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The Many Voices of Nuclear…that shaped my debut novel, TANGLES

Writer's picture: kaysmithblumkaysmithblum

My deep dive into the world of all things nuclear began with a random conversation with a writing pal, discussing my concept for a new project. “You’re going to need expert help,” she said. That led to a quick Google search for nuclear “experts” in the Northwest. A plethora of professors topped the list, not the least of which were at the University of Washington. Made sense. The history of nuclear science has deep roots in our state.


Clockwise, from top left: Robert Franklin, Simone Anter, Carl Willis, Dirk Dunning


David B. Kaplan, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nuclear Theory, responded to my outreach (for help vetting my manuscript) saying, “You can send it to me & I will take a look at, no promises that I will read the whole thing.”


I sent him the first three scenes with Luke and the whale. Several days later Kaplan replied, “ I skimmed through what you have written; among the radioactive elements you list, “Mesitun” and “Corium” aren’t real isotopes… you need to fix that up if you want the story to sound at all realistic.”


But unfortunately, Kaplan’s workload precluded any more help. He forwarded me onto Anu Chaudhary, a biologist who did a decade-long stint at Los Alamos studying the effects of Beryllium exposure on a small fraction of the Los Alamos workers. Some of her colleagues had been there for over forty years, but none talked about early days.


Chaudhary, now a global tech lead in immunology at Fred Hutch, offered some useful info about laboratory protocols and gear that might have been worn in the labs - all of which made it into multiple lab scenes in TANGLES - depending on the work being done, but she was not involved in radiation studies.

 

Next, I reached out to Carl Willis at the University of New Mexico. Professor Willis (also a Nuclear Reactor Operator) posed the quintessential question (via email) that, in the end, drove my tale:

“I think there's an overarching philosophical decision that you have to make: is the story universe one in which the Hanford facilities behaved as they did historically to the best of our knowledge, or is it a universe in which something nasty happened in furtherance of the dramatic action that may be ahistorical but which we still want to treat in the pattern of technical realism that is otherwise respected?”

Carl Willis, Professor at the university of New Mexico


I asked for clarification on how damaging the radioactive releases were and how they might – in both the short term and the long term - affect the region. Professor Willis offered this:

“I say this because, while standards were lower and there were some radiologically-significant releases from Hanford over the years, nothing in evidence suggests fallout that could cause acute deterministic injury like this. 


“BUT...that's not to say it would be implausible for something terrible to happen that might make such a mess.  We can look to history for examples (the Windscale pile fire in the UK, which created a massive release of volatile fission products, particularly I-131), and a number of severe accidents at a plutonium production facility near Chelyabinsk in Russia (now called PO Mayak).”


Willis served up examples. “All known accidents at Hanford pale in comparison, though there were some small, local fuel fires and fuel failures. But a reactor burning out of control would be another plausible explanation, I'd say. Uranium metal and graphite are combustible…and there were some small fuel fires at Hanford.”


But Professor Willis ended his email to me with a caution, “Where the radioactivity gets concentrated is in the processing waste. Hanford had tanks for that, just like Mayak. A waste tank blowing up would be just about the worst accident imaginable and would plausibly shower areas downwind with fallout intense enough to literally tan the living hide of a deer or other organism, especially if waste from green fuel was being accumulated when it came apart.”


At this point I’d already researched the 1949 secret government operation, The Green Run, that purposely released fall out from green fuel production (highly radioactive) in 1949. With that discovery and Willis’ inspiration, my plot and subplots (think the mule deer), and characters took shape.


Luke’s father became a maintenance supervisor who interacted daily with toxic waste from the reactors. Other sources revealed that the waste was dumped in a variety of places. The scientists’ thinking at the time was: someone will come along to figure out what to do with this stuff in the long run.


My characters, Harry and Mary work in the technical lab in the 300-Area and are privy to minor fires and other malfunctions in the reactors as well as involved in the engineering problems of the “jacketing” of the plutonium fuel. That process slowed the project more than any other cause.


Luke, my male protagonist, became the later (1963) and wiser second-timeline hero. His character, inspired by the late Tom Bailie grew out of a series of conversations with a variety of activists, including Linda Richards.


