The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  The researchers who carried out the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study thought that their results would be welcomed in the Tri-Cities. As the initial draft of their report put it, the results should provide “a substantial degree of reassurance to the population exposed to Hanford radiation that the exposures are not likely to have affected their thyroid or parathyroid health.” Instead, downwinders exploded in anger and frustration. “These ‘reassurances’ were worthless, even insulting, to the memory of loved ones dead of thyroid cancer or suffering with thyroid and parathyroid disease,” wrote Trisha Pritikin, a resident of Richland in the 1950s whose immediate family had been ravaged by thyroid diseases. Making such a statement, she added, “was at best an exercise of very poor judgment and, at worst, just plain callous.” Reviews of the study and subsequent research found slightly more thyroid disease in the area than in other areas, though few populations have been as rigorously screened for thyroid disease as the Hanford downwinders. Later studies also called into question whether the dose reconstructions were accurate, which would increase the findings’ uncertainties. Still, after all the reviews of the initial draft were completed, the study’s final conclusion stood: “These findings do not definitively rule out the possibility that Hanford radiation exposures are associated with an increase in one or more of the outcomes under investigation. However, it does mean that if such associations exist, they were likely too small to detect using the best epidemiologic methods available.”

  Radiation released by Hanford has certainly caused individual tragedies. Some people undoubtedly got sick and died because of excessive radiation they got from Hanford. Native Americans who lived in the area and ate lots of fish from the Columbia may have gotten especially high exposures. Some studies of nuclear workers and other people who are regularly exposed to excess radiation have found somewhat elevated levels of cancer and other diseases. Beyond the study’s antiseptic language are harrowing individual stories of disease, disability, and death.

  But the failure of the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study to find obvious signs of radiation-induced illness is, in retrospect, not surprising. Radiation in high doses, such as from the explosion of an atomic bomb, makes people sick and causes cancers. But radiation in low doses, such as the doses people received from working at Hanford or living nearby, is not a strong carcinogen. In the United States, about 42 percent of people will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 20 percent will die from cancer. In a hypothetical case where all Americans received a one-time but fairly substantial dose of radiation—40 times the average background dose—about 43 percent of Americans would get cancer, according to the most widely accepted interpretation of past epidemiological studies. Furthermore, identifying the additional cancers caused by that sizable dose of radiation would be very difficult. People are exposed to so many carcinogens in their daily lives that separating the signal of cancers induced by low-dose radiation from the noise of other environmentally induced cancers is virtually impossible.

  Fairness requires considering another possibility. Radiation harms a cell by ripping electrons off atoms, which can incapacitate or scramble the functions of a cell and possibly cause it to grow out of control. But cells have evolved biological mechanisms to repair such damage. In addition, cells exist within networks of other cells that can control aberrant cellular behaviors. At low levels of radiation, these repair mechanisms may be able to keep up with the damage caused by radiation and minimize or eliminate health effects. Epidemiologists may have been unable to find markedly elevated levels of disease around Hanford because the radiation released by Hanford has not caused markedly elevated levels of disease.

  Most scientists who study radiation and health do not fear exposures to small doses of radiation, even if they recommend against unnecessary exposures. Hanford workers were mostly the same way. They knew they worked in radioactive environments. Most of the exposures they received were small, though sometimes they took risks to get something done. Most of them considered radiation part of their jobs.

  Those observations accord with the experiences of people who worked on the Manhattan Project. Except for Enrico Fermi, most of the United States’ atomic pioneers did not die prematurely from diseases that might have been caused by radiation. Glenn Seaborg died in 1998, at the age of 86, after suffering a massive stroke while exercising by walking up and down the stairs of the hotel where he was staying. Recognizing his condition as hopeless, he willed himself not to eat and died at home. A few years before his death, his lifelong quest to discover new elements received the ultimate accolade. The element with 106 protons, which he and his colleagues had detected in 1974, was named seaborgium. “This is the greatest honor ever bestowed upon me—even better, I think, than winning the Nobel Prize,” he said. Yet for all the acclaim he received during his life, Seaborg will always be remembered as the discoverer of plutonium. “Do I wish I hadn’t discovered plutonium?” he once said. “No way. Once God had made a world that made bombs possible, there was no option. Both sides were going to make them. But if you ask me, ‘Do I wish the laws of nature were such that you couldn’t make an atomic bomb?’ God, yes.”

  After a productive and peripatetic life that took her from the University of Chicago to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island to the University of Colorado to UCLA, Leona Woods died in 1986 at the age of 67 from a stroke. By that time, she had published more than 200 scientific papers on such varied topics as nuclear engineering, cosmology, and climate change. Her friend Herb Anderson, who had invited her to join the Met Lab in the summer of 1942, died two years later, on the forty-third anniversary of the Trinity test, at age 74. He had suffered for decades from the lung disease berylliosis, which he contracted from breathing in beryllium while making neutron sources with Fermi.

  Leo Szilard died at 66 of a heart attack, though he also had developed bladder cancer by then. His nemesis Leslie Groves died six years later at 73 from heart problems that had plagued him for years.

