Ep 4: Atomic Frontier

Aug 12

*Docent Marty Zizzi stands in front of the B Reactor at Hanford, the top-secret plant that developed uranium into plutonium in Washington State. (Alec Cowan)*

Far away from the mines of the Colorado Plateau, the first nuclear reactor in the world was built in Washington State. Here, uranium was used to create plutonium at Hanford, transmuting from a helpful ore to a nagging waste. As more atomic veterans died from radiation exposure, their families sought to hold someone accountable — and though it would come back to uranium country eventually, those outside of Colorado would be the first to blaze the trail.

Episode Transcript

Marie Cobb: With that, I think we'll start the video.

Hanford video: The Manhattan Project National Historical Park preserves and interprets the nationally significant historic sites, stories, and legacies associated with the top secret race to develop an atomic weapon during World War II.

They knew they were helping a war effort, but few could have imagined they were producing materials for the world's first atomic weapon.

Uranium billets were milled into fuel slugs and sealed in aluminum jackets.

As in the ancient dream of alchemists, of turning lead into gold. Or as in the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, of spinning straw into gold, the end result of the Hanford process was the transmutation of one element, uranium, into another: plutonium.

Michele Gerber: I think there are three reasons people should care about the Manhattan Project today, even in the 21st century.

One reason has to do with money. The events set in motion by the Manhattan Project have cost this country trillions of dollars. And every American has paid those taxes. And something that expensive, it’s in our national interest to know as much as we can about it.

Alec Cowan: Since the beginning of the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1946, thousands of people have worked on some cog in the United States nuclear machine.

Michele Gerber: Another reason is health and safety. If the cleanup of the Manhattan Project facilities and the Cold War facilities in this country is not done expeditiously and well, We could all suffer some consequences in the degradation of our environment.

Alec Cowan: Today, these workers are given the broad title of “atomic veterans.” Even if they weren't directly involved in building a bomb, the industry around the atom spanned the country. Miners in the remote corners of Colorado sent their yellow cake to be enriched and packaged into barrels. Facility workers drove home just downwind from smokestacks belching radioactive air. Scientists developed bigger and more destructive bombs.

And today, the cleanup of waste produced by these sites is ongoing.

Michele Gerber: And the third reason really is different than both of those. It's, it's the lessons in democracy. that this project offers to us. The lessons that we can even translate and use in the modern world about how information was handled, how technology was handled, how large organizations function, and all of those lessons come to us from the Manhattan Project.

Alec Cowan: Construction of nuclear bombs was done by a handful of companies, including Union Carbide, General Electric, DuPont, and Monsanto. And as decades passed, the nation became one big uranium supply chain — one big nuclear machine that was hard to stop.

All the while, both the companies and the government knew more about the dangers of this atomic world than they were letting on.

So as more workers died, as more towns were shuttered, and as more secrets became public, people started to wonder who should be held accountable. And even as it would benefit them later, the first domino wouldn't be in uranium country.

It was the shrublands of Washington state, where the first nuclear reactor changed everything.

John Findlay: Yes, some people know it's risky. Do they know exactly what the risks are? No. So they can't tell anybody what happened.

Kirk Gladwin: Maybe you weren't there when When the cloud went over. But guess what? The cloud settled on the grass in the field. The cows ate the grass and guess what? The kids drank the milk.

Trisha Pritikin: I started to get sick, but nobody knew why.

Alec Cowan: I'm Alec Cowan, and this is Boom Town: A Uranium Story. Episode 4: Atomic Frontier.

Pt. 1: Big Country

Marie Cobb: So off on the left hand side of the bus, that is the Lamb Weston Potato Processing Facility.

Alec Cowan: Central Washington State is known for being an open expanse of shrubs and rocky valleys. It's where the Cascade Mountains recede and give way to big, open sky. And for centuries, communities here have grown alongside the mighty Columbia River, building villages and towns.

And today, the region is filled with plots of apple orchards, potato farms, and cattle ranches.

Marie Cobb: Some people, when they drive this stretch of road, they see this landscape and they would describe it as barren, or boring, or maybe even a wasteland.

Alec Cowan: That voice over the PA is Marie Cobb. She's a docent and tour leader for the National Historical Site we're driving out to see today.

And by we, I mean 45 tourists packed into an old charter bus on a hot September morning.

Marie Cobb: How is it that this particular patch of nothingness became instrumental in World War II?

