1
50
3
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbab9aaad909435686a751bcbe39d438b.JPG
66ab21e45337864e82e518e34179747c
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1397d9eb82d20248c32d7079d03d7288.mp4
f4cbd8641a1b1edcb6e4447010862c8d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Douglas O’Reagan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Maxwell Freshley
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?</p>
<p>Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11<sup>th</sup>, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?</p>
<p>Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?</p>
<p>Freshley: ’45?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I think so.</p>
<p>Freshley: That—oh, okay.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.</p>
<p>Freshley: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.</p>
<p>Freshley: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: But what is annealing?</p>
<p>Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon me?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?</p>
<p>Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?</p>
<p>Freshley: Overall?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?</p>
<p>Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.</p>
<p>Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!</p>
<p>Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?</p>
<p>Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?</p>
<p>Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: You don’t do that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.</p>
<p>Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great.</p>
<p>Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?</p>
<p>Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.</p>
<p>Freshley: No.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:06:39
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
324 Area
3706 Building
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-today
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1951-1993
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
John Fox
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Max Freshley
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Max Freshley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
02-10-2016
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
300 Area
324 Building
3706 Building
Battelle
Cold War
Engineering Test Reactor
General Electric
Hanford
Livermore
Los Alamo
Los Alamos
Mountain
Mountains
N Reactor
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
River
Savannah River
School
Street
Theater
War
Westinghouse
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F076444117ae2c86647ee8d705fe3c145.jpg
8976c055d68251fc4d46ba983b6f47fb
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F89da53c58c34229c68c8890bd2ee16b8.mp4
f561bf21f4c6e0119896680d6c3fa4de
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
O'Reagan, Douglas
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Freshley, Max
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?</p>
<p>Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11<sup>th</sup>, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?</p>
<p>Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?</p>
<p>Freshley: ’45?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I think so.</p>
<p>Freshley: That—oh, okay.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.</p>
<p>Freshley: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.</p>
<p>Freshley: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: But what is annealing?</p>
<p>Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon me?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?</p>
<p>Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?</p>
<p>Freshley: Overall?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?</p>
<p>Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.</p>
<p>Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!</p>
<p>Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?</p>
<p>Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?</p>
<p>Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: You don’t do that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.</p>
<p>Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great.</p>
<p>Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?</p>
<p>Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.</p>
<p>Freshley: No.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:06:12
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
248 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
3706 Building
234-5 Building
231-Z building
324 Building
N Reactor
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-2016
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1951-1993
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Fox, John
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Max Freshley
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Max Freshley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford (Wash.)
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-1-11
231-Z building
234-5 building
300 Area
324 Building
3706 Building
Battelle
General Electric
Housing
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor (PRTR)
Richland (Wash.)
Secrecy
Westinghouse
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7f7715623100afbb66dd47e73de6f561.jpg
0002ffe11948b43311ebb7a961d5a628
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9ebfcd597b679760a742fd7933925b23.mp4
ed164cfe7bd11e113062417f98a3f61a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Bauman
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Jack McElroy
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><strong><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Northwest Public Television | </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">McElroy_Jack</span></span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></strong></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Robert Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">All right. We'll go ahead and started then.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Jack McElroy</span>: Okay.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> We could maybe start by having you say your name</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">and spell it for us.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah. My name is a Jack McElroy. It's J-A-C-K M-C-E-L-R-O-Y.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Great. Thank you. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">nd today's date is October 22</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="NormalTextRun SCX152878036">nd</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> of</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Washington State University Tri-Cities. So let's start if we could by having you talk about when you came to work</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">at Hanford initially, what brought you here.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right. I was born at Grand Coulee Dam when my folks came out here from North Carolina and grew up in</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Spokane. And they came out here to work on the dam. After it was completed, we moved Spokane. I grew up</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">there.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So at Lewis and Clark High School I took all their math and science classes. And in my senior year,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Hanford started an engineering technician development program. And I was hired directly from high school by</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">General Electric. And I came here in the summer of 1955 and started working.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I was at the large central store's administration building next to the bus lot for a couple months while they obtained</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">our Q clearances. And the program also involved sending us to classes. So during that time, we also started going</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">to classes. So I basically came here in 1955 at the age of 18 directly out of high school.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">How many students were there? How many--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">There was about 20 of us that they recruited. There were several of us from Spokane. In fact, we formed a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">carpool and would go back to Spokane almost every weekend using the ferry that was here </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">at North Richland,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">went over to South Landing on the Pasco side. And that was the quickest way to get back and forth.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And so how long did you do that then?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I did that for a year and a half. And I had some great rotations. And at th</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">e same time that I signed on down</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> here, I</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">joined the Air National Guard out in Spokane.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And I was interested in flying. So in 1957, I actually left here to go into the pilot training program. But I probably</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ought to back up to my experiences here.