  Robert Oppenheimer died at 62 from throat cancer, almost certainly caused by his incessant cigarette smoking. Ernest Lawrence died even younger, at age 57, from a combination of colitis and atherosclerosis; element 103 is named lawrencium in his honor. Arthur Compton died at 69 from a cerebral hemorrhage after a distinguished career as chancellor and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. And Raisuke Shirabe, who was standing a half mile from the bomb that detonated over Nagasaki and nearly succumbed to acute radiation poisoning, died in 1989 shortly before his ninetieth birthday.

  Rumors about secret government projects had a tendency to run wild even before the internet was invented, and one was that all the people who witnessed the startup of Chicago Pile 1 beneath the west stands of Stagg Field died early of cancer. On the contrary, more than two-thirds of the 49 people who were there that day lived for at least 36 more years, and more than half lived more than 50 years longer. Of those for whom the cause of death is known, only seven died from cancer, and their cancers were probably not caused by radiation. At least 13 of the people who were with Enrico Fermi that freezing cold day in Chicago died in their nineties.

  After the death of Tom Deen from myelodysplastic syndrome, Carolyn and the rest of her family decided not to file a lawsuit seeking damages. “I didn’t want their blood money,” Carolyn said. After Carolyn’s mother died, she moved back into the family house, on Cedar Street in Richland, while continuing to work at Columbia Basin Community College as a trainer of elementary school teachers.

  A few years later, a close relative of Carolyn’s who had worked at Hanford contracted a cancer sometimes caused by exposure to radioactivity and other toxins. So far, treatment appears to have stemmed the progression of his disease.

  IN THE 1980S, when she was 38 years old, Susan Leckband moved from Iowa to Richland to go to work for a small long-distance telephone company. She immediately fell in love with the stark natural beauty of her new home: the sympho
nic skies, awash in color and light; the nearby hills and more distant mountains, brown most of the year but a deep mossy green after the rains of winter; the magic blue ribbon of the Columbia River, a crease in the desert that has been attracting people to the area for millennia. A few years later, Leckband applied for a job at Hanford. She did not have a college degree, but she soon was hired and began acquiring jobs of increasing responsibility. She did administrative work involving the Plutonium Finishing Plant in the 200 area, the PUREX separation facility, the water-filled basins that held the spent fuel from the K Reactors. Supervisors recognized her competence and rewarded her for it.

  In 1993, Hanford held a celebration to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the plant, and Leckband volunteered to help re-create a mess-hall dinner. The auditorium at the Benton County fairgrounds was decorated with World War II posters, and servers ran platters piled high with food to tables of old men and women who had arrived at Hanford a half-century earlier. “I was so moved by their patriotism, their love of their country,” Leckband recalled. “They moved away from comfortable homes to live in conditions that most of us would consider worse than camping.”

  She got interested in an unusual institution that marked the transition from plutonium production to cleanup at Hanford. The Tri-Party Agreement signed by the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington State Department of Ecology led in 1995 to the creation of a Hanford Advisory Board that would produce guidance for each of the three agencies. An intriguing experiment in civic engagement, the board contains seats for people representing local and state governments, business interests, the Hanford workforce, environmental organizations, public health agencies, tribal governments, universities, and the public at large. Despite its diversity of interests, the board operates by consensus. On the rare occasions where it cannot reach agreement, it conducts what it calls a sounding board to gather and make public the views of its members.

  Leckband applied for the board position designated for a “non-union, non-management” member and was selected in 1997. Since 2002, she has been either vice chair or chair of the board. She runs tight meetings with strict rules of engagement. Her number-one rule is that people will speak civilly to each other, even when they disagree. “People are passionate. I respect diverse opinions. But it’s my job to get the outcome we really want, which is consensus.”

  Since its establishment, the Hanford Advisory Board has issued more than 300 consensus statements on everything from the leaking waste tanks to budget priorities for the cleanup to worker safety to the long-term stewardship of Hanford’s land. “Sometimes it’s painful,” Leckband said. “Having someone say, ‘Your baby is ugly,’ that can cause friction. Some officials are not comfortable with the public pushing back, because their boss is pushing on them. We on the board need to respect both sides. But our job is to say that this is what the public needs.”

  In recent years the board’s greatest concern has been the amount of work that remains to clean up Hanford, despite the money the federal government and taxpayers have already devoted to the task. The leaders of the Manhattan Project did not devote much thought to the mess they were creating. They had a war to win; other people could worry about the environment later. Later, the companies that operated Hanford during the Cold War were more concerned with producing plutonium than disposing of wastes properly. Now the bill has come due—and it is immense. The Department of Energy has calculated that cleaning up Hanford will cost at least $300 billion and possibly more than $600 billion, much more than the cost of building and operating Hanford throughout its history. Today the federal government is spending about $2.5 billion a year to clean up Hanford. In one of its guidance documents, the Hanford Advisory Board observed that funding will need to increase to more than $9 billion a year to get the job done. This seems unlikely given the federal government’s many other obligations.