Alec Cowan: Just a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allied powers were already in a race to build the first nuclear weapon in the world.

The Manhattan Project determined the sparse deserts of western Colorado were suitable as a hub for uranium procurement. But now, they needed somewhere to process it. And where would be better suited to the task than 600 miles of shrubland in central Washington state?

Marie Cobb: They had already been to other states. This was last stop. And Colonel Mathias came here and saw exactly what you're seeing now. And he called his boss and said, I found it. I found a great, I found a nearly ideal site. Why? Because it didn't just meet their siting criteria, it exceeded them.

Alec Cowan: The people operating mines in Uravan were only on the front end of the uranium supply chain.

After the ore was concentrated, barrels of yellow cake were shipped to other remote corners of the country. That's why I'm here today, in Washington state, where uranium would serve two functions: powering the earliest nuclear reactors, and transforming into a potent element of destruction.

Both of these technologies were pioneered at the facility we're now driving out to see — the first full scale nuclear reactor ever built, which, from our view, looks like a concrete box with a smokestack on the horizon.

To locals, it's simply known as Hanford.

——

Alec Cowan: Everything at Hanford is on fenced in, gated government property. Which is why we have to bus out as a group. You wouldn't want the public getting their hands on any machinery for producing plutonium.

Marty Zizzi: Well, you're looking at the front face of the reactor.

Alec Cowan: This is our next docent, Marty. He's standing in front of a giant glittering wall, a golden maze of tubing, nozzles, and switches plugged into a massive 40 foot block.

This is the heart of the reactor, and for 30 years uranium mines of the Colorado Plateau helped feed it.

Marty Zizzi: Uranium is made up of two principle isotopes: uranium 238 and uranium 235. Both are numbered 92 on your periodic table, meaning they have 92 protons in the nucleus. The 235 has three less neutrons, so it is what we call “fissile.” It can be “fissioned” with slow neutrons.

Alec Cowan: Uranium was recognized as a formal element when a German chemist, Martin Klapproth, was able to isolate it from the other sediments to a purer form in 1789. He named it after the planet, Uranus.

More than 100 years later, chemists at the University of California at Berkeley were breaking the boundaries of nuclear science, crashing uranium atoms against one another. The result was a chain reaction that turned uranium into something new.

Well, several new things, actually. As particles flew off and reconfigured, they became neptunium, before decaying into an element they named plutonium. You can see they stuck with the planetary theme: Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Marty Zizzi: So that's the physics lesson, Marie, can you give your test on the way back? Okay, good.

Alec Cowan: These became the first man made elements in history. And because of plutonium's highly radioactive and unstable nature, they believed it could have more destructive potential, create bigger, more dangerous bombs.

But this massive building wasn't made as an academic lab. Its express purpose was industrializing that chemical plutonium making process.

And to do so, it ran on an incredible amount of uranium.

Marty Zizzi: Eight of these process tubes that you see in the nozzles, fully loaded, would be about a ton of uranium in there. The yield on that ton of uranium would be, on the average, one half pound of plutonium.

The rest is waste.

Alec Cowan: After Marty's presentation is over, I ask him where Hanford's uranium was sourced from. He mentioned that in World War II, all of it came from the Belgian Congo and Canada. I'm about to Uravan when he says very confidently that the U. S. had no active uranium mines until after the war.

But, of course, I've heard differently. It seems Uravan’s history with the Manhattan Project is still a secret to some folks.

Marie Cobb: Welcome to the control room.

Alec Cowan: In the control room, our group takes turns grabbing photos in the control seat, pretending to push buttons and keep the facility from melting down. The whole thing feels a bit surreal, especially the sign saying that we shouldn't worry about radiation, because most of the facility is, well, mostly safe.

Our group huddles around our docent, Marie, as she tells us the story of when the plant was first switched on.

Marie Cobb: What happened the very first day this reactor operated? September 26th, 1944 at 10:48 p. m…. That's why the clocks are stopped on that minute all throughout the reactor. That's when this reactor first started up, full bore.

Alec Cowan: Some of the most influential scientists in the nuclear world were piled into this room to see what happened as the plant began the first minutes of its 30 year run. The plutonium made here would go into tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, but the reactors would also produce electricity for a short time.

Just like Uravan, this remote facility, in this remote region, would go on to change the world. And it would represent two promises: that of an atomic utopia, and that of a nuclear apocalypse.

Marie Cobb: The newspaper articles would have been, and the newsreels would have been full of the casualties, the American casualties.

