Steve olson is a seattlebased writer and author of several books, 2016s eruption, the untold story of mount saint helens, the Washington State book award and named one of the best nonfiction books of 2016 by that aforementioned multinational conglomerate. In 2003 mapping Human History genes race and common origins was nominated for the National Book award. His work is featured in atlantic monthly, science, smithsonian and other magazines. He is a consultant writer for the National Academy of sciences and other National Scientific organizations. Kathleen Philip Mccain is a poet and educator in seattle and the author of three poetry collections including 2012 plume, and addition of nuclear aid songs of innocence and experience inspired by hanford. She was also the Washington State abshes currently serving on the board of jack straw a local audio art studio and cultural incubator. They are here tonight to talk about steves book the apocalypse plutonium in the making of the atomic age. Please walk with joe mike join me in welcoming Kathleen Flanagan and steve olson. Thank you. As you notice, kathleen published a book of poems in 2012 and all the poems are about ai quote several of those poems in my book that just last week including one of the very beginning of my book that is called the great physicist recalled to the Manhattan Project. For the beginning of this conversation kathleen is going to read a poem from her new book of poems. Which is entitled posttraumatic and coming out in october from university of Washington Press temporarily so i can make sure my slides are going to work im going to project the words on her home onto my screen so that we can we can follow along. Thanks steve. I just want to say before i read the poem how pleased i am to be part of this evening. I think its wonderful to celebrate the publication of this book and it means a lot to me personally because its not just because i have poems in it but this is a story, the story of hanford, which is not told as much as i think it should be and it gives me a lot of hope to think this is nationally published book. It was a big new york Publishing House to help get the story out. I think thats one of the biggest that we have is theres all these ways it doesnt go away im very excited that its out there for people to read and its really interesting and exciting read too. This is a poem, we thought it would be a good place to start because it kind of sets the tone for our talk tonight. It kind of tells a story, one big fell swoop. Its called story that wont end well it begins in a laboratory under a football field, while the role under distant continents, 50,000 nomads journey to the American West to construct cathedrals in the desert for nobel physicists performing feats that are not privileged to understand. The microscopic tolerances, and dust storms the stuff of legends. Periscopes and codewords train cars loaded with uranium. The heroism of a just war all prologues to the story we cant see, smell, or taste. It drifts undetected downstream and downwind while the soviets matches bomb for bomb while we build lives and more reactors pledge allegiance to send the key plant birches in the yard and naugahyde couch and family room are story develops into the week, incrementally and until one afternoon daylight and townsquare and we force ourselves to read it bubbling there. The ugly stinking bitter truth and some fall down. And some go home unmoved. Steve, its wonderful to have you here tonight to begin to tell the story, i will hand it over to you. Thank you kathleen. That is an incredible poem that really does tell the whole story. I wish it had been available to publishing the book. The short version of the story is right there. Im going to back up and fill in some of the details. First of all, where is hanford . As you can see in this map on the lefthand corner, its in southcentral Washington State where the Columbia River flows briefly in the wrong direction to the east and then to the north before it ultimately curves around again to the south and below the tricities it curves west and then flows through the river gorge to the pacific ocean. So why is hanford there . The location was chosen on the first day of winter in the year 1942. A colonel from the seed u. S. Army corps of engineers franklin messiahs have been sent from washington dc look for a place to build a facility that could create the material that was needed to build atomic bombs. He was flying around various sites in the states of washington, oregon, looking at places and he just looked at a site in oregon and was now flying north. As soon as the small plane he was in came over the top of the hills he knew he found what he is looking for. In this broad plain that stretches from richland to the bend of the Columbia River near white gloves, you can see my cursor up here where white bluffs is. He had a list of requirements that the site had to meet, it needed cold water to cold the Nuclear Reactors. The Columbia River can provide plenty of that. It needed electricity to Power Equipment at the site and coincidently the dam had come online just the year before and a new set of highvoltage lines ran right through the sites on their way down to bottom hill dam on the Columbia River. It needed a rail line to haul equipment and chemicals to the site and amazingly, the main branch