  The government has made significant progress on the cleanup, despite how far it still has to go. Six of the nine reactors have been cocooned, and two more will be soon. Contractors have dug up old dumps and contaminated soils and have moved the wastes to a huge landfill near the separation plants, where the radioactive byproducts of Hanford’s history can be isolated and monitored. Gigantic pump-and-treat stations scattered across the site lift water from below ground, remove contaminants that can go into landfills, and reinject the clean water back into the subsurface. Except for a few troublesome plumes and contaminants, the treatment plants have largely stemmed the flow of radioactive and chemical toxins toward the Columbia.

  But the hardest and most expensive cleanup tasks are just getting started. In particular, the high-level radioactive wastes generated during the Manhattan Project and Cold War continue to sit in the single-shelled and double-shelled tanks around the canyon buildings. The plan has been to mix the waste with glass flakes, heat the mixture, and send the resulting glass logs to a high-level waste repository. But this vitrification technology has been expensive and hard to develop, and the Department of Energy and its contractors have spent billions of dollars on botched attempts to get vitrification to work. Furthermore, the vitrified waste has no place to go, since the United States has not yet designated a place to dispose of its high-level military and civilian nuclear wastes. Even after the waste is vitrified, it will need to be stored on site until a repository is available.

  Most recently, the Department of Energy has proposed to vitrify most but not all of the wastes from the tanks and then reclassify the remaining hard-to-remove waste as low-level waste, after which it would fill the tanks with grout, put a fence around the site, and try to keep people away far into the future. Officials and advocates from Washington and Oregon, where hundreds of thousands of people live downriver from Hanford, have strenuously objected. Over the years, they point out, rainwater will penetrate the tanks, leach through the grout, and carry radionuclides toward the river. Leaving waste in the tanks would essentially create a shallow high-level nuclear waste repository at Hanford, saddling the region with a mess that the federal government has vowed, ever since World War II, to rectify.

  Leckband wants what other people in the Pacific Northwest want—for the federal government to fulfill its promises. She wants her children and grandchildren to be able to hike and ride their bikes along the river, past the shuttered reactors and separation plants, without worrying about radioactivity in the water, soil, or wind-blown dust. She wants the local tribes, several of which are represented on the Hanford Advisory Board, to regain access to the cultural sites and traditional hunting and fishing grounds that they have been guaranteed in treaties. Several of the facilities left at Hanford remain extremely dangerous. A collapsed waste tank, a fire, an earthquake—many kinds of disasters could spew radioactivity across the landscape. Preventing such catastrophes will require careful planning, empowered workers, and increased funding.

  Ironically, the Hanford nuclear reservation is one of the best-preserved regions in all of eastern Washington. The areas associated with the reactors and separation plants take up just a small part of the overall site, which was half the size of Rhode Island when it was established. The rest of the land has gone largely untouched since Matthias flew over Richland on that first day of winter in 1942. A proposal to build a dam near the Tri-Cities was scuttled when people observed that the resulting reservoir would raise the water table beneath Hanford’s wastes. As a result, the 50-mile stretch of the Columbia that runs through Hanford is the last free-flowing section of the river from the Canadian border almost to Portland, where Lewis and Clark noticed the tides of the Pacific beginning to lift their canoes. In 2000, President Bill Clinton preserved almost half of the reservation as the Hanford Reach National Monument. Today people can hike on the chalky white cliffs across the Columbia from the cocooned reactors and watch bald eagles soar above the wind-rippled river.

  As late as the 1960s, the population of the Tri-Cities area was just 50,000 people. Today, more than 300,000 live ther
e, and the region is booming. People from the soggy western side of the state have retired there, attracted by its sunshine and conservative politics. The economy is strong, partly because of the cleanup funds flowing to the region. Almost four thousand people work at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory just north of Richland on everything from ecosystem science to energy efficiency to nuclear nonproliferation. A few miles northwest of the lab, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory searches the cosmos for signals from colliding black holes and neutron stars. Perhaps most surprising to people who have lived in the region for decades, the barren hillsides around the Tri-Cities, which are at about the same latitude as central France, have proven ideal for growing grapes. Today, on weekends, the area is packed with people who have come to the Tri-Cities to sample some of the world’s best wines.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Mitsugi Moriguchi’s mother decided that she needed to get her children as far away from the city as possible. The Mitsubishi shipyards in Nagasaki had become a target of conventional US bombers, and the family lived nearby. In 1945, Mitsugi was eight years old. His oldest brother was in the military, another brother and a sister were middle-schoolers and therefore required to work in munitions factories, an older sister was in the sixth grade, and a younger brother was in the first grade. Many of the families near them were evacuating to the northern part of the Urakami Valley, but Mitsugi’s mother did not think that was far enough away. She decided, instead, to take her three youngest children into the countryside—she knew that she would have to leave her middle-schoolers behind, since they could not be excused from their factory jobs. Three days before the bombing, Mitsugi, his two siblings, and his mother got onto a train. When they got off they were 25 miles away from the city.