in the laboratory, not in orbit around the Earth. Reagan refused to limit the scope of SDI research. The two men could not agree. The opportunity passed.
The idea that some sort of defensive system could shield the United States from nuclear weapons was based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Stopping a massive nuclear attack was no more possible in 1986 than it was the week after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the situation is the same today. Just seven years after Reykjavik, the Clinton administration canceled the Strategic Defense Initiative, though work has continued since then on much more limited ground-based defenses.
An agreement by Reagan and Gorbachev to eliminate nuclear weapons probably would not have held. Too many powerful interests opposed to disarmament were arrayed beneath the two leaders. But what if they had emerged from their meeting room in Hofdi House and had announced to the world that they had vowed to destroy the nuclear weapons they controlled? Would we still live in a world where human civilization could be destroyed in a few hours through mishap, malevolence, or madness?
AFTER GRADUATING FROM Richland High School in 1978, Kathleen Dillon and Carolyn Deen went in different directions. Though Carolyn was a good student, her family did not have enough money to send her to an expensive college, and she wanted to stay close enough to her parents and brothers to come home on weekends. She decided to go to Eastern Washington University near Spokane and become an elementary school teacher.
Kathleen had not been all that interested in science in high school, but she was always impressed by the scientists her father brought home for dinner. They seemed urbane, educated, experienced—a window on a place far away from Hanford. She decided to go to Washington State University, on the border of Washington and Idaho 100 miles east of Richland, and study engineering.
In 1983, with a degree in civil engineering, Kathleen moved back to Richland and went to work at Hanford as an environmental engineer. One of her jobs was to perform what was called a water balance. As Hanford dumped contaminated water into the ground, the extra water created underground mounds in the water table, which drove contaminants faster toward the Columbia River. A water balance compared the amount of water being withdrawn from the river with the amount being officially released from the reactors, separation plants, and other facilities. The two never matched up. Kathleen’s job was to figure out where the missing releases were taking place.
The old-timers at Hanford were not eager to tell her. Partly, Kathleen later reflected, they were still part of a “need to know” culture that originated in the Manhattan Project. What business was it of hers where the water went? “My water balance probably sounded to them like busy work—and doomed. Everybody knew that the facilities were held together with baling wire and bubble gum. Even if you could get numbers on the instrumented effluent streams (and the instruments were rarely calibrated), what about all the leaks they knew about, and the ones they didn’t.” It didn’t help that she was a 24-year-old woman while they had worked at Hanford for decades. The old-timers knew the plant better than any environmental engineer or government official could know it. They had built and run Hanford, and it had never blown up or caused any obvious problems. On the contrary, it had provided a material that America desperately needed during the darkest days of World War II and the Cold War—along with good jobs and a sense of purpose. If that required burying and then ignoring radioactive wastes in the desert sands, well, that was the price of security.
But by 1983 the problems posed by Hanford’s wastes were becoming impossible to ignore. Since 1943, the federal government had built 177 huge underground tanks near the chemical separation plants. The tanks consisted of circular, concrete shells with one and, later, two layers of interior steel linings. They contained the chemical and radiological effluent of 40 years of plutonium production—a toxic mishmash of chemicals, fission products, and unrecovered uranium and plutonium so radioactive that, if held in a glass at arm’s length, the waste would deliver a fatal dose in just a few minutes. Buried beneath 6 to 11 feet of dirt to protect people from their radioactive contents, the tanks were always meant to be an interim solution for the separation plants’ liquid wastes, but no one had come up with a permanent solution. Meanwhile, the early single-shelled tanks began to leak not long after they were built; a million or so gallons of waste had already flowed into the rocks and soil below the tanks.
Immense steel and concrete tanks, shown here under construction, still hold millions of gallons of highly radioactive chemicals produced by plutonium separation. Courtesy of the US Department of Energy.
In addition to the high-level waste at Hanford, plant operators had released more than 400 billion gallons of water from Hanford’s reactors, canyon buildings, and other facilities directly into the ground—nearly a thousand times the volume of waste in the tanks. They assumed that the chemicals and radioactive elements in the water would bind to the dry desert soil and remain immobilized. But some of the contaminants, carried deeper by rainwater and continued wastewater flows, moved farther downward. Eventually they hit the water table beneath the dry soil. There they began moving sideways, toward the Columbia River.
By the 1980s, something else about Hanford was becoming impossible to ignore. For years, farming families on the flat expanse east of Hanford had been adding up the number of cancers, miscarriages, and st
illbirths that they and the people they knew had experienced. The total seemed suspiciously high. Environmentalists had been saying that the radiation released from nuclear facilities and tests was making people sick. Now the farmers—and increasingly the residents of the Tri-Cities—had to ask themselves a question: Could their illnesses, and those of people they knew and loved, be the result of living near Hanford?
It was a hard question for people in the region to confront. They were proud of their contributions to ending World War II and supplying America’s nuclear arsenal. Now they had to ask whether the sacrifices they had made were greater than they had known. As books and magazine articles began to appear in the 1980s about Hanford’s assaults on human health and the environment, written mostly by outsiders, residents of the region became increasingly concerned—and also defensive. In 1986, a group called the Hanford Family formed to defend the Tri-Cities and its largest employer from what they called “Hanford bashing.” Using grassroots methods common among antinuclear groups, they organized volunteers, distributed flyers and newsletters, and held rallies to attract newcomers and spread their message. Former Washington governor Dixy Lee Ray—a lifelong supporter of nuclear power and the last chair of the Atomic Energy Commission before its responsibilities were divided in 1975 between the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—spoke to the group wearing a “Proud of Hanford” cap. “There are enemies committed to the demise of nuclear power,” she warned them. In November 1986, more than 2,000 people marched over the bridge connecting Kennewick to Pasco bearing such signs as “Nuclear Power, Man’s Best Friend” and “The Nuclear Industry is Safer than Farming and Logging.” Their ire extended as well to organizations in the Tri-Cities and elsewhere that were arguing for nuclear disarmament. At a rally World Citizens for Peace held that August in front of the federal building, counterprotesters hung a banner proclaiming “How About Pearl Harbor?” on the opposite side of John Dam Plaza.