Transcripts For CSPAN2 Steve Olson The Apocalypse Factory 20240712

That awe fore mentioned state multinational conglomerate. And 2003s mapping Human History, it was not nateed for the National Book award. His work has been featured in atlantic monthly, science, smithsonian and other magazines. Hes a consultant writer for the National Academy of sciences and other National Scientific organizations. Kathleen friend ken is the author friend ken is the author of plume. She was also the Washington State the poet laureate from 20122014, and shes currently serving on the board of jack straw, a local cultural incubator. Theyre here tonight to talk about steves book, the awe pock lips factory plutonium and the making of the atomic age. Please join me in welcoming them. Thanks, wis er. As you noted, kathleen knolledded a book authored a book in 2012, and all of those poems are about hanford. For the beginning of this conversation, kathleen is going to read a poem from her new book of poems which is entitled postrow plant you can and is coming out in october from the university of washington press. And partly so i can make sure that my slides are going to work, im going to project the words of her poem onto my screen so that we can, we can follow along. So there we go. 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, not just because i have poems in it, but because this is a story, the story of hanford, which is not told as much as i think it should be. And it actually gives me a lot of hope to think that this nationally published book with a big new york Publishing House help get the story out. And i think thats one of the biggest problems we have, is that theres all of these ways it doesnt go away and not enough people that know about it. So thank you for your book. I learned all kinds of things from it. And im, im very excited that its out there for people to read. And its a really interesting and exciting read too. Okay. So this is a poem, with we thought it would be a good place to start because it kind of sets, sets the tone for our talk tonight. It kind of tells the story, and its called story that wont end well. It begins in a laboratory under a football field. While the axis rolls over distant continents, 50,000 nomads journey to the more than west to construct cathedrals in the desert for nobel physicists, performing feats theyre not privileged to understand to microscopic tolerances [inaudible] storms. Periscope and code words, chain cars loaded with uranium. The heroism of a just war, all prologues to the story we cant see, smell or taste that peaks underground and drifts undetected downstream and downwind. While the soviets match us bomb for bomb, while we build lives and more reactors, pledge allegiance to [inaudible] plant virtues in the yard and the nag hide couch in the family room. Our story develops incrementally until one afternoon it daylights in town square, and we force ourselves to read it bubbling there. The ugly, stinking, bitter truth. And some fall down. And some go home unmoved. So, steve, its wonderful to have you here tonight to begin to tell the story. So ill hand it over to you. Thanks, kathleen. That is an incredible poem really that does tell the whole story of hanford. I just love it. I wish it had been available to publish in this book. And so thats the short version of the hanford story right there, and im going to back up and full in some 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 briefly flows in the wrong direction, to the east, and then to the north before it ultimately curves around again to the south and the tricities, it curves west and flows to the Columbia River are gorge to the pacific ocean. Okay. So why is is hanford there . The location was chosen on the first day of winter in the year 1942. A colonel from the u. S. Army corps of engineers named Franklin Mathias had been sent from washington, d. C. To look for a place to build a facility that could create the material that was needed to build atomic bombs. Soflying around so he was flying around various sites in the states of washington and oregon looking at places, and he had just looked at a site in oregon and was now flying north. And as soon as the small plane that he was in came over the top of the horse heaven hills, he knew he found what he was looking for n. This broad errant plain that stretches from richland to the bend of the Columbia River up there near white bluffs. You can see my cursor up here where white bluffs is. Colonel mathias had a list of requirements. First of all, it needed cold war to they had huge Nuclear Reactors that were going to be bullet at the site, and the Columbia River could provide plenty of that. It needed electricity to Power Equipment at the site, and quince dent aally the grand cooley dam had come online just the year before and a new set of high voltage lines ran right through the site. Mathias needed a rail line to haul calls and equipment to the site, and amazingly, the main branch of the old milwaukee railroad, and a line made us way along the west flank of the Columbia River to the town of white bluffs in the center of the site. So the rail line was already there. He needed the area to be sparsely populated because everyone in this lawyer was going to have to leave, and in 1942 each of these small towns of richmond, hanford and white bluffs had about 200, 250 people loving in them. Altogether in this whole lawyer there were about 1500 area there were about 1500 people that would have to move. So mathias figured that was a relatively small number. And finally, he needed the site to be far away from any Major Population Centers because if anything went wrong with the Nuclear Reactors or with any of the other facilities on this site, he didnt want too many people to be killed. As i write in my book, if mathias had looked just to the northeast of the sites he had chosen for hanford, he would have 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 from this, in this photograph sort of in this area right here. At 915 elm street. Just to give you a sense of how things are laid out, my wife and i were hiking a few months ago, and i took this photograph looking back toward hanford