Linda Marie Richards, aka Atomic Linda, Historian, Professor


Richards, “a historian of science who writes and teaches about the places where nuclear and environmental history converge with human rights,” is a professor at Oregon State University. As “Atomic Linda,” she blogs about a variety of issues, most importantly waste and the questionable new narrative around nuclear energy. Richards co-edited Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure (2023) (info in sources below).


Making the Unseen Visible book cover, co-edited by Linda Marie Richards


Richards patiently explained the importance of even a fictional work having the feel of a peer-reviewed paper and pointed me toward numerous resources that were prescient in creating a believable tale.


Linus Pauling, a legendary activist, taught at Oregon State. Says Richards, “Everyone knew how polluted Hanford was back then. [Thanks to Pauling] it was open info.” In 1957, Pauling, toting 25 boxes full of radiation studies into the courtroom, sued the US to stop the testing.


Eisenhower did, but the newly established Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) soon began testing again. Various other experts weighed in: Ernest Sternglass became outspoken and in 1958, Joseph Mangano began looking at baby teeth (at Washington University in St. Louis), finding high levels of strontium-90.

Joseph Mangano, Scientist, Director of Radiation and Public Health


Strontium mimics calcium and is taken up in baby teeth. Mangano called his research the “tooth fairy project.” A conversation with Alex Wellerstein (author and professor) had mentioned this.


Sample participant card in the Tooth Fairy Project


The strontium would not have occurred naturally. Mangano’s project map of fallout flows show the downwind streams across the U.S. Mangano now heads the Radiation and Public Health (in Ocean City, NJ) project that utilizes the 100,000+ teeth lost to children in the vicinity of radioactive fallout.


Fall out trajectories as charted by the Tooth Fairy Project


With the AEC funding everyone’s research, they more or less defined the rhetoric used in environmental science. The polluters created the message.


Richards referred me to the NY Times article of May 31, 2023, which stated: “From 1950 to 1990, the U.S. Energy Department (formerly the AEC) produced an average of four nuclear bombs every day, turning them out of hastily built factories with few environmental safeguards that left behind a vast legacy of toxic radioactive waste.”


The article, written by award-winning journalist, Ralph Vartabedian, goes on, “Nowhere were the problems greater than at the Hanford Site in Washington State, where engineers sent to clean up the mess after the Cold War discovered 54 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge…” Vartabedian describes the aborted cleanup effort. “At a cost of $4 billion, a towering structure of an abandoned chemical treatment plant serves as proof of our failure to deal with the horrific legacy of the nuclear age: the waste.”


While Hanford is home to three superfund sites, plants in South Carolina, Ohio, and Idaho that helped produce more than 60,000 atomic bombs have tons of radioactive debris that will be radioactive for thousands of years. Vartabedian enumerates, “Two million pounds of mercury remain in the soils and waters of eastern Tennessee. Radioactive plumes are contaminating the Great Miami aquifer near Cincinnati.”

Award-winning journalist Ralph Vartabedian


But, at Hanford the problem has an urgency the other sites do not. Vartabedian reports,  “given the risk of radionuclides contaminating the Columbia River, a vital lifeline for cities, farms, tribes, and wildlife in two states.”


My next call was to Simone Anter, head of ColumbiaRiverkeeper.org, a close counterpart to Heart of America NW. The two organizations occasionally work in tandem on Hanford Cleanup issues. Founded in 2000, Columbia Riverkeeper serves as a platform for environmental activism along the river, interacting with multiple communities not the least of which are the tribes, the real stewards of the region (as I write in the first scene of Chapter One of TANGLES).


Simone Anter, Director of Columbia Riverkeeper


A wealth of info and sources, Anter directed me to a former Oregon Department of Energy engineer, Dirk Dunning. Dunning, now retired, was the rare internal “whistleblower” that had the persistence to make real change at Hanford, accurately defining the challenges around the cleanup and worker safety issues.


Dunning agreed to vet much of my manuscript – going scene by scene – pointing out ways to improve or correct the language. I am in his debt for the intuitive read and quick responses that allowed me to craft a scientifically sound - I hope!- manuscript.


In reviewing a key scene, Dunning noted, “In 1965 the levels of radioactivity in the river were so high that the dose to people in Pasco drinking Columbia River water exceeded twice the acceptable standard and the sediment is still highly radioactive even today.” Dunning, a speed-reading demon when it comes to technical documents, has powered through almost every released classified (and some not released) document. If anyone can make a case for the health hazard, Dunning can. This comment led to my scene in which Mary, my female protagonist, asks for a water filter.


