The Reckonings
Page 24
We human beings are not born with prejudices. Always they are made for us: These two lines are drawn from Don’t Be a Sucker, an educational film created by the War Department in 1947 to warn against the rise of fascism, which argued that whenever we sacrifice the freedom and liberty of others, we jeopardize our own. In one particularly prescient monologue, the narrator tells his nearly duped foil:
You have a right to be what you are and say what you think because here we have personal freedom. We have liberty. And these are not just fancy words. This is a practical and priceless way of living. But we must work at it. We must guard everyone’s liberty or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice, we are threatening our own freedom. And this is not simply an idea. It is good, hard common sense.
You see, in America, it is not a question of whether we tolerate minorities—America is minorities. And that means you and me. So let’s not be suckers. We must not allow the freedom or dignity of any man to be threatened by any act or word.
I have an opinion on evil: Director Victor Salva tells Nev Pierce in an interview for the BBC, “I have a controversial opinion about evil, because I don’t believe evil exists. I believe that actions are dark and destructive but I don’t believe evil is a thing. I believe it’s a by-product of man’s fear and desperation.”
we do not wish to acknowledge a painful truth: Julius Charles Hare and Augustus William Hare write in Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers, “A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.”
THE FALLOUT
Karen did look into it and learned: In 2011 a group of North County alumni reconnected on Facebook to plan a class reunion. Members noticed that many classmates, friends, parents, siblings, and children were being diagnosed with unusual cancers, autoimmune diseases, birth defects, and other disorders. At that time, no one had any idea what might be causing them. Two of the alums, one of whom is a statistician, began conducting a health survey and creating disease maps in an effort to learn what was behind the bizarre illnesses. They discovered a disturbing cluster of illnesses concentrated near the creek and, even more disturbing, the cause.
“They let Pandora out of the box”: According to Hesiod, Pandora was molded out of clay as the first human woman, and all the gods collected their “seductive gifts” in a jar (pithos) to present to her on the occasion of her birth. Opening the jar released these gifts, leaving only Hope (elpis) inside once Pandora realized her mistake and closed the jar again. Interpretation of this myth is difficult. The jar contained all the evils of humanity but also its good. Hope is left inside the jar, which either keeps hope for humanity or keeps it from them. It’s not unlike the moment Eve eats an apple from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis, which created an understanding of both evil and good. But how do we judge the eating itself? Was it evil? Was it good? There’s a similar difficulty in interpreting the consequences of opening the nucleus of the atom. Some see this scientific revolution as the promise of completely clean power; others see only the promise of complete destruction.
only one aircraft that opened its bay doors: Robert Lewis, the copilot of the Enola Gay, reportedly wrote in his log as he watched the city incinerate, “My God. What have we done.”
At first, the Manhattan Project didn’t have a name: The story of Mallinckrodt’s involvement in the Manhattan Project began on April 17, 1942, over a gentlemen’s lunch. Arthur Holly Compton, a renowned physicist working at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, was visiting St. Louis, and with all the authority of the federal government, he planned to ask a favor of his old friend Edward J. Mallinckrodt Jr. They had known each other from the time Compton was head of the Department of Physics at Washington University, where Mallinckrodt served on the board of trustees and had endowed two separate departments and the Institute of Radiology. Mallinckrodt had taken over the family’s “fine chemical” business when his father died in 1928. A year before Compton had won the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of thirty-five and had since gone on to the University of Chicago to work on something called “fission.” As nice as it might have been to catch up about career developments and life changes, these days the thing most occupying both their minds was the war, and this was exactly what Compton had come to speak to his old friend about.
For the past few years, Compton had been racing the Germans, he explained. Ever since Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had discovered uranium fission in 1939, physicists around the world had been racing to see who could produce the first self-sustaining chain reaction. Leo Szilard, an Austrian physicist living in the United States, was on Compton’s team in Chicago. Szilard had been the first to realize that neutron-driven fission of heavy atoms like uranium could be used to create a nuclear chain reaction that could yield vast amounts of energy—vast enough to power cities or destroy them. Szilard had tried to warn his colleagues that anyone who could harness a chain reaction like this could build the ultimate weapon. He had been the one to persuade his friend Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to support and speed up research in pursuit of the bomb and to secure more and better uranium ore for experiments before our enemies could. “A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port,” Einstein wrote, “might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”
By the time Compton was sitting down to lunch with Mallinckrodt, it appeared that the Germans were two years closer to the ultimate weapon than the Allies were, which meant they were on the verge of losing the war. The thing holding the Allies back, Compton explained, was that fission required purified uranium. He and his team had perfected a method in the laboratory for extracting purified uranium from ore using ether, but they could achieve it in only small quantities. At that time, all the purified uranium in the world could fit into a teacup. This brought Compton to his question: Could the chemists at Mallinckrodt use the methods developed in the lab to purify uranium for the war effort?