toward the south. So that little splash of blue in the middle right there is the Columbia River, and you can see tiny specks of white on the other side of the live. Those are the Nuclear Reactors. So when i was taking this photograph from the top of saddle mountain, othello was direct lu behind me. Or heres another way of looking at it. On the cover of my book, othello is about 15 miles behind these twin smokestacks that are right here that are rising from the power plants of the reactor. And on the other side of the Columbia River are the white bluffs from which the town of white bluffs got its name, and that ridge in the distance is the Saddle Mountains, the ridge that separated hanford from othello where i took that peeves photograph. Othello, when i was i growing up, had about 4,000 people grow in it people in it. As i wrote in the book, ill just quote one sentence from the book in rosy hindsight, i remember othello has an isolated, selfcontained paradise where we were free to make our own mistakes and enjoy our own triumphs. But there was another feeling i had while i was growing up in othello. I had the sense that this little, small town was really in the middle of nowhere. And by the time i was in middle school and then in high school, i was just desperate to get out of that town to go to someplace more exciting and move to seattle to watch the son you cans play. Sonics play. I wanted to be closer to the center of the action. And i might say, but the way, this was a isntment that my parents encouraged every day they could. 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 a long time. But ten years ago when my wife got a job here in seattle and we moved back from the east coast where we hadlied previously, i had lived previously, i started traveling in washington and realized in represent prospect that othello really wasnt as isolated as it seemed back in the 1960s and 1970s. Right on the top of Saddle Mountains was an air force station that we called radar hill because of this large ray dome that sat on top of this hill. And that air force station was there to protect the town of hanford just 15 miles away from othello e on the orr side of the ridge line. This was in the 1960s and 1970s, and we didnt know much about hanford at that point. I mean, we knew it was involved in the Nuclear Weapons program. I was a big science geek in the sputnik age in the 1990s interested 1960s interested in science, so i probably knew at that time that it manufactured plutonium. But hanford was, in the 1960s and 1970s actually, the 40s behind tall barbed wire, heavily armed fences. My grandfather sometimes worked as a steam fitter at hanford. But when you were an employee at hanford, you had to sign an agreement that all not tell even your families about what you did there. This motto, silence means security, was a common feature. You would see this plastered on billboards and on water towers. Theres workers in the background presumably completely ignorant about what that person might be doing at hanford. And, you know, i think to some extent the secrecy that surrounds hanford, that surrounded hanford back then, it still surrounds the place today. I mean, hanford is still a closed site because of whats going on there today, the cleanup effort thats going on. But youre free to learn everything you want about hanford, its just that this our of secrecy has stuck to it, and i think thats one of the reasons, as kathleen said, so few people know about its history and whats going on there today. So what is it that happened at hanford . As i said, colonel ma knew whereas was looking for a place to build a facility that would manufacture a substance that could be used to make atomic bombs, and this substance was discovered in 1941 about ten months before pearl harbor by these two scientists right here. Actually, it was discovered in this laboratory. The one on the right in the dark suit is glenn sieborg who was a 29yearold chemist at the university of californiaberkeley. Thats where this lab tour is located. And he was working with a 23yearold graduate student named art wall. In this laboratory where theyre standing, they ooh isolated a new element that they named plutonium. In fact, theyre holding in this, in the laboratory here the very first sample of plutonium which they stored in this su garre box, and thaw used the sample to make some critical measurements of whether or not plutonium was going to be able to work in atomic bombs. By the way, this photograph was taken when the laboratory was being designated a National Historic land mark even though they tried as hard as they could to be careful during their experiments, this laboratory had to be thoroughly scrubbed before this event to reduce the amount of radioactivity that was still present in the countertops and on the floors. Heres how your make plutonium. They were doing fundamental research into the properties of heavy elements like your run yum, and they discovered that if you add a neutron to the most common isotope of uranium, 238, you create an unstable ice stone that decays through this twostep process into two new elements. Over the course of a couple of days, it decays into neptunium239, and it dei cays over the course of another couple of days into what is called in this element 94 which they called plutonium. So plutonium239, or what i i called element 94 here, is extremely stable. It essentially remains unchanged for thousands of years. Thats why it can be used to build awe topic bombs. A atomic. So they discovered this at a critical juncture. Before their discovery, scientists knew about one way to make an atomic bomb using a rare isotope calls uranium235, but extracting enough was going to be they knew at the very beginning of world war ii it was going to be a very difficult process. During the Manhattan Project, a huge factory was built in oak ridge, tennessee, and it worked throughout the war to produce exactly enough uranium235 for one bomb chft dropped on huh roche ma. They couldnt have tested that bomb even if they wanted to because they didnt have enough uranium to do so. But the discovery of plutonium in 1941 by seiborg and wall gave scientists two ways. They