Full Body Burden (28 page)

Despite the admonitions of his friends, Stone isn’t worried about his job. He’s doing what he was hired to do. He knows where the skeletons are buried, and the company needs to know it, too. He knows he’ll never rise in the ranks at Rocky Flats, but he also knows that his job is absolutely secure.

M
Y FAMILY
never talks about feelings, and we certainly never talk about plutonium. It’s hard to take something seriously if you can’t see it, smell it, touch it, or feel it. Plutonium is a cosmic trick. The invisible enemy, the merry prankster. Can it hurt you or not? None of us know.

Plutonium is the darling and the demon of the nuclear age.

The story of plutonium began with radium, an element discovered in 1899 by Marie Curie. She called an element “radioactive” if its nucleus was unstable and it decayed and released particulate radiation. A radioactive atom gives off radioactivity because the nucleus has too many particles, too much energy, or too much mass to be stable. The nucleus of the atom disintegrates in an attempt to reach a stable or nonradioactive state. As the nucleus disintegrates, energy is released in the form of radiation. Different terms are used for measuring radiation, depending upon what is being assessed. The amount of radiation emitted by a radioactive material is measured in
curies
, named after Marie Curie. The radiation dose absorbed by a person—that is, the amount of energy deposited in body tissue—is measured in
rads
. A person’s biological risk of health effects due to exposure to radiation is measured in
rems
or
sieverts
(the sievert, which equals 100 rem, is the international standard). Radiation workers wear film badges called dosimeters, which measure exposure in rems or sieverts.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, though, radium was not viewed as a health risk. On the contrary, it was hailed as a cure for all kinds of ailments. As early as 1906, radium salts were used to try to shrink or eliminate cancerous tumors. Radium-laced water, facial creams, and baths were also popular. But the excitement about radium was shortlived; it wasn’t long before people began to experience health effects like bone fractures, bone cancer, and jawbone infections.

Perhaps the worst cautionary tale was that of the “Radium Girls.” In the 1920s, about seventy young women worked long days at the U.S. Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, employed by a defense contractor that supplied glow-in-the-dark watches to the military. Each girl painted
250 watch dials a day with radium paint, earning about a penny and a half per dial. Chemists at the plant wore masks and used lead screens and tongs, but the female workers were told the paint was harmless. They licked the tips of their paintbrushes to sharpen the points, and some girls even painted their fingernails and faces with the glowing substance. The girls suffered from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, and some died. An ensuing lawsuit, settled in the fall of 1928, created a media sensation and helped establish a new labor law protecting employees from hazards in the workplace.

In response to concern over the dangers of radium, the National Bureau of Standards established an occupational standard for radium, just two months before the discovery of plutonium. Six years later a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan, synthetically produced the solid, silvery-gray element using a five-foot-long cyclotron.

McMillan called the element plutonium after the recently discovered planet Pluto, which had been named by an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, who won five pounds for her efforts. She took the name from the Roman god Pluto, god of the underworld, god of the dead, the Destroyer. It seemed an appropriate name for a cold, dark planet made of rock and ice.

Seaborg suggested the abbreviation
Pu
as a joke. No one seemed to get the gag, and
Pu
passed into the periodic table without comment.

A paper describing the new element was prepared for publication in March 1941, but was abruptly withdrawn after the discovery that plutonium was capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction, and thus might be useful in an atomic bomb.

In 1939, amid concern that Germany might be in the early stages of developing a nuclear bomb, physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that the United States should begin its own research into a bomb. The letter was also signed by Albert Einstein. (Einstein, as well as other prominent physicists, later regretted the letter, as it led to the development and use
of the atomic bomb against civilians. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” was later opposed to nuclear weapons.) Niels Bohr, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922, was prescient.
When asked if enough uranium-235 and -238 could be separated to produce a bomb, he said, “It can never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge factory.” Years later he repeated this to his colleague Edward Teller. “I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory,” he said. “You have done just that.”

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government initiated the Plutonium Project at the University of Chicago, with the goal of creating a nuclear chain reaction for plutonium-239 and developing an atomic bomb. In a makeshift lab under Chicago’s Stagg Field in a project euphemistically called the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab), a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi achieved a sustained nuclear reaction in the world’s first nuclear reactor. When the project was taken over by the army in the summer of 1942, it became the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project would bring together some of the greatest physicists in the world to try to build a workable nuclear bomb from scratch in three years.

General Leslie Grove was chosen to lead the project, and J. Robert Oppenheimer managed the day-to-day operations for the research and design of an atomic bomb. The project moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, near Santa Fe, to a piece of land on a beautiful high mesa that previously had been the site of a ranch school for boys. A hidden city with a deadly secret blossomed in the high desert. There were two other research and production sites associated with the Manhattan Project: the plutonium-production facility at the Hanford site in Washington State and the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Upon the death of President Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, and learned of the secret wartime project. When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the Manhattan Project was just months away from producing a workable nuclear weapon.
Two types of atomic bombs were developed. The first, a gun-type fission bomb, was made from uranium-235. This weapon design ultimately proved inefficient, and Los Alamos developed an implosion bomb in which a fissile mass of uranium-235, plutonium-239, or both was surrounded by high explosives that compressed the mass, resulting in nuclear fission. The plutonium triggers eventually produced at Rocky Flats were fission “pits” that when detonated trigger the more powerful fusion explosion of a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb.

