The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  Seaborg never gave up on plutonium. For its first two decades on Earth, it had been used almost exclusively to fuel nuclear weapons. But Seaborg always believed that it was destined for great things. By converting uranium-238 into plutonium-239, nuclear reactors can unlock all the potential nuclear energy in uranium ore, not just the energy available in uranium-235. Once plutonium was generated in a reactor, reprocessing plants like the ones at Hanford could extract it for use in other reactors, providing humanity with essentially unlimited amounts of energy. But this bounty would come at a large cost. Producing plutonium for nuclear energy would require a huge new industry, which some have called the “plutonium economy.” This industry would inevitably create large stores of plutonium, which could be diverted to nuclear weapons programs. And reprocessing would produce vast quantities of toxic and radioactive chemicals, which would need to be isolated from the environment for many thousands of years. Still, Hanford had demonstrated that at least the first part of a plutonium economy would work—reactors could convert uranium to plutonium, and this plutonium could be extracted from spent fuel. And in the first half of the 1960s, with science and technology ascendant, with the United States working to send men to the moon, anything seemed possible.

  On June 7, 1968, Seaborg returned to Richland to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Hanford. With Groves and Matthias both in attendance at his speech, Seaborg termed plutonium “the fuel of the future.” He predicted that it would power spacecraft, which it subsequently did, and also artificial hearts, which it did not. He joked that plutonium’s value “may someday make it a logical contender to replace gold as the standard of our monetary system.” He observed that nuclear energy had transformed the area around Hanford. “The atom has been responsible for some healthy and happy communities, and Richland is certainly among the foremost of them.”

  In his speech in Richland, Seaborg said that plutonium was going to create energy “on such a grand scale and so cheaply” that it “will radically change our relationship to almost all other materials,” including food, water, air, and minerals. Nuclear power “is being accepted for economic reasons,” he said. “It is being accepted for environmental reasons. And it is being accepted for aesthetic as well as for practical reasons. The time is not far off when clean, compact, competitive nuclear power plants will be the ‘conventional’ power plants of the day.” Nuclear plants would desalinate seawater, produce gasoline from coal, and generate steam heat for factories. Heavy industry could be located around large nuclear power plants, creating what Seaborg called a Nuplex. Such facilities could pump water from deep underground, create new and exotic materials, and even economically recycle wastes, which is “increasingly important when the disposal of our output of junk and garbage is becoming a problem of major proportions.” The Nuplex would physically separate heavy industry from cities “so that we could plan and build cities designed for the ultimate in healthy living. Powered by the Nuplex, cities like Richland could become urban utopias.

  In 1968, Seaborg was speaking during the peak period of enthusiasm for commercial nuclear power. Over the previous two years, US utilities had ordered 67 nuclear reactors. By the time Seaborg left the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, 25 reactors were operating, 52 were under construction or being reviewed for operating licenses, and 39 were being reviewed for construction permits. At that point, nuclear energy was generating about a fifth of the United States’ electricity, as it does today.

  “Perhaps 25 years from now we will be able to gather here to look back over half a century of progress of the Nuclear Age,” Seaborg predicted. “By then Richland, together with the Tri-Cities Area, will probably be a large metropolis thriving on its growing science-based industries. Perhaps Hanford will be its Nuplex, able to preserve the surrounding vast and majestic area close to the way nature created it. And we will be able to reminisce about the beginning of the Nuclear Age while we see all about us many of the wonders that it has brought and continues to unfold.”

  MANY OF THE PEOPLE listening to Seaborg’s speech that day in Richland were desperate for such a vision. Since Kennedy’s visit five years before, Hanford’s prospects had nose-dived. The reason was simple: after two decades of plutonium production at Hanford and South Carolina, the United States had all the plutonium for weapons it would ever need. By 1968, the reactors on the Columbia and Savannah rivers had produced 90 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium—enough for more than 14,500 Nagasaki-type bombs. Newer bombs used even smaller plutonium pits, which meant that more could be built.

  Political considerations also reduced the need for plutonium. In the early 1960s, Seaborg had helped lead the negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which banned all testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and outer space. The ban was not really comprehensive, since testing could still occur underground, which led to continued rapid development of nuclear weapons. But with live images of mushroom clouds removed from the evening news, people were less fearful of nuclear war, and the need to intimidate the Soviets seemed less pressing. As a result, the US military could shift funding from Cold War armaments to the very hot and escalating war in Vietnam.

  Ironically, the first reactor to close was the replacement for the D Reactor, in 1964. The H and F Reactors closed the next year, and the D, B, and C Reactors closed in 1967, 1968, and 1969. By 1971, after the shutdown of K-West and K-East, the only reactor still running was the N Reactor, and even it was no longer producing weapons-grade plutonium. The reactors that the United States had built to end World War II and help win the Cold War sat unused and abandoned on the desert floor.

