Downwinders Left Out 70th Anniversary of Plutonium Central

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The Hanford Files — Downwinders Left Out of the 70th Anniversary of Plutonium Central
by Paul Haeder / September 10th, 2013

We are at a point where we try so hard to shunt our human stupidity, forgo any foresight, embrace and honor our consumer plague and believe the stories in our heads that somehow this point of methane explosion – a world without ICE — human population blight, economic and ecological divisions and degradations somehow are just blips in the scheme of things.

A good movie, an in-your-face iron chef cooking show, some silly jive about I Have a Dream is So Coming True lol, and a few milliseconds of philanthropy in between a billion waking hours surfing and porning and blathering on the Internet and listening or reading (do we still do that as a species) to pundits, great pretenders and some great white hope nonsense from the Zionist-Cristo-Allah genetic defects, well, all of that, completely pimped by our flasher-exhibitionist-voyeur modern-post-modern pre-collapse sentient selves is pushing us to the brink of collapse fatigue, analysis paralysis and the will of the coders.

Amazing really how hubris, the skilled believers in magical thinking, and the backers of technology as savior and ecopornography as substitute for hard work and conservation and pulling back on EVERYTHING we smear on earth as part of the West’s Killing Machine of Economic and Military Superiority, and social Darwinism, thrown in, around the whirl of abstractions and distractions that is the message of the medium, how it all is just one clot on humankind’s collective brain. It really just comes from the endless waste of human capital and grenade-tossing at our community cohesion.

All that time spent on the killing in Syria, the Killing Obama in Chief, and oh the irony that Japan okays a military strike by Obama on Syria – now what clean and non-toxic and chemical-free weaponry might that be that the US of A deploys as a retort to the chemical sprays supposedly delivered by Syrian X and Syrian Y? – when that country, Japan, has unleashed a truly despicable force of radioactive isotopes and then more with bleeding millions of gallons of “hot” water into the oceans for all species to love and see and bio accumulate. Better living through nuclear chemistry, they say.



I’m working on the Hanford story, now 70 years old, a celebration coming up in October — read, c-e-l-e-bray-tion for the breeders that gave us some of the plutonium that fueled the 70,000 war heads in the USA’s arsenal of chemical weapons on steroids. Oh, yeah, made twice as much plutonium than was used in war heads. Rods sent to Korea, then, well, you get the picture. Atomic Age USA. It’s in the Tri-Cities, Eastern Washington, on the Columbia River, right there where water-water-water could be used to cool the radioactive muck. The place is desert, yes, in WASHINGTON state, the evergreen state. Many indigenous tribes used to use/still use the fish ( incredible salmon BEFORE dams, pollution, over-fishing), the roots, the berries and the air for their benedictions. Out in the middle of white man’s nowhere, for the secrecy and for the monkish nature of governments making false dichotomies around atoms for peace.

They kicked farmers off the land in 1943, with eminent domain buy outs. The people scattered, and the displaced farmers who got lucky and found “new” land had to pay out the nose as land prices spiked. What peace. Over a 177 leaking tanks, and millions of gallons of hot-hot and corrosive muck moving into groundwater, into soil. Forget about the downwinder aspect of this mess. There’s a generating plant on the spot where the big bang plutonium was manufactured to bomb the hell out of Japan, one way or another, and there were all sorts of “others” in attacking children and adults and civilians.

There are over 40 miles of unlined trenches with radioactive and chemical wastes – picture I-90 as a trench fifty feet deep filled with radioactive wastes from Spokane to Ritzville, or I-5 from Seattle to Marysville. Then picture your federal government refusing to do anything to clean it up. — Gerry Pollet, JD; executive director, Heart of America Northwest

I’m just letting off steam, sort of, as a precursor to a news article I am finishing up and writing. Sort of the cathartic emissions for writing in a world of shifting baselines, agnotology and dumbdowning and anti-journalism. But get this – Oct. 2 pomp and circumstance by the engineers, by the Department of Energy, by the welfare giant contractors eating off the public coffers – GE, Fluor, Bechtel, et al, and the city fathers of Richland and Kennewick and Pasco, the Tri-Cities, who have benefited from the arid lands of this sagebrush place of winds and permanent drought – they are not including the downwinders, some two million affected by the Iodine-131 releases into the atmosphere.

Yep, I’ve been talking with historians, downwinders, environmental lawyers, and many more. People with the Hanford necklace – scars from the thyroidectomy to take out cancerous and blown out thyroids. It’s a story of know-it-all-scientists, and, really, government collusion, secrecy, and the Radiation Warfare Project, taken over by DARPA.

