1 50 5 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F28cd2043c9ba0ab8d30fec025de8c735.JPG 8354e6925db0dfcc31cd6233a0bf0a77 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F85523bfe18aac656aff6c2ba9818cebc.mp4 b786779793fd5e6237875cbaa5f52764 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 Philip Craig Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Man one: So it’s pointing at you. Philip Craig: So it’s pointing at me? Man one: Yeah, yeah. Man two: Exactly. Craig: Oh, there we go. Man two: Perfect, perfect. Craig: There we go! Man one: Okay, excellent. Craig: Okay? Robert Bauman: Okay. Let me know when you’re ready, all right? Then we’ll—all right? Man one: We are rolling, so on your cue. Bauman: So, let’s start, first of all, by just having you say your name and spell it for us, so we make sure we have that correct. Craig: My name is Philip Craig. P-H-I-L-I-P. C-R-A-I-G. Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this oral history interview on June 24th of 2015 on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So, Mr. Craig, why don’t we have you start, maybe, by just telling us a little bit about your background. Where you came from, how you came to Hanford, and that sort of thing. Craig: Well my how I came to Hanford started back in high school. I had a high school chemistry class. I liked what I saw. And I knew that the Hanford Project was down the road—I was living in Selah, Washington, and the Hanford Project was very interesting to me. And I even wrote a term paper on Hanford, because I really wanted to work here. So, I went on to Whitman College, graduated from high school in ’56—or ’52, I’m sorry. Graduated from college in ’56, and then went on to Washington State College, then, now Washington State University in Pullman, and did a year of graduate work in chemistry. And at the end of that, I came to Hanford for my very first job. And lo and behold, that was exactly 58 years ago today: June 24, 1957. And it was quite an experience, let me tell you. The first thing that struck me, of course I had to have credentials to get in the building. And in those days, we didn’t have badges like you have today that are on a cord around your neck. We had a little plastic folder with our ID in it, and you’d pull that out of your pocket and flash it open to the guard sitting at the entrance desk. And then you could go on into the building and find your office and take it from there. The most interesting thing, I think, about it all was it was a very formal setting. For years we wore suits, ties, long sleeved white shirts only—couldn’t have colored shirts—and the ladies wore dresses. Far more formal than today’s environment. Security, of course, was very paramount. I mean, we were in the years where the Soviets and the United States was competing. And so the Hanford site, being one of the two principal sites manufacturing plutonium in the United States, the other one being Savannah River, most of the stuff in terms of total production and that sort of thing was top secret. A lot of it was not—it was secret, but security was paramount. I remember in my little office cubby hole—it was a room, it wasn’t just a cubby hole, in a big room—we had a three-drawer file cabinet with a combination lock. And I could take a piece of paper out of that file, put it on my desk and work on it. But if I had to go to the bathroom, it went back in the combination file, locked it, go down the hall and come back and you had to unlock the combination and start all over again. And the very first thing they had me do is they handed me about a three-inch black three-ring binder with a red coversheet, marked secret. This was the PUREX operating manual. Now, PUREX stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction, and it was the chemical process that is used to take irradiated uranium from the reactors, dissolve it in acid, treat it chemically, and come up with a plutonium nitrate solution. And I had to read this manual in about a week. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty daunting. Bauman: Now where was your first office? Where on site? Craig: It was on in the 703 Building, which is about where the Federal Building is today. The last part of the 703 structure—it was a herringbone structure. We had offices coming off a main corridor, and there was about six tiers of those. And the very last one is still standing, and the city offices are in there. But later on, the Federal Building took over. Bauman: And what was your first job title? Craig: Physical—let’s see. Physical Science Administrator, I think it was. The other thing about the environment is that you handwrote all your reports, and then gave them to a secretary who typed them. There was no computers. So, it was kind of a laborious process to do that. I needed to check out a government car, which I did in the motor pool, and drive out to the Area to PUREX, and see what was going on most every day, drive back, write the daily report, mark it all secret, send it up a line to my boss. But that government car, let me tell you—it was not air conditioned. So those days were pretty warm. But we got it done. About two months later, after getting into the PUREX part of it, the fellow who was a companion office mate had been handling the plutonium shipments. And he went off to Washington, D.C. for another job. So I got the job of accepting plutonium products on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission and the US government. So it was a very formal process. The products were in two forms. After the plutonium nitrate left PUREX, it was sent over to what is known as the Z Plant. And in that plant, by a series of chemical operations, it was converted to a metal button about this big and it fit in a tuna fish can. It weighed something close to two kilograms. So that was the first product. The second product were manufactured, machined weapon components. And I won’t talk about the exact details of their size and shape at this point. But nonetheless, Hanford was in the business of making weapon components. So my job was to accept this product and make the shipment, every couple of weeks or so, to Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats was about 15 miles northwest of Denver, and it was the receiving site for the plutonium as buttons. They would take that metal and cast it into weapon component shapes and machine those and so on. And of course the other part was the shapes themselves, they’d go up in pieces themselves, and they would go into an inspection process and eventually assemble parts of the warhead. Bauman: So when you say—you’re accepting them from the contractor, or--? Craig: I was accepting these materials from the contractor. I mean, General Electric Company was the contractor, and their job on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract basis was to run all these processes. And there’s hundreds of people involved in this. But at the end of the line, I had to make that transition from Hanford to the next step. So it was a couple of months into my first job, my buddy left for Washington, and here I am, learning how to actually accept these components. Now, you need to understand that plutonium was very radioactive. It emitted some gamma radiation, but not huge amounts. I mean, you could actually handle it. But it also emitted alpha radiation. And so it had to be contained in some kind of container, like a can. And then you could hold it in your hand. Interesting. It