had shown that plutonium was an even better withdraw than uranium235, and if you had two withdraws to make an atomic bomb, then a german scientist has two ways as well. I argue in this book that the Manhattan Project probably would not have occurred if plutonium had not been discovered at exact ly the right time because it was going to be so difficult in both the United States and in germany to produce a bomb using uranium. But when the u. S. Scientists read zed that germans could possibly build a bomb using plutonium, thats when the Manhattan Project started. The whole objective was to produce a bomb that could counter the development of an atomic bomb by germany. But to build an atomic bomb using plutonium, as seen in this diagram, you need lots of neutrons. And to this day theres only one way to generate lots of neutrons. So in 1941 Nuclear Reactors didnt exist, but through another amazing countries dense, this man coincidence, this man who had fellowed italy in 1938 because husband wife was jewish was working at Columbia University on a prototube of a Nuclear Reactor. And when scientists and government officials realized that Nuclear Reactors could be used to produce plutonium, they gave him much more money to do his research. And at the end of 1942, so right before mathias flight to pick a site for hanford, a group of scientists all men except for one woman who we can see in the middle of this painting built this, built the worlds First Nuclear reare actor under the stands of a football field at the university of chicago. Now, this is one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century. Its been written about countless times. But most accounts of this experiment have emphasized that it was designed to prove that a selfsustaining Nuclear Chain reaction was possible, that somebody could do it. And, you know, thats true. He was trying to do that. But at the time, the end of 1942, or he was trying to demonstrate something equally as important, which is that the Nuclear Reactors that were then being designed at the university of chicago to produce blew to be yum for atomic bombs would work. So less than two years afterrer fermes experiment, this Nuclear Reactor on the banks of the Columbia River had been built. This reactor was built in just 11 months from the time they broke foundation to when they began producing plutonium in this reactor. This is called the b reactor. This is a photograph from world war ii. The b reactor is that blocky building between the two water towers. Those water towers contained Emergency Water in case something went wrong with the reactor. So this reactor was the very first large Scale Nuclear are actor built anywhere in the world. All subsequent reactors have been based on the technologies that were developed here at the b reactor. By the way, some of the people listening to this event may know that the b reactor has been preserved by a group of engineers and other People Associated with hanford, and its now part of a new National Park that was created about five years ago, the Manhattan Project National Historical park. Ive been to all three sites in the park both at hanford and theres another site at los alamos and another site in of course ridge, tennessee, and the b reactor is by far the most impressive thing to see in all of the Manhattan Project National Historical park. When you walk into the room and the front of the reactor and see these 2004 aluminum tubes which pierce this huge block of graphite which is what this reactor was made out of, this is where the operators would load the uranium fuel cell elements into these tubes where the Chain Reaction would occur to make plutonium and the fuel cells would then fall out of the back, when i walked in and saw this thing, i could not believe it. It just took my breath away that this thing could still exist. And, you know, it looks almost exactly the same. It has changed very little since 1944, since enrico ferme and other world famous scientists of the 20th century started this reactor and began making plutonium in september of 1944. Its an incredible thing. Once this pandemic is over, i would certainly encourage people to book a tour and try to go over and see the b reactor. This was the first of nine reactors, Nuclear Reactors that were eventually built along the left bank of the Columbia River. Three during world war ii and then another suggestion during the cold war when hanford made the plutonium that today acts as the trigger for the Nuclear Weapons in the u. S. Nuclear arsenal. Thats why i call my book the apocalypse factory. Its not so much a reference to the site, but a reference to what was made at the site because the plutonium is used in our current Nuclear Weapons. That would be the end of human civilization. But making plutonium in a Nuclear Reactor is only the first step in a twostep process. After you add the neutrons to the uranium and fuel, you need to chemically extract the plutonium from the fuel elements, and that was done in these immense windowless, concrete buildings at hanford. The workers called them [inaudible] because they were as large as ocean liners. Queen marys. Its a remarkable site to look out in the desert and see these gigantic buildings rising from the desert. Its really the sight that me ed me think about writing this book when i visited once in 1984 for a magazine story i was doing. The way this works, essentially you take the i radiated fuel elementeds out of elements out of the Nuclear Reactors and you put them in one end of these buildings, and from the other end emerges a tubeny dribble tiny dribble of plutonium. That was the trinity test in new mexico. The 75th anniversary was a few weeks ago. And that was used in the bomb dropped on nag sack key. The bomb on hiroshima used uranium from oak ridge, tennessee. We were renderedded finish they were rendered extremely radioactive. Now, builders and operators of hanford, they first, world war ii and the cold war, they assumed subsequent generations could figure out how to deal with these chemical and radiological wastes. So what they did is they pumped the waste into gigantic tanks that were built at hanford and then covered them with sand