Nuclear engineer, Dirk Dunning presenting to Columbia Riverkeeper in 2020


Dunning also noted the “great flood” washed away waste ponds and carried millions of gallons of waste downriver. There was little to substantiate what did and did not happen on the nuclear reservation during the flood of 1948, but there is some information that suggests what Dunning offered is in the realm of possibility. The townspeople and the Army Corps of Engineers succeeded in building the "miracle mile" to protect the city. but, according to Dunning, "they ran out of time [not] building the dike far enough north to protect the 300 area and its ponds on lower ground.”


In vetting one scene from TANGLES, Dunning offered, “The waste from the 300-area was extremely radioactive. Often packed into 5-gallon paint cans, the waste was loaded into a shielded truck. [The first] driver would drive toward the Area where the runoff to the CGS reactor is. Halfway there, [that driver] would stop, jump up, and run away. He had reached or exceeded his annual dose limit.


“Then a second driver would jump in [the truck] and drive to the 618-10, or 618-11 burial grounds. He [too] would jump out and run away. A third driver would then position the truck over open pipes (caissons) and with the help of spotters, trigger a lid to open and drop the waste down the caissons. Often those hit the side, popped open, and spread highly radioactive waste on the surface, an extremely radioactive goo [created] from dissolving fuel to develop and study the Hanford processes.



According to Dunning, this kind of thing was common in the 60s. Dunning explains, “They ran the reactors on the ragged edge of destruction to maximum production. The water in the back third of the center of the core was boiling and a flow [was implemented]. There were huge [radioactive] emissions from the reactors in the liquid effluent. Boiling (a two phase flow) greatly reduced the heat transfer, but it also raised the fuel temperature. In 1962, the resulting fuel element failures—releasing most or all of their contents—were dumped into the water [pipe] headed to the river.”


“Radiation detectors sounded alarms when that (fuel element failures) happened and they would divert the discharge from the "cooling basins" to the ditches, which became intensely radioactive. The contaminated water percolated down through the crib structures and soil, and [eventually] into the river. While the sediment slowed the underground seepage, some flows were too much for the trenches to contain, and a lot of highly radioactive water flowed across the desert surface and into the river.” This occurred in the early days of production, well into the 1950s.


Particularly worrisome, according to Dunning, was that even the “normal discharges, [that were contained] sent from the reactors to cooling ponds or into pipes that led to the river bottom, were radioactive and thermally screaming hot at 195-210 F. Very nearly boiling.” I had spoken [a few weeks before] with Michele Gerber (historian and author of On the Home Front) about the rise in river temperature that led to the Department of Interior “flushing” the river secretly.

Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River near Hanford


Dunning continued, “They used chromic acid added to the water to minimize corrosion in the reactors, and the toxic hexavalent chromium releases were huge.”


I noted that we all know about chromium from the Erin Brockovich film.


Dunning segued to ruthenium, recalling an anecdote his father told. (Dunning’s father was among the first workers in the 1940s at Hanford. “Ruthenium plated out as crud in the exhaust stacks. Periodically thermal and flow conditions would cause the crud to burst. Particles would rain down on the site. Extremely radioactive.”

Hanford Nuclear reservation early 1950s


Dunning tells this tale. “One of my dad’s workers was stopped by the site patrol and forced to abandon his car. They chemically scrubbed it, removing most of the paint. They ground most of the rubber off the tires. Before they let him have the car back. They also took away his clothes and decontaminated him with potassium permanganate.”


Such were the sights and sounds of Cold War Hanford. Chuck Stephens was born in 1954. His parents had a dairy farm between Auburn and Enumclaw, but his mother, who had been hauling hay from Eastern Washington, decided they’d make more money raising alfalfa in Eastern Washington.


Former Eastern WA resident Chuck Stephens, outside Elliott Bay Marina, August 2024


The Columbia Basin Project gave veterans preference in the land being doled out, and  Chuck’s parents got Block 19 for virtually nothing. Stephens’ dad spent several years perfecting his agricultural skills. The family lived in a small shack with no plumbing. Many of their neighbors lived in Quonset huts.


A post-WWII quonset hut in Washington State


His parents were lauded in the National Grange for their alfalfa crop. They became key suppliers to Juergens Brothers Dairy and Smith Bros. Chuck was around seven years old when men [from Hanford] appeared, interested in the Stephens’ crop and the dirt in which it grew.