was warm. It was—the radioactive decay—was producing heat. So this can felt like hanging onto a 60 Watt lightbulb. Now, the other part of the business of plutonium is that if you got too much of it together in one spot, you had a criticality event. And of course, the bomb itself was designed to make a lot of it go critical at the same time, and that created an atomic explosion. But the point is that if you’re handling plutonium, it had to maintain a certain degree of separation at all times. In the chemical processing plants, they used different sized columns of chemical solutions and whatnot, depending on what was going on. And that was to maintain this critical geometry, so that you didn’t have any kind of criticality event. And after the plutonium was made into these buttons we called them, and canned in the tuna fish cans, they were stored in a vault. And the vault had pillars of metal rods, and little rings on that rod that you could put a can in. But it maintained the separation. So on shipping day, what we would do is we operators of the plant would go into the vault and take these cans and very carefully put—I don’t remember exactly how many—something about five or six cans in a little red wagon. Just a little kid’s wagon. But there was spacers in there so that these things didn’t get too close. And they’d bring it down the hallway to the room that exited to the building where it then could be handled further. And this assembly area, in this room were birdcages. Now a birdcage is a metal frame that’s about this big, this big, and this big. And in the middle was a metal pot with a lid. And the idea was that you took—one at a time—one of those cans from the red wagon, and you put it in the pot. And then I think the birdcage held like three buttons. Then there was a lid, and a bunch of bolts in places where you could put a wire with a lead seal on the end. And my job was to squeeze the seal closed with an imprint and record, of course, what the identity of those cans were, and the weight, and that sort of thing on paperwork. And at the end of that, I would sign this receipt for this material, and give it to the contractor. The weapon components varied a little bit differently, depending on the size and shape of the weapon component. Eventually, those were a much bigger birdcage, and it contained a couple of pieces of weapon material. Bauman: So— Craig: Hold up. Bauman: Oh, sure. Craig: I got to collect my thoughts here. Okay. You can go back on. The business of shipping, then—I owned that plutonium for maybe 15 minutes [LAUGHTER] before the government. Then I would transfer it to armed couriers, AEC couriers. They were not only armed with side arms; they were armed with machine guns. This was serious stuff. And they would load these birdcages into a truck, and eventually ship that off to Rocky Flats. Bauman: How often did these shipments--? Craig: Well, every couple of weeks or so. Bauman: And so, they were shipped by truck then, to Rocky Flats? Craig: That was a method used in later years. They didn’t really like shipping by truck that well. We actually had another system that involved—all I’m going to say is it involved rail. Because the exact details was highly classified. Bauman: And did the amount that was shipped vary significantly, or--? Craig: It varied, yes. Depends on how the production was going and what the requirements were on the other end. Bauman: Oh, okay. Sure. And so how long did you do this, then? How long were you--? Craig: From 1957 to 1972. Bauman: Wow. Craig: So I shipped a lot of plutonium. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Craig: The other thing that was kind of interesting—I was explaining to you about the criticality. I hadn’t been on the job more than, I don’t know, a couple of months, shipping. I knew what to do, I knew the whole process, and I knew the sensitivity of it. One day one of these chemical operators who worked for the contractor had gone to the vault, and he came down the hall carrying about five tuna fish cans in his hand, and holding it with his arm like this. Well, that was absolutely high risk criticality event waiting to happen. And he walked in the room, and I said, ooooh. Just stop right where you are. And I instructed one of the other operators, take one of the cans from him and put it in the birdcage very carefully. And we got that shipment loaded and we were on our way. And then I went to the manager’s office—the plant manager’s office. Now, this fellow was like 60 years old. Kind of a salty southerner with—I mean, he was definitely in charge. And I’m 23 years old. Fresh out of college, wet behind the ears. And I gave him a real lecture about safety. And he didn’t like that. He called my boss. And my boss said Mr. Craig was right: you really almost had an accident today. That’s the end of that story. There was more to the whole weapons system. Since I was in the whole process, one of the small cogs—there was uranium coming from Oak Ridge. There was plutonium—some plutonium—and tritium coming from Savannah River. There was high explosives coming from Pantex. And then Hanford plutonium. This all had to be scheduled into what was known as the US master nuclear delivery schedule. It was the weapons document for all the weapons made in the country. It was a top secret document, and representatives from each of these sites got together, usually in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or at the Rocky Flats Plant. And we handwrote this schedule. There was no computers. There was a spreadsheet format, yes. But we didn’t have computers to do all that. Everything had to be balanced. This whole process had to bring all these materials together for processing at Rocky Flats. And so, about once a year we got together to do the master nukes schedule. I found I was pretty fortunate to be a part of that. I was pretty young. But it was a challenge. I had a lot of help, of course. But I was very impressed. One of the things that kind of scared me though was—and let me check on the date. October 22 to 24, 1962. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were in Denver and Rocky Flats to work on these schedules. Now, that was ground zero for the Russians. If they were going to attack the United States, that probably would have been one of their targets. And it was kind of scary working there for those two days. I was very thankful that President Kennedy convinced Khrushchev to back off and no ill things happened. Bauman: Were you here when President Kennedy came to Hanford in ’63? Craig: Yes, yes. Bauman: Do you remember that? Craig: Oh, I remember that. We got to drive out and see him out at the reactor site. It was quite an experience. I think that was one of the only Presidents I’ve ever seen in person. And it wasn’t long after that, you know, a couple months or less, that he was assassinated in Texas. Bauman: Do you remember much about that day? Craig: It was hot! [LAUGHTER] It was still warm when he was here visiting. But it was a big event. There was thousands of people out there in the desert. But it was very thrilling experience to see the President come. Bauman: Sure. So, you said you were working on the shipment from ’57 to ’72. So did that process change much over those years, other than shifting from— Craig: Well, yes. In about ’66, we quit making weapon components at Hanford. And the process moved to Rocky Flats entirely. Bauman: So that part changed. Craig: Yeah. That part changed. But