and dirt. This slide shows 12 of what eventually became 177 underground tanks that were used to store highlevel chemical and radioactive waste from the processing plant. And the department of energy has made Good Progress in chieninging up some parts of cleaning up some parts of hanford, but theyre just starting to deal with and process the wastes that have been stored in these tanks for more than 75 years now. Its astonishing to realize that the chemicals used during world war ii to generate the plutonium for the nagasaki bomb are still sitting in these tanks. Which had a design life, by the way, of about 20 years and here we are 75 years into it. Im going to end with this slide. This week on thursday is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima, and sunday, this sunday is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of nagasaki. For few book i my book i spent a week in nagasaki walking through the city and trying to reconstruct what that Nuclear Weapon did to the city and to the people who lived in that city. In my book i followed the experiences of a physician at the Nagasaki University medical hospital. He was standing in Husband Office in the middle of these buildings in the foreground of this photograph right here. He was about a half mile from where the bomb exploded right above the center, sort of in the center of this photograph. He was standing right by a heavy concrete wall between him and the explosion and which cut down, reduced significantly the amount of radiation to which he was exposed although he still suffered from terrible radiation sickness in the weeks and months after the bombing. I had his diary translatedded from japanese, i talked with his daughter and granddaughter. Theres still a museum to him at the University Medical hospital. He would spend the rest of his life studying the effects of the bomb on the survivors of the bombing of nagasaki. As you can see, the valley part of nagasaki, it was totally destroyed with a death toll between 40,000 and 70,000 people. And by todays standards, this was a very small Nuclear Weapon. The average Nuclear Weapon in todays arsenal is 5, 10, 20 times as large as the weapon that was dropped on nagasaki. I mean, a single Hydrogen Bomb dropped on seattle would destroy much of the city. So in the 1970s, the United States had more plutonium than it would ever need, and plutonium production at hanford was scaled down and then, ultimately, stopped. And since the 1980s, the focus of hanford has been cleaning up the environmental contamination left from decades of plutonium production. There was no longer a need to make any plutonium. And so thats why i wanted to bring kathleen back into this conversation, because kathleen not only grew up in richland, which was the town that was constructed to house the operators of hanford, but also worked at hanford as an environmental engineer. Many of her poems relate to that experience, and i describe kathleens experiences at hanford in some detail in few book. So, kathleen, you and i i have a question for you to start off this conversation. You and i grew up right about the same time 60 miles away from each other. You were growing up in richland the daughter of a scientist who work at hanford. So what was that like . You have even more direct experience with relatives who worked at the facility than i do. Yeah. I was thinking about how you said you probably knew by high school or before that they were making plutonium out at the hanford site, and i honestly do not remember when i figured that out, but i would guess it wasnt until high school. And i know that sounds shocking, but this was a hallmark of the, of the dont talk about it if you dont have a reason to culture of the trust cities and especially tricities and especially richland. We just did not talk about what we called the area. Of we didnt talk about it. In fact, we were sort of proud of ourselves. It was a marker of our culture. So, you know, we just dad would come home, and nobody talked about work. And thats, you know, kids at school would say, you know, we would, of course, whisper to each other what could it be, and i remember one of the secret ideas was that they were, there were eagles in cages out there that were being taught to smoke cigarettes. That was one of the theories i remember. [laughter] so i was tardy to learn about plutonium and about that part of it. But i eventually figured it out, and i knew as a child, you could sort of soak things up, soak up the idea that this was for the country, for our safetying you know . Theres a sort of undercurrent of patriotism that runs through the hanford site and the communities that support it. So we had good schools, we had a very close community, it was a great place to grow up. I think probably not that different from othello e in that regard. Its very hard to describe it from the inside. We were a monoculture. There werent multiple generations living there, there was just, you know, our parents and there were the kids. And everybody looked like me, mostly white, a lot of educated, very educated people. My dad had a ph. D. , and then a lot of people that had eighth grade educations, and wed all be living next door to each other in houses that all looked the same. We called them alfalfa houses. There were some things about it that i really miss and love that idea of this egalitarian community where nobody talks about work, so theres not somebodys dad is more important than somebody elses. We lived in houses that looked pretty much the psalm. So there were elements that of it that i thought were really ideal and great public schools. A lot of emphasis on family life because there was nothing else to do. Most people had families. So there was a lot of that that i liked. Did you know what your dad did at hanford . And did you tell me and did i forget to put in the book that he actually worked in an office once that enrico ferme had worked in . Well, that is thats the family story. Dad had an office in the 300 area in the only, one of the old office building, and he had the only window in the building. So he thought that that might have been fermes office because it had the window. E he likes to