Most people in this room firmly believe the success or failure of this reactor would determine the outcome of the war. And it worked. And I can't imagine the people in this room, their elation and pride and joy and belief or whatever else they felt. I truly can't put myself in their shoes.

Alec Cowan: At its most operational, the B Reactor ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and was producing 75% of the world's plutonium.

But for us today, the most lasting impact of this facility is that waste that was mentioned earlier — everything that didn't make it into a nuclear weapon.

And for this, our guide takes us to the back of the reactor, which is still largely closed off.

Marie Cobb: …because it's still a contaminated zone…

Alec Cowan: After months of fissioning, the uranium would drop down into a pool of water to cool.

Marie Cobb: …the back face guys would open up the back ends, and then they would literally push the uranium out…

Alec Cowan: The rods would then be sorted and hauled by train. Because so little uranium was actually transmuted, most of the resulting green sludge was buried in underground containers and left to posterity. It's an issue still plaguing the site today.

But other functions of the reactor weren't as limited to the Hanford site itself. There was the water they pulled from the Columbia River to cool the heating reactor core. And operating the site led to a buildup of radioactive gases, which had to be released into the open air.

As it would turn out, the conditions in this arid valley weren't as perfect as the government thought they were. And as more people moved to work at Hanford, this empty region was getting bigger, meaning more people were being exposed.

Although uranium towns like Uravan operated on smaller scales, their story wasn't much different. Local water was used to run the mills. Radioactive waste was piled by the rivers, and cleanup would be anything but quick.

Today, Hanford is known as the most polluted site in the country, and the response to who was hurt as a result would have far reaching impacts for anyone working with uranium.

That's after the break.

Pt. 2: Downwind

Alec Cowan: I don't think it's unfair to say that the situation at Hanford was like a Uravan on steroids.

In just a year and a half, DuPont had helped construct the world's first nuclear reactor, along with the housing and entertainment for its tens of thousands of workers. And for decades, they would be the ones running one of the world's most famous nuclear facilities, just upriver.

To feed that facility, uranium towns like Uravan had to begin digging millions of tons of ore.

John Findlay: Niels Bohr, the famous Danish physicist, when he heard about the project of, uh, creating a bomb, 1938-39, he said you'll have to turn the whole country into a factory. And he was right, the whole country had to become a factory.

Alec Cowan: John Findlay is a historian of the Atomic West based in Seattle, where he grew up and taught at the University of Washington. For perspective, Seattle's about three hours from Hanford, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains.

John Findlay: Hanford was always just sort of a boring thing for me. There were always, it was always being covered in the papers when I was growing up, especially as I paid attention in the 70s and 80s.

Alec Cowan: For decades, Hanford was just a fact of life in Washington. It helped make bombs, it broke new scientific ground. But by the 1960s, it was outdated and shutting down. That's when attention was being turned toward the facility's leftovers. And early on, government officials knew waste would be a problem.

The most hazardous sludge would go underground, but the water used to cool the uranium rods would sit stagnant and burn off the worst particles before going back into the Columbia River.

And officials felt pretty certain the winds in the region would blow the radioactive gas north, away from any residential areas.

They even had a slogan for the process.

John Findlay: The motto at the time, World War II and afterwards was “Dilution is the solution.” And they thought that if you dumped it into the river or cast into the winds, it would be diluted

Alec Cowan: “Dilution is the solution.”

It wasn't a bad idea. But the speed and secrecy that the country's nuclear projects required meant that a lot of radiological science was being done in hindsight, or in the best case scenario, in real time.

The thousands of workers running the facility, and their families, lived in a new town the government had built downriver — a town called Richland, that's still there today. Similar to Uravan, it was a kind of company town, except the government provided everything; not a contractor, like Union Carbide.

It was your landlord, your local grocery store, your doctor. That unique situation has its benefits, like stability. But it also had its downsides.

John Findlay: For all of World War 2, until the very last days, what happens at Richland is a secret. The government, as its operating Hanford and running the town of Richland, knows that it's exposing people to risks of radiation. And it tries to minimize those risks in different ways — but it can't reveal too much about them.

Yes, some people know it's risky. Um, do they know exactly what the risks are? No. So they can't tell anybody what happened.

Alec Cowan: Like in Uravan, many workers at the facility accepted the risks. There was a real honor in being the first community to try out the new atomic future.