the plutonium buttons didn’t. Bauman: And so then in ’72 then, how did your job change? What did you start doing at that point? Craig: Well, take a break for a sec. [VIDEO CUTS] Bauman: Sure, that’d be great. Do you want to go ahead and do that now? Craig: Hmm? Bauman: Do you want to go ahead and start that now then? Start talking about that? Craig: Yes. Bauman: Okay. That’d be great. Man one: All right, just a moment. Okay, we’re rolling again. Just start whenever you— Craig: Okay. Well, let’s see, I need the face page of this. Okay, I’m ready. Bauman: Go ahead. Man two: We’re rolling. Craig: The other significant activity that I was involved with was in 1968. The site was in a state where we had 149 single-shell waste tanks and 28 double-shell waste tanks. Actually, that’s not quite right. There were four short of that on the double-shell. And these were boiling waste tanks. The others were not boiling waste. But it was all liquid, and we were concerned about the integrity of the tanks and the lifetime of the tanks. And so at that time, the Atlantic-Richfield-Hanford Company, ARCO, was the contractor. And two of their engineers, Sam Beard and Bob McCullough and I co-authored a document that was called “The Hanford Waste Management Briefing.” And the purpose of this was to explain the Hanford situation to our headquarters—our AEC headquarters staff, and Congressional staffers who were then going to be funding what is now known as the Tank Farm projects. And this document was a briefing document, and the key—one of the key charts that we were particularly proud of is to try to show people how complex the business of the Hanford waste system was. And this chart shows what happens to a ton of uranium that’s been irradiated and then processed at PUREX, and the wastes that come out of that whole process. And some of it’s boiling waste, because of high levels of radioactivity that are in that particular section of waste, and some was non-boiling. For example, you’re dealing with—for that ton of waste—680 gallons of non-boiling waste and 220 gallons of boiling waste. And in the non-boiling tank, you have 900 pounds of salts, chemical nitrate—nitrates and so on, and about 350 curies of radioactivity. But in the boiling side, there’s 230 pounds of salt, but 300,000 curies of activity. That’s why they’re boiling. And then there was a low-level stream that had like 55,000 gallons of waste that went to a crib—a crib is like a septic tank—tile field—and the swamp, which is just an open pond. There was another 560,000 gallons went there, but their radioactivity was less than a tenth of a curie. I mean, it was just negligible. On the solid side, there was about ten cubic feet of solid waste. There was about 10 million cubic feet—I’m sorry—of gases that came out. And here’s the number that it was radio—a surprise to everyone that it was published. It was secret then, but it’s been declassified since. Out of that ton of fuel came 530 grams of plutonium and four grams of neptunium. So the chemical process that started with a ton of material and ended up with just a very small amount. So it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. Bauman: Right. Craig: Because these wastes were boiling, we’d started building—had started building double-shell tanks. A double-shell tank is a steel tank within a steel tank within a concrete barrier. And this diagram in that briefing document showed what a double-shell tank was all about. These were million-gallon tanks. And in those days, it was about a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half a gallon to build those tanks. A million-million half dollars for one of these big tanks. Far, far, less than what they would cost today. Bauman: Yeah. Craig: At any rate, we made this presentation to the staffers and the ultimate activity was to remove as much as water as we could from the single-shell tanks so that we ended up with a salt cake that was not going anywhere. We isolated cesium-137 and strontium-90 by another chemical process, carried out in B Plant, to bring those short-lived emitters of radiation to a point where we could encapsulate those in steel cylinders. That was done and they’re stored. I think they’re still stored that way, but I’m not entirely sure. I kind of lost track of what’s happened since. We also built—were recommending that they build four more double-shelled tanks and that’s why the number finally grew to 28 double-shell tanks. And then, of course, it ultimately led to the pretreatment plant that’s in the process out here now, and the Waste Vitrification Plant. Bauman: You mentioned one of the reasons for doing the report was there were concerns about the integrity of the single-shell tanks. Were some of them leaking at that point, or just concerns that they might leak? Craig: I think at that point there were some that had displayed a little bit of leakage, yes. There’s other documents that showed some leakage, but, again it wasn’t into the concrete overpack, if you will. There was some, of course, got into the soil column, but it was not a series breach, and it wasn’t any radioactivity that got down into the groundwater. But we were afraid that it would. I mean, 1968, these tanks have been—the initial ones—had been built in 1944! ’45, ’46. So there was some that were approaching the end of life, and those tanks are still there today. And that’s why they’re so concerned about trying to remove some of the waste from these tanks and process it. Bauman: So, who initiated—was this ARCO or AEC that sort of initiated the study that you helped write? Craig: Oh, I think it was—collectively, the Hanford folks at engineering—folks on both sides of the contractor and the government were saying, we got to do something about this. Anyway, I think that’s about all I want to say about the creation of that document. I thought it would be interesting for you to look into if that ever showed up in the REACH literature as the kickoff document to get this thing going. Bauman: Right, right. Yeah. And did you continue to be involved after this report in some of the tank—waste management end of things? Craig: Yes. Actually, I had some side activities that I got into first. From 1968 to 1972, I was the plutonium leasing officer for the government. There was one in Oak Ridge for uranium, and I was the plutonium one for the US. And basically, what I was—what we did is we created a lease document, so the 125 commercial organizations, 40 government agencies, and about 450 colleges and universities could have plutonium material. And we would, in effect, rent it to them for a use charge. Wasn’t very expensive, but it was a charge. More importantly, if they lost any of it, they had to pay for it. The largest users of that lease program were the two reactor fuel contractors. One of them was Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation in Apollo, Pennsylvania. And the other one was Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma. They made reactor fuels for the breeder program at Oak Ridge, and the Fast Flux Test Facility here. Bauman: Oh, okay. Interesting. Craig: So that was a way for them to have this material. For the next nine years, I continued to be involved with the PUREX and Z Plant, and the management of both site materials—all of the different types of materials that we had: uranium, and plutonium, and so on. And those materials were about $500,000 to $750,000 in value. I’m sorry, $500 to $750 million in value. But