say that that was probably. So he didnt know for sure. That sounds like a good theory to me. Is so then you went to i mean, you went to Washington State university and studied environmental engineering. And how dud that the come about . Was that because of growing up at a site which by that time was just starting to transition away from production to cleanup . To dealing with all these environmental wastes . Well, it hadnt transitioned yet. Oh, it hadnt . No. I took the only job in 1983 after graduating in civil edger flooring that i could find. I found a sure thing at hanford. And the job market then even [inaudible] was really poor that year. So i took a job with rockwell out at hanford, and i worked in the 200 area. So when you talked about being driven past the separations plant in 1984, i was there in one of those trailers nearby working my first year as an engineer out at hanford. I didnt know that. Yes, you would have been in that very same place. And what was that like, you know . Hanford was, it was designed by scientists and engineers, but the operators and the people who bullet hanford made very important built hanford made very important contributions to the plant in that so much had to be sort of invented from scratch of in building the worlds First Nuclear rea actors. They were convinced that they were the people who sort of knew the plant best and knew how to get it to operate. Not a lot of that necessarily was written down. I mean, they had spent decades working on that plant and knew it from the inside out and knew all of its quirks. All of a sudden and so there must have been generational issues and maybe gender issues involved with you coming into the plant and all of a sudden starting to ask them questions. Definitely. I didnt work in manufacturing, i worked in monitoring. So we were doing Environmental Monitoring of the ground water, surface water, and we measured the movement of ground water towards the river. So we were in the environmental group. So that sort of separated us out. And i did have to do a water which you talk about in the book. It was an attempt to figure out where the warts coming in and where its going out. And theres a difference between the two numbers. And i was trying to figure that out. So i would be calling the old guys, and this were not very receptive they were not very receptive. And theres a lot of things working against me. Theres the idea of culture of need to know, you know, why did i need to know that. They were suspicious right from the very gunning. Theres that. And then theres the idea that theres a girl on the phone, and its not really you know, its 1985 or whatever, and you have a lot of authority at the time. Is so i look back on it, i think there was, you know, problems around that. But i also was very respectful of the way they kept everything running. Whatever you will say about whether the plant should have been operating, what they did, the cold war, politics aside, it was quite a marvel s. And one of the things i love in your book is the way you talk about difference between the scientists and the engineers. There was some friction there. I thought you captured that really well, and id love it if you would tell the story of the number of aluminum tubes that they needed to make the oh, thats right, the aluminum tubes. Yeah. The famous story about when enrico e fermes was there, everything work fine. It was december of 1944, and they got the reactor up to the power they wanted it to, and all of a sudden the rea actor started losing power. Nobody could figure out what was going on. It was built by dupont, and many of duponts engineers and executives were there in the room. As one observer said, smelling of good whiskey at the time that the Nuclear Reactor was going to be started up. And all of a sudden this disaster started happening where the reactor starts losing power, and nobody knows whats going on. So all the scientists get to work, and they say, well, theres got to be something in the reactor that is soaking up knew terrors. And so neutrons. So as we start up the neutrons, uranium atoms are splitting and soaking up like a sponge. It turned out to be xenon, but at that time nobody knew that was a possibility. So now they looked at this reactor and thought this entire thing could fail. I mean, weve built all these reactors, and we didnt anticipate this problem. It could very well be that all of the money that we spent on this was wasted and that were never going to be able to generate plutonium here and that were, at the end of world war ii, only going to have one bomb because weve wasted all this money on plutonium. General groves, the man who ran it, almost had a heart attack when he heard about the reactors. But, you know, the engineers at dupont, thaw like to build in these margins of safety. As engineers always do. Theyre just taught that in school. You know, design it for these specifications but then add 25 just in case something goes wrong and you need it. And in this case, thaw had 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, the engineers say say said, other, were going to build 2,000. And the scientists complained bitterly. They said weve got to get this done, if we dont get this plutonium done, were going the lose this race. The engineers said, sorry, were going to put 2,000 tubes in there. The only way they were automobile to overcome this sue e nonpoisonning problem was by loading up the extra 500 tubes that they had put in there as a safety margin just in case the scientists had something mess up. And theres this poem that ran around dupont for decades of after that about how the engineers had saved the scientists bacon, essentially, by building in these extra process tubes. And im sure that story is told when you go and see the b reactor there. You know, some of the displays. The b reactor was preserved by a group of engineers who had worked on the reactors over the years and realized the suggest significance of this structure as a technological achievement for the 20th century. And, you know, theres some controversy about whether the Manhattan Project should be a historical park because it can tend to lend an air of celebration to