Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

by Joseph Mangano

  Under normal conditions, with political issues not a factor, these would be very daunting questions to address. Research would have to be prospective, literally following the lives of human guinea pigs (Hiroshima and Nagasaki residents, nuclear weapons plant workers, persons living near nuclear plants, and persons exposed to bomb test fallout) to find answers. But in a Cold War environment in which a nuclear war was seen as inevitable by many, “winning” the race to develop superior numbers of atomic weapons was all important. Truth was an inevitable casualty. James Nolan, the chief safety planner at the Los Alamos site where plans for the first atomic bomb were conceived, stated what many scientists on the project knew to be true:

  Possible hazards were not too important in those days. There was a war going on… [Army] engineers were interested in having a usable bomb and protecting security. The physicists were anxious to know whether the bomb worked or not and whether their efforts had been successful. Radiation hazards were entirely secondary.

  The federal government’s atom bomb program had been legislated into civilian hands, namely the Atomic Energy Commission, by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. The idea was that the AEC would follow the principle of civilian control of the military, as established in the Constitution. Congress did not trust the military to manage any aspect of nuclear weapons, other than to know how to use them in warfare. The AEC, an independent commission reporting to the President, would handle the rest – including the establishment of safety standards based on relevant research.

  This was a noble goal, but one that was structurally doomed to fail. The need to “take the lead” in the race for nuclear superiority against a hostile Communist power like the Soviet Union was far too strong. The AEC became not an objective group of civilians as designed, but one that essentially made conditions as easy as possible for the military to build its arsenal. From the outset, the AEC fully committed itself to not admitting nuclear weapons development, including operation of weapons plants, posed any undue harm to Americans.

  During World War II and its immediate aftermath, the federal government vigorously developed a series of nuclear plants, each with a discrete purpose in developing nuclear weapons. These included:

  Wasserman H, and Solomon N. Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation. New York: Delta, 1982.

  Each of these continued work until the end of the Cold War around 1990 made additional production of nuclear weapons unneeded. Safety conditions at these plants in the early days of the atomic age would be considered terrible by today’s standards. Probably nowhere was the amazingly shoddy handling of large amounts of dangerous radioactivity as evident as it was at the Hanford Site. Hanford is a huge tract of 586 square miles, on the Columbia River in southeastern Washington State. The site was selected by the US military during World War II to manufacture plutonium for atomic bombs. Plutonium is considered even more dangerous than uranium, so this remote site was selected. (Oak Ridge was the main site selected for bomb-grade uranium production; but because the site was just twenty miles from the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, military leaders opted to produce plutonium at Hanford).

  Working quickly, workers at Hanford produced plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb, set off in Alamagordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and the Nagasaki bomb a few weeks later. The breakneck pace was accompanied by tremendous contamination at the site. In the first three years of operation, a staggering total of 685,000 curies of iodine-131 were released into the air at Hanford. In 1949, the plant conducted an experiment known as the “Green Run” that deliberately released 8,000 more curies of I-131. Health and safety concerns occupied a back seat to progress in nuclear weapons development. The Hanford complex eventually reached nine nuclear reactors by 1963.

  DuPont and General Electric operated the Hanford plant under contract with the federal government. Despite being accountable to the public in principle, much about Hanford and its safety practices was deliberately kept secret. Huge amounts of water from the Columbia River were required daily to cool the reactors and returned to the river full of radioactive contamination. Massive amounts of airborne releases from Hanford also occurred. One hundred seventy-seven tanks holding captured nuclear waste were buried underground; nearly half leaked (and are still leaking today) into groundwater and threaten to enter the Columbia River. Exposures to workers and to local residents, also known as “downwinders,” were considerable, but were not addressed publicly by either the Atomic Energy Commission or its contractors. The vague assurance that Hanford was being operated “safely” was the standard official position for decades.

  The highly toxic situation at Hanford was not known to the public for years, but anecdotes told during the post-Cold War era eventually brought the situation to light. One such recollection was given by William Wright, an engineer who described the crude conditions of dissolving uranium slugs (one of the numerous processes at Hanford) during those early years:

  If we starting dissolving and the wind got bad, we would have to quit, so we were at the vagaries of the wind. That’s before we had sand filters and all kinds of purifiers. The radiation danger was always with us. In the early days, we carried Geiger counters with us, we didn’t have fancy pencils and badges.

  For decades, no health studies were conducted, either on the population living close to Hanford or on the thousands of workers at the plant. No studies were needed, according to official pronouncements, as exposures were below federally-developed standards, and thus assumed to be too low to cause damage. Health physicists, many of whom depended on the AEC or other federal agencies for financial support, simply agreed and took no action to question this position. Finally, in the 1960s, there was some movement from the AEC. Large-scale protests against atomic weapons tests had led to the ban of all tests above the ground, but also put the entire weapons production industry on the defensive. In 1964, the AEC hired Dr. Thomas Mancuso, an occupational health specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, to study long-term health effects of nuclear weapons workers, including those at Hanford. Mancuso had a distinguished record, and had become one of America’s most esteemed researchers in understanding occupational health risks posed by various hazardous chemicals.

