A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People (28 page)

In late 1948 and early 1949, Air Force and Oak Ridge personnel conducted a series of twenty air-sampling flights at Oak Ridge and three at Hanford.
The results were disappointing. Instruments detected airborne releases of radioactive material at ranges of up to fifteen miles in the hills and valleys near Oak Ridge, but no farther than two miles from Hanford because of measures taken to reduce radioactive emissions there. At an October 25, 1949 meeting at Hanford, representatives of the Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and General Electric (the postwar contractor for the Hanford site) agreed to a plan to release enough radioactive material from Hanford to provide a larger radioactive source for intelligence-related experiments.

This intentional release took place in the early morning of December 3, 1949 but information about it remained classified until 1986. Two periodic reports of the HI Divisions described a plutonium production run using “green” fuel elements. The story of this “Green Run “ has emerged piecemeal since then. The most complete account comes in a 1950 report co-authored by Jack Healy (referred to as the Green Run report), which was declassified in stages in response to requests from the public under the Freedom of Information Act and inquiries by the Advisory Committee.

Although cooling times of 90 to 100 days were common by 1949, the fuel elements used in the Green Run were dissolved after being cooled for only 16 days. This short cooling time meant that much more radioactive iodine 131 and xenon 133 were released directly into the atmosphere, rather than decaying while the fuel elements cooled. Furthermore, pollution control devices called scrubbers normally used to remove an estimated 90 percent of the radioiodine from the effluent gas were not operated.

When these “green” fuel elements were processed, roughly 8,000 curies of iodine 131 flowed from the tall smokestack at Hanford’s T plant. This stack was built in the early years of Hanford’s operation when large quantities of radioactive gases were routinely released in the rush to produce plutonium. Although the Green Run represents roughly one percent of the total radioiodine release from Hanford during the peak release years 1945-1947, it was almost certainly larger than any other one-day release, even during World War II.

One clear purpose of the Green Run was to test a variety of techniques for monitoring environmental contamination caused by an operating plutonium-production plant. A small army of workers, including many from Hanford’s HI Divisions, took readings of radioactivity on vegetation, in animals, and in water and tested techniques for sampling radioactive iodine and xenon in the air. The Air Force operated an airplane carrying a variety of monitoring devices the same aircraft used in earlier aerial surveys at Oak Ridge and Hanford and set up a special air sampling station in Spokane, Washington.

Those operating the equipment encountered numerous technical problems including a lost weather balloon and failed air pumps. The greatest problem, however, was the general contamination of monitoring and laboratory equipment. The contamination created a high background signal that made it difficult to distinguish radioactivity on the equipment from radioactivity in the environment. The main cause of this contamination was the weather at the time, which led to much higher ground contamination near the stack than expected.

The plans for the Green Run included very specific meteorological requirements. These requirements were designed to facilitate monitoring of the radioactive plume by aircraft; but they were similar to the normal operational requirements, which were designed to limit local contamination. These included:

Jack Healy reports that he made the decision to go ahead with the Green Run on the evening of December 2, 1949, even though the weather did not turn out as expected. Some have suggested that the Air Force pressed to go ahead with the release in spite of marginal weather conditions, but Healy recalls no such pressure. The plume from the release stagnated in the local area for several days before a storm front dispersed it toward the north-northeast. Consequently, local deposition of radioactive contaminants was much higher than anticipated.

The Green Run report concludes: Under the worst possible meteorological conditions for such a test, the airborne instruments detected the radioactive gases at a distance better than 100 miles from the stack. Under favorable conditions, it was estimated that with the same concentrations this distance could have been increased by up to a factor of ten.

Despite the contamination of equipment, the monitoring provided a record of the extensive short-term environmental contamination that resulted from the Green Run. Measurements of radioactivity on vegetation produced readings that, while temporary, were as much as 400 times the then- “permissible permanent concentration” on vegetation thought to cause injury to livestock. The current level at which Washington state officials intervene to prevent possible injury to people through the food supply, is not much higher than the then-permissible permanent concentration. Animal thyroid specimens showed contamination levels up to “about 80 times the maximum permissible limit of permanently maintained radioiodine concentration.”

Radioactive materials released into the environment can affect humans in two ways. First, they can be a source of radiation external to the body: beta radiation that affects the skin, or more penetrating gamma radiation. Second, they can enter the body from contaminated air, food, or water and provide an internal source of radiation. Of these environmental pathways to radiation exposure, the food pathway is by far the most complicated. Radionuclides can enter the food chain at many points; through contaminated air, water, and soil, resulting in contaminated fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products.

The hazards from environmental exposures to radionuclides differ in important quantitative ways from those due to medical procedures or participation in biomedical research. The natural dilution of materials in the environment means that individual exposures even from massive releases are often quite small, although the chemical and biological processes involved in exposures through the food chain can lead to effects that counteract this dilution. Finally, many more people may be exposed, with exposures that vary widely from person to person. Because individual exposures are generally too low to produce any acute effects, the main form of injury possible from environmental radiation exposure is cancer, which may occur many years after the exposure.