it was a management process. Then later on, from 1981 to 1985, I was able to be involved in the last big development program that I had while I was working for the government. It was called the Spent Fuel Management Program. Now, during this time, the AEC had been in charge—prior to this time, the AEC had been in charge of both the Defense orientation of radioactive materials, and also the development of commercial power reactors. And there was a political hue and cry from about 19—let’s see—1974, I think it was—that the commercial reactor stuff should go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a new agency. And then, of course, a few years after that, about 1978 I think it was, the—oh, by the way, when the NRC was created, they changed the name of AEC. It became ERDA: Energy Research and Development Administration. And then about four years later, they changed it again to the Department of Energy. Well, now we had the government on our side—DoE had an obligation to kind of help the nuclear power industry deal with the long-term disposal of their spent fuel. I mean, as the fuel is burned up in their reactor and is no longer useful, eventually it was going to be encapsulated and sent off to Yucca Mountain. Well, until Yucca Mountain got authorized and built, then they needed an interim storage, and so we developed a concept called the at-reactor spent fuel storage. Several of us—myself and somebody from NRC, and somebody from Battelle, the contract who was working with me, and somebody from the Electric Power Research Institute, representing the power industry—I think that’s about it—we all went off to observe some dry storage in casks in Germany. We brought that technology back to the United States. We worked with the NRC to get it licensed. And now the power reactors of this country are using at-reactor storage in basically steel containers that contain the spent fuel and are just sitting on concrete pads, and the radioactive decay heat is dissipated into the surrounding environment. But all the radioactivity is very well contained in these casks. Hopefully, eventually Yucca Mountain will open. It was part of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that I was involved with in those days. The whole purpose of this act was to create a long-term disposal. And NRC was involved in licensing that long-term disposal, and the nuclear power industry was to pay a fee for all this fuel that they were generating to help pay for this. Well, then all this got stopped because of the politics of Nevada and the—it’s going to be restarted, because there was a lawsuit that was settled recently that said that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act should be followed. Bauman: Right. So, you were involved with that in— Craig: I was involved in— Bauman: About ’85? Craig: --all that kind of stuff. Bauman: Right. Craig: Yes. And then I left the—at that point, this will be—okay, you can go back on. At that point in 1985, I left the government, went private, went to work for a packaging—an engineering and design company that designed high-level waste shipping containers for use on transportation. They started off—their first big project was the Three Mile Island cask, to move that waste. And then from that, I marketed to the government a high-level waste—any kind of high-level waste that could be put into a cask and removed. And then the TRUPACT-II cask for use in transferring transuranic waste, or primarily plutonium waste, from the government sites to the waste isolation pilot plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. And from there, I got involved on a couple of other organizations. Eventually, in 1991, I went to work for Lockheed. In 1996, Lockheed, along with—well, Fluor Daniel was the primary contractor, but we were on the Fluor Daniel team, and Lockheed was to manage the Tank Farms. So we came full circle, and I helped Lockheed win that contract. Bauman: Right, you did come full circle. Craig: So then, Lockheed moved me from—I was then living in Federal Way, and Lockheed rewarded me by moving me back to Hanford and letting me work on the Hanford site in ’96. And I did that until December of 2000. And there I was involved in the new contracting method. Instead of cost-plus-fixed-fee contracting, it was cost-plus-incentive-fee. And what we would do was we would create a document for a scope of work, a performance agreement. And the contractor would say, here, DoE, this is what we’re going to do for you, and here’s how long it’s going to take. And DoE said, okay, if you do that, we’ll pay you this fee, and if you don’t get it done on time, we’re going to cut your fee. And if you don’t do it well, we’re going to cut your fee. And my job was to, at the end of the work performance, was to write up the actual work done in a document to present to DoE that says, okay, pay us the fee. We were very successful in getting our award fee. And then I gave it all up in December of 2000, after 43 years. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Craig: Cut. Bauman: That’s a long, fascinating career. Can I ask you questions, kind of go back? Craig: Yeah, there’s a couple of transition spots I’m kind of worried about, that I kind of sound like an idiot. Bauman: No. Craig: I want to—is there any editing we can do? Bauman: Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. If there’s any issue we can go back to it later. It’s not a problem. I wonder if I can go back—and this is really interesting stuff, fascinating career. I wanted to ask you just about the community, when you arrived here in 1957, what was Richland like at the time? Could you talk about that a little bit? And did you live in Richland, or--? Craig: Oh, yes. Yes. We were allowed to rent from the government a B house—half of a B house on Haupt. This was June 1957. And by then—a couple of months—the government started selling off the town to private citizens. And we were in the first block to be sold. The senior owners in the other end of the B house bought the B house. And at that time, we moved to the other side of town, into a ranch house, because that had been sold to its owner. This is kind of an interesting—are you recording? Bauman: Yeah. Craig: Oh, okay. This was kind of interesting, because the ranch house that the owner—I mean the resident who was able to buy it bought for like $7,700. And then when we bought the ranch house, I think we paid like $9,500. And of course, those ranch houses today sell for over 100. The town was very—initially of course, it was very caste-oriented. I mean, if you were a contractor, management, you got to live on the river. If you were a lowly government GS-7, you got to live in a B house. And there was a certain level of, you know, if you weren’t in this class, you weren’t part of it, you know. And I think that’s changed dramatically over the years. It doesn’t make any difference who you work for and how much money you make and all that stuff. People have changed for the better. Bauman: Anything else about the community that stood out to you at the time? Craig: Well, the first thing that Richland did was they had to celebrate their founding as Richland. They set off a mock atomic bomb, and it was a bunch of fanfare out in the park, and made a poof of smoke that was to represent a mushroom cloud. Bauman: So, was this at Howard Amon Park? Craig: Yeah. It was. Bauman: Anything else that—memories that stand out, either about in community of Richland, or