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I want to ask you about, you said a dif</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ferent rotation. What sort of</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah. My first assignment was</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> radiation monitoring in a 325 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">uilding, where I was basically a technician</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">supporting chemists and also other radiation monitors. I learned a lot about the radiation and monitoring and so</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> on, which was limited </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">to the radio c</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">hemistry labs there in the 325 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">uilding. My second assignment took me</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">out to the 1</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">00 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">reas, where I worked for Larry McEwen </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">and the heat transfer group.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And I was assigned to his group in the hydraulics lab that was at the 1</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">00-D and D A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">rea. And I brought in a picture</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> and ga</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ve that to you of me working there in the lab. I met some really great chemical engineers there including a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> guy that would have an e</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ffect in my life later on </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">by the name of John Batch</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> who was a PhD from Purdue.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And they had quite an influence on my future as it turned out. My next assignment, I went to radiation monitoring</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> again with Herm Pass </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">in the 100 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">reas. And he was stationed</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">y had an office at the 100-D, D A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">rea</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">also.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And while I was on</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> that</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> assignment, I was very fort</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">unate to be involved in the 105-</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">B outage. And during that outage,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">we supported th</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">e changing out of the old curli</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">cue pig tails. They basically looked like the real pig tail</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">, and t</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">hat's how they got their name. The</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">y were formed just like a curli</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">cue. And they were on the front face of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">r</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">eactors. And in 1956, on the B R</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">eactor, they changed those out and put in stainless steel, flexible hoses and</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">pipes.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And so I was there at the reactor at that time supporting that operation.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">How long did that take?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Oh, it was just a month or so to actually do that. And that was actually my last assignment. And I did pretty good</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">and actually achieved radiation monitor status before I left and went into the Air Force in early 1957.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Of those different assignments, did you have one that you enjoyed the most?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I think t</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">he radiation monitoring at 100 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">reas. I got to go out to all the different reactors. I was able to go the rear</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">face on occasion. I mean, the rear face is a really hot, hot area.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So you had to stay out to the side. But at least I was able to see the rear faces on the reactors and the front faces</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">on several reactors. And so that was a very exciting assignment. But it was the hydraulics lab and heat transfer</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">unit that probably had the biggest impact on me later on when I decided to go to college after I was in the Air</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Force.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And so what sort of work did you do in the hydraulics lab?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Basically took measurements of fluid flow. And then I did an awful lot of graphing for the engineers and realized at</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">that time that, geez, if I had a degree, I could be having somebody else do the graphs for me. So it was very</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">interesting.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And you said that you and a group of you </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">would drive to Spokane often,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> ba</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">sically </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">on weekends. Where did</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">you stay? </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">when</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> you--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">When we came here, they put us up in the Sanfor</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">d Hotel, which was on Swift Boulevard</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">. It's since been removed. But it</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">was an old army barracks type of place and had simple bunk beds and so on in it.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">But in 1955, the government started turning the city over to the community</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> basically. And things like prefab</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">became available for renting. And so on a group of four of us actually applied for a prefab and ended up in a one</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">-</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">bedroom prefab at 1213 Potter Street. And it was a little bit crowded, but we had a ball.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And what was the community of Richland like at the time, 1955, </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">'56</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: It s</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">till had a mess hall. You could go to the mess hall there downtown just across from where the post office is at</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">now and have a large buffet dinner and eat there. As I said, we stayed in the little hotel, barracks type hotel.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> Uptown T</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">heater was there. It was pretty normal, small community.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And so you were here for a year and a half or so.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And then if you can talk about what you did and what brought you back to Hanford.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah. Well, I left to go in the military. And I actually became a pilot and an officer and came back to the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Washington </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Air </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">National Guard up at Geiger Field and basically, at that time, decided, well, this is a great opportunity</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">for me to go back to school. So I went to Gonzaga University while I was flying with the Guard and Air Force.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And I received a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering. And GE hired me immediately to bring me back</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">down here. So I was back down here in July of 1963. So I was gone for about six years.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Were you hoping to get back to Hanford at some point? Or was that--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">You know, I didn't know. I really didn't know </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">what life had in store for me, b</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ut it just kept changing and</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">progressing. And I was certainly glad to get back down here once I had the opportunity.