of the old milwaukee road railroad ran right to the north of tsao mountains. And a spur line made its way along the Columbia River to the town of white bluffs at the center of the site. The railway was already there. He needed the area to be sparsely populated because everyone in the area was gonna have to leave. In 1942 each of these small farming towns of richland, bluffs, 200o50 People Living in them. Altogether in this area there were about 1500 people who would have to move. Matthias figured that was a relatively small number that would have to leave their homes. Finally, he needed to site to be far away from any major population centers, which is one reason he was looking at the western United States. Because if anything went wrong with the Nuclear Reactors or any of the other facilities on the site, he didnt want too many people to be killed. Matthias had looked just to the northeast of the sites he had chosen for hanford, he wouldve seen the small town of othello. Thats the town where i grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s you can almost see my house in this photograph sort of in this area right here. Just to give you a sense of how things are layout, i took this photograph looking back toward hanford toward the south. The little of blue in the middle is the Columbia River and you can see tiny specks of white on the other side of the river, those are the Nuclear Reactors. Othello was directly behind me, thats how close they were. Heres another way of looking at it. On the cover of my book of othello was about 15 miles behind these twin smokestacks right here rising from the power plant of the f reactor. The ridge in the distance is the mountains, the bridge that separated from old fellow. A fellow when i was growing up at about 4000 people in it, it was a wonderful town to grow up and come as i wrote in the book, i will quote one sentence from book. In rosie hindsight i remember you as an isolated selfcontained paradise where we were free to make their own mistakes and enjoy our own tramps. There was another feeling i had while i was growing up in old fellow, i had the sense that this little small town was really in the middle of nowhere. But the time i was in middle school and then high school i was just desperate to get out of that town to go to someplace more exciting and we would come to seattle on vacations to watch the seattle supersonics play and it just seemed i wanted to be somewhere closer to the center of the action. I might say that this is a sentiment my parents encouraged every way they could commit heres an example of their encouragement, the only problem with this plan is that your children then move far away from you and dont come home for one. But 10 years ago when my wife got a job here in seattle back to seattle from the east coast where we had previously i started traveling in Eastern Washington and realized in retrospect that old fellow was it really is isolated as it seemed back in the 1960s and 1970s. Right in the top of the mountains between otago and hanford was an air force station that we call the radar hill because of this large radome that sat on top of hill. That air force station was there to protect the town of hanford. Just 15 miles from othello on the other side of the ridge line. This is back in the 1960s and 1970s and we didnt know much about hanford at that point. We knew it was a balding Nuclear Weapons program, i was a big science geek in the 1960s. Hanford was in the 1960s and 1970s actually throughout cyst abbehind tall barbed wire heavily armed defenses the grandfather sometimes worked as a steam fitter and hanford but when youre an employee at hanford you had to sign an agreement that you would not tell even your families about what you did there this motto silence mean security was you would see this plastered on billboards and water towers there is the workers family in the background presumably completely ignorant about what it is that person might be doing at hanford. I think to some extent the secrecy that surrounds hanford surrounded hanford back then it still throughout the place today. Hanford is still a closed site because of whats going on there today the cleanup effort going on but you are free to learn everything you want about hanford its just that this air of secrecy that stuck to it. Thats one of the reasons, as kathleen said, so few people know about its history and whats going on there today. What is it that happened to hanford . Colonel matthias was looking for a place to build a facility that would manufacture a substance that could make dough might be used to make atomic bombs. The substance was used in 1941 about 10 months before pearl harbor had these two scientists, it was discovered in this laboratory. The one on the right in the dark suit is glenn seaboard who at the time in 1941 was a 29yearold chemist at the university of california berkeley. He was working with a 23yearold graduate student named art wall whose abin this laboratory where they are standing they isolated a new element that they named plutonium. In fact, they are holding in this laboratory the very first sample of plutonium, which they stored in the cigar box. Use the sample to make critical measurements of whether or not plutonium was going to be able to work in atomic bombs. By the way, its photograph was taken when the laboratory was