The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  The link between Hanford and health effects has never been as clear-cut as many books and magazine articles have made it out to be. For one thing, many farmers and residents of the Tri-Cities knew that radiation was far from the only health hazard they faced. A familiar and entertaining sight in eastern Washington in those days was a single-engine plane swooping a few feet above a field of deep green crops to lay down a thin mist of pesticides. In the winter, when temperature inversions trapped pollutants close to the ground, the air turned brown and acrid from fertilizer plant emissions. Most farmers around the Tri-Cities got their irrigation water from the same place Hanford got its electricity—Grand Coulee Dam a hundred miles to the north. But irrigating the desert brought with it a plague of mosquitoes. To tamp down the infestation, trucks used to roll through the streets of eastern Washington towns emitting thick billows of DDT. Kathleen’s parents were among the few who did not let their children ride their bicycles behind the foggers and breathe deep the clouds of sickly sweet pesticides.

  The idea that Hanford was making people sick ran up against another problem. The Tri-Cities were full of people who were healthy, active, and playing golf well into their 80s. A common rejoinder to a comment about Hanford’s health effects was: “Look at me, I’ve lived here my whole life and I’m fine.” Careful study of Hanford workers did not find elevated rates of disease. On the contrary, because Hanford tended to hire healthy young people and pay them well, they suffered from fewer illnesses than did the average American. Long-range studies going all the way back to the Manhattan Project similarly could not find elevated cancer rates, nor could studies of populations living nearby. Exposure to Hanford’s radiation might have affected some people, but the plant was not causing an epidemic of radiation-induced illnesses.

  In 1986 the controversy over possible health effects blew up. That February, the Department of Energy released 19,000 pages of documents describing the history of Hanford’s operations—part of a campaign by the department to quell continuing complaints about the plant. Government scientists and archivists had reviewed the papers to make sure that they would not reveal any secrets or cast Hanford in a bad light. Still, the documents showed that Hanford had released far more radioactivity into the air, water, and soil than outsiders had known. An example that made headlines across the Pacific Northwest was the Green Run. In December 1949, three months after the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, Hanford operators at the T Plant dissolved a ton of irradiated fuel elements just 14 days after they left the reactors. The radioactive iodine and xenon from the fuel elements spewed into the atmosphere, with planes and ground-based observers tracking the radioactive cloud. The idea was to figure out how much plutonium the Soviet Union was processing, under the assumption that the Soviet equivalent of Hanford had been dissolving green fuel to produce a bomb as soon as possible. But it rained on the day of the Green Run, and the wind shifted erratically, making the experiment hard to interpret. Meanwhile, radioactive iodine fell on plants, livestock, and people throughout eastern Washington State.

  In 1987 the Department of Energy released a second batch of historical documents, just about the time it was becoming obvious that the N Reactor would never operate again. Newspaper and television reports were once more full of stories about Hanford’s radioactive releases. A few years later, the first lawsuits were filed seeking damages for people who said they had been harmed by Hanford’s emissions. Thousands more followed.

  IN 1987, AT THE AGE of 58, Carolyn’s father, Tom Deen, started feeling dizzy and tired. A local doctor diagnosed anemia, but when the usual treatment failed, he went to see a doctor at the University of Washington in Seattle. In early 1988, he received a new diagnosis: myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer in which blood cells do not mature properly. Only about one person in 25,000 contracts the syndrome, usually around age 70, and one of the risk factors is exposure to radiation. He began receiving transfusions of blood, but he was often too weak to leave the house. He tried an experimental treatment, but it was painful, had uncomfortable side effects, and did not seem to make a difference. On November 1, 1988, at the age of 59, with his wife, daughter, and two sons at his side, he died. He rarely said anything negative about the industry in which he had worked his whole adult life. But just before his death he told Carolyn that maybe he had trusted the wrong people.

  Carolyn’s lifelong friend Kathleen had gotten married by this time, to Steve Flenniken, and together they had moved to the wet, western side of Washington State. As they began raising a family, Kathleen took a writing class, fell in love with poetry, and began writing poems. Later she wrote a poem about Carolyn’s father:

  To Carolyn’s Father

  —Thomas Jerry Deen, 1929–1988

  On the morning I got plucked out of third grade

  by Principal Wellman because I’d written on command

  an impassioned letter for the life of our nuclear plants

  that the government threatened to shut down

  and I put on my rabbit-trimmed green plaid coat

  because it was cold and I’d be on the televised news

  overseeing delivery of several hundred pounds of mail

  onto an airplane bound for Washington DC addressed

  to President Nixon who obviously didn’t care about your job

  at the same time inside your marrow

  blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next

  a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation

  as you milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down

  train cars or reported to B reactor for a quick run-in-

  run-out and by that morning Mr. Deen

  the poisoning of your blood had already begun.