your work—any stories or memories that really stand out to you that you’d like to share? Craig: I think I’m kind of— Bauman: Good? [LAUGHTER] Craig: Completed. Bauman: All right, well I want to thank you very much. This was really interesting. I appreciate you coming in and sharing stories about your work, and all that you did out there. I really appreciate it. Craig: Well, you’re more than welcome. I feel confident that this waste document that shows particularly how much plutonium was made, that was a very revolutionary thing. I mean, the idea how much of material you got out of a ton of uranium was— Bauman: Right. Craig: Very classified. And to see that declassified and whatnot. It’s— Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Craig: Kind of mind-blowing. But there’s the document. And it’s legitimate to talk about. Bauman: Right. Craig: Not sure I want it on the local news tonight, but—[LAUGHTER] [VIDEO CUTS] Craig: Details, but I know that he was— Bauman: Yeah. So, just let me know when you’re ready, all right? We can— Craig: So this was August, ’76. I don’t know the exact date. Bauman: That’s all right. I mean, the exact date we have, so— Man one: Okay, we are ready. Bauman: Just whatever memories or knowledge you have about it. Man one: We’re rolling. Whenever you’re ready. Bauman: Okay. So I don’t know if you want to talk to us about the McCluskey incident and your involvement in that? Craig: Well, at the time, I was responsible for the Z Plant operations. And so, one morning, early, about 4:30 in the morning, I get a call from the plant that there had been an accident out of the plant, and I needed to get out there. And so I threw some clothes on and got a government car and went out to the site. What had happened was the plant had been operating on the recovery of americium-241 as part of the reclamation activities. And it was a chemical process. Inside this chemical process were criticalities tanks, small tanks like this, long, inside of a glovebox. Earlier in that summer, there had been a labor dispute, and the plant was on strike. And so the process had been shut down. Well, what was going on was americium was loaded onto the ion exchange medium inside this long column. When the dispute was settled and we had several days of reviews, conducting interviews with the contractor people, are you ready to restart? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? And finally they were authorized to start. Well, what happened is that when they poured strong nitric acid on that ion exchange column to take, you lose off the americium. The americium had decayed the resin beads of the ion exchange medium ‘til it was kind of an organic gunk. And that acid reacted with it, and that violent chemical reaction blew open that column. It breached the glovebox, and it sprayed chemicals and americium all over Mr. McCluskey. And he was taken to an initial decontamination spot onsite, and then downtown. But my job, when I got there, was to fend off the media. What had happened—as soon as this became knowledge, and the media got hold of it, here they come in helicopters, landing inside the secure area of 200 West. The guards were going nuts. I mean, here’s these people that are not supposed to be there! Eventually, they didn’t do anything but try to manage it and bring them over towards the building, the end of the building, where behind the building walls was this processing cell where everything had taken place. And they were standing there, I was standing there outside talking to the media, trying to explain what happened. And I had an alpha copy machine. I was standing there, showing them that there was no contamination on my feet, there was no contamination around. They were panning everywhere with their cameras, and they found a sodium hydroxide feed tank that had just a little bit of salt cake around the valve on the outside. Non-radioactive, nothing—I mean it was a nothing tank. And they filmed that like it was the biggest thing since sliced bread. And I remember I went through all this and—to find out that it made the national news. But I didn’t get to see it, because I was out there. [LAUGHTER] But it became a non-event. It was not a disaster, there was containment, there was—all the safety things worked as well as they should. The public was never in any harm. But that was a— Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So, what happened, then, with the room, or whatever, where the incident took place? Craig: Oh, they sealed that room off right away. And then it remained sealed up until very recently, when they went in and took it apart. And processed it for disposal. Bauman: Did you know Mr. McCluskey at all? Craig: No. Bauman: Okay. Craig: No. He was a chemical operator. I didn’t know who he was, hadn’t met him. But it was one of those things that— Bauman: Right. Craig: --Happened. Bauman: Well, thanks, again for sharing that story. Glad we remembered to do that. Craig: What was funny about it—I was trying to stand up. I used to be able to do this. I could stand there and hold my foot up and balance. And then I realized I couldn’t do that. Bauman: Oh, watch the microphone there on your— Craig: Oh, yeah. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:54:56 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 189 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Plant Waste Vitrification Plant Z Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1957-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1957-2015 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Kennedy Sam Beard Bob McCullough Kerr-McGee Fluor Daniel Mr. McCluskey 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 Philip Craig Description An account of the resource An interview with Philip Craig 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 06-24-2015 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. 2017-29-11: 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. 703 Building Atomic Energy Commission B Plant Battelle Department of Energy Event Fast Flux Test Facility General Electric Hanford Kennedy Mountain Nuclear Regulatory Commission Park Plutonium PUREX River Savannah River Tank Farm Tank Farms Vitrification Plant Waste Vitrification Plant Z Plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3c0a15b7341da5395fe544ee39586122.JPG 4c81c97bcaf611d56e40f2d717c1f940 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 Stanley Goldsmith Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Douglas O’Reagan: First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us? Stanley Goldsmith: Stanley Goldsmith. O’Reagan: Okay, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Goldsmith here on March 21st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Goldsmith about his experiences working at Hanford. Okay. Could you tell us about your childhood up through—just briefly tell us about your life up through college and entering the Manhattan Project. Goldsmith: At Hanford here, or at Los Alamos? O’Reagan: Before that. Your life before the Manhattan Project. Where were you born? Goldsmith: Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia. In 19—March 25th, 1924. O’Reagan: Can you tell us about your life before the Manhattan Project? Up through college? Goldsmith: Well I— O’Reagan: Why don’t I move closer, that might— Goldsmith: I was raised in Norfolk and went to Virginia Tech to take—to get a chemical engineering degree. I entered Virginia Tech in 1941, and I