“They came out and said – you are growing great crops. We think you have the best soil and we want to analyze it,”  recalls Stephens.


His father “left a block of [alfalfa] hay out by the mailbox.” Chuck’s job was to cut out a chunk of hay for the “government guys to take weekly.” He vaguely remembers thinking the men were from Washington State University.  But clearly remembers the men also taking soil samples, but, to his knowledge, they never offered the results of any tests.


From an early age, Chuck’s job was to meet his father in the barn at dawn to bale hay. One morning in 1965, [Chuck was in the 5th grade] “my Dad [comes into the barn and] announces we are not baling any more hay.”  Chuck had overheard his parents talking about an article in the local newspaper, saying the crops were poisoning the children at the local elementary school. A week later, the Stephens family had packed up and moved back to Western Washington.


Early on in my research, I reached out to Robert Franklin the Assistant Director and Archivist/Historian of the Hanford History Project and Director of the Hanford Oral History Project. Franklin, who grew up in Alaska, and spent his formative years in Hawaii, had never heard of Hanford despite a familiarity with most things Manhattan Project.


One of his professors at WSU in Pullman, WA had been running the Hanford oral history project and called Franklin, and said, “We have some money to digitize our files. Can we pay you to do that?”

And Franklin said, “Hey, that’s great.” He goes on with a grin. “I was a grad student, I needed money.” 

Robert Franklin, Director of the Hanford History Project, and KSB via Zoom June 2023


Then one day after graduation, Franklin was working in the archives, and Robert Bauman called him up saying, “Vice Chancellor, Michael Mays (see Legacies of the Manhattan Project), has gotten some money from the DOE to manage some artifacts and archives from Hanford and we need an archivist. Are you interested?”

Source books used in the development of TANGLES


Franklin drove to Richland and after a “work” interview that lasted about six weeks, he became the Assistant Director of the Hanford History Project (HHP) in January 2016. Eventually, the directorship of the oral history project passed to Franklin and, in 2020, he signed a teaching contract (professor of history).


A federal act mandates the preservation of historical sites such as Hanford. The HHP manages the Hanford Collection (an artifacts and archives) for the DOE. The Hanford collection spans the years 1943 to 1990. “It’s comprised of [3000 individual] artifacts from the site used in the operation of Hanford. Everything from tools to dummy uranium slugs to pencil dosimeters to an autopsy table…”


I raise my eyebrows, thinking an autopsy should figure into my plot. Franklin goes on, “If it’s material used on-site in everyday work or specialized work, we gather it.” But the document that laid out the preservation work, also required that “everything be safe to handle.” Franklin noted that every artifact is radiation-free and has been checked for a variety of industrial and security/information concerns - i.e. it all meets the standard for public release.


Says Franklin, “I do about 60% teaching and 40% Hanford at this point. I try to incorporate Hanford [into my teaching].”  Fast forward, Franklin has co-authored two volumes on Hanford with Robert Bauman). Franklin motions over his shoulders, “Right now, our building is stacked with everything just waiting.” The permanent facility for the Hanford Collection is being built by the Port of Benton.


Franklin grins. “About once a week, I get a phone call with someone saying, we found some things in Grandpa’s files we think you might want…” Sometimes he already has multiple copies of old brochures, but other times, it’s unique and “maybe not something Grandpa should have brought home.”


We laugh about the careless way such things were treated in decades past and Franklin goes on to explain the HHP’s relationship with DOE. “The DOE has a structure that is somewhat rigid by nature [and] a lot of secrecy because it manages our nuclear secrets.” Franklin gestures with both hands like a scale. “But we’re a good partner. As an academic organization, we’re charged with making the collection accessible.” But Franklin is making sure that the “things Grandpa kept” are cataloged into the Hanford Collection which is protected by legislation.


“Richland was a government town from 1943 to 1958,” Franklin says. “A small dedicated group of volunteers and WSU interns work on the community collections.” Oral histories collected by the Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science and Technology (CREHST), a now defunct operation, were transferred to the HHP. Housing the former CREHST collection (the CREHST Museum that closed a while back in a political swirl) is an unfunded mandate, but important.

Now closed CREHST Museum in Richland, WA


Franklin also worked with the African American Community Cultural and Educational Society out of Pasco, another non-profit devoted to the African American experience.