  Chapter 23

  REMEMBERING

  DEL BALLARD WAS OUTRAGED. THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY WAS proposing to tear down the B Reactor. Didn’t they know what that facility represented? Tearing down the B Reactor would be like tearing down the Great Wall of China, or Stonehenge, or the Taj Mahal. It was an irreplaceable artifact, a dividing line in history, an object that explained how today’s world came to be.

  Admittedly, the Department of Energy had its hands full. In 1989, it had signed an agreement with the State of Washington and the US Environmental Protection Agency, known informally as the Tri-Party Agreement, that required the department to clean up Hanford. By then, plutonium production at Hanford was over forever. But the site still had thousands of aboveground structures and buried waste dumps containing radioactive materials, along with its tanks of high-level wastes and contaminated soils. The department was estimating that the cleanup would take 30 years and cost $50 billion. From today’s perspective, those estimates are laughably naïve.

  Department of Energy managers had hard decisions to make. One was what to do with the nine shut-down reactors that lined the right bank of the Columbia River (technically, the N Reactor was still on standby, but it was permanently closed in 1991). The department could hire contractors to tear down the reactors and bury the pieces in Hanford’s desert soils. It could seal up the reactors to let their radioactivity decay and demolish them sometime in the future. Or it could bury them in place, creating immense concrete sarcophagi scattered across the desert as permanent memorials to the dawn of the atomic age. But, as an early environmental impact statement from the Department of Energy put it, “no future long-term use of any of the [reactors] has been identified by the DOE.” In other words, they were all slated for destruction.

  In the summer of 1991, Ballard joined with a group of other Hanford supporters—including Jim Stoffels, who was as dedicated to preserving the B Reactor as he was to nuclear disarmament—to officially form the B Reactor Museum Association, or BRMA. At first the group’s goal was simply to demonstrate that the reactor was a historic structure and should be preserved, and the next year they succeeded in placing it on the National Register of Historic Places. But that could not protect it from the Department of Energy’s wrecking ball. They
needed to get politicians involved.

  At that time, the representative of the district that included the Tri-Cities was Sid Morrison, the scion of a fruit-growing family from nearby Zillah who served first in the Washington State legislature and then in the US Congress. Morrison was interested in making the reactor into a museum. He had fought hard over the past decade to keep federal funds flowing to Hanford. A preserved B Reactor could remind people of everything that had happened there.

  Officials from the Department of Energy were resolutely not interested. “We’re not in the museum business,” they repeatedly told the members of the B Reactor Museum Association. Still, the department did not actively undermine the association’s goals. In 1992, it decided to “cocoon” the reactors by enclosing them in concrete walls and metal roofs for up to 75 years, after which they could be torn down and buried. But the department always placed the B Reactor at the end of the cocooning list to give Ballard and his colleagues time to maneuver. “No one’s heart at DOE was in tearing down the B Reactor,” says Colleen French, a DOE manager who has long championed the reactor’s preservation.

  The members of the B Reactor Museum Association knew they needed some other organization to partner with the Department of Energy if the reactor was to be opened to the public. Some thought a local museum could do it, but Ballard disagreed. The two organizations were too dissimilar. Only one institution could match the Department of Energy’s clout, he thought—the National Park Service.

  The idea seemed like a nonstarter. The Park Service had never partnered with the Department of Energy on a preservation project. Though it had experience establishing parks on controversial subjects—like the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in northern California—the Manhattan Project would be by far its most controversial undertaking. Just how controversial was suggested by the experiences of another federal agency. In the early 1990s, for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian Institution made plans to display the Enola Gay at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, with an accompanying exhibit that would explore the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan and display artifacts from the bombed cities. The resulting fracas was the worst in the Smithsonian’s history. Attacked by veterans’ groups, politicians, and the media, the proposed exhibit soon collapsed. In the end, the display included only the fuselage of the Enola Gay, some videotaped interviews with members of the crew, and a history of the B-29 fleet.

  The members of the B Reactor Museum Association knew that displaying the reactor would stir strong emotions. It was a symbol not just of technological triumph but of the threat of nuclear annihilation. They nevertheless persevered, despite the Enola Gay debacle. By the mid-1990s, Morrison had given up his seat in Congress to run unsuccessfully for governor of Washington State. The new congressman representing the Tri-Cities was Doc Hastings, who had owned and run a paper-supply company in Pasco before entering politics. Hastings was a master of the legislative process. In 2003, he managed to get legislation passed that directed the Park Service to study the feasibility of protecting Manhattan Project sites. Astoundingly, the draft study recommended that only the Los Alamos laboratory be made a fully managed park. Hastings went back to work. By the time the document was revised, the proposed park included all three of the major Manhattan Project sites—Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford.

  Such ideas take a long time to gestate and have many midwives. The Atomic Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, DC, dedicated to preserving the history of the Manhattan Project and its legacy, made the creation of a national park its primary goal. Washington State’s two senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, worked within Congress to advance the idea, with Cantwell’s office drafting the initial legislation. The renowned historian of the nuclear age Richard Rhodes gave the keynote address at the sixtieth anniversary commemoration of the B Reactor. “You have, here in your midst, one of the world’s most significant historical sites, a place where work was done that changed the human world forever,” he told his enthusiastic Tri-Cities audience. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy cleaned up the B Reactor so that it was safe to enter, and the B Reactor Museum Association began taking people on public tours of the facility.