being designated a National Historic landmark, even though seaborg and walt tried as hard as they could to be careful during the experiments, this laboratory had to be scrubbed before the event to reduce the amount of radioactivity still present in the countertops and the floors. Heres how you make plutonium, they were doing fundamental research into the properties of heavy elements like uranium. They discovered that if you add a neutron to the most common isotope of uranium known as uranium 238 you created on stabilized uranium that goes through the two step process into two new elements. First the case over the course of a couple days into this element that 2239. It was extremely stable. It remains unchanged for thousands of years thats why it could be used to build atomic bombs. They were a critical juncture before their discoveries scientists knew about one way to make an atomic bomb. With uranium 235. But enough of that isotope from the war i was can be a very difficult process during the Manhattan Project. A huge factory was built in oak ridge tennessee. Enough uranium for one bot. They couldve tested it even if they wanted to. The discovery in 1941 gave scientist two ways to make it atomic bomb. It wasnt even better substance. And if youre a scientist they had two ways to make an atomic bomb. I argue in this book that the Manhattan Project probably would not have occurred if they have not been discovered at exactly the right time because it can be so difficult in the United States and in germany to produce a bomb using her uranium. When they possibly use the bomb. Thats when the manhattan but to build an atomic bomb using to tony him as seen in this diagram you need lots of neutrons. In 1941 Nuclear Reactors did not exist. This man who have fled italy in 1938 because his wife was jewish was working at Columbia University on a prototype of Nuclear Reactor. And when scientists and government officials realized that they could be used to produce plutonium. Im not the end of 1942 so right before and a group of scientist. All men except for one woman that you can see in the middle of the painting. Built the First Nuclear reactor under the span. It was designed at the time the end of 1942. He was trying to demonstrate something that was equally important that that new you Nuclear Reactors. Less than two years after the experimental reactor. This Nuclear Reactor on the banks of the Columbia River had been built. When they begin producing plutonium. This is called a b reactor. Between the two water towers they contained this was the first large scale Nuclear Reactor. By the way. Some of the people listening to this event may know that they had been preserved by a group of engineers. I had been to all three sites in the park. And all of the Manhattan Projects. In the National Historical park. When you walk into the room and the front of the reactor and you see these 2004 aluminum tubes which have a huge block of graphite. This is where they would load the uranium into the tubes with a the Chain Reaction would occur. In the fuel cells would fall out of the back. I could not believe it. It just took my breath away that this thing could still exist. Looks almost exactly the same. Since the other world famous scientists worldfamous scientists and engineers. Started this reactor up. It is incredible thing. I would encourage people to book a to her and try to see the reactor. This was the first of nine reactors. Another six during the cold war. When they made the plutonium as the trigger for the Nuclear Weapon in the u. S. Nuclear article. Not so much a reference to the site but what it was made at. It is used in our current Nuclear Weapon. That would be the end of human civilization. Its only the first step in a twostep process. After you add the neutrons. You could chemically extract the workers that hampered called them queen marys. They were as large as the open site. The way it works. And you put them in one end of this building and from the other end emerges a very tiny place of plutonium. That was in the very First Nuclear explosion. At the trinity test in new mexico. The 75th anniversary of that was a few weeks ago. That was also the material that was used from this building when the bomb dropped on nagasaki. As a byproduct this manufacturing process generates an immense amount of chemicals that were used to separate eight out plutonium. It was extremely radioactive after being used in the processing plant. The builders and operators they figured they have a war to win. They could deal with all of these chemical and radiological he wastes. They pump the waist. And the department of energy has made Good Progress in cleaning up some parts of hamburg but they are just starting to deal with and process the waste that has been stored in the tanks for more than 75 years now. Chemicals used during world war ii. It generate the plutonium. This week on thursday is a 75th in a bursary of of hiroshima. Its the 75th anniversary of our psyche. I spent a weekend the area. Trying to reconstruct what that Nuclear Weapon did to the city i followed the experience at the nagasaki medical hospital. Right in the center of the florida graph. Him in the explosion. It is the amount of radiation in which he was exposed. In the weeks and months after the mean. He spent the rest of his life studying the effects of the bomb. In