No one used the word
bomb
; they called it a “gadget.”

The first test of a nuclear bomb was in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer named the test bomb Trinity, reportedly in reference to lines from the poet John Donne: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” and “As West and East / In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one / So death doth touch the Resurrection.” Twenty miles from the blast, Edward Teller put suntan lotion on his hands and face, even though the early-morning sky was still black. Enrico Fermi stood beside him. For many onlookers, the tremendous explosion evoked powerful, ambivalent feelings: pride and joy at the extraordinary—and swift—scientific achievement, and horror at the deadly weapon that had now been unleashed. The Trinity bomb had a plutonium-239 core.

Three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, the crew of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber
Enola Gay
—named after the pilot’s mother—dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. “Little Boy” was a gun-type bomb. Ninety thousand to 160,000 people died within the first four months. “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, three days later, killed 100,000 people within the first two to four months, and tens of thousands more were injured in both blasts. “Fat Man” was a plutonium-core weapon.

The existence of plutonium was made public only after the bombs were dropped. From 1945 to 1989 the United States produced tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in its arms race with the Soviet Union. Mutual assured destruction—known as MAD—was the governing philosophy. The MAD program was intended to act as a deterrent
in that if one country attacked another with nuclear weapons, the attacked country would immediately retaliate and both countries would be destroyed.

After the Second World War, to formulate safety standards for the nuclear industry, American scientists carried out studies of the effects of plutonium on humans, including tests in which researchers exposed or injected people with plutonium without their informed consent.
These studies determined that for humans, even 1 microgram—that is, one-millionth of a gram—should be considered a potentially lethal dose. Experiments with animals demonstrated that within the body, plutonium was distributed differently and more dangerously than radium.

The term
body burden
was used to describe the amount of radioactive material present in a human body, which acts as an internal and ongoing source of radiation. The DOE established a permissible “full body burden” for lifetime accumulation of radiation within the body on the assumption that a worker whose exposure did not exceed this level would not suffer ill effects. Although some workers whose body burden was near the limit did not experience any adverse health effects, others exposed at levels far less than the permitted full body burden developed various types of cancers. Exposure to plutonium was linked to cancers, brain tumors, and reproductive disorders, but plutonium was determined to be most dangerous when taken into the lungs.
Particles of plutonium weighing 10 micrograms or less can easily be inhaled.

Robert Stone, head of the Plutonium Project Health Division at the Met Lab in Chicago, made the first estimate of a permissible plutonium body burden. He set the limit at 5 micrograms. In July 1945, scientists at Los Alamos reduced that standard by a factor of five, to 1 microgram. In 1949, in the wake of the disturbing new results from animal testing, representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada at the Tripartite Permissible Dose Conference set an even stricter standard: they agreed that the maximum body burden for plutonium should be 0.1 microgram.

Officials from the AEC were not pleased.
Workers at Los Alamos
were already operating with a limit ten times higher than that, and they pointed out that this “extremely conservative” standard would add millions of dollars to the construction of buildings at Los Alamos. They held the level at 0.5 microgram. In 1977 the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) established a guideline for the maximum occupational plutonium dose for workers of 5 rem annually from both internal and external radiation. In 1991 the ICRP proposed that workplace exposure be lowered from 5 to 2 rem per year, but the United States has not accepted this change. The level of 5 rem per year, set in 1958, is still the U.S. standard.

Plutonium was supposed to be a savior, to save us from the enemy. It wasn’t supposed to leak and burn and blow away, seep down into the water table and fly up into the sky. It was supposed to pay attention to borders and fences and property lines. It was supposed to know the good guys from the bad guys.

We don’t worry about it too much, though. The government will let us know if there is any real danger.

D
ESPITE
J
IM
Stone’s stern memos, Rockwell decides to go ahead and manufacture pondcrete. Workers call the production of pondcrete the Jelly Factory. But the plutonium pudding, a huge concoction of pond sludge, radioactive substances, hazardous chemicals, and concrete, takes longer than expected to gel. Managers pack the gooey mess into cardboard-and-tarp boxes the size of small refrigerators anyway, resulting in 12,000 one-ton blocks that stand out in the open. Unprotected from sun, wind, and snow, many of the blocks of pondcrete are part liquid, and the boxes are piled on top of one another like huge, soggy, sagging Lego blocks. In less than a year the blocks start falling apart. As they disintegrate, liquid containing nitrates, cadmium, and low-level radioactive waste leaks and leaches into the ground, where it runs downhill toward Walnut Creek and Woman Creek. Workers test the thickness and consistency of the sludge by sticking their thumbs into it.
When they report the problem to management, one foreman tells them to “cap” the soft pondcrete blocks with
fresh cement over the spot where inspectors usually stick their measuring instruments.