graduated in 1945. O’Reagan: And then you entered the Army, is that right? Goldsmith: After graduation, I was drafted into the Army, and assigned to the Manhattan District of Engineers. Eventually, after waiting in several different places for my clearance, I wound up at Los Alamos, where I worked from 1945 to ’47—1947. O’Reagan: Did you just find out about what the goal was once you arrived? Goldsmith: Yes. After I got to Los Alamos, we were told what the objective was, and all about the problems. This was different than the other nuclear sites were. This mission was kept secret. O’Reagan: What element of the project did you work on at Los Alamos? Goldsmith: At Hanford? O’Reagan: At Los Alamos. Goldsmith: At Los—I worked on processing the uranium-235 for the first atomic bomb. O’Reagan: What did that involve? Goldsmith: That involved converting uranium oxide that had been enriched with 235. That involved processing it from an oxide to a fluoride so it could be reduced to a metal. And then machined into the shapes they needed for the bombs. O’Reagan: Were you figuring out your process as you went? Goldsmith: No. The process had been pretty well established. This was more like just individual laboratories processing individual amounts of u-235 to get it to the point where it could be reduced to metal. O’Reagan: Who did you work with? Goldsmith: What? O’Reagan: Did you work with anybody? Goldsmith: Yes. O’Reagan: Who else was in your lab? Goldsmith: That was a long time ago. Let’s see. There was Al Drumrose and a Purcell—I don’t remember his first name. There were two other—well, maybe a few other more people. But I guess I just don’t recall the names. O’Reagan: So what brought you to Hanford? Goldsmith: What got me to Hanford? I left Los Alamos to get a graduate degree in chemical engineering. When I graduated, I got a job here at Hanford as a nuclear—as a reactor engineer. O’Reagan: How did you hear about the job? Goldsmith: Well, I knew about Hanford, and I sent out letters of inquiry about positions that may be open here and at other sites. And I got the position here in 1950. O’Reagan: So you wanted specifically to work at Hanford or other sites—what was—did you have specific goals of what you wanted to do? Goldsmith: Well, I liked what Hanford had to offer. So there was no question about that. They satisfied what I was looking for. O’Reagan: What were your first impressions of the area? Goldsmith: Well, it was shocking to say the least. It was like out in the wilderness. And when I arrived in 1950, General Electric operated the whole site, including the housing and all of the utilities and so forth. They assigned me a house that—I don’t remember what the rent was, but it was very inexpensive. And then in 1960—let’s see, it was about 1960—between ’61 and ’65—they divided the work at Hanford among several—among four or five contractors. One of them operated the laboratory, one of them operated the nuclear reactor, and one the separations plant. I stayed with the laboratory. O’Reagan: Could you walk us through an average day when you first—say in 1950 or ’52—what sort of work were you doing? Goldsmith: What sort of work? O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. Goldsmith: The average day—you want me to start back there?—is that my worksite was located about 20 miles from Richland. You could take a bus operated by the plant, or you could drive. But you had to go through an entrance gate—entrance—not a gate, but a station. And then we had to show our passes—badges. Then we went out to the site where we were working. In this case, at that time, I was working at F Reactor. As a reactor engineer, I rotated positions at the different reactors. So the work was—you asked me about the work—the work was, I thought, extremely interesting. And I felt very fortunate in that I felt like I was on the forefront of a new technology. By the time I got up here, there was a lot of emphasis on the peaceful use of nuclear power. I got involved in work for improving the nuclear fuels that was currently being used. This was because I was with Battelle then, and Battelle had a joint contract with the DoE where they could use part of their facilities—well, the major part of the facilities were for DoE work. But they also had a contract which they called 1831, and that was for doing private work for industrial corporations involved in nuclear work. I spent a lot of time on that, trying to—my group was trying to improve the performance of the fuel. Wanted to get higher powers. So that the fuel—we could produce fuel at a faster rate—I’m sorry, produce plutonium at a faster rate by increasing the power of the reactors. I worked as a reactor engineer for about four years. Then I took the position of manager of nuclear fuels research and development. We worked on developing or designing nuclear fuels, analyzing the fuels that had been used in the reactors to see what improvements could be made. Let’s see. We had a lot of interactions with the commercial fuel designers. As I mentioned, there were two contract billers. And this was done on the 1831, which allowed Battelle to use some facilities that were DoE’s—some facilities on the plant in their private work. So I’m trying to think about the timing, now. The main—after working on DoE projects for about five years, I worked on a private project that was sponsored—that was funded by Exxon—they’re now called Exxon Nuclear. They were interested in getting into the nuclear business, because they had a lot of claims on land that have uranium. They wanted—they decided to utilize those claims. Get the uranium, then processing it for use as nuclear fuels. So at that time, I think there was only one Exxon employee involved in this. They took over part—a major part of that, as Exxon Nuclear—took over a major part of Battelle. We were moved out of the buildings that DoE built, and we were located in Uptown in Richland in the industrial—just completely isolated from the other nuclear work that was going on. We designed a nuclear fuel for Exxon Nuclear which evolved into their first commercial fuels. During that time, Exxon Nuclear began to have their own staff. But we stayed with them until about 19—early 1970s, we worked with them. And then their own employees could take over from then. After that, I worked on fuel cycles. On seeing if we could design different types of fuels with different types of materials, like thorium, on the fuel cycles. And we—let’s see. This was work for DoE. And we continued that work—my group continued working for DoE. They were working on the nuclear reactor regulation, on NRC. We had projects with NRC. Our main project was DoE. And here again, I was telling you--[COUGH] Excuse me. I was still involved in nuclear fuel development. We did a lot of work for NRC and also for DoE. This was on helping them understand and approve their review of new nuclear fuels in reactors—nuclear fuel design. So we were working on both sides of the street: with the regulatory side, and the DoE development side. And then in 1980—excuse me just one minute—I should have jotted these dates down. In late 1980s, I worked on a DoE program on nuclear fuels—on nuclear fuel cycles, where we were looking at different way of utilizing the nuclear fuels so that they would last longer and that they would be safer. Then after that, I was assigned to Battelle Columbus, because I had worked through this project. It turned out quite successful. And Battelle Columbus had a contract with DoE to perform research on finding a nuclear repository—nuclear burial site. I was the Battelle manager of that program for about four years. We looked at the—examined the potential nuclear sites in New Mexico, Louisiana, Georgia, and here at Hanford. This program went on for about four or five years, and then DoE selected the Nevada site at Los Alamos—not Los Alamos—at Las Vegas for the site to bury the spent nuclear fuels. That program lasted for quite a while, but I left it in 19—after four years, because I didn’t want to move down to Texas, which was one of the sites that was being considered. So I moved back here to the Hanford. I worked on miscellaneous programs after I came back to Hanford. A lot of them had to do with the nuclear fuel cycle and the nuclear waste disposal—nuclear waste treatment and disposal. And I did that type of work for about four years, and then I retired in 1987? 