  Mancuso was given access to health records of workers, as well as the doses received during their employment (measured daily by badges they wore at work). His work proceeded slowly – too slowly for the AEC, which wanted a quick assurance that “no risk” was detectable from research. Mancuso’s deliberation became more infuriating to the AEC in 1974, when Samuel Milham, an epidemiologist with the Washington State Department of Health, wrote a paper concluding a 25% excess of cancer deaths existed among Hanford workers. AEC officials demanded that Mancuso publicly announce that no such excess existed. He refused to do so: “But I told them (the AEC) they couldn’t use my study to counteract Milham’s. My findings were much too premature. For all I knew, Milham might be right.”

  The AEC then turned to Battelle Northwest, a research organization considered likely to be sympathetic to AEC/Hanford supporters and hostile to Milham, to analyze the report. Much to the shock of the AEC, Battelle researchers found that Milham had correctly analyzed the data, and that a link between occupational exposure to radiation and cancer risk among workers existed. Mancuso, now openly defying the AEC, called in esteemed British physician Alice Stewart to help with the project. Stewart had become a pioneer in radiation research twenty years before, when she found that pelvic X-rays to pregnant women nearly doubled the chance that the fetus would die of cancer before age ten (1956 and 1958). She had become the subject of tremendous scorn from health, medical, and nuclear officials – until similar studies by other researchers found similar results, and the practice of prenatal X-rays ended in favor of the safe, non-radioactive ultrasound. Also brought on to the team was George Kneale, an expert statistician and a close colleague of Stewart.

  Mancuso’s moves were too much for federal officials. He was notified that his
funding would be terminated, and ordered to hand over his database to the federal government. Mancuso, knowing that his time on the project was limited, persisted nonetheless. In 1976, during the “grace period” given by the US Department of Energy (DOE), which had replaced the AEC as the chief regulator over nuclear matters, to collect his papers and hand them back, results were finally reached. Mancuso, Stewart, and Kneale concluded that cancer death rates among Hanford workers were 5–7% greater than expected – not quite the 25% figure given by Milham, but still statistically significant because of the large number of workers involved. The following year, the findings were published in the scientific journal Health Physics and reported widely in the media. Congress quickly requested hearings on the matter, and the DOE falsely testified that Mancuso was no longer with the project because he had reached retirement age – even though his contract with the University of Pittsburgh would last eight more years, and he was in fine health at age sixty-four (he would live until ninety-two). The DOE transferred the project to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, a group over which it could exert more control.

  But the story wasn’t over. Mancuso handed over his extensive files to the DOE – but kept a copy, and sent it to Stewart and Kneale. Government funds were no longer available, but Mancuso’s British counterparts did much of the heavy lifting, and five more journal articles on risks to Hanford workers were subsequently published. The DOE now padlocked any public access to records of radiation doses and health of nuclear weapons workers, even though they were paid with federal funds and thus public record. A lawsuit based on the Freedom of Information Act was filed to obtain the records, but the DOE fought it in court. Some members of Congress threatened to pass legislation shifting responsibility for nuclear research away from the DOE, but still there was no response. It wasn’t until 1990, as the Cold War ended, a full fourteen years after federal officials locked up nuclear worker files, that the ban was lifted, and the DOE agreed to share files with the Three Mile Island Public Health Fund, which had been set up to conduct similar research as a result of legal actions following the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

  Then, and only then, was objective research on nuclear weapons workers and occupational health risks allowed to proceed. A number of articles were published in medical journals; and finally, in the year 2000, the DOE released a report concluding, based on these studies, that workers suffered from cancer in unusually high numbers. Later that year, Congress enacted a law that guaranteed compensation for workers who suffered from one of various types of cancers.

  This story of the battle over the understanding of health risks posed by working at Hanford concerned a nuclear weapons plant. However, the dynamics of this story—denial of risk by federal officials who were pressed to show supportive evidence and tried to control results to favor findings of “no risk” – are very pertinent to nuclear power plants. It pitted those experts like Mancuso and Stewart who sought to conduct objective research against federal agencies and nuclear industry officials who did everything possible to make public assurances of “no risk” and to prevent any findings of health risk from being published. Even though nuclear power plants represented a “peaceful” use of the atom, and did not have a direct link with national security as did nuclear weapons plants, the same culture of secrecy and deception would continue in the years to come.