something that ultimately resulted in production of these Nuclear Weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of people in japan and that threaten human civilizationed today. The b reare actor the really offers us an opportunity, i think, to go there and learn about this episode of Human History and to become aware of the capabilities that are out there and these Nuclear Weapons. People here in seattle dont realize, i look out the window toward to to the olympics over , and halfway between me and the to limb pucks is the west coast base for our nuclear submarines, and they have a stockpile of the largest stockpile of Nuclear Weapons in the United States is just 20 miles northwest of seattle. And, you know, we worry about climate change, but the fact of the matter we destroy human civilization in an afternoon if those weapons were with ever used. Hey, were getting some questions here, so we were supposed to encourage you to ask some questions in the ask a question tab. So were going to talk a look at those. Ah, that first one is a really interesting one. Kathleen, i think we can both take a hack at this. Do you think this is a question from james. Do you think hanford would have taken as many risks with exposing people downwind if the managers were not protected by the secrecy that surrounded the plant . Reconstructing that cold war mentality about the decisions that were made. I showed you im not going to pull my slides back up, but both the reactor and the processing plant, the chemical separation plants, have these big smokestacks that are right next to them. And in both of these processes of running the reactor and separating plutonium from the uranium fuel cell, you generate raid yo active compounds that are gaseous. They would just put them up the stacks and hope that the wind was blowing hard and would disperse these materials so they would not be too concentrated downwind. I looked hard through the materials at hanford to try to find some evidence that the managers of hanford during the 50s and 60s knew that they were releasing what at that time would have been termed dangerous amounts of radiowith activity. Radioactivity. And i have had trouble finding new kind of evidence that thaw did so. That they did so. In other words, they had certain standards beyond which they didnt want to go in releasing radioactivity, and we may quibble with those standards, and those standards may be stricter today than they were then, but i personally believed that the operators of hanford thought that they were not releasing enough raid yo activity railed yo activity to cause widespread Health Problems in the surrounding population. We were there during the times of operation. What do you think about that issue . Well, i would maybe rephrase the question, i think, a little bit. I dont think necessarily although i think thats very possible that the upper management would hide behind secrecies. I think thats very possible. I think in some ways im more interested in the people, you know, the regular joes that are down working in the plant. And i agree we you, i dont think in some ways. I think that people werent very knowledgeable about environmental releases. The people who did know would be the environmental monitors, and they knew. And they would report all their figures to my favorite shakespearean character which is Herbert Parker from hanford, and he definitely knew all of this stuff, and he kept it all he did not let this be known. In fact, he even lie to congress. Ive seen things written down that proved that he lied to congress about numbers. But i think he was a very paternalistic person and thought he was protecting the ignorant masses from stuff that they tonight understand, science they didnt stuff they didnt understand, science they didnt understand. And theres always been that element. You dont understand this, its too sphus candidated for you. We, the scientists, will take care of you. And thats part of the culture of the time, and it was also very, a very heavy lu part of that Scientific Community at the time. So its a mix. Yeah. Lets keep talking talking abous because theres another question that relates direct lu to this issue, and im really interested in hearing your answer to this one. Kathleen, you talk about the pride of growing up near the area, and that made me think of the very different reaction like the people who lived in nevada where the bombs were tested. They were not proud and grew up with a deep mistrust in government. I wonder have you or steve looked into the stories on the other side of the machine so to speak, and i do tell a variety of downwinder stories in my, in my book. And theres a great book by a woman named trisha that just came out a couple of months ago called hanford downwinders, and she presents the evidence and the history of the people who were affect by some of these releases in very compelling fashion. But thats e an interesting question because though i havent really been down to north dakota or some of the other sites nevada or some of the other sites that surround Nuclear Facilities from the cold war, you would new theres a different attitude in richland than some of these other towns affected by nuclear are facilities. Well, im not an expert on some of these other communities. Ive, you know, ive read a little bit about the longterm storage that they tried to build. So little bit. But i think that rushland is different. Theyve always wanted these things. They wanted the longterm store an. They tried to get it. I mean, theres something that ran a little bit counter to what you would expect. There is this strange community pride, theres a lot of tribalism, theres a lot of us versus the rest of the world. And so much of that community of identity and also their feeling for economic safety is around talking what nobody else wants taking what nobody else wants. And i cant explain it, but its, i think it does run counter to what you would expect, and it runs counter to some of these other communities that were very definitely victims of what was going on around this many. And ive never felt that sense of victim hood in the people who work at hanford except when it becomes personal