The hot milk study, the scientists and overseers knew about. You know, grass and hay touched with the radioactive Iodine 131 transmitted via vapors from the nuke facility. Through the winds, and rains and snow concentrated it in hot spots, and, lo and behold, cows eat the hay and the milk accumulated the I-131. Hell, there were milk trains, twice a week, from Pasco to Spokane. The milk the Richland folk drank came from Wisconsin. Nothing like a giant guinea pig experiment. Except, downwinders are dying, are old, and are sick. And worn down by the Michael Clayton rule of law – we the taxpayers are footing the bill for the legal fees of the downwinder lawyers – up to $69 million thus far. No payouts for folk who have seen entire families die of cancers and autoimmune diseases, and, well, look it up – all the maladies caused by radionuclides.

Forget about DNA mutations one, two- four generations down the line. So, in the end, some of these people, AKA whistleblowers, conspiracy nuts who are in fact sane, all these folk who have been screwed by scientists, academics, city, county and federal officials, by the corporations, by the Curies hitting them, they are the heroes in some sense. I try to capture some of the struggle.

Of course,go back 70 years to Eastern Washington along the Columbia River, called the Mid-Columbia Valley: small farms and communities like White Bluffs, Richland and Hanford, and down the way the towns like Mesa where Tom Bailie (one of my sources) grew up and worked as a dryland farmer, or Prosser. Go back to the 1800s and you see a land exclusively made up of Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla people.

I’ll post the story once it gets published, but I will continue to cover education from this angle – oral histories, and ground truthing. Unfortunately, some of the eugenics greenie weenies (More Trees, Less People) see nuclear as a future savior for a very screwed up and out of balance globe of the few haves who have it all and the haves not who have not a thing other than agency in some cases, minds and the willingness to go against the grain of a culture of financial syphilitics going after every rotten dime and dollar they can find their time to lick up.

Bizarre, really, the greenie weenies thinking a solution to human population exponential growth is somehow closer than conservation, reducing, death of consumerism, death of capitalism, death to transnational economic hitmen partnerships, and the reverse of environmental fortunes in favor of NATURE. They want big energy and big construction and big surveillance and big money to own it all – nukes, us, our seven generations down the line.

Every decision that we make relates to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?
– Chief Oren Lyons, Haudenosaunee (Six Nations).

Note: I will also be reviewing Kate Brown’s book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (See her story: one chapter).

Arid Lands, the film about the place and people there in and around Hanford.

See Trisha Thompson Pritikin’s web site, a real fighter, and downwinder.

The Hanford Challenge.
For my poem on the watch painters, circa 1920s, who painted our watches with radium zinc -based paints, go to the DV Poetry Page. This poem first printed in Crosscurrents around 2008.

See the history of the Radium Girls here and here.

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Hanford Engineer Works (Hanford, WA)
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Hanford Engineeer Works (Site "W") Site Selection

Moving the pilot plutonium plant to Oak Ridge left too little room for the full-scale production plant at the X-10 site and also left too little generating power for yet another major facility. Furthermore, the site was uncomfortably close to Knoxville should a major catastrophe occur. Thus the search for an alternate location for the full-scale plutonium facilities began soon after DuPont joined the production team. Compton's scientists needed an area of approximately 225 square miles. Three or four pile reactors and one or two chemical separation complexes would be at least a mile apart for security and safety purposes, while nothing would be allowed within four miles of the separation complexes for fear of radioactive accidents. All towns, highways, rail lines, and laboratories would be several miles further away.

December 16, 1942 found Col. Franklin T. Matthias of Groves' staff and two DuPont engineers headed for the Pacific Northwest and southern California to investigate possible production sites. Of the possible sites available, none had a better combination of isolation, long construction season, and abundant water for hydroelectric power than those found along the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. After viewing six locations in Washington, Oregon and California, the group agreed that the area around Hanford, Washington, best met the criteria established by the Met Lab scientists and DuPont engineers.

The Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams offered substantial hydroelectric power, while the flat but rocky terrain would provide excellent support for the massive plutonium production buildings. The ample site of nearly 500,000 acres was far enough inland to meet security requirements, while existing transportation facilities could quickly be improved and labor was readily available. Pleased with the committee's unanimous report, Groves accepted its recommendation and authorized the establishment of the Hanford Engineer Works, codenamed Site W.

Now that DuPont would be building the plutonium production complex in the Northwest, Compton saw no reason for any pile facilities at Oak Ridge and proposed to conduct Met Lab research in either Chicago or Argonne. DuPont on the other hand, continued to support a semi-works at Oak Ridge and asked the Met Lab scientists to operate it. Compton demurred on the grounds he did not have sufficient technical staff, but he was also reluctant because his scientists were complaining that their laboratory was becoming little more than a subsidiary of DuPont. In the end, Compton knew the Met Lab would have to support DuPont, which simply did not have sufficient expertise to operate the semi-works on its own. The University of Chicago administration supported Compton's decision in early March.

