In her new book Plutopia, Kate Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia − the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. US and Soviet leaders created 'plutopias' − communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidised, limited-access atomic cities. Plutopia shows that the segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In this article for the Nuclear Monitor, Assoc. Prof. Brown focuses on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington.
When faced with something frightening and unsightly, a primary human reaction is to bury it. That is what corporate contractors have been doing with high-level radioactive waste for five decades at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the world's first plutonium factory in eastern Washington. The great irony of the global nuclear industry is that despite the 20th century's vaulting inventions in nuclear physics, no one has yet figured out how to safely store volatile and dynamic radioactive waste that self-heats to hundreds of degrees, corrodes metals, and seeps readily through soils to plant and animal life − and will do so for tens of thousands of years. Recent headlines about leaking waste storage tanks at Hanford alongside a lawsuit by Donna Busche, a health physicist who claims the San Francisco-based corporate contractor URS tried to stifle her warnings about unsafe procedures at Hanford is yet another chapter in a sadly repetitious history of nuclear waste management.
The first repressed Hanford whistle-blower on record is health physicist Herbert Parker. In 1948, three years after the plant produced its first plutonium, Parker shut down operations because he was worried about the high levels of radioactive iodine pouring from the stacks, and with it, milligram-size particles, fiercely radioactive, that came from corroded duct work inside the processing plant. Monitors tracked the particles, which burned skin on contact, a hundred miles to Spokane. Parker worried that if one tiny flake, among an estimated 800 million, was eaten on a French fry in a local drive-in, it could lodge in soft organs and remain there, a tiny bomb decaying for years to eventually produce cancer. Parker acted responsibly, writing he stopped processing because he did not "dare" to expose workers and neighboring populations. Two days later, however, a high-powered team of scientists sent by the Atomic Energy Commission arrived in the remote town of Richland and upbraided Parker. They ordered the plant going again, at full speed.
In the forties and fifties, AEC contractors spent more federal dollars on tiny Richland's school system than on storing lethally dangerous radioactive waste. They buried the most hazardous waste in temporary tanks underground and cooled them so they would not overheat and explode. They dumped mid and lower level waste in holes, trenches and man-made 'swamps' as well as into the Columbia River. That was the cheapest way to treat radioactive waste, as if it were any other industrial waste, though health physicists knew better. A couple broke ranks in the 1970s passing news to the press that Hanford's tanks had leaked a half million gallons of lethal waste into the surrounding soils.
During the Cold War, the rationale to sacrifice safety in order to produce bombs made sense to a lot of people, but since 1987 Hanford has not issued a drop of plutonium. Instead the federal reservation's main mission and massive billion dollar budgets has been cleanup. Even so tanks are still leaking and the problem of storing waste appears intractable. In the 1990s, a series of Hanford contractors − Rockwell, Westinghouse, Fluor Daniel, and Battelle − each in turn took on the Hanford contract. The contractors spent scores of billions of dollars only to have reviewers conclude at the end of the decade that they had made no substantial progress.
In each case, contractors, rushing to make deadlines so that top executives could receive handsome bonuses, stifled whistle-blowers. In 1991, a Department of Labor investigator found that Westinghouse had a spy-master's arsenal of bionic ears, pinhole video cameras, helicopter gunships, listening devices and a mobile home modified as a spy center which it had turned on its dissenting employees who threatened to go to the press.
In the 21st century, Battelle, Bechtel National and now URS have fought lawsuits against employees charging they were blocked from pointing out safety concerns. Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, a designer of the multi-billion dollar vitrification plant that is supposed to turn waste sludge into glass logs for storage, told his superiors at Bechtel that their designs would lead to a massive hydrogen explosion at the plant. Tamosaitis was given a basement office and iced out. Last summer, the Department of Energy sent a memo in concord with Tamosaitis, stating that Bechtel's designs were not technically viable and the corporation "not competent" as a design authority.
Perhaps there is a problem with corporate culture and the bonus system that prioritises deadlines and speed over safety and long-term solutions. But the larger problem, the elephant in the room, is that the mission to safely contain 1,700 pounds (770 kgs) of plutonium-239 scattered among 53 million gallons (200 million litres) of chemical toxins and other fission products has never before been attempted. This is a problem we can no longer bury. So far, after 75 years of nuclear waste production, no one nowhere on the globe has figured out how to safely store industrial sized quantities of radioactive waste. Until that happens, nuclear power is a road to ruin.
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Kate Brown
March 2013
Oxford University Press
ISBN13: 9780199855766
ISBN10: 0199855765
Hardcover, 416 pages
Hanford whistleblower settles with Fluor
A Hanford contractor hired by the US federal government to train workers involved in radiation clean-up work has agreed to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department. As part of the settlement, a whistleblower who filed a lawsuit under the False Claims Act in 2011 will receive $200,000. The suit alleged that the contractor, Fluor, used federal government money from the Department of Energy to lobby for additional government customers at another facility. (5 April 2013, www.whistleblower.org/blog/44/2618)