  KATHLEEN DILLON, who later wrote the poem about seeing John Kennedy in 1963, never knew a time when she was not best friends with Carolyn Deen. Born a few months apart in Richland’s Kadlec Hospital in 1960, the girls lived in identical Y houses three doors away from each other near the intersection of Cedar Avenue and Cottonwood Drive. Every day they walked to and from Marcus Whitman Elementary School, and then Carmichael Junior High School and Richland High School, sharing both the trivia and the turning points of their lives. “I learned how to be a friend from Carolyn,” Kathleen later said. This was a time in small town America when children did not know that the doors of their homes could lock, when car keys were left in ignitions so they wouldn’t be misplaced, when children of any age could go wherever they wanted so long as they were home for dinner. Each of the mothers had her own signal—a whistle, a cowbell, a ranch-style triangle—to indicate that it was time to eat. If a couple of extra kids showed up for a meal, there always seemed to be enough food to go around.

  Carolyn’s father, Tom, came to Hanford in 1951 when he was 22 years old. He had just finished serving in the Korean War, had a new wife, and had heard that men with a high school diploma could find good jobs at Hanford. For the next 27 years, he did the kinds of things that thousands of other Hanford workers did. He canned fuel elements on the production line, worked a metal lathe, drove a high lift to load and unload uranium billets. He rarely if ever got sick and often volunteered for special jobs to make extra money. He chopped up railroad boxcars that had been contaminated and bundled up the radioactive planks for disposal, often with little or no protective clothing. Sometimes he served as a jumper—a worker who would enter a radioactive area, make a repair, and then quickly leave, having received a month’s permissible radiation dose in just a few minutes. He was a union member and served as union president of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council. Toward the end of his career, he became manager of labor relations for UNC Nuclear Industries, which operated the reactors at Hanford.

  Kathleen’s father, Robert, was a chemist from Portland with a PhD from Northwestern University. When he got his doctorate, he received two job offers—one from Texas, one from Hanford. He chose the offer that was closer to his childhood home. He spent his career at Hanford studying aluminum corrosion to better understand what happens inside a reactor’s process tubes, working for much of that time in an
office reportedly used by Fermi. Research could be done at Hanford that was impossible to do elsewhere. Scientists working at laboratories associated with Hanford developed new methods of monitoring radiation exposures. They studied the effects of radiation on fish, plants, livestock, and humans. They investigated how radiation affects materials. By the 1960s, thousands of people were working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory at Hanford, a research enterprise run by the Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute.

  In the 1960s the Tri-Cities and the towns surrounding it were isolated, proud, and self-reliant. Directly or indirectly, most people relied on the federal government for their jobs, and people supported the government and its leaders. As Carolyn recalled much later, “If you were going to work here, you’d better believe in what the government was doing.” Teenagers enlisted or were drafted into the military and went to Vietnam, but the war was far away, and the protests that erupted in other parts of the United States were largely absent in the Tri-Cities. For the most part, it was an innocent and largely carefree place and time to grow up in America.

  But growing up in an atomic city had its peculiarities. When Carolyn and Kathleen were in elementary school, a semi-truck once pulled up outside the building with the words “Whole Body Counter—Mobile Laboratory” printed on the side. One by one, the students filed into the truck and lay down on a flat rubber platform. A motor whirred, and the platform moved the recumbent child through a large cylindrical radiation detector. As an adult, Kathleen wrote a poem about the experience:

  We were told to close our eyes.

  Everyone was school age now, our

  kindergarten teacher reminded us,

  old enough to follow directions

  and do a little for our country.

  My turn came and the scientists

  strapped me in and a steady voice

  prompted, The counter won’t hurt,

  lie perfectly still, and mostly I did. . . .

  Just once I peeked

  and the machine had taken me in

  like a spaceship and I moved

  slow as the sun through the chamber’s

  smooth steel sky.

  Kathleen and Carolyn were children in Richland during the years of peak plutonium production—their monitoring in the whole-body counter was part of an experiment to see if emissions from the plant were getting into the food and water of people in the area. But they were also children when production was ramping down. In 1968, when they were in the third grade, the principal of Marcus Whitman Elementary School came into their classroom and told them that they were going to write letters to President Johnson pleading for the K Reactors to stay open. Later, Kathleen was one of the students chosen to accompany the bags of mail to the Pasco airport for delivery to Washington, DC.

  The letter-writing campaign failed—K-West and K-East both closed a few years later. Yet employment at Hanford did not go down much, even after eight of its nine reactors were closed. Washington State’s congressional delegation was so influential that it was able to keep funds flowing to the site—plant managers and union leaders found things for people to do.† But the government largess would not last forever. Hanford would have to change to remain a viable operation. What would it become?

  * My grandfather, who spent the latter part of his life as a farmer downwind from Hanford, also died of stomach cancer, but exposure to radioactivity was almost certainly not the cause of his illness.

  † My other grandfather was a steamfitter who lived in a trailer with my grandmother and travelled throughout the western United States for much of the second half of his life. He occasionally worked for a few months at Hanford during the period when union pipefitters there operated by the motto “nobody can lay pipe too slowly.” He reported that he played a lot of gin rummy.