Mallinckrodt thought it over as he finished his usual lunch of cold cereal. He knew that three other companies had already declined Compton because they were either unable or unwilling to enter into this dangerous work. But it seemed a simple enough task to him. Mallinckrodt agreed and shook Compton’s hand.
Mallinckrodt didn’t know whether what Compton was asking could actually be done, but at that point in the war, an average of 220 US service personnel were dying every day, nearly 6,600 every month. Whatever he and his workers could do to help, they would do willingly. They needed equipment not readily available in wartime, so workers at the New Jersey Mallinckrodt plant salvaged pipes, kettles, motors, steel drums, and pans and sent them by train to the plant in St. Louis. Engineers drew plans on scraps of paper, or chalked them on the floor or the wall, and carpenters and pipefitters brought the drawings to life the next day. They labored around the clock to install the equipment, and then around the clock again to test it. They were working in completely uncharted territory. The chemists tried out small experiments in the alleyways between buildings and in the empty corners of warehouses so that if an explosion occurred—and they did occur—it wouldn’t damage the equipment.
Meanwhile, chemists from Mallinckrodt visited the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where Compton’s team had discovered that uranium ore could be dissolved in hot nitric acid—making uranyl nitrate—and that if the hot nitrate was dissolved in ether, the uranium could be extracted and all the impurities washed away. The challenge for Mallinckrodt chemists when they returned home to St. Louis was to replicate these precise laboratory methods in a hastily constructed factory on a massive scale. The work was dangerous, and the scale of the operation made the measurements imprecise. No one knew the correct proportions of ether and ore to mix or the temperatures at which any of these materials could safely be combined. Ether is extremely flammable and explosive, and adding it to the hot slurry of uranyl nitrate seemed like a recipe for a m
assive explosion.
The first ore that arrived had been pressed into small cylinders, which the physicists in Chicago had tried to use in early attempts to initiate a self-sustaining chain reaction. They had been unsuccessful. The ore was a high-grade Canadian concentrate, but it wasn’t pure enough. The physicists needed uranium without impurities. Boron, cadmium, and rare earth impurities in particular were problematic, since those elements absorbed any neutrons that might be liberated in a chain reaction.
The Mallinckrodt workers dumped this raw uranium ore into a giant tank of nitric acid, heating it until it formed a kind of thick slurry, to which they added cooled ether and then proceeded to rinse the impurities away. In these residues were dissolved all the elements that naturally occur in uranium ore besides the uranium itself: radium, thorium, lead, and all of the other radioactive progeny in uranium’s natural decay chain. Some of these early residues were collected and set aside for later processing, and some were rinsed down drains or dumped into the Mississippi River, which flowed directly behind the Mallinckrodt campus. The residues were not what mattered: workers were focused on recovering the uranium from the ether, millions of dollars’ worth, concentrated and reduced to pure uranium dioxide. This is what they sent back to Compton and his team in Chicago.
That November, a team of high school dropouts stacked cast blocks of this purified uranium under the squash courts stands on the campus of the University of Chicago. By the first Wednesday of December, “Pile-1,” as it was called, stood twenty feet high, six feet wide, and twenty-five feet deep, and contained fifty-six tons of uranium oxide and uranium metal, all of which had been purified by Mallinckrodt. One of the physicists on Compton’s team had calculated that with the fifty-seventh layer of blocks, there would be sufficient uranium in the pile to send it into a chain reaction. At 3:25 in the afternoon, Chicago Pile-1 achieved criticality. The scientists allowed the self-sustaining chain reaction to proceed for twenty-eight minutes before radiation surpassed preset safety levels. They halted the reaction and drank Chianti from paper cups to celebrate.
See “Legagy of the Bomb: St. Louis Nuclear Waste,” a six-part series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 12 to 19, 1989, as well as Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
the new uranium division at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works: At the peak of the Manhattan Project, roughly 160,000 workers labored in more than three hundred separate locations around the country. Among the many sites that eventually came to refine uranium for the Manhattan Project, the very first was Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis, Missouri. All of these sites were classified at first. Ironically, the once so-called secret sites—Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Hanford—are now among the best known. We hear less about the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center in Ohio, the Maxey Flats disposal site in Kentucky, or Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis. At each of these locations, the purpose of the project was kept secret from all but a very few of the most senior staff. Men came to work and did their jobs. They were paid well and asked no questions.
A ring of fire spreading outward for miles: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the Earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds,” William Laurence wrote in a press release for the War Department. He had been the only journalist allowed on board the Bockscar when it dropped the plutonium bomb over Nagasaki; his account was the only one the government didn’t censor. “It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”
workers were given the day off: After the bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945 and the secret project became known, Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent gold pins stamped with the letter A (for A-bomb) to anyone who had worked on the bomb as an honor for their service. In St. Louis, Mallinckrodt executives put a bronze plaque over the entrance of Building 51 that read, “In this building was refined all the uranium used in the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear reaction December 2, 1942.”