  Health threats of generating electrical power at nuclear plants exist well before reactors operate. The genesis of reactors is the production of their fuel, i.e., fissionable uranium. This metal must be mined from rocks, which is a highly dangerous and dirty process. For many years, even before the atomic bomb was developed, health experts had observed elevated disease and death rates among uranium miners. These workers routinely inhaled the fine particles and gases found in dust during the mining process, harming their lungs and respiratory organs. After the mid-1940s, much more uranium mining was conducted to generate nuclear weapons. Safety was poorly enforced by uranium companies and government health agencies. Making the situation worse was that much of the uranium mining in the US was done largely by poor Native Americans living in uranium-rich western states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. These largely disenfranchised people had little power against large companies and pro-nuclear government regulators, along with poor access to health care. The culprits here were (once again) the AEC, and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which typically did the bidding of the military to generate as many weapons in the quickest time possible – again, relegating safety and health to a less important role and either ignoring or denying any problems.

  The next step after uranium mining is that of milling, in which uranium-encrusted rocks are crushed into a fine powder. Similar to uranium mining, these mills were largely unregulated and companies were left to themselves to determine functions such as measuring exposures, enforcing safety measures, and conducting health assessments of the workers. Anecdotal testimony to Congressional committees showed that mills were often full of radioactive dust. Workers did not always wear respirators, and even if they did, cloth protectors for the nose and mouth often became full of uranium powder. There were also reports that milling companies used by the federal government falsified levels of exposure by the workers.

  The next step in the uranium “fuel cycle” is conversion, which occurs when the powder from milling, known as yellowcake, is converted to uranium fluoride gas. Following conversion is uranium enrichment, in which the U-235 used in reactors is separated from the unusable U-238, which must be stored thereafter. The three federal enrichment facilities, at Oak Ridge TN, Paducah KY, and Portsmouth OH, all have extensive histories of large-scale contamination. Following enrichment is fabrication, in which the uranium is converted to uranium oxide form, and packed into long tubes known as fuel rods. Then, and only then, is the uranium ready to be sent to nuclear power plants to fuel reactors. Each of the five steps – mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication – takes place in a different setting, and considerable transportation is required to move uranium from one setting to the next. There are risks to workers and local residents that accompany each process, as workers are exposed occupationally and some uranium byproducts are released into the local environment. And naturally, there is an enormous amount of energy – typically greenhouse gas emitters – required to operate factories for each step, as well as to power trucks that transport the uranium in its various forms from one place to another. Once the pellets of uranium oxide are ready, they are shipped to nuclear plants, and the process of generating energy is – finally – ready to begin.

  From the outside, the several buildings comprising nuclear power plants do not make a grand impression. In fact, they look relatively similar to coal or oil plants and the buildings are not particularly high or wide. The one exception is that some nuclear plants have cooling towers, about 500 feet in height, adjoining the reactors. The towers release steam at the end of the process of creating electricity. Other plants have no cooling towers, but instead operate “internal” cooling systems.

  There are two types of reactors used in the US. One is the Pressurized Water Reactor, which is the most common type (sixty-nine of the 104 reactors now in use are PWRs). This type of reactor employs primary and secondary circuits to cool water. The other type is the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR), which represents most of the older US reactors. BWRs differ from PWRs in that they have only a single circuit to cool water.

  Nuclear reactors operate by taking in cool water from nature and heating it. They require very large amounts of water, so all reactors are typically located on rivers, lakes, bays, or oceans. Water is drawn into the reactor’s core, and is heated to a temperature of about 325 degrees Celsius. The heating process is focused in the long fuel rods containing the pellets that are bombarded by neutrons. There are hundreds of these rods that are bundled into what is known as a fuel assembly; a large reactor typically uses hundreds of fuel assemblies at one time.
The number of fuel rods and assemblies in a reactor differ by whether the reactor is a PWR or BWR design. It is important to note that the process of releasing neutrons is controlled and limited by operators at the plant, as opposed to an explosion of an atomic bomb, which is an uncontrolled process.

  When heated water turns to steam, it travels through piping to turbines, which produce electricity. Used water is returned to the environment, either as steam through the cooling towers, or as heated water sent directly back into the source.

  The principal components of nuclear reactors are made of steel and concrete. The reactor’s pressure vessel, a steel structure that houses the core, is in turn contained in a larger steel containment vessel. Beyond the vessels is an outer building made of concrete, which exists to keep radiation from escaping into the environment in case of a meltdown or other accident.

  About every eighteen months, fuel assemblies are no longer capable of producing electricity, and must be replaced. This process is known as “refueling” and requires that the entire reactor be shut down while this occurs. The reactor core is allowed to cool and new fuel assemblies are brought in to replace the old ones, which are stored in deep pools of water within the plant. Enormous amounts of radioactive waste particles generated while producing electricity are now contained in the fuel assemblies. Those chemicals that decay rapidly, such as iodine-131 (half life of eight days), disappear quickly. But a number of other man-made radioactive chemicals have not decayed, and will remain for a long time. cesium-137 and strontium-90 have half lives of thirty and twenty-nine years, and will thus continue to exist for hundreds of years. But these aren’t the slowest decaying chemicals: the half life of plutonium-239 is 24,400 years; thus, this chemical will need to be stored safely away from humans for about twice as long as civilization has existed.