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So when you came back in 1963, then what sort of work were you doing? What areas were you working in?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: I kind of stumbled, or fate </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">or something steered me into waste management and the group that was pioneering</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">the development of waste treatment technology for handling radioactive waste. And they were just based, had a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">lot of their people, in a 321 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">uilding, which was a building that had a lot of history. Other people may have</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">mentioned it, but it had a lot of history for developing separations technology for the site.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And at the time I was there, it was actually being used to develop which treatment technology. And so I got in with</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">that group. And I spent three or four months with them learning about vitrification and also something called</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">calcining, where you take liquid waste and heat it up, and drive off a lot of the volatile materials and turn it into a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">powder. And then from that, we would melt it, vitrify it, </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">make</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> glasses.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So that was my first assignment. Second a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ssignment, I went out to 100-N A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">rea and had a great assignment there.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I was a process engineer. And I was actually out there at the site when President Kennedy came in 19</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I think</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">was 1963, prior to the assassination of course</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">and saw him </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">speak. And</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> that was a great event. And N R</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">eactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">was a great reactor. It's unfortunate that we had to shut it down the way we did.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Do you have any specific memories from the day that President Kennedy was here?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Not really, no. I definitely remember being out there and seeing him, and hearing him talk, and the helicopters,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">pretty routine stuff. Yeah. I had one other rotation at PRTR, Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, where I worked </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">on </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">the containment system for them.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">But in 1964, it was announced that they were going to shut down all the reactors. And so I decided it was time for</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">me to pick a permanent assignment. And so I went back to the waste management group.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I don't know if </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I mentioned their names, but Al</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> Platt </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">and </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Carl Cooley were heading up that</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">organization. And they were real pioneers for developing waste treatment technology and working with other</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">international people like in England and France at that time. So I got in with that group and had a lot of great</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">opportunities with them.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">You mentioned as early as '63 they were already starting to work on vitrification sort of technologies?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">What other sorts of technologies and waste treatment were being researched or worked on?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">At that time, it was primarily calcination and vitrification and looking at three different products, either a calcine</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">powdery dry product for final storage or either phosphate glass or borosilicate glass. And also there was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">phosphate ceramic at the time. So it really hadn't been decided what was going to be the choice for the US, what</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> direction we</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> were going to go with the treatment technology.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And in the program I was in starting a '65, we actually demonstrated with r</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">adioactive material in the 324 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">uilding</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">several different technologies with all these different products. And from that, we chose to go with borosilicate</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">glass, which is the current standard for product form for high level radioactive waste.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And what led you to that</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> sort of</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> solution?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">The processes that we demonstrated, basically that seemed to be one of the best. We actually made it with in-can</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">melting, a spray calciner, and in-can melter. I brought in another photograph of that showing all this equipment in</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">the cell with the spray cal</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ciner setting over </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">an in-can melter. And basically the product from that, the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">borosilicate glass, turned out to be the best product in terms of its durability. And also the process, in-can melting,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">was a pretty straightforward simple process to--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Can you explain that a little</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> bit</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">, just a little detail?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah. Basically we sprayed liquid waste into the spray calciner, which is heated to about 700 degrees centigrade.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And as the droplets came down, they dried. And it would be hot enough to where you'd get rid of all the nitrates</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">and convert it to oxides.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And the oxides would then fall down into the melter. We had a couple different </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">melters</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> at the time. We were</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ac</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">tually looking at a continuous </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">melter, that was made out of platinum and far too expensive, and the in-can</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">melter, which is made out of Inconel. And we would add additives, boron and silica, to the calcine, and then heat</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">them up to over 1,000 degrees centigrade in either the melter or the in-can melter and convert to the glass.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So about what time period was this conclusion made to go with vitrification?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">The program was from '65 to '71. And so it was around 1970 that we basically decided that the borosilicate glass</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">was the preferred route. And then things changed. And they actually didn't support doing </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">any waste </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">work for</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">about a year and started it backup in 1972.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And in 1972, I was recruited to be the manager for the development of the vitrification program. I was recruited by</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Al Platt, who I mentioned earlier and John </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Batch, </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">who was one of the PhD chemical engineers out</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">at the 100-D R</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">eactor at the time I was there as a technician. So it kind of came back around again with one of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">people that I word for earlier. So they recruited me to head up the program to further develop technology for using</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> in the United States, </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">for vitrifying high level waste.