URANIUM ORE—PRODUCT OF BELGIAN CONGO: According to Tom Zoellner’s Uranium, Leslie Groves, the commander of the Manhattan Project, sent Kenneth Nichols, one of his deputies, to meet with Edgar Sengier, then director of Union Minière du Haut Katanga, the Belgian mining company in possession of the ore, who had fled to New York from the Congo when World War II broke out, bringing along with him a stockpile of twelve hundred tons of Shinkolobwe’s best uranium. According to Nichols, “Our best source, the Shinkolobwe mine, represented a freak occurrence in nature. It contained a tremendously rich lode of uranium pitchblende. Nothing like it has ever again been found.”
The US contract with Union Minière specified that the United States had purchased only the uranium content and that all the nonuranium residues were to be held for eventual return to Belgium. This ore contained a higher concentration of the U-235 isotope of uranium, which is what the government needed for the bomb, rather than the more abundant U-238. This purity, which was good for making bombs, made the ore highly radioactive and therefore extremely dangerous.
Over the decades, the mine has often been closed and sealed to protect local villagers and the rest of the world from what it contains, but someone always arrives to reopen it—Union Minière, the Army Corps of Engineers, men who want to wreak their havoc on the world. Legend has it that Shinkolobwe is haunted by the spirit of a woman named Madame Kipese, who had been powerful when she was alive but had grown vengeful after her death. It’s Madame Kipese who guards the mine, emerging at night to even the score, to deliver justice by claiming these men’s souls.
a 21.7-acre property just north of Lambert Field: In the late 1970s, as the health effects of radiological contamination were beginning to become apparent, Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducted radiological testing of the airport site to make sure it was clean and evaluate it for future land use. They found the site, as well as the nearby ditches leading to Coldwater Creek, to be contaminated “above acceptable levels,” and in the early 1980s, the entire 21.7-acre site, including these ditches, was put in line for remediation under FUSRAP—the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Responsibility for cleanup bounced around regulatory agencies until 1997, when FUSRAP was transferred from the Department of Energy to the US Army Corps of Engineers. Officially, the Army Corps of Engineers finished remediation activities at the airport site in 2009, but even as I write this, it is still trying to figure out how far the wastes migrated off site. It has discovered contamination in drainage ditches leading away from the airport and all along Coldwater Creek, in the ballfields and in parks and gardens and backyards, in driveways and in people’s basements.
a series of letters from Cotter to the AEC: “We believe deposit in the quarry to be the most satisfactory resolution of all substantial problems involved in disposition of the contaminated material,” an attorney for Cotter writes in a letter dated April 23, 1971. “No conflict exists in this situation with the Commission policy against engaging in operations with private industry, since existing privately operated waste disposal facilities are not designed in capacity or otherwise for disposition of material in the quantity and form involved in this situation.”
A response to this letter comes a month later, on May 24, from Henry Nowak, director of the AEC’s Division of Waste and Scrap Management. “First, what is the intent of the phrase ‘or otherwise’?” he writes. “Does it mean that the licensed burial ground operators could not handle the material within the safety requirements of their present licenses? Is the judgement expressed in this statement that of the Cotter Corporation or that of the licensed burial ground operators?”
My stomach sinks when I read this letter. The tone is so snarky, so rude. Then in June, Cotter asked for permission to spread the leached barium sulfate across the surface of the site, bury it under four feet of clean soil, and then pave the whole thing over with asphalt. T
he AEC responded by saying that Cotter would first have to fund a radiological evaluation of the wastes, “including principal radioisotopes and their activities”; a feasibility study, including “a complete description of the proposed method of burial”; and produce a complete geological, hydrological, and geochemical survey of the site, and a study of the possible environmental impact. The letters from Cotter stop after that.
“special exposure cohort”: Credit belongs to Denise Brock, who is now ombudsman for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), for getting the first portion of this legislation passed. Brock’s own father worked for Mallinckrodt Chemical from 1945 until 1958; during that period Mallinckrodt was processing pitchblende ore from the Belgian Congo and workers were receiving radiation doses in excess of a thousand rem (a unit of radiation dosage—today, the maximum allowable dose is five rem per year). Denise Brock’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer, which spread to his brain and liver; he later also developed leukemia and died in 1978. In 2003, Denise Brock formed United Nuclear Weapons Workers, a nonprofit workers’ advocacy group. Based on the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act passed in 2000, which offers compensation to nuclear weapons workers who developed certain illnesses as the result of workplace exposure to radioactive materials, Brock petitioned the government to provide automatic compensation to former Mallinckrodt workers who meet certain criteria—they must have worked at least 250 days and must have been diagnosed with at least one in a list of twenty-two “specified” cancers (two of which are lung cancer and leukemia). In 2004 and 2005, she won that petition to create a special exposure cohort for Mallinckrodt workers, giving them access to tax-free compensation and medical costs and to death benefits if the worker has already died. It has been life-changing for so many families, many of whom now call Denise Brock “a true hero.”