Remember, this was a time that promised nuclear powered cars, limitless electricity, triumph over the communists. Of course building bombs was risky — but they were just doing their part.

John Findlay: They begin to see themselves as pioneers and Westerners. And we know that pioneers suffer. They go out to the edge of civilization and conquer something or claim something for the United States. The rest of us benefit. I don't mean to forgive anybody for being careless about waste. I don't mean to say that people bought it on themselves.

But even the people in charge, the scientists themselves, are still figuring out how which way the wind blows, how much people are being exposed. They don't know that if the waste leaks into the groundwater, it could go to the river. I mean, all these things are things they figure out later.

Alec Cowan: Of course, workers at the facility had some kind of company insurance. Their sacrifice was covered.

But thousands of people, from ranchers to native tribes, did not. And then there's the tens of thousands of new residents who are moving to this quiet bend in the river. Not all of them knew just what was going on in those blocky, concrete buildings.

Trisha Pritikin: As I grew up, I loved Richland because it was, uh, the Atomic Energy Commission put a lot of money into making everybody in Richland, all the families. There were cultural events, the schools were really good. So it seemed like a perfectly normal town to me.

Alec Cowan: This is Trisha Pritikin. Her father worked at Hanford, on the reactors, and her mother also worked at the facility as a secretary.

This is from an oral history interview that Trisha did with the Atomic Heritage Foundation, in 2018.

Trisha Pritikin: I started to have health issues at around age 18. And we didn't know what was wrong. I started to have my weight fluctuate from high to low without any changes in my diet. I would get, become overweight and then underweight and I was sick.

Alec Cowan: Trisha talks about something called the milk pathway. Basically, radioactive particles were settling on grass, which was consumed by local livestock. The milk from those cows and goats was then consumed by locals. I mean, it's incredible how radioactivity can be transferred all the way through that process.

And it's equally incredible that Hanford researchers actually knew this pathway existed, even back in the 1940s. But even though her parents worked at the facility, Trisha was in the dark about what was happening to her.

Secrecy trumped everything.

Trisha Pritikin: Uh, my thyroid was shutting down, and it, uh, That's why my weight was going up and down, and my hair was becoming kinky and not kinky, and then I felt sick, and I started to get tired.

That's a latency period that happens before you feel these effects of exposure. And the latency period for me had been from age 10 to about 18. So eight years after the end of my exposures, I started to get sick. sick, but nobody knew why I was getting sick because there wasn't any information about what had happened at Hanford.

Alec Cowan: That was just the beginning of Trisha's health problems. She developed a rare sickness called “cat scratch fever,” which grew a big tumor on her neck. She had trouble with random muscle contractions, autoimmune thyroiditis, and infertility.

And living downwind was only one of the facility's problems. There was the cooling water being released back into the river after it ran through the radioactive core. And Native tribes, some of whom were forcibly relocated for the facility, and many of whom had agreements with the government to continue fishing on their usual and accustomed lands, were also at risk.

Veronica Taylor: There are bouts with cancer, uh, either be it prostate or be it with breast cancer or whatever, cancer in the uterus or whatever, uh, I think that, uh, Uh, a lot of it has happened because of the diet and the things that happened here on the Columbia River.

Alec Cowan: This is an oral history interview with Veronica Taylor, an elder with the Nez Perce Tribe.

As a kid, Veronica would camp along the banks of the Columbia River during tribal fishing trips.

Veronica Taylor: The uranium and the plutonium and the different things that has affected the water and the, the fish. And that we still ate and we still eat a lot of that, has affected our lives, I think. I think that had the stories happened way back then, and people were paying attention as to what was actually going on here, or that we were told what was going on here, we would have been maybe a little bit more selective, but we, we were just continuing on with our lives.

Alec Cowan: As time went on, there were more stories of sickness and death from Hanford. And similar stories started to come out of New Mexico and Nevada, where they tested new iterations of bombs.

Together, the groups came to be known as “Downwinders.”

As more stories came out in newspapers and medical circles, there was a growing understanding that the problem was unique to nuclear facilities. And in 1986, the suspicions of downwinders were confirmed.

In a surprise declassification, thousands of documents were released to the public by the Department of Energy, which was now splitting atomic responsibilities with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Those documents showed the government didn't only know about the harms they were causing, but were actively studying them.

But as always, it was secret. Wouldn't want the Soviet Union to know how we were measuring their pollution. Here's historian Michele Gerber, in one last oral history interview.