the death toll between 40,070,000 people. And by todays standards this is a very small Nuclear Weapon. The average Nuclear Weapon is 20 times as large as the weapon that was dropped. The single Hydrogen Bomb was dropped. They have more bullet plutonium than it would ever need. And the production was scaled down and ultimately stopped as the 1980s has been cleaning up the environmental contamination. There is no longer needed to make any plutonium. Not only group in richland. They controlled the houses of hamburg. Many of the homes include something with that experience. You and i grew up in just about the same time. About 60 miles away from each other. You are growing up and richland. The daughter of a scientist with even more direct experience than i do. You probably knew by high school that they were making the tony him and i honestly dont remember. I would guess it was not until high school. I know that sounds shocking this is a hallmark of the dont talk about if you dont have a regent a reason too. We just did not talk about what we called the area. We were sort of proud of ourselves it was a marker of our culture nobody talked about work. And the kids at school would say whisper to each other what could it be. One of the secret ideas they were eagles in cages out there. I was tardy to learn about the tony him and that part of it. I eventually figured it out. I knew as a child for the country or the safety. It will run through the site in the community. We have good schools. It was not that different in that regard. It is very hard to describe it from the inside. There was not multiple generations living there. And there were the kids. Everybody looked like me. Mostly white. A lot of very educated people. We would all be living next to each other in houses and theyd all look the same. There was some things about it that i think i really miss and love that idea that this alec garo terry in the community where no one talks about work. Its not somebody elses dad is more important. We live in houses that live pretty much the same. There were elements that really ideal. A lot of emphasis on family life because there is nothing else to do. Most people have family there was a lot of it that i liked. Did you know what your dad did there. Did i forget to put in the book that he actually worked in a office want. Thats the family story. Dad have an office in the 300 area in one of the old office buildings. He thought it might have been his office. He like to say that that was probably there. Then you went to Washington State university in environmental engineering. Was that because of growing up at a site. By that time it was just starting to transition for dealing with all of these environmental ways. After graduating in Civil Engineering that i could find. I found a sure thing at hanford. It was really poor that year. I took a job out there. I worked in the 200 area. When you talk about being driven past the separation plant i was theirs and one of those trailers nearby working my first year as an engineer. See mike you would a bed in that very same place. And what was that like. It was designed by scientists and engineers. But the operators and the people that built hanford made very important contributions to the plan and that so much had to be invented from scratch and building the first Nuclear Reactors. They were the people that knew the plant best. Not a lot of that was necessarily written down. They had spent decades working on that plant. There must have been generational issues there. With you coming into the plants. I did not work in manufacturing i worked in monitoring. The groundwater and the surface water and we measured the movement of the groundwater towards the river. We were in the environmental group. That sort of separated us out. I did have to do water ballots. Balance. In the book. In an attempt to figure out where it was coming in. There is a lot of things working against me. The culture of need to know. Why did i need to know that. They were suspicious right from the beginning. And then there is the idea that theres this girl on the phone 1985 or whatever i do not have a lot of authority at the time. I look back on it and i think there was problems around that. Im very respectful of the way they kept everything running. Whatever you will say. The cold war. Politics aside it was quite a marble. And one of the things i love in the book is the way the difference between the scientists and engineers. I love it if you would tell the story of the number of aluminum tubes that they needed it was the same story when they were there. Starting out with the reactor. They got the reactor up to the power that they wanted. All the sudden it started losing power and nobody could figure out what was going on. All of the reactor it was built by dupont. Smelling good whiskey at the time that it was good to be started up. And then all of a sudden this disaster started happening. All the scientists get to work. There has to be something that has been soaking up neutrons. Is creating something. It is just soaking up these neutrons like a sponge. At that time nobody knew that was possible. This entire thing could fail. And we didnt anticipate this problem. It could be that all of the money that we spent on this was wasted and were never gonna be able to generate the tony him here. Weve just wasted all this