Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation

By Melvin R. Adams

“I have spent a career sifting through the rubble, the abandoned documents, the factories and tools, with the thought of saving what remains of water, land, and animals. But water, wind, and root have their way.”--Melvin R. Adams

Perhaps the first environmental engineer at Hanford, Adams spent twenty-four years on its 586 square miles. His thoughtful vignettes recall challenges and sites he worked on or found personally intriguing, like the 216-U-pond. Nestled among the trees, the pond looks like a pleasant place to go fishing. In reality, it has been contaminated with plutonium longer than any other place on earth.

In what Adams considers his most successful project, he helped determine the initial scope of the soil and solid waste cleanup. The Environmental Restoration and Disposal Facility today covers 107 acres and has a capacity of 18 million tons.

His group also designed and tested a marked, maintenance-free disposal barrier. It uses natural materials that will remain stable for thousands of years. They expanded a network of groundwater monitoring wells to define contaminated plumes, assess treatment effectiveness, and provide relevant data to hydrologists. They also developed a pilot scale pump and treatment plant for use on a four-square-mile carbon tetrachloride plume.

His environmental and engineering unit included a biological control group fondly dubbed “The Weeds.” They controlled tumbleweeds, tracked and collected plants and animals found growing or digging in contaminated sites, and caught stray wildlife discovered in Hanford offices.

In Atomic Geography, Adams presents some surprising revelations. He shares his perspective on leaking high-level waste storage tanks, dosimeters, and Hanford’s obsession with safety. He answers the question he is asked most, insisting he does not glow in the dark. He leaves that to spent fuel rods in water storage basins--a phenomenon known as Cherenkov radiation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Washington State University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636820422

Melvin R. Adams

Melvin R. Adams has published two other books with WSU Press, both on southeastern Oregon: Netting the Sun: A Personal Geography of the Oregon Desert and Remote Wonders: An Explorer’s Guide to Southeast Oregon.

Book preview

ATOMIC

GEOGRAPHY

ATOMIC

GEOGRAPHY

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE

HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION

Melvin R. Adams

Washington State University Press

PO Box 645910

Pullman, Washington 99164-5910

Phone: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Website: wsupress.wsu.edu

© 2016 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University

All rights reserved

First printing 2016

Printed and bound in the United States of America on pH neutral, acid-free paper. Reproduction or transmission of material contained in this publication in excess of that permitted by copyright law is prohibited without permission in writing from the publisher.

The essays The Atomic Pond and The Street Names of Richland originally appeared in COLUMBIA The Magazine of Northwest History, published by the Washington State Historical Society, in the Fall 2010 and Winter 2013-14 issues, respectively.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Adams, Melvin R., 1941- author.

Title: Atomic geography : a personal history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation / Melvin Adams.

Other titles: Personal history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation

Description: Pullman, Washington : Washington State University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016023036 | ISBN 9780874223415 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Adams, Melvin R., 1941- | Hanford Site (Wash.)--History. | Environmental engineers--United States--Biography. | Hanford Site (Wash.)--Environmental conditions.620.8 | Hanford Site (Wash.)--Safety measures. | Nuclear weapons plants--Waste disposal--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. | Hazardous waste site remediation--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. | Groundwater--Pollution--Washington (State)--Hanford Site. | Radioactive pollution--Washington (State)--Hanford Region. | Radioactive waste sites--Cleanup--Washington (State)--Hanford Site.

Classification: LCC TD898.12.W2 A43 2016 | DDC 623.4/5119 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023036

Cover images from the U.S. Department of Energy

Dedication

While working at Hanford from 1979 to 1993, I had the privilege of working on many interesting projects, some of which are described in these essays. I also hired, trained, and worked with many talented people over a number of years and formed many friendships. It is gratifying that many of the projects the Environmental Group pioneered have become full-scale, successful projects necessary to the cleanup of Hanford. The various mementos, awards, and acknowledgments I received from the contractors at Hanford I worked for, from DOE, and from employees and co-workers are precious to me.

Dedicated to the Environmental Engineering Group,

Hanford Site, Washington, 1988-1994.

In memory of Ron Mitchell, Hank McGuire,

and Walt Grisham.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Roy Gephart

Introduction: What is Hanford?

A Unique Geography

A Place of Paradox

The Personal Challenge

A Hanford Timeline

Part I. Hanford: The Cultural Progression

First Fishing, then Farming

The Beginning of Hanford

The Secret Revealed

Cleanup

Part II. Hanford: The Engineering Challenge

Coming to Hanford

Archaeological Analogs and the Nuclear Priesthood

The Weeds

Natural Analogs: Designing a Water Retaining Barrier

Thousands of Wells

Tumbleweeds

Bird in a Tank and Data Overload

Pumping Carbon Tetrachloride

Glowing in the Dark

Tank Leak Controversy

Part III. Anomalies and Unusual Events

The Atomic Pond

The PUREX Railroad Tunnels

Z-9 Crib, Poisoning Plutonium, and the Crawler Robot

Burial Grounds

The Atomic Man

How a Japanese Balloon Shut Down Hanford

Part IV. Hanford as Home

F House

The Street Names of Richland

Part V. Hanford: The National Park

The Hanford Reach

Elk and Wild Horses

Rare Plants/New Plants

B Reactor

Part VI. Reflecting on Hanford

Hanford as a Redemptive Quest

The Poetic Response

Glossary

References

Index

FOREWORD

THE GOAL OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT during World War II was to build the first atomic bombs in the shortest possible time. During the Cold War, Hanford’s goal was to preserve a dependable source of plutonium to support the military strength of the United States. Today, the goal of Hanford is waste management and environmental cleanup.