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So were you actually able to begin the process of [INAUDIBLE]?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">In '72, we started building the program with the focus on the spray calciner and in-can melter, which was the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">choice from that earlier program</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> and also decided it was time to look at something that would handle large</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">quantities</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> of waste</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">, such as what they have here at Hanford. Because when you just melt in a can, you're pretty well limited</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">in terms of size and processing rate. So in 1972, I hired an engineer, actually Battelle hired him.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Hanford Labs under General Electric became the Pacific Northwest Laboratories under Battelle. And so in 1972, I</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">was then working for Battelle. And at that time, we started developing and hiring engineers.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And so one of the engineers was Chris Chapman out of Kansas. He was a mechanical engineer. And we put</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">him in charge of developing a new melter technology, a Joule-heated ceramic melter.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> to</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> jump further </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ahead,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">the </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Joule-heater ceramic melter now is the heart of the waste treatment plant. There's</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">two of them in the low activity waste facility and two in the high level waste facility. But anyway, we started</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">developing that technology in early '70s. And by 1975, we had </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">a prototype working in the 324 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">uilding of a liquid</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">-fed </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Joule-heated ceramic melter. And I brought in a picture of that also to share with you.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So that's almost 40 years ago now that you really started developing some of that technology.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right. If you </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">add that up, that's probably</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> 41 years. So it's over 40 years.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah, time flies. Anyway, that technology</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">1977</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">we were developing most of this technology actually for the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">commercial nuclear fuel cycle with the expectation that the United States would develop reprocessing and have a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">complete fuel cycle here. In 1977, President Carter put a moratorium on reprocessing and that just threw</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">everything into turmoil.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And fortunately, there was a gentleman by the name of Frank </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">Baranowski</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> that was running the Department of</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Energy Defense Waste sites. And he chose to pick up the technology. And so we then turned all of our efforts</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">from the commercial fuel cycle to supporting the Defense Waste facilities.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So we spent several years working with DuPont to transfer the know-how for the spray calciner and in-can melter</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">, as well as the Joule-heated</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> melter for use down at Savannah River. And they ini</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">tially started out choosing the </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">spray calciner and in-can melter. But after they figured that there was a huge cost savings by eliminating the tall</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">calciner in terms of canyon height for hot cells and processing cells, they decided to go with the Joule-heated</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">melter.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So we worked with DuPont and helped them get that technology in place in the Defense Waste Processing facility</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">at Savannah River. And it's been very successful. It's been running for about 20 years.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So you came initially in 1955--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: --and the focus at Hanford was </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">production</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">nd came back in the '60s. It was just about to shift to definitely reduced</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> production, right, and then--</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I guess if you look back at that, you've seen a lot of the changes in mission, changes in technology.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">In thinking back to the years you worked</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> at Hanford and the changes</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> what--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I mean, obviously impacted your work</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">in terms of what you were focusing on. But the changes in technology must've impacted your work as well.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah. I still do a little consulting. It turned out to be a hot area,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> waste management. So I'm still involved in it on a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">small part-time basis. I've retired two or three times. And I actually ran a small company for Battelle</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> out there</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> called</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">Geosafe</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">We actually went out and we developed another technology called in-situ vitrification, where we literally </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">clean up</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">sites by putting electrodes in the ground and melting the earth and the soil. And we brought that along and made</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">it to where it was capable of actually using the same method to melt in a large container. And so for a while here,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Hanford was looking at that technology, it was called bulk vitrification, as a way of</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> supplementing the current </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">V</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">it</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">P</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">lant. And it's possible that that technology might still have a use here at Hanford.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Mm-hm. </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">So you came back and '63. And then how long did you stay working at [INAUDIBLE]?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I worked for 30 years as an engineer and retired in '95 from Battelle. But I retired to run a small company for</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Battelle, the </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">Geosafe</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">company</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Right. </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">In looking back at the various things you've worked on, was there a part of your work, an aspect of the work that</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">you found most challenging or part of it that you found the most rewarding?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Probably the most challenging and rewarding was trying to make thin</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">gs work in a hot cell. The 324 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">uilding</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">which is still there and may be there for a while, because there's contamination under the cell where we were</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">doing the processing. Making things work, making them reliable, and getting week-long tests completed without</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">major interruptions that was very challenging and very rewarding.