“They did an oral history project, but it was on VHS,” says Franklin. “and in somebody’s closet. They donated it to us and we got grant money to digitize it.” Franklin’s office also serves as subject matter experts for the National Park Service (NPS), which runs the B-Reactor Museum, but the B Reactor tour program rests on the DOE, the other agency partner. According to the enabling legislation the NPS is responsible for interpretation and the DOE is responsible for facilities. 


I ask about the 1948 flood, and Franklin says none of the reactors were flooded. He’s studied the weekly reports from that year and there is no record of any flooding on the bluff where the reactors were.

 

We discuss the low-lying areas like the Richland Wye and Kennewick that were situated in the 100-year event flood plain. Says Franklin, “The Army Corps of Engineers had no reason to think a 100-year event would happen again. And now, with the dam system, it’s unlikely.”


We segue to secrecy oaths and Franklin says there is no such document in the archives. No copy of a declaration to keep secrets or oath of loyalty that folks might have been required to sign. But he tells this anecdote: “A guy I interviewed [said] his father came here to be the Superintendent of the Hanford High School in 1940-41 [when Hanford was still a town].


Now abandoned Hanford High School building on Hanford Nuclear Reservation


When the Hanford Nuclear reservation was created, his dad stayed and worked for Dupont as a spy. He would try to get people to talk about their work. If they did, he wrote down their names and reported them. Numerous accounts of folks just leaving one day swirl in the Hanford rumor mill of the 40s and 50s.


We move to DuPont’s role at Hanford. Franklin reminds me that in Jan 1942, Seaborg had just discovered the existence of micrograms of plutonium and now in 1943, DuPont is being asked to produce kilograms of plutonium when all the information is still theoretical. Fermi had only proved chain reaction was possible in Dec of 1942 and DuPont is being asked to build a reactor 2.5 million times the capacity of Fermi’s experimental prototype.”


Franklin explains. “DuPont said, “We’ll take the theoretical designs,” but they insisted on having final say on what was actually built. Most of their modifications are about safety…they added more vertical safety rods - the ball 3x system - the accumulators that shut down the reactors in case of a loss of electricity – and, they installed 2004 process tubes, instead of the 1500 originally specified.”


In TANGLES, various scenes address DuPont’s attempt to prioritize safety despite the wartime mentality of the government. I say, “I just read about them adding more process tubes, that essentially saved the day.’ The reactors wouldn’t have worked without the additional tubes.


Franklin also verifies that the 700-area, located in Richland, is gone now, but in the 40s and 50s, it housed the administrative workforce (typing pools of secretaries, telephone bank operators, and top administrators). I ask if there were female secretaries on the site, working for the various labs and areas, seeking confirmation for Mary’s placement and employment in the story.

Robert Redder Franklin, Professor of History, WSU, Director of the Hanford Oral History Project


“Yes,” says Franklin. “There were very few scientists on site, and the female employees did mostly domestic (think laundry) and clerical work (radiation monitoring, the filing).” He reiterates that the scientists on site were technical scientists (think my character Harry), not the big physicists like Oppenheimer. Mostly they were engineers.”


“Figuring out how to bind the aluminum to the plutonium slug is an engineering problem.”

Franklin offers a last comparison. “Oakridge produced an enriched uranium (a higher U235 content, about 14%), and enough plutonium for one bomb. Whereas Hanford produced enough plutonium for multiple bombs in a couple of months. After WWII, Hanford becomes the chosen process plant, and everything about Hanford is classified for a couple of decades. By the time Groves can write about it in the 1960s, it’s old news and old technology.”


Franklin says, “The “old news” part of it is why so many folks don’t realize the importance of Hanford.”


And I can’t help but think, the dismissed history kept the truth of the waste buried even deeper. 

This past week (9.24.24), NPR produced a podcast series about  all things Hanford, including the state of the cleanup, but more interesting are various ways folks think about the “Hanford situation.” 


The final podcast episode addresses the geology of the site and the difficulties of finding the right site for a nuclear waste repository. A game of hot potato it appears with the voices of community activists gaining ground. Transporting the waste is a key issue – yet another problem, besides vitrification, that needs a better plan.


My characters, Mary and Luke, agree.

TANGLES, coming December 3, 2024, from Black Rose Writing


Sources:

 

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