money on the tony him. Then engineers that do pods. They like to build in the margins of safety. For these specifications. But then add 25 just in case something goes wrong. In this case they have done that. Instead of building the reactor with only 1500 of those aluminum tubes which is what the scientists had called for in their design. Working to build 2000. They complained bitterly. We are in a race with the germans right now. Sorry, where the ones in charge. Where to put 2000 tubes in there. The only way that you are able to overcome that. What is by loading up the extra 500 tubes they can essentially buy. I am sure the story is told when you see the be reactor there was some of the displays. We will work on the reactors over the years. And realize the significance of the structure as a technological achievement for the 20th century. Whether the Manhattan Project should be at a historical park. It can tend to lend a celebration to something that ultimately resulted in the paragraph production of the Nuclear Weapons. It really offers us an opportunity. And then halfway between me and the olympics they have a largest stop pile. We could destroy it. We are getting some questions here. We were supposed to encourage you to ask some questions we are gonna take going to take a look at those. The first one is really interesting. I think we can both take a hack at this. Do you think they wouldve taken as many risks with exposing people downwind if the managers were not protected by the secrecy surrounding the plant. Reconstructing the cold war mentality. Im not cannot pull my slides back. Both the reactor the chemical separation plants that are right next to them. You generate those. You cannot keep them in the plant. They will hope that the wind was blowing hard. They would disperse the the managers during the 50s and 60s new that they were releasing what was at that time wouldve been dangerous amount of activity. I had had trouble finding any kind of evidence that they did so. They have certain standards and we make quibble with those standards. And they may be stricter today than they were then. I personally believe the operators thought that they were not releasing enough radioactivity to cause widespread health problems. What do you think about the issue. I would rephrase the question a little bit. I think that is very possible that the upper management would hide behind secrecy. Im more interested in the people and the regular jos that are down working in the plant i agree with you. I think that people werent very knowledgeable about environmental release. They would be the environmental monitors. They would record them all. My favorite shakespearean character. And he definitely knew all of this stuff. He kept it all. He did not let this be known. He even lined to congress. I think he was a very internal a sick person. He thought he was protecting the ignorant masses. There has always been that elements. You dont understand this. Its 26 sophisticated for you. We will take care of you. That is part of the culture of the time. And very heavily part of that Scientific Community at the time. Lets keep talking about this. And there there is another question that relates to this issue. You talk about the pride of growing up near the area and that made me think of a very different reaction. They grew up with a deep mistrust in government. And i do tell of variety of down when dean stories. Very compelling path option. Around nuclear facilities. Then in some of these other towns affected by nuclear facilities. Little bits. That is something that runs a little bit counter to what you would expect. So much of the identity. And theyre feeling for there feeling for economic safety is around. Taking what no one else wants. I cant explain it i think it does run counter to what you would expect. And what they would definitely be victims of what was going on around them. I never felt that sense of victimhood except when it becomes personal. If someone i dont get runs that way. I talk in my book about some of the illnesses among family members that you and i know in the tricities. And people i know as well. It has been related to this one. Apologies of this have already been covered. They would instigate a Chain Reaction and the destroy it. This has been written about and studied scientists have calculated at that time. The risk is very low. They couldnt prove that cut it prove that the risk was zero. We have scientists that were justified. In testing a weapon that have a nonzero possibility of destroying the planet even if that risk was very low. At the time they sort of made fun of it. He started taking bets. On whether or not the Nuclear Weapon been tested would set the atmosphere on fire. That made them extremely irritated because he thought everyone was teed up already. The scientist tended to treat it as a joke but people have looked back at that episode and said where we justified in taking those risks. The reason i bring the particular issue up. In the 1950s and 60s when we were living there there was a lot of sentiment among the scientist. Where and a very serious situation in these risk needs to be taken. There is still some of that mentality that considers hampton. People that volunteer for projects. They will only get this high dose for a short. Of time. When there are people like me that would go down