if somebody becomes, you know, ill. Then you start to see that breaking off. But in terms of the general we, i think its, it doesnt run that way. Right. And talk in my book about some of the illnesses including family members, people you and i know in the tricities and people i know in othello as well. Im going the answer a question which, oddly enough, relates to this one although its a bit of a tangential story in the Manhattan Project. Apologies if this has already been covered, says kevin, but can you talk about the nonzero possibility understood at the time that Nuclear Weapons would instigate a Chain Reaction in the atmosphere and destroy the planet . And, yes, its very interesting. This was a concern at the very first test of a Nuclear Weapon in new mexico, the trinity test using plutonium from hanford. This has been written about and studied, calculated at that time that was risk was very low. Very low. But they couldnt prove that the risk was zero. And, therefore, were scientists justified in testing a weapon that had a nonzero possibility of destroying the planet even if that risk was very low. Now, at the time they sort of made fun of it. Enrico fe or rmes was there, and he started taking bets as the time of the test approached on whether or not the Nuclear Weapon being tested would set the atmosphere on tour, and if it did so, whether it would just destroy new mexico or whether it would destroy the entire planet. And that made the head of the Manhattan Project extremelier tauted because he didnt want fermes taking bets. The sign it wases tended to treat it as a joke, but people have looked back at that episode and said, gosh, were we justified in taking those risks. And the reason i bring that particular issue up is in the 1950s and 1960s when we were loving there, there was a lot of sentiment, and there was sentiment among the scientists that were in a very serious situation, and these rusks need to be taken. They are justified. And theres still some of that mentality that occurred out at hanford with people who volunteer for projects in which theyre going to get a very high dose of radiation which, you know, theyll only get that high dose for a short period of time. Nevertheless, they are increasing their risks of health outcomes. Do you remember that mentality back in the 50s and 60s . I remember when there were people like me who would go down to hanford and be jumpers, people who would be hired to go into a highly radioactivity environment, perform a very specific task for a short period of time, and then you were done. And you could make all kinds of money if you didnt like being exposed to radiation at high levels for this short period of time. What do you think, kathleen . Do you know anybody in the trust city who was a jumper . Well, i actually have never heard that expression before. Oh, you havent . I do know that my friend carol and her dad who is a major character in my book swim, he, you know, he didnt make a lot of money. He had three kids and a wife, and i know that he sometimes would do under the table jobs where, you know, he actually would take [inaudible] run in and run out, you know, do that kind of work. It was scary and hed get paid under the table. So i know there were people who did that kind of work, but it was never written up, it was never, you know, official. So people do thing for money yeah. Yeah. And people didnt always follow the rules back then. We only have another seven minutes, and were getting all kinds of interesting questions which were probably going to not give enough attention to that they deserve. Can i ask you a quick question . Oh, sure. I really would like to know why you think that the hanford story, of all the Manhattan Project stories los alamos, you know, oak ridge whew hanford . And also why did nagasaki, the bomb drop get kind of pushed aside . Its odd, and i think it has to do with the secrecy that surrounded hanford for so long even during the cold war. At that point people knew more about oak ridge and places like los alamos. Some of its just timing. The hiroshima bomb was first. But it is mysterious, as i say at the very beginning of my book. I make the case in this book that hanfords really the most important place in the history of the nuclear age. The development of large scale Nuclear Reactors that occurred there, the production of this new element on a large scale, the development of the material that now serves as a trigger for our Nuclear Weapons and their rapid expansion of hanford during the cold war, there were all kinds of things that happened at hanford that really have not gotten the attention they deserve. Theres been many, many books written about the Manhattan Project, and one of the things that excited me about writing this book was i would actually be able to talk about things that hadnt been written about in popular books before. I had the papers, and people had considered these thicks, but there really hadnt been a popular book that talked about some of these things. Yeah. Do we dare address some of the, some of the hard issues . Well, there is one question and a comment that came up at the top, and i think it would be great to at least mention it. Thursday, 8 6, is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima. That will be virtual, the comment rawtion, about the 35 years of this iconic event available on youtube. And theyre asking us to encourage everyone to watch it and to remember the run out of Washington State production of plutonium which was a critical and essential element of atomic bombs and which still threaten our existence. Absolutely. Im spooking myself at the 75th Anniversary Commemoration on sunday about great. And also about the fissile material cutoff treaty, an effort to eliminate Nuclear Weapons by monitoring and eventually eliminating the materials that you can use to build Nuclear Weapons which is plutonium and your run yum235. I just want to saw i love the way that you have written, you write your books uniquely follows the history through characters. And i think thats just so effective in this book. I learned a great deal about gwen sieborg and leslie groves, and i didnt know the story of the physician