Colonel Matthias returned to the Hanford area to set up a temporary office on February 22, 1943. His orders were to purchase half a million acres in and around the Hanford-Pasco-White Bluffs area, a sparsely populated region where sheep ranching and farming were the primary economic activities. Many of the landowners rejected initial offers on their land and took the Army to court seeking more acceptable appraisals. Matthias adopted a strategy of settling out of court to save time, time being a more important commodity than money to the Manhattan Project.

Matthias received his major assignment in late March of 1943. The three water-cooled piles, designated by the letters B, D, and F, would be built about six miles apart on the south bank of the Columbia River. The four chemical separation plants , built in pairs, would be nearly ten miles south of the piles, while a facility to produce uranium slugs and perform tests would be approximately twenty miles southeast of the separation plants near Richland, WA. Temporary quarters for more than 45,000 construction workers would be put up in Hanford, while permanent facilities for other personnel would be located down the road in Richland, safely removed from the production and separation plants.

During the summer of 1943, Hanford became the Manhattan Project's newest boomtown. Thousands of workers poured into the town, many of them to leave in discontent. Well situated from a logistical point of view, Hanford was a sea of tents and barracks where workers had little to do and nowhere to go. DuPont and the Army coordinated efforts to recruit laborers from all over the country for Hanford, but even with a relative labor surplus in the Pacific Northwest, shortages plagued the project. Conditions improved significantly during the second half of the year, with the addition of recreational facilities, higher pay, and better overall services for Hanford's population, which reached 50,000 by the summer of 1944. To many, Hanford still resembled the frontier and mining towns once common in the west, but the rate of worker turnover dropped substantially.

The Giant "Piles" at Hanford

As stated previously, there were to be three nuclear reactors (Piles) built at Hanford. They were to be designated as Piles B, D and F.

Groundbreaking for the water-cooling plant for the 100-B pile, the westernmost of the three, took place on August 27, 1943, less than two weeks before Italy's surrender to the Allies. Work on the pile itself began in February 1944, with the base and shield being completed by mid-May. It took another month to place the graphite pile and install the top shield and two more months to wire and pipe the pile and connect it to the various monitoring and remote control devices.

Once operational, uranium slugs, produced at a nearby facility, would drop into water pools behind the 100-B Pile after being irradiated. From these pools, the highly-radioactive slugs would be moved by remote-controlled rail cars to a storage facility five miles away. Next they would make their way to their final destination at one of the two enormous chemical separation locations, designated 200-West and 200-East. 200-West was comprised of two separation facilities, the T and U units, while a single plant, the B unit, made up the 200-East complex. (A planned fourth separation plant at 200-East was never built).

With the abandonment of the "plutonium gun bomb" in July 1944, planning at Hanford became much more complicated. Pile 100-B was almost complete, as was the first chemical separation plant (T Unit), while Pile D was at the halfway point. Pile F was not yet under construction. If the newly theoretical implosion devices using plutonium could be developed at Los Alamos, the three piles would probably produce enough plutonium for the weapons required, but as yet no one was sure of the amount needed.

Excitement mounted at Hanford as the date for pile start-up approached. Enrico Fermi placed the first uranium slug in pile 100-B on September 13, 1944. Final checks on the pile had been uneventful. The scientists could only hope that they were accurate, since once the pile was operational the intense radioactivity would make maintenance of many components impossible. Loading slugs and taking measurements took a full two weeks. From just after midnight until approximately 3:00 a.m. on September 27, the pile ran without incident at a power level higher than any previous chain reaction (though only at a fraction of design capacity). The operators were elated, but their excitement turned to astonishment when the power level began falling after three hours. It fell continuously until the pile ceased operating entirely on the evening of the 28th. By the next morning the reaction began again, reached the previous day's level, then dropped.

Chemical Separation of Plutonium

In early 1944, DuPont, the operating contractor at Hanford, foresaw the need for four chemical separation facilities. These facilities, designated the T and U plants at location 200-West and the B and C plants at location 200-East (the C plant was never built), would be located approximately ten miles south of the reactors.

The separation facilities at Hanford were massive scaled-up versions of the semi-works at Oak Ridge, each containing separation and concentration buildings in addition to ventilation (to eliminate radioactive and poisonous gases) and waste storage areas. Labor shortages and lack of final blueprints forced DuPont to stop work on the 200 areas in the summer of 1943 and concentrate its forces on 100-B, with the result that 1943 construction progress on chemical separation was limited to digging two huge holes in the ground.