In late December 1942, the U.S. Army conducted secret reconnaissance visits and studies across portions of Montana, Washington, Oregon, and California in search of a favorable site to build the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactors and chemical reprocessing plants to produce weapons-grade plutonium. A tract of land in southeastern Washington State, lying between the Columbia River, Saddle Mountain, Rattlesnake Mountain, and the city of Richland, looked promising for building the Manhattan Project’s first plutonium production facilities. Just three months later, in the early spring of 1943, the federal government announced it would acquire 670 square miles of land (nearly one percent of the state) to begin construction on what became known as the Hanford Site. Some 1,500 residents were given notice of only two weeks to three months to vacate their properties. Soon the first of nearly 50,000 workers began arriving at the largest construction site in the world.

Construction of the first nuclear reactor (B Reactor) plus support facilities took eleven months to complete. It began operating in September 1944. Four months later, Hanford’s first reprocessing facility (T Plant) began recovering the first pounds of plutonium from spent fuel discharged from B Reactor.

Plutonium was formed inside Hanford’s nuclear reactors. It was later concentrated and extracted using large quantities of chemical solutions flowing through one of the reprocessing plants. Approximately one pound of weapons-grade plutonium was recovered for each pound of spent fuel discharged from Hanford reactors. Hanford made nearly two-thirds (sixty-five tons) of the plutonium produced in the United States. The remaining one-third was produced at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

Nine reactors were eventually built along the Columbia River shoreline and five processing plants constructed atop the central plateau of Hanford. Reactors were placed along the Columbia because they needed large quantities of cooling water. Reprocessing plants were built where the underlying sediment was thicker so as to absorb contaminant releases.

The last reactor (N Reactor) was shut down in 1987—one year after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in the former Soviet Union. The final reprocessing plant (PUREX) closed in 1990.

Hanford facilities not only created plutonium but also large volumes of radioactive and chemical waste, some of which was released into the environment exposing people who lived downwind and downstream. Today, Hanford’s soil, groundwater aquifer, underground waste storage tanks, solid waste, and stored nuclear materials contain nearly 330 million curies of radioactivity and 450,000 tons of chemicals. This is the largest accumulation of radioactive waste in the Western Hemisphere.

Until the mid-twentieth century, industries such as power plants, steel mills, and city sewer systems used the environment as dumping grounds for their waste. Pollution and health risks were accepted as necessary side effects to preserving economic growth and jobs. In other words, no pollution…no wages.

Starting in the early 1940s, wartime secrecy surrounded not only the production of nuclear material such as plutonium but also the storage and disposal of radioactive waste. This need for secrecy extended into the 1980s and deceived the public about possible health risks from contaminant releases.

Public concerns about their health, plus preservation of an irreplaceable environment, mounted as the American middle class expanded in the years following World War II. A groundswell of anxiety grew as the public saw sewage dumped into streams, rivers catching on fire, air choked with gray, foul-smelling industrial gases, dangerous chemicals oozing from abandoned landfills, dying animals, sick people living near waste disposal sites, and damaged ecosystems. Newspapers ran front-page stories warning parents to keep their children from eating strontium-tainted snow polluted by atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. I was one of those young kids living in Ohio. Recognizing the damage being done by environmental exploitation and chemical contamination, people began seeking environmental protection and cleanup.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a regulating community, empowered by laws and agencies such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, CERCLA, RCRA, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), took shape, and words such as ecology, environment, green revolution, Silent Spring, and Earth Day became part of the national dialogue.

As standard industrial waste management practices fell from favor, so did those at nuclear weapons sites scattered across the United States. However, the Atomic Energy Commission, and later the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), claimed exemption from state and federal pollution controls and waste-handling laws by stating its activities were covered under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and thus were immune from independent oversight.

In the 1970s a new crop of young environmental scientists, engineers, and managers began joining the ranks of Hanford contractors. Many of their jobs centered on studying Hanford’s surface and subsurface environment and potential risks resulting from contaminant releases. These young men and women also started writing Hanford’s first environmental reports specifically designed for public reading and understanding.

During this time, Mel Adams and I were hired alongside other staff as a new era of field studies and openness grew. Examples of work and studies undertaken and discussed in this book include: the need for engineered barriers to stabilize