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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kate Brown
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August 22 - August 22, 2017
I suggest that the world’s first plutonium cities shared common features, which transcended political ideology and national culture and were derived from nuclear security, atomic intelligence, and radioactive hazards.
Interestingly, the reviewer(s) that were "Hanford is nothing like other plutonium cities" often lived there or are related to someone that lived there.
The Manhattan Project officials introduced racial segregation to eastern Washington. The rationale for segregation was the presence of white workers from the South, who Matthias and Groves reasoned were too racist to live with nonwhites.14
In the thirties, the DuPont Corporation had acquired a particularly racist reputation by backing anti–New Deal propaganda that used the threat of racial equality as a scare tactic to warn voters away from the Democratic Party.17
They did just as they were told and followed directions precisely. The best lab technician he knew was a woman who had been a short-order cook. She was good at following the same recipe, exactly the same way, over and over.
Repeatedly there was an institutional impenetrability, as if research on the biological effects of radiation was conducted in isolation from plant operations.
In June 1943, DuPont and the Army Corps had made a secret deal with officials of the Washington State Department of Labor, who pledged to redact from workers’ files information that would threaten the plant’s secrecy. They also agreed that workers’ lawsuits would not go to civil court but would be heard before a special tribunal consisting of representatives of the federal government and the contractor.40
Half of his workers were exiled ethnic Germans, detained during the war in mobile labor squads called the Labor Army.5 Rapoport also had the use of thousands of other exiles. Since the thirties, the Soviet government had shipped hundreds of thousands of inmates and deportees to the Urals to work in heavy industry and resource extraction.6
The paucity of roads explained the sparse population. To live in an area cut off from supply lines in Stalinist Russia meant to toil ceaselessly, occasionally go without food, and perpetually live in fear of frost and hunger.
In the summer of 1946, there was no electrification. Wood and charcoal were used for heat, candles and pine splinters for light.
What American commentators failed to grasp is that order and security are luxury items, ones that came naturally at Hanford but took years to serve up in the Stalinist Urals.
Perhaps that is why in Richland people feted the bomb with reckless abandon and an insensitivity that shocked outsiders.
The desire to keep the government-stimulated communities alive led residents to blithely exchange the possible dangers of radioactive contamination for the certainties of growing prosperity, bankrolled by an expanding federal government, which, as they grew more dependent on it, they politically derided.
the GE corporation’s “benevolent dictatorship.”
Richland had no free enterprise.
Richland had no free press.
Residents again balked at this threat to their financial security. In polls in 1952 and 1955, voters rejected “privatization,” “disposal,” and “self-government” by margins of three to one.53 Renting, they argued, was cheaper, and they feared that if they bought their houses and the plant closed, there would be no jobs and no market for their real estate investments.
They voted, in essence, for the conveniences and especially the economy of government ownership and corporate management over private property, a free market, and local democracy. In turning down incorporation, residents also took a pass on the right to self-government, free speech, free assembly, and an uncensored press. No one said it because it would have breached security regulations, but by living in Richland, people also gave up rights to their bodies, placing urine samples on the front stoop in the morning and undergoing compulsory annual medical exams.
In Ozersk, the inmates were more common than newspapers, more dependable than the sale of vegetables, more punctual than the bus service.
By 1950, inhabitants of Ozersk annually drank more than thirteen quarts of vodka and wine per capita, more than double the national average.13
untouched as the first scouts found it in 1945. Yet in 1990, to stand on the windswept, reedy shores of Lake Karachai for an hour was to get a fatal dose.2 The difference from 1947 is that the landscape, still beautiful to behold, is now dangerous to traverse.
and tributaries. Once the plutonium plant’s pipeline started to drain into the river system, the river was rapidly overtaken. From 1949 to 1951, a full 20 percent of the river’s water consisted of plant effluent.