in nagasaki. I think that part of the book is so moving. Well, thank you. Its told through his eyes, and, you know, he lost two sons, and, you know, its a and its a harrowing story. So i think one of the real pleasures of this book is even though its a huge story, its told on a human scale, and i think you do a beautiful job thats very nice of you. As you know, these characters themselves are so interesting. Theyre human stories. Even these scientists find themselves facing these immense moral quandaries where the results of basic research all of a sudden make it aa parent that these awe topic weapons can be built. How do you respond . Do you contribute . Do you walk away . And there were scientists that made that decision to not participate in the Manhattan Project. Theres, its also the cause that scientists, including glenn sieborg, 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 probability or to make it project or to make it apparent to the japanese that we had mastered this weapon. Their arguments were not in some cases they werent even listened to at the time. And yet we look back at those arguments today in retrospect and say, boy, if only people would have paid more attention to those arguments, even if the bombs had been used, perhaps the second one wouldnt have been dropped, or they would have used them in a different withdraw. It could have had a big influence offense the way the cold war developed and on events after world war ii. So its not just a story of sign terrific achievement. Its also a story of people really grappling with some of these demons that arise as you make these scientific discoveries. Thats exactly right, yeah. And you dont stop it at the end of the war, which is where Everyone Wants to stop the story. If you ask an old time orer to tell the story oldtimer to tell the story, itll edge on august 9th, 1945, with a big hooray. And we all know that that isnt even beginning to tell the story. It really starts there. Yeah. There were only those three reactors built during world war ii, and there were another six built subsequently to that. I think a lot of people in Washington State dont realize that washingtons one operating power Nuclear Reactor is just south of the cocooned reactors that were used to make plutonium. So theres a lot about that site that remains relatively unknown. This has been great, steve. It has been fun. Thanks. Thanks very much for doing this with me. Thank you. Its 6 30, and i saw someone starting to appear this, but thaw seem to have faded back into the background. Nope, theres candace. Hi. Just wanted to pop back in and thank you both so much for this talk. Very fascinating. My father works at west Valley Nuclear site in western new york. Hes worked there for probably 30 years, so i found this conversation to be very interesting. And thank you all for watching. If youre entered in more town hall content, follow oured podcast channel by clicking the follow button in the topright corner. I want to encourage you to purchase a copy of steves book. Thank you both again so much. Really fascinating. And i hope everybody has a great night. Here are some of the current best selling nonfiction books according to indy bound. Topping the list, pulitzer prizewinning author Isabelle Wilkerson explores what she saul calls a hidden caste system in the United States after that, mary trump takes a look at the president and his family followed by activist glenn nondoyles memoir, untamed. Then, ike rim kennedy. And wrapping up our hook at some of the best selling nonfiction books according to indybound is eric larsons study of Prime Minister Winston Churchills leadership during the london blitz. Some of these authors have appeared on booktv, and you can watch them online at booktv. Org. Author and historian jill la poor offered her thoughts on the covid19 pandemic during a Virtual Program hosted by the library of congress. Heres a portion of that event. The striking thing, you know, the a certain amount of attention to the conflictbased stories of people who are calling for the reopening of america. But on a whole, the population, you know, people have been fatherly compliant with the fairly compliant with the need to take action to protect the common we. Not just yourself, but the Larger Community of your neighborhood and your city, your town. So i think there actual has been a lot of that has already happened. But as its out of the political gridlock, the hyperpolarization of recent American History in the last, you know, since 2008 really. I mean, the trends in polarization are different. But it would take a lot of leadership at the National Level for Economic Reforms that could avrt a much greater tragedy than what were experiencing right now which is a lot of leadership at the congressional level. And i, yeah, i mean, i think i wouldnt exactly call it an opportunity, but there is absolutely a call for a kind of political courage and political will that has largely been absent from the american scene for quite some time. So watch this and all of our coverage on jill lepores books, visit our web site, booktv. Org, and search for her name in the box at the top of the page. Youre watching booktv on cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas cable its companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. You know, when you read the things that were said about thomas jefferson, you know, that he was an infidel and that he was a pagan of the french government, sounds a little reminiscent, doesnt it . The things that were said about abraham lincoln, the things that were said about fdr, that he wanted to be a dictator. So it because it does kind of come with the territory. But i think in trumps case, at least in the modern political era postworld war ii, ive never seen anything like it. Sunday at noon eastern on in depth, our live twohour conversation with author and faith and Freedom Coalition founder ralph reed whose books include awakening, act of faith, and his most recent, for god and country, joined in conversation with phone calls, texts and betweens. Watch booktvs in depth sunday at noon eastern on cspan2. Scholars interpret the past policymakers debate the