Michele Gerber: They were measuring the gases in the atmosphere, they were measuring wind dispersion patterns, um, keeping track of their measurements.

They were measuring every contaminant and every parameter, whether liquid, solid, gaseous, or any other form. Um, and they did a terrific job in record keeping. Unfortunately, we have to say that they faltered in that they classified their findings and did not share them with the scientific community at large for many years.

Alec Cowan: The revelation from these papers was galvanizing. Trisha Pritikin, who'd gone on to get a law degree by this time, was looking for someone to put a case together. Through litigation, the Downwinders were hoping to make someone accountable for the sickness that changed their lives. But just who would take the blame was up in the air.

Here's historian John Findlay again.

John Findlay: The contracts from the start say it's the government's responsibility. They're the ones on whom the economic burden is going to fall. It falls anywhere.

Alec Cowan: In Hanford's case, DuPont and General Electric had overseen stewardship of the facility. In Uravan’s case, it was union carbide.

John Findlay: So the contractors find ways to eschew themselves from certain kinds of risks at the start of their participation in the Manhattan Project. And that pattern continues. They carefully limit what they would or wouldn't get sued for later on.

Alec Cowan: A flurry of cases would be levied against the federal government for not doing more to alert and protect those on the atomic frontier.

And for uranium miners in places like Colorado, this legal battle would finally bring some admission and some closure for those who died in the mines.

That's after the break.

Pt. 3: Recompense

Alec Cowan: As time went on throughout the Cold War, with nuclear weapons and nuclear power proliferating, atomic workers around the country were dying. But despite the shadow of sickness looming over them, communities like Richland, Washington were able to survive. And in fact, they've embraced their identity as the country's model atomic city.

On the morning of my Hanford reactor tour, I stopped for a nearby coffee shop that had menu items named the Manhattan and the Nuke. Afterwards, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant called the Atomic Brew Pub, where I drank a plutonium porter by a football jersey for the Richland Bombers.

Back in uranium country, few towns were able to stay so proud and so vibrant.

I mean, obviously this is now more further removed, but how, you know, once that, once everything kind of started to cool down, I mean, what did that do for those communities?

Bob Ince: It killed them. It killed them. And not only that, by this time, the dangers of the mining was showing up and people were dying of lung cancer.

Alec Cowan: This is Bob Ince again, longtime friend of my dad's and a one time uranium miner in Gateway, Colorado.

Bob Ince: As a matter of fact, my dad died from small cell lung cancer, and every father of every guy that I grew up with that worked in the mines is dead from the same thing.

Alec Cowan: Most uranium miners probably had little to no idea that throughout the country, a legal battle was being waged over the danger of working on the atomic frontier.

For years, downwinders had sued the U. S. government, claiming they failed to give adequate warnings and treatment for their exposure to radioactive materials. Many of those suits were dismissed in lower courts.

But eventually, it pushed the government to do something. In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, the RECA. This program set aside federal funds for workers and residents harmed by their exposure to radiation.

And it's not the most scientific thing. To qualify, workers just have to check a series of boxes. Did you work in a nuclear job or live in a nuclear area? And could you also check off a number of specific health conditions?

It was this program that Bob stumbled upon in 1999 while he was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bob Ince: And I called my mom and I said, ‘Mom, you need to get a hold of this outfit.’ And it turns out they were paying people, I don't know, I think it was 150, 000 per person.

Alec Cowan: So they looked into it, and sure enough, the circumstances around his father's death were qualifying. This kind of claim was a long time in the making, and it was just the first of several nuclear compensation acts, like the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.

These compensation programs were designed to address the sickness of workers like Bob's father, and downwinders, like Trisha Pritikin. But for Bob, the payout wasn't a total fix. And there seems to be a consensus that more can be done today.

Bob Ince: My mom bought me a set of golf clubs for finding it. But, you know, $150,000 for a lifetime is not a whole bunch of money. But there was some compensation. Let me put it that way… there was compensation for it.

And that was, that was when they kind of wiped their hands and said, okay, there you go.

Rep. Steve Cohen: Enacted in 1990, RICA established a program administered by the Department of Justice to pay compensation to certain individuals who were harmed by the U. S. government's atmospheric testing of atomic weapons…

Alec Cowan: This is Representative Steve Cohen, chairman at the time of the House Committee on the Judiciary. It's 2021, in a hearing about potentially amending the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act — and this meeting is a good history lesson.