Both 221T and 221U, the chemical separation buildings in the 200-West complex, were finished by December 1944. 221B, the counterpart in 200-East, was completed in the spring of 1945. Nicknamed "Queen Mary's" by the workers who built them, the separation buildings were awesome canyon-like structures 800 feet long, 65 feet wide, and 80 feet high containing forty huge process pools. The interior had an eerie quality as operators behind thick concrete shielding manipulated remote control equipment by looking through television monitors and periscopes from an upper gallery. Even with massive concrete lids on the process pools, precautions against radiation exposure were necessary and influenced all aspects of plant design.

Chemical Concentration and Isolation of Plutonium

Construction of the chemical concentration buildings (224-T, U, & B) was a less daunting task because relatively little radioactivity was involved, and the work was not started until very late 1944. The 200-West units were finished in early October, the East unit in February 1945.

In the Queen Mary's, bismuth phosphate carried the plutonium through the long succession of process pools. The concentration stage was designed to separate the two chemicals. The normal relationship between pilot plant and production plant was realized when the Oak Ridge pilot plant reported that bismuth phosphate was not suitable for the concentration process but that Glenn Seaborg's original choice, lanthanum fluoride, worked quite well. Hanford, accordingly, incorporated this suggestion into the concentration facilities.

The final step in plutonium extraction was isolation, performed in a more typical laboratory setting with little radiation present. Here Perlman's earlier research on the peroxide method paid off and was applied to produce pure plutonium nitrate. The nitrate solution was then transported to Los Alamos where it was converted to metal.

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[Iamwhomiam]

Here's a monster of an article on Hanford that's much to long for posting. Hanford; Lethal And Leaking; A Race To Armageddon? 60 Minutes

The article features a video of Dr. Helen Caldicott speaking about Hanford, another excerpted from the 60 Minutes show and has dozens of links to referenced materials.

While we all should be concerned about what is transpiring at Fukushima and that it will certainly worsen, the ice wall a time and resource-wasting effort in futility at best, we all should be aware of the most dangerous conditions now existing at Hanford, WA and West Valley, N.Y. (and at every of our 104 nuclear reactors)

Both sites have long suffered from the releases of highly radioactive materials, like Strontium 90 entering groundwater from dozens of leaking spent fuel rod cooling tanks.

These materials are so toxic that they must be handled robotically, but once the radioactive material enters the groundwater, the water becomes contaminated forever and cannot ever be totally "cleaned-up." But much of it can be pumped into tanks for later processing; a great many tanks of course would be needed.

While Hanford is vast in size, some 560 sq. mi., the strontium plume from West Valley is threatening the safety of the Great Lakes, the water source for tens of millions of people and every effort should be taken to avoid this calamity. However, they wait to decide for another 10 years, now shortened by twenty by our efforts, to clean-up any further West Valley.

Hanford Plume

West Valley Plume

Strontium-90 Coming to a Great Lake near you

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NOVEMBER 11, 2014

The Case of Hanford Contractor Walter Tamosaitis
Whistleblower Will Finally Have Day in Court
by JOSHUA FRANK
A few years ago I wrote a two-part investigative series for Seattle Weekly on the mismanagement of the costliest environmental cleanup the world has ever seen. The Hanford nuclear site in Eastern Washington, all 580 square miles of it, is perhaps the most polluted land in North America, which puts it in the running for most environmentally toxic in the world. Home of the Fat Man bomb, Hanford carried out much of the covert Manhattan Project during World War II. Over the course of its lifespan, Hanford’s nuclear program leaked at least 475 billion gallons of radioactive waste. A cleanup of that magnitude means there has been a lot of cash to be made, and a few contractors have raked it in for years. The final costs of cleaning up Hanford could well exceed $120 billion. That’s right, billions.



Hanford is a spooky place that’s hugged up against the majestic Columbia River, which provides water for endangered salmon, 10,000 farmers and dozens of commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest. The Department of Energy (DOE) oversees the cleanup, which is undertaken by Bechtel, URS and other contractors. Yes, that’s the same Bechtel that botched its fair share of Iraq reconstruction contracts.

A few brave whistleblowers, both DOE employees and contractors, spoke with me on record about how the DOE is not only understaffed, but also not capable of dealing with such a massive cleanup. Likewise, they helped expose how their employers are wasting taxpayer dollars and jeopardizing public safety along the way.