and be jumpers. People that would be hired to go to environments and perform a specific task. And you could make all kinds of money if you werent afraid of that for a short. Of time. Do you know anybody in the tricity who was a jumper. Ive never heard that expression before. My friend carol and her dad who was a major character in my book. He didnt make a lot of money he had three kids and a wife. I know he would sometime due under the table jobs where he would take off those and do that kind of work. Its really scary. He would get paid under the table. I know people who did that kind of work. But it was never written up. It was never official. People will do things for money. And they did not always follow the rules back then. We only have another seven minutes and we are getting all kinds of interesting can i ask you a quick question i would really like to know why the hampered story. Why hampered. Why did they get pushed aside for some of the other her oshima. Its odd and i think it has to do with the secrecy thats around it. People knew more about oak ridge. Some of it is just timing. It is mysterious as i say at the very beginning of my book. I make the case in this book that its really the most important place in the history of the nuclear age. The production of the new element on the large scale. The development of the material that now serves as a trigger. In the rapid expansion. They were all kinds of things that happened at hanford that have not gotten the attention they deserve. There has been many books written about the Manhattan Project. One of the things that excited me about writing this book was that i would be able to write about things that i have seen before. They have considered these things but there hadnt been a popular book written about hanford that talked about that. Do we dare address some of the hard issues. There is one question in the comment that came up. I think would it would be great to at least mention it. Thursday 86 is the 75th anniversary. It will be virtual this thursday. About 85 years of this event. And they are asking us to encourage everyone to watch and remember the run out of Washington State production. It was a critical and essential element of the atomic bomb and it still threatens us. I am speaking myself at the commemoration on sunday. All about that cut off the treaty and how to eliminate Nuclear Weapons. And eliminating the materials that you can use. I just want to say i love the weight way you write your book. You write the history through characters and i think thats so effective in that book. I learned a great deal about glenn seeberg. And i did not know the story the physician in nagasaki. It is told through his eyes. It is a harrowing story. Even though it is a huge story is told on a human scale. Its very nice of you. These characters themselves are so interesting and they are human stories even the scientists find themselves facing these moral quandaries all the sudden they make it apparent. And can be built. How do you respond. There were scientists that made the decision to not participate in the Manhattan Project. Also the case that scientists were at the forefront of groups who were urging the u. S. Government not to drop the bomb on cities in japan but to have a demonstration project. That we have mastered the weapon. In some cases they would not even listen to at the time. When you look back at those arguments today. If only people would have paid more attention to those arguments. Even if the bombs have been used perhaps a second one would have been dropped. Or they would have used in a different way. It couldve have a big influence on the way that the cold war developed and on events after world war ii. Its not just a story of a Scientific Achievement its also a story of people really grappling with some of these demons that arise as you make these scientific discoveries. Dont stop it at the end of the war. If you ask an oldtimer to tell a story. Then on august 9, 1945 and we all know that does not even begin to tell the story. There were only those three reactors that were built during world war ii. I think a lot of people dont realize that washington is one operating power and its at the house hands of scientist with the now cocooned reactors. There is a lot about the site that remains relatively unknown. Thanks very much for doing this with me. I saw someone is starting to appear there. It seems to have faded back into the background. I just wanted to pop back in and think you thank you so much for this talk. My father works at west Valley Nuclear site in western new york. I find it to be very interesting. If youre interested in more content you can follow our crowd cast kennel. They will purchase a copy of the book. It will take you to the website. Thank you so much again. Really fascinating and i hope everybody has a great night. Has top nonfiction books and authors. Coming up today. In the lead up to this weeks Republican National convention coverage. Authors had written about this in the upcoming election ralph reed. For god and country. With his book blitz. And then at nine a. M. Eastern. On how it became mobile pandemic. And ways to vent future outbreaks. I am honored to begin tonights program by introducing two individuals with vision and generosity. The family namesake
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