Rep. Steve Cohen: Thousands of U. S. uranium workers labor to produce the raw materials necessary to fuel the U.S. atomic weapons development…

Alec Cowan: Over 30 years, RECA has been in constant evolution.

The original version of the Compensation Act, which passed in 1990 after 12 years of deliberations, was literally written as a public apology from the federal government. But in the early decades of its implementation, people applying for compensation were frequently denied, including the widows and family members of deceased uranium miners, like Bob Ince.

Subsequent amendments have tried to make that process easier, and expand the range of applicants to include states outside the Four Corners region.

Rep. Steve Cohen: Despite efforts to improve uranium worker safety, Through increased federal regulation, uranium mine workers continued to face elevated risk from radon exposure after 1971.The federal government, in many ways, failed to adequately protect or warn people about the potential hazards associated

Alec Cowan: One reason for the continued negotiations is just how limited the Act was in its original form. To be compensated, workers had to work in a narrow list of places during a narrow range of dates.

Because of those restrictions, the act made it notoriously difficult for thousands of uranium miners from the Navajo Nation to receive compensation.

Many Navajo miners didn't have standard marriage licenses, meaning their widows are still unable to collect on behalf of deceased husbands. And the act cuts off exposure after 1971, which ignores the hundreds of regional mines that continued operating past then. On top of all that, the companies operating on Native land didn't tell workers about the harms of working in uranium mines — and even today, many of those company mines have been abandoned and the cleanup neglected.

Of the 500 mines located on the Navajo Nation, half are still littered with uranium and radioactive tailings today. And on the ground studies and reporting have found strong links between uranium exposure and cancer and birth defects.

This is Jonathan Nez, then president of the Navajo Nation, in that 2021 Judiciary hearing.

Jonathan Nez: The Navajo Nation has a deep, complicated uranium legacy. From 1944 to 1986, approximately 30 Million tons of uranium ore was extracted from Navajo lands to support America's nuclear activities, such as the U. S. military's Manhattan Project, World War II, and the Cold War.

Alec Cowan: While Hanford is the site of the worst radiological cleanup in the country, one that is still ongoing, Church Rock, New Mexico is the site of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history. It's continued to be detrimental to native communities.

In 1979, a dam filled with uranium tailings in Church Rock, New Mexico was breached.

Jonathan Nez: This, uh, uranium mill spill released more than 1,100 tons of solid radioactive mill waste and 93 million gallons of acidic radio, radioactive tailings into, uh, into the Porco River — sending radioactive waste into several Navajo communities, threatening thousands of local residents.

Alec Cowan: Now, the reason for this 2021 hearing was twofold. There was a push to expand eligibility, but the pressing issue was that in June 2024, the act is set to expire altogether.

Nez and other congressional members were saying there's more work to be done.

And in September 2023, Congress agreed.

Ben Ray Luján: Folks have traveled to Washington with lung cancer, oral cancer, asthma, heart problems, begging us to extend and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.

Alec Cowan: That's Ben Ray Luján, Democratic senator from New Mexico.

Ben Ray Luján: A few years ago, an elder from the Navajo Nation traveled here to testify, and she looked us all in the eye.

And she asked a simple question: Are you waiting for us all to die for the problem to go away?

Alec Cowan: Residents in western states and American territories have been asking for more considerations as to just who can qualify for these RECA funds. There are the mining examples I just mentioned, but for another example, in what seems like another historical irony, many of the folks downwind of the very first atomic bomb test, the one in New Mexico, are still ineligible for compensation.

The act excludes the workers doing cleanup work in radioactive places like Uravan and Hanford. And the list goes on, so the evidence felt clear.

The clerk will call the roll.

Alec Cowan: After years of testimony, it took all of 20 minutes for the issue to be decided on the Senate floor.

The yeas are 61. The nays are 32.

Under the previous order requiring 60 votes for the adoption of this amendment, the amendment is agreed to.

Alec Cowan: Now, it would be nice if this is where the issue landed. Ed. But even after this amendment passed the Senate, it was eventually cut from the bill it was attached to, the National Defense Authorization Act. And in fact, since I first started on this project a year ago, there have been several votes on extending RECA and its subsequent revisions.

But unfortunately, as of July 2024, Congress members failed to act in time, meaning that as of now, even as proponents continue to scramble, the program has expired altogether. Until a reauthorization happens, the funds and any potential expansion are essentially done.