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And it could be done. Sometimes the only way to solve the problem was to put it in a hot cell and make it work.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">You could spend a lon</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">g time outside playing around, b</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ut you really didn't know what the issues and problems</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">were until you put in it in there and tried to do it.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And then also during your years at Hanford, were there any incidents that stand out or problems or events that</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">happened that stand out in your mind above some of the others?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: Hmm. </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Not reall</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">y. I mean, some little events, b</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ut probably wouldn't want to put them on tape.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> I would have to say that I</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">am so amazed at the Manhattan Project and what they did so quickly and successfully.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And even when I came here in '55 and then on in the '60s, we were able to do things pretty quickly. I mean, we</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">could build it, put it in, </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">test</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> it. And somewhere '70s, '80s, things started to get too bogged down in paperwork and</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">overly cautious. The safety culture was always there.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> But some</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">how or another the safety culture got to where it really slowed things down. And it's unfortunate. It just</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">takes too long now to get things done.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Is there any specific examples of concerns about safety or security that sort of thing that you can think of?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Just th</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">e requirements for dotting the i's and crossing the t</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">'s and undergoing inspections and being afraid. I mean,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I mentioned that sometimes the best way to get something done was to put it in there and make it work. Now, you</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">can't put it in there until you're positive it's going to work. The </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span class="SpellingError SCX152878036">Vit</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> plant's a great example of that.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And they have a truly big concern associated with these Pulse Jet Mixer tanks in the black cells, where they're</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">going to be in there for 40 years. And I mean, that's a legitimate concern. But the fact is I believe that 90% of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">waste could be processed without that concern. And then we're holding up the whole plant because of this other</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">10% of the waste. And that's frustrating.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Looking back on your time working at Hanford, how </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">would </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">you a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ssess, overall, your experiences working at </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Hanford?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I had a great, great career, great experiences. A lot of memories, a lot of good memories, a lot of great people.</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And I raised my family here, too, my wife Carol, and daughter Toni and Jill. They're Bombers. It was Col High,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Columbia High</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> at t</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">he time that they went to high school there. Now, it's Richland High School. And they had a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">great, great life and experience here also.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I wonder if you could talk about the relationship between Hanford the workplace and then the community. How</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">would you describe that relationship as y</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">ou were living here in the '60s and</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> '70s?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I don't know, just business as usual. I don't set it apart from any of the other businesses around the area in terms</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">of being different or unique. So just business as usual to me.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I wonder</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> is there anything I haven't asked you about yet related to your work experience at Hanford or something</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">that you'd like to share or talk about that you hav</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">en't had a chance to talk about </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">yet?</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I don't think so.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">I wanted to make sure.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">There's probably something I'll think about later.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">That happens.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah, of course, right.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman:</span> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Well, I want to thank you for coming in today. This is a really interesting</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">as someone who came like you said as</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">just out of high school</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> really.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Yeah</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> I think that is kind of a fortuitous event</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> to come directly out of high school as something like this and to be a</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">part of history. It basically impacted my life and my future decisions of where I was going to go and what I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">going to do</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> very positively.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">And then you came back in a very different capacity in many ways.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Right.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">Well, thank you again for coming in.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">McElroy</span>: Okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036">. Thank you.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX152878036">
<p class="Paragraph SCX152878036"><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: I appreciate your coming and</span><span class="TextRun SCX152878036"> talking to us.</span><span class="EOP SCX152878036"> </span></p>
</div>
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri-Cities
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:28:00
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
198kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
325 Building
100 Area
100-D Reactor
D Area
100-N Area
N Reactor
B Reactor
Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1955-1957
1963-2013
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1955-1957
1963-1993
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
McEwen, Larry
Batch, John
Pass, Herm
Platt, Al
Cooley, Carl
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
Chapman, Chris
Baranowski, Frank
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jack McElroy
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Jack McElroy conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2016-06-15: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/22/2013
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Richland (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Hanford (Wash.)
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant (Wash.)
Nuclear weapons plants--Health aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site Region
100 Area
100-D Reactor
100-N Area
324 Building
325 Building
B Reactor
D Area
Hanford (Wash.)
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
N Reactor
Pasco (Wash.)
Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor (PRTR)
Richland (Wash.)