We need to listen to two survivors to get the true picture of the devastation from these experiments at Hanford. Darcey Sollars’ and Brenda Weavers’ testimony before the Interagency Working Group addresses the reality that all of the facts have not been presented by our government. Darcey says,

“I fall into many categories. I’m a downwinder. I’m a human experiment, a whistleblower, daughter of a Hanford worker, sister of an atomic veteran. I was born and raised only a few miles from Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I’ve testified at three Advisory Committee meetings. In the 1961-62 school year I was in second grade in a public school in Richland, Washington. I was taken from my class and made to drink liquid that made me very ill. I was then sent through a body counter. I was studied and sent back through again in two weeks. That day, and that liquid that I drank that day, made me very ill. Since then I’ve had very many more illnesses and much too many surgeries. Two years ago I made that fact known and introduced myself to the Advisory Committee. They did not address this issue in their report, nor did they address the horrid harassment that followed. From the very day I spoke out in public about this matter, I began to receive threats by phone, by mail, at work and at home. I was told to shut up and to leave town, and on many occasions, my live was threatened. When that did not silence me, my family pets were poisoned and brutally mutilated. This is the attitude of the old culture in that area. My family and myself lived with this constant harassment for a year, until I was so scared I left my home of 9-1/2 years and moved to New Mexico. I left my 18-year-old daughter behind to finish high school. I was running out of pets and I felt my family or myself would be next. This frightening issue also was not addressed in the Advisory report.”

Brenda Weaver graphically illustrates her personal experience with the radiation exposure with her testimony,

“I lived and was raised just across the river, seven miles downwind from Hanford. I’m here to tell partly my story, and also I’m here in representation of all downwinders, regardless if they’re from Hanford. I want to represent those persons. I was raised on a ranch where my father raised sheep and cattle; and we farmed and used all of the natural resources, water, food and so forth from that area. I want to kind of start out with a story of another reason that I’m here is because I had very many medical problems and so forth, losing an ovary when I was 14. But then when I became pregnant, I had a daughter born to me, and she I want to show you, first of all, my daughter’s eyes, and I want to tie that into (Pause.)

My father, in that length of time that we’ve lived there, there were many farmers who had sheep and animals born without eyes, without part of their heads. It was referred to many times when these births would go on-we’d refer to them as the nights of the little demons. And I never got to see any of them because my father wouldn’t let the female women to the barn at this time. But we knew about it, in the community it was well known; and a number of years later in 1965, I had a daughter born without eyes, just like the sheep that my father had born.

I’d like to present this is my daughter’s eyes.

(Pause.)

Let’s you see what we have to deal with. My daughter now is 30 years old. Her name is Jamie. She is college educated and hopes to go on to get her doctorate. She’s a taxpaying contributor. She is not on a disability. But still, at this time is not able to make enough money to provide her own health care, and a member of our family has to provide her healthcare.

I know that’s a little shock factor, but I kind of wanted you to see with what we deal with on a daily basis in our home, as well as my own health problems which I’m not going to go into now; because I’ve already done that in front of the President Committee. I just feel that I represent, and Jamie represents, those people born with birth defects that are not being acknowledged.

And as downwinders we feel that we’ve been ignored, that we are really not being acknowledged at all. That we’re nonexistent. That we’re not citizens. We feel that we’ve been totally ignored in the report and we’re told that we don’t exist. That we really these people are not radiated. That we don’t have affects. And that isn’t the case. And we just represent those persons. There are many thousands of us with all kinds of problems and health problems and birth defects that I don’t think can be ignored, that we don’t exist. And I didn’t really write out a formal because I’m just a housewife and a mom. I’m not really a professional person. But I do want to I feel that we’re being ignored not being seen, you might say--just as my daughter has to use these eyes to see. I feel that the Committee didn’t open up their eyes and to really
see what and look at those people that have been affected in communities, large communities that were radiated--that have had these effects throughout the United States, like Laguna and Alaska and New Mexico and all of the places Oak Ridge. Those are communities. And our fault in this is just being living in the wrong place at the wrong time, I think. And now we’re told that we weren’t there and that these things didn’t happen. I mean, that’s a little hard to live with. I think that I would like to see, at least in my daughter’s case, we’ll use her as an example. I’d like to see some sort of health care program because she doesn’t have one. As long as she’s on a disability and is a second-class citizen on a disability, then she can have the health insurance that goes along with having a disability from the states. But if she’s a hardworking person like she is, and she pays taxes and she works but doesn’t make quite enough money to pay for health care; she’s in a Catch 22.

Also her artificial eyes cost a great deal of money, and she’s now paying for that herself because they say it’s cosmetic. Well, it’s difficult. You can see the dilemma that she is in. She is one of hundreds and thousands of people, and I’m just using her as one example of what goes on. I am personally offended and deeply hurt, and I know the community that I represent feels the same way. That we’ve been put aside as being not, I don’t know, not
important enough; but simply not even existing.”

In July 1963 the Hanford Laboratory conducted another study. It involved the release of 120 micro- curies of iodine-131 into the environment. The purpose of the experiment was to enable scientists to study how the radioactive iodine spread in turn through the air, soil, and vegetation and how it affected animals.
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I guess we need look no further than Brenda Weavers’ own family.