This colossal volume combined with the boggy river system created a radioactive landscape.
maximum annual dose for a nuclear worker. These people had the third-highest occurrence of leukemia after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, plus a notable excess of cancers of the intestine, liver, gallbladder, uterus, and cervix, and a general mortality that was 17 percent to 23 percent higher than their neighbors who did not live on the river.3 The
The one-industry city relied almost wholly on the hazardous plant for jobs. In the previous few years, Richland residents had been forced by congressional fiat to incorporate their city and buy their rented houses, albeit at highly discounted rates.2 It was a “dirty trick,” Tri-City Herald publisher Glenn Lee seethed. “They sold the town, and then cancelled the jobs.”3 Without the plant, locals feared the regional economy would go bust and real estate values would plummet.
In the early seventies, as Vietnam and the Watergate scandal were shattering public trust in government, scientists leaked documents to journalists about the “staggering” scope of Hanford’s waste management problem.32
American readers discovered that Hanford engineers were trying to recover two hundred pounds of plutonium intentionally deposited in open trenches over the course of three decades, because engineers feared the accumulated plutonium might go critical and blow a volcano of radioactive mud for miles.
The Chernobyl liquidators found the specialists from the Urals uncannily knowledgeable.9 They recommended burying cottages in pits, shaving away the top layers of soil, spreading fertilizer to stave off radioactive mimics of essential minerals, cutting down forests turned red from exposure, and rinsing streets with special chemicals devised for radioactive spills. How did they know so much? Most liquidators in Ukraine had no idea that Chernobyl was not the nation’s first nuclear disaster or that, from a scientific perspective, there was little that was new in the Chernobyl cleanup. The
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The Chernobyl accident sent shock waves through the American nuclear establishment because Chernobyl’s graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactors were based on designs stolen from the United States in the forties. The dual-purpose plutonium-producing Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 was a close replica of Hanford’s N reactor, and DOE officials quickly closed it a few months later.
But many more locals seethed over the negative national press coverage. If whistle-blowers kept complaining and journalists continued to pander to them, the plant could be shut down permanently, and then what would happen to their jobs, real estate values, and communities?
Meanwhile, in Richland, residents organized to defend their plant. They formed a group called the Hanford Family. They printed brochures promoting the excellent health of the community’s residents and the plant’s safety. They staged rallies and joined hands across the Columbia in solidarity for their plant and national defense.
A Department of Labor investigation found in Westinghouse’s possession a spymaster’s arsenal: helicopter gunships, bionic ears, pinhole video cameras, time-lapse VCRs, listening devices for a network of two hundred phones, and an RV modified as a spy center.34
harder to hide fraud and safety violations. As long as the journalists, watchdog groups, and congressional committees continue to monitor and investigate, then the stewards of the country’s largest Superfund site can be held accountable.
Reform and revolutions, however, are drawn-out, tiresome, messy affairs best suited for those with dogged patience, steely courage, and unflinching determination. And those people, fortunately, exist.
Muslumovo cohort. He said, after hearing the lecture, he did not want to have children with her. He advised her never to have children. “At the time, I was very hurt. I thought he was being cruel,” Rosa recalled, “but now I see he was trying to help me.”
struggling to find relief. The trope of ignorant, genetically deficient, and drunken villagers is a common one in Russia. In the southern Urals in the past few decades the cliché has been useful in glossing over the human suffering connected to uncontrolled dumping into the Techa River.
connecting pesticides to health problems.14 Rather than it being a cover-up, John Gofman, the former medical director of Lawrence Livermore labs who clashed with the AEC in the sixties, was closer to the truth when he told Steele, “It’s easy to have no observable health effects, when you never look.”15
28 His defiant silence during his last days illustrates how, as sociologist Ulrich Beck postulated, resistance to understanding a threat grows with proximity. The people most severely affected by a hazard are often the ones who deny the peril most vehemently in order to keep on living, or, in Pritikin’s father’s case, to finish dying.29
It is not that one form of knowledge, expert or local, was right and the other wrong. The two domains of knowledge reflected diverging interests.