One of the central figures in the saga I wrote about for Seattle Weekly was whistleblower Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, a systems engineer who was employed for more than 40 years by Bechtel subcontractor URS. Tamosaitis claims he was removed from his position for citing concerns about safety failures at Hanford’s Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), a facility that is central to cleaning up Hanford. The plant’s ultimate goal is to turn some 56 million gallons of radioactive gunk into glass rods. Here’s a snippet from the first Seattle Weekly piece:

[Walter Tamosaitis exposed] what he saw as safety failures at WTP and citing concerns that the pulse jet mixer design issues would prohibit the plant from operating correctly. As a result, Tamosaitis says he was removed from the project; Bechtel and URS both deny that they removed Tamosaitis because he raised safety concerns.

“The drive to stay on schedule is putting the whole [WTP] project at risk,” Tamosaitis contends. ” ‘Not on my watch’ is a standard mantra among [DOE and Contract] management who like to intimidate naysayers like me. These guys would rather deal with major issues down the road than fix them up front . . . Cost and schedule performance trump sound science time and again.”

On March 31, 2010, Tamosaitis e-mailed Bechtel managers Michael K. Robinson and [Frank] Russo about concerns about pulse jet mixer failures … to which Russo replied, “Please keep this under control. The science is over.” In an internal e-mail string dated April 14, 2010, Robinson writes to Russo that he will “just have to keep [Tamosaitis] in line.”

“As soon as Russo came on board, the chain of command was altered,” Tamosaitis says. “Before Russo, I had to report directly to Bill Gay, a URS employee, but Russo removed Gay from the command chain and [made me communicate] directly to Mike Robinson [of Bechtel]. I think Russo believed it was easier to drive ahead with his cost and schedule push if he didn’t have two URS managers directly under him.”

***

In an e-mail dated March 31, 2010, Russo updated President Obama appointee Inés Triay on the situation. Triay, who did not return calls seeking comment, served as Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management and oversaw the DOE’s Hanford work until July, at which time she stepped down.

“It was like herding cats,” Russo wrote Triay about a meeting he’d had with senior contract scientists and engineers regarding his quest to stay on schedule. “Scientists . . . were in lock step harmony when we told them the science is ending. They all hated it . . . I will send anyone on my team home if they demonstrate an unwillingness or inability to fulfill my direction.”

“Walt is killing us,” Russo later e-mailed Bill Gay of URS on July 1, 2010, who though removed from the chain of command still had to sign off on Tamosaitis’ removal.

“Get him in your corporate office today.”

“He will be gone tomorrow,” Gay replied.

“This action [Tamosaitis' removal from the Hanford project] was initiated by Dale Knutson probably not knowing the sensitivity,” Gay e-mailed to another employee in response to the decision to get rid of Tamosaitis.

Knutson would not respond to interview requests from Seattle Weekly. However, in a sworn statement sent to the Department of Labor, Knutson denied that he was in any way involved in the decision to demote Tamosaitis.

While no longer working on Hanford and WTP, Tamosaitis is still employed by URS, but is confined to a windowless basement office in Richland, where he says no management has spoken to him in over a year. His daily work routine isn’t that of a normal URS scientist, and he is not even sure what official title he presently has. URS has recently shipped him around the country to work on various company projects as a sort of in-house consultant.

Tamosaitis is currently suing Bechtel in Washington state, as well as URS and the DOE at the federal level, over his ousting at Hanford. “It is my opinion that [Dale] Knutson and Frank Russo are in lockstep,” he asserts. “Due to the constant managerial turnover [on the WTP project], these guys won’t likely be there in a few years, so they’d rather have these problems happen on someone else’s clock, even though it is always more expensive to fix something later then to do it right the first time.”

Three sources working on the DOE’s and Bechtel’s Hanford vitrification project tell Seattle Weekly that “the WTP project is in total jeopardy” because of their employers’ refusal to address technical and safety concerns raised by staffers like Tamosaitis and Alexander. These sources, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution by their employers, believe congressional hearings in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the issue are imminent. They also contend that the project could be temporarily shut down any day due to safety concerns.

Shortly after my first article appeared in Seattle Weekly, Tamosaitis filed his lawsuit against URS and the DOE, claiming he was demoted for speaking out. Last year he was fired. It’s been a long haul, but nearly three years later, Tamosaitis will finally get a chance to have his case heard in front of a jury of his peers. Of course, this wasn’t something his former employers or the DOE embraced with open arms. They’ve wanted nothing more than to keep Tamosaitis silent and out of court.

Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tamosaitis has a constitutional right to a jury trial, which reversed a lower court’s decision. Walter Tamosaitis will now be able to seek damages under the Energy Reorganization Act in federal court. You can read the Ninth Circuit’s ruling here.