  In 2013, unsuccessfully, and then again in 2014, Hastings, with support from the Tennessee, New Mexico, and Washington congressional delegations, introduced a bill to create a Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Hastings was retiring from the House in 2014, which gave the bill a momentum it would not have otherwise, and he chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, which had jurisdiction over the national parks. Included in the National Defense Authorization Act, the provision to establish the park passed on December 12, and President Obama signed it into law on December 19. The next year, the Department of Energy and the National Park Service signed a memorandum of agreement for joint management of the new park. The Energy Department continues to own and operate the three sites, but it agreed to facilitate public access to facilities in the park. The National Park Service assumed the job of interpreting the story of the Manhattan Project for the public and providing visitor services at the three locations.

  Many questions continue to surround the park. Whose stories will it emphasize—those of the triumphant scientists and engineers who designed the bombs, those of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project, or those of the people against whom the bombs were used? Will it tell the stories of the people living near Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Hanford who claimed they were harmed by emissions from the facilities? What will it say about the radioactive wastes left behind and the many billions of taxpayer dollars that are still required to clean them up?

  THE YEAR AFTER the Manhattan Project National Historical Park was created, the last of the lawsuits filed by people claiming that Hanford had harmed their health were finally resolved. Few of the downwinders were satisfied with the results. Some got cash settlements, but usually for less than they expected or needed. Others had their lawsuits dismissed or died before their cases were decided. The law firms that the government hired to defend itself made tens of millions of dollars—substantially more than the plaintiffs received.

  The plaintiffs had always faced a difficult task. They had to prove that they would not have gotten sick if they had not been exposed to Hanford’s radiation—in other words, that their exposure to excess radiation caused their cancers. But a cancer caused by radiation does not look different from a cancer caused by a carcinogenic chemical, by a genetic predisposition to cancer, or by bad luck. Some cancers are more common among people who have been exposed to radiation, but they occur as well in people who have not been exposed to radiation. Furthermore, everyone is exposed to radiation all the time—from the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the objects around us, the medical procedures we undergo, even from outer space. To prove that excess radiation from Hanford caused particular illnesses required some sort of scientific evidence. That evidence could come partly from animal studies, but other animals are not perfect models for humans. No, the bulk of the evidence would have to come from epidemiology—the study of the health of large groups of people exposed to toxic or infectious agents.

  Even before the first lawsuits were filed, just such a study was under way. In 1986, after the Department of Energy’s release of documents describing Hanford’s history, the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control convened a group of researchers to talk about Hanford’s possible effects on health. That review led to an $18 million initiative to determine, once and for all, if Hanford’s radiation was responsible for some of the cancers and other illnesses of people living nearby. The researchers who led the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study, as it was called, decided to concentrate on the disease that should be easiest to find among downwinders. From 1944 through 1948, when filters were installed, and in lesser amounts thereafter, radioactive iodine-131—the radioisotope discovered by Glenn Seaborg a
nd John Livingood back in 1938—billowed from the stacks next to the canyon plants whenever irradiated fuel elements were dissolved. Borne downwind, this iodine fell on vegetation, fruits, and vegetables. Cows and goats grazed on the vegetation, and the iodine passed into their milk. People in the area drank the milk and ate local fruits and vegetables. The iodine-131 concentrated in their thyroids, the butterfly-shaped gland in the neck that uses iodine-containing hormones to regulate growth and metabolism. There the radioiodine could irradiate thyroid cells and cause conditions ranging from benign nodules to cancer. Harmful effects are especially notable in children, since they drink more milk than other people and their thyroids are still growing. The researchers therefore decided to focus on people who grew up downwind from Hanford during the years of highest iodine releases.

  Working with birth certificates from the area, the researchers identified more than 3,400 people who were born to mothers in seven Washington State counties between 1940 and 1946. They then gathered as much information as they could about the sources of the milk, water, and foods those people consumed. Reconstructing what someone ate and drank decades before is not easy, but the researchers were confident that they had estimated the doses within a factor of two or three. They then gave the study participants a thorough diagnostic evaluation for thyroid disease. By this time, other researchers had found higher rates of thyroid disease in residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki exposed to the atomic bombs, in children downwind from Chernobyl, and in people who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site. Leaders of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study expected to find a similar effect in the population they were studying.

  In 1999, they released a draft of their report to the public. Despite their best efforts, they could find no relationship between the doses of radioactive iodine people received and thyroid disease. In other words, people who were exposed to more radiation, according to their reconstructed doses, were not more likely to have a diseased thyroid. The researchers did find plenty of people with thyroid disease, but they concluded that the rates were not markedly higher around Hanford than in other areas.