Kirk Gladwin: Well, in Congress, a lot of times, in my opinion, they don't fix things the right way the first time, you know, they put a Band Aid on it.

Alec Cowan: This is Kirk Gladwin. He works with the National Cancer Benefit Center, filing claims with programs like the RECA. He files those claims on behalf of downwinders, atomic workers, and uranium miners.

He says so far he's helped file around 8,000 claims. Not a bad track record when you consider that 54,000 claims have been filed altogether. That comes out to $2.6 billion altogether, if you were curious.

Kirk Gladwin: There are some people in Washington, they call it the, the “jumble bill” because it's such a large amount of money.

Alec Cowan: If you were eligible, claims with the RECA could have ranged from $50,000 to $400,000. It was tax free, and the IRS didn't consider it income.

But Kirk says that historically, it's actually been difficult to get the word out, or to convince workers that these kinds of funds were there. No strings attached.

Government workers were adept at keeping the country's nuclear secrets, but that included those who might've needed to know about them. And he believes that secrecy, both from workers and the government, is is a shadow still looming over the issue.

Kirk Gladwin: They wouldn't even tell the doctors that they did it.

And, and so, you know, these doctors, you know, again, they're scratching their head, you know, why do they have all these illnesses? And of course, these, these fellas can't even say that they were subjected to radiation. I've heard as many as a hundred thousand veterans that were subjected to radiation from 1945 up through 1962.

Alec Cowan: That number might belie a bigger unknown. The recent amendment of the RECA coincides with new research. It turns out that scientists are still looking into the effects of that first atomic bomb in New Mexico. A recent study, also from July 2023, estimates that radioactive fallout from that single bomb reached 46 states.

As well as Canada and Mexico. Just think about the hundreds of more potent detonations that were done later on. Now, that study still needs to be peer reviewed before the science is solid. But the gist of what Kirk is saying is that our radioactive legacy is a problem that extends far past what the average person or the government might think it does.

How much radiation is sitting on the ground, bleeding into rivers at need of cleanup?

Kirk Gladwin: I've talked to people that were there during 30 tests. I mean, these, these, these guys were glowing literally, you know, I've talked to these fellas, you know, they lost two children at, two, three, four years old with cancer, you know, and, and, you know, their whole family wiped out of cancer.

So this is something that just doesn't, isn't going to go away because they closed the mine or maybe the town, you know, is kind of forgotten about, or maybe the rebuilding or, you know, the towns and so on. That fallout cloud did not stop at the state line. They know now there is without question, and the government knows it, That those fallout clouds went all the way to New York and Florida and everywhere in between.

And so, you know, these programs now, they look at these things and they say, well, holy cow. I mean, how many, how many billions and billions and billions of dollars are we talking about here?

Alec Cowan: Talking with Kirk. I get it. Looking at a place like Hanford, there isn't a great track record of making sure nuclear work was safe.

Secrecy has always trumped caution, and the government has been slow and limited in how it writes that wrong. But their problem is twofold. Government agencies have to be reactive and proactive in charge of addressing the damage of the nuclear past and the waste that will live on thousands of years into the future.

One time payments can help address a piece of that problem. But if radiation is still in the environment, yet to be cleaned up, how long will health issues persist? It's this balance that's guided decisions around cleanup at sites like Eurovan. But going into these atomic communities, where many people took great pride in their work, even knowing the dangers, well, it's complicated.

No matter how well intentioned, cleaning up the pieces of our nuclear past comes with its own kind of fallout. And to see the complicated feelings around those decisions, for better and for worse, I have to see this now buried town up close.

A trip to Uravan. That's next on Boom Town: A Uranium Story.

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Boom Town is reported, written, produced, and scored by me, Alec Cowan. The guitar on this song is performed and recorded by my dad, Ron Hayes.

Oral history recordings used in this episode, including interviews with Tricia Pritikin, Veronica Taylor and Michelle Gerber are courtesy of the Atomic Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, All Rights Reserved.

Don Colcord: The mines closed, the mill closed, and so people were moving away, they had no jobs and everything. It was, it was a pretty tumultuous time.

Dr. John Boice: We can't allow one in a million, it's a regulation. We, the scientists, cannot detect a risk at 100 million.

Michele Gerber: To just wipe that town away, and let's not talk about that history anymore, it's gone, it's done, it didn't, was wrong.

Alec Cowan: Thanks for listening.

Ep 4: Atomic Frontier