  Chapter 22

  THE RECKONING

  BY THE LATE 1970S, SEABORG’S VISION OF A NUPLEX RISING FROM the desert outside Richland seemed to be coming true. Earlier that decade, a consortium of publicly owned utilities called the Washington Public Power Supply System announced plans to build three nuclear power reactors on the Hanford reservation, and by the early 1980s swarms of construction workers were pouring foundations and laying pipe. Boosters in the Tri-Cities talked of 15 to 20 nuclear plants being built just upriver, more than replacing the shutdown production reactors.

  Even plutonium production was about to return, though in a limited way. In the 1970s, a bipartisan coalition of US foreign policy hawks, loosely affiliated under an organization called the Committee on the Present Danger, began to issue warnings of a strategic imbalance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Their arguments never made much sense. By that time, each nation had approximately 25,000 nuclear warheads. Given estimates made about the same time that, at most, 300 atomic bombs dropped on either the United States or Soviet Union would end each nation’s existence, the antagonists had almost a hundred times more warheads than they needed.

  Advocates’ claims of a missile gap grew from political expediency, naked self-interest, and, to some extent, legitimate concern about the actions and intentions of the Soviet Union. Hard-line politicians like Scoop Jackson from Washington State and his assistant Richard Perle, who later became a prominent foreign policy hardliner, played the same card Groves had played during the Manhattan Project: in the face of uncertainty, assume the worst of an enemy and act accordingly. In the late 1970s, under the leadership of an aging Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union was again behaving in threatening ways. Earlier in the decade, Cuba had become involved in a civil war in Angola with Soviet backing. Soviet support for governments in the Middle East was heightening tensions in that key geopolitical region. Then, in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In the following US election year, which pitted the conservative former governor of California, Ronald Reagan, against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, stoking fears of Soviet nuclear supremacy was an obvious way to get votes.

  The N Reactor, in the foreground, produced plutonium for nuclear weapons and steam for electricity from 1966 through 1987. The K-West and K-East Reactors (emitting steam) and the B Reactor (emitting a plume of dark smoke) are farther up the Columbia River. Courtesy of the US Department of Energy.

  The N Reactor had been chugging along since 1966, mostly to produce steam for the electricity-generating plant next to it. But it had not been producing weapons-grade plutonium because no one foresaw a need for more after the production frenzy of the 1950s and 1960s, and the South Carolina reactors were newer and better suited to make plutonium. (The South Carolina reactors also made tritium for the United States’ hydrogen bombs.) Nevertheless, bowing to political pressures, both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations called for the N Reactor to begin producing more plutonium for bombs. After being upgraded, it began producing weapons-grade plutonium in 1982. The next year, the PUREX Plant, after an 11-year shutdown, resumed separating plutonium from irradiated uranium.

  After years of declining employment at Hanford, the Tri-Cities seemed on the verge of a turnaround. New reactors were going up north of Richland. Hanford was producing more plutonium. During the 1970s, the federal government had built an experimental reactor at Hanford, the Fast Flux Test Facility, to evaluate new commercial reactor designs, and the reactor began operating in 1980. Despite a severe recession in the United States at the beginning of the 1980s, Hanford’s future seemed bright.

  Then it all came apart.

  ON JUNE 21, 1982, Jim Stoffels, a physicist at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, saw a notice on page five of the Tri-City Herald. “The Tri-Cities Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign is to meet at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Sixth and Clark, Pasco,” it said. The nuclear freeze movement was a worldwide reaction against the heightened militarism of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It called on the United States and Soviet Union to stop testing, producing, and deploying nuclear weapons, both to reduce international tensions and to halt the arms race. With support from prominent public figures and sci
entists, the idea caught fire with the American public. A week before Stoffels saw the notice in the Tri-City Herald, a million people congregated in New York City to demonstrate in favor of a nuclear freeze—still the largest single demonstration in US history. In the fall elections, more than 60 percent of voters supported referenda calling for a freeze, and the movement helped Democrats pick up 27 seats in Congress.

  Stoffels had been working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory near Richland for nearly two decades by then, after graduating from Marquette University with a master’s degree in physics. He was part of a group using a technique called mass spectroscopy to measure levels of uranium, plutonium, and radioiodine in the environment. Tall, thin, with wavy brown hair, Stoffels was a deeply religious man who always sought to apply the tenets of his Catholic faith in his daily life, but he had not previously been politically active on nuclear weapons.

  Within a few days of the meeting, Stoffels had become founding vice president of a new organization, World Citizens for Peace–Tri-Cities. A month later, World Citizens for Peace held its first public event—a commemoration of the atomic bombings of Japan that drew about 100 people to John Dam Plaza across the street from Richland’s federal building. “No one expected a big crowd for a nuclear freeze gathering in Richland,” reported the Tri-City Herald the next day. “But some were encouraged that such an event would occur at all.”