19—yes, in 1987. And I left Battelle, and went to work for an environmental engineering company in Washington, DC, who was working on the same sort of thing. They were technical support contracted to DoE headquarters. So I was there until—let’s see. I was there until about 1994. And then I had to just—I still continued to work even though I was retired from Battelle. I had actually moved back to Battelle and was hired by Battelle as a consultant so that I could retain my pension and the salary for the job. That went on until about 1992. And finally, I retired for good. [LAUGHTER] So, that’s a very brief and sketchy description of what I did here at Hanford. One thing that—a little sideline you might be interested in. You asked about what Hanford was like. When I first came to work here, there were very few facilities that could be used at Hanford. I was not—I didn’t need anything special to do my work; I didn’t need a specially designed building structure. But I did do work on design and that work was done—the group was assigned to the Hanford High School. [LAUGHTER] Let’s see, where else? As I said, I had worked at most of the reactors that were operating at that time. Oh, there’s one thing that—I want to back up a little bit until about 1975. I got in—my group got involved in plutonium recycle. This was a program that DoE sponsored, a fairly large program, in which we were trying to recycle the plutonium that was not being used in bombs. Plutonium—to show that it could be used in nuclear power reactors. And we actually had a plutonium recycle test reactor built here onsite to test the fuels, the mixed oxide. We called it mixed oxide fuel because it’s plutonium and uranium oxide. And the reactor, which was the PRTR, Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, was designed specifically to try to test, get information on mixed oxide fuels. Let’s see. I moved around a lot. After about five years on that program, I moved on, I think, to working for Exxon Nuclear, to assist them in their program. Now, Exxon Nuclear was so sensitive about their work being exposed by DoE that they moved many of the facilities that they used at Battelle, they moved them to different sections. We had offices at the old—what was it—the woman who had all of this fabric stuff? It was in Richland, it’s right in downtown Richland. And we took the top floor of one of the buildings that had already been built. And of course, there, we only did calculations because they had no facilities for taking care of irradiated material. That was an interesting time, too, when we were off on our own, so to speak. O’Reagan: They did that because they were afraid of the Department of Energy taking their knowledge? Goldsmith: Well, they were concerned there would be some link—crossover—inadvertently, perhaps. The DoE could claim that some of the work done by Exxon Nuclear was done by DoE. And they didn’t want that to happen, so they completely isolated themselves. O’Reagan: Did that hurt your work? Goldsmith: Did that work? O’Reagan: Did it impact your work, being isolated like that? Goldsmith: I’m sorry? O’Reagan: Being isolated, did that impact your work? Did it slow your work, or did it cause any problems? Goldsmith: No, it didn’t cause any problems. We were able to move our whole group out into the new facility in downtown Richland. So were other groups—nuclear physics group, and the other groups that went into the fuel cycle. But that was an interesting time, because we were really developing commercial nuclear fuels. The design that we had come up with was the first nuclear fuels that Exxon Nuclear had marketed. They marketed to—I’ll think of that in a minute. But anyway, we got involved in—since I mentioned earlier that there were very few Exxon Nuclear employees involved in this program—that we actually got involved with the Exxon Nuclear people who went out to market their product. That was at the time when we ran into some very interesting commercial situations. O’Reagan: What makes one nuclear fuel better than another nuclear fuel? Goldsmith: Well, they were made primarily from uranium, and they were oxides. They were made into compressed pellets. Now, some of these were different—some of these were specifically made for boiling-water reactors, and others were for pressurized-water reactors. There was a design difference in the two reactors. One of them—the power level was about the same, but the design of the fuel and the way it was structured was different. That made a difference in the fuel for the two types of reactors. After we got involved in working for Exxon Nuclear, when our contract with them expired, we became very much involved in working only for DoE and NRC. I think I mentioned that to you. We—oh, we had contracts—my group had contacts with practically all the commercial nuclear fuel design people, and we provided them design support, and we did testing for them. So we were pretty much involved in the nuclear industry by then. O’Reagan: How secretive or how classified was your work? Goldsmith: After—when I moved to Hanford, the classification was almost—was very slim. It was very lax, because with the dropping of the atom bombs, then all of that came out, what the bomb was made of, and some ideas what the design of the bomb was. So by that time, it had pretty well leaked out, the security was relaxed on that, also. So that wasn’t—that was no longer a big problem. There were still some residual problem in security. In fact, the Russians, of course, wanted to get into the nuclear industry business. They wanted to know—well, this backed up into the weapons program—Cold War program. They wanted to know what powers we read our plants at—how many megawatts. And they actually took measurements of the Columbia River and calculated from that what powers we were obtaining. So that was when the Cold War was going on. O’Reagan: How did you hear about that? Goldsmith: Hear about what? O’Reagan: The Russians testing the waters. Goldsmith: Oh. I think we had—our security people kept an eye on what was going on with the Russians. And this is one of the things they found out. O’Reagan: Let’s see. What was life in the Tri-Cities like back in the 1950s and ‘60s outside of work? Goldsmith: Well, it was pretty plain in a way—several. Because there weren’t many things to do. There was only one theater, and there may have been one or two grocery stores, and I think there was one real estate agent. That was the case with most of the various businesses. There was maybe one, or two at the most. There was not much in the way of entertainment. I mentioned that we had one theater. People—the workers at the plant—developed their own entertainment—sources of entertainment. They formed all kinds of different clubs. One of the most popular club was the bridge club—competitive bridge. We played that in one of the commercial buildings that had an open space that we could use. Another was the Richland Little Theater. And then there was a Richland opera—Light Opera, also. And there were—of course, golf was a big activity, because there were already several different golf courses. So that was taking off. There were other activities like that where you had to build them yourself. You may have gotten a little support from DoE, but you couldn’t depend on it. So we had to make our own source of entertainment and relaxation. O’Reagan: Did you play bridge? What was your entertainment? Goldsmith: Yeah, I got involved in playing bridge. This was duplicate bridge. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that’s a form of bridge that is competitive. It’s still—it’s played in such a way that everybody—each couple gets to play against another couple, and they rotate during the evening, so that other couples play the same cards. The competitive part comes in as to who comes up with the best score at the end of the evening. [LAUGHTER] And that was quite controversial. Particularly when a man and woman were partners—they would—they had no shame, or no hesitant to getting into arguments at the bridge table. So that was a big deal. Even now there’s a lot of bridge clubs that are playing here—duplicate bridge is what it’s called. O’Reagan: Where did you live throughout your time at Hanford, or in this area? Goldsmith: What’s that? O’Reagan: Where did you live? Did you move houses? Goldsmith: Yes—well, yeah. At that time, they were building houses like mad. I lived in one of the government houses in Richland—old Richland. Then I moved into what they called a ranch house. Those were a government house that was one story, and it had three bedrooms. There was some furnishing that came with these houses. The rental on it was very nominal. And as I recall, we were provided—many of these houses, or most of them were heated by coal. DoE actually—at that time, it was actually GE who ran the town—provided free coal. They would come around periodically and dump a load of coal for you to use in your houses. O’Reagan: Sounds dirty! Goldsmith: Huh? O’Reagan: Sounds dirty! Seems like it would get you messy. All the—dumping the coal, is there a coal dust that would come up? Goldsmith: What’s that? O’Reagan: When you burned the coal, would it be dirty? Would it make a lot of smoke, I guess? Goldsmith: Not too bad. They must have used a hard coal that gave out less smoke. I don’t know that—it wasn’t like an industrial company where they had large facilities that generated a lot of steam, a lot of smoke. This was kind of dispersed. So we didn’t have an air problem at that time. We had—now the other thing that they did to make life easier—we had our own transportation—public transportation system. You could ride on the buses that they had for free. So that was to make life easier for the employees. O’Reagan: Must have been a lot of buses? Goldsmith: What? O’Reagan: Must have been a whole lot of buses. Goldsmith: Well, most of the buses were actually used to go out to the Area—to take the workers out to the Area, because there’s where you had a lot of people to be transported. The civilians, or the private people, had—many of them had their own cars. So didn’t use the bus. O’Reagan: Was it different when you were working on commercial energy compared to when you were working for the Department of Energy? Goldsmith: Yes, there were quite a lot of differences. We were able to produce fuel designs and produce developmental fuels in a much shorter time than DoE, because there was a lot of paperwork involved in going through the DoE process. In fact, one of the DoE people at headquarters who was in charge of reactor development said he was very upset because he couldn’t—he was in charge of the fast reactor, the FFTF. And they were struggling to try to get the thing going. He was very upset because he couldn’t understand how we were able to get fuel for Exxon Nuclear, and they were still struggling. They’d been struggling for a long time. [LAUGHTER] So he wanted to know what we were doing. Well, what it was, we didn’t have to jump through all the loops that you did. O’Reagan: Was it finding the uranium, the procurement that was the problem? Or just write paperwork? Goldsmith: No, the problem that DoE had was that they had a bureaucracy that kind of controlled things. And that always slows things down. It took them about twice as long to develop the fuel for the Fast Flux Reactor than it did us for the commercial reactors. O’Reagan: Hmm. Let’s see. Have the Tri-Cities changed much in the time you’ve been living here? Goldsmith: Oh, yeah. It’s been amazing how it’s grown. The Tri-Cities now is like a normal city. The nuclear influence is much less, because we have so many other businesses now involved for our economic base. As I had mentioned earlier, there were usually one kind or maybe two types of business or entertainment or something like that. When the commercial people came in, they opened as many stores as they wanted, or that were needed. So that was one big thing. Another big thing was the housing development, the real estate. I remember up until 19—let’s see, about 1965, GE was in charge of everything, including building houses. [COUGH] Excuse me, I’ve got a cold. When they opened up the lands, part of the land, surrounding territory was owned by the Department of the Interior—it was government owned. And then they made those available to the public for building houses and other types of structures. The demand for these things was great enough, so the building was really at a peak. Now, even now, you take a look at the housing—the amount of housing that’s going on, and take a look at the commercial businesses, like drive down George Washington Way, you see all these new businesses or restaurants or that sort of thing. So it’s really changed. Richland was all on this side of the Columbia River. That was one of the boundaries for Richland. But then the Columbia River curved around, and there were—on the other side of the river, there was nothing but sagebrush. But some entrepreneurs had bought land there, and then when they started to build, they had lots of land to build on. That was no problem. There’s a whole new part of Richland that’s on the other side of the river that wasn’t there until probably about 1965 or so. That’s when it started. So there’s been a growth of industry. The highways have been developed. There’s new industry that’s come in. So we’ve developed quite a good industrial base now, and it’s still growing. O’Reagan: Are there any—to ask an open-ended question, are there any moments or stories that come to mind that you think are worth telling about your time working at Hanford? Goldsmith: Well, I told you about how we had, early on, we had offices at the Hanford High School. That was—we made a lot of fun of that, when anyone called you at the high school, we said this is the Goldsmith class of ’41-’42. There was a lot of—amazing amount of work that was done on animals to use those as some of the basic studies for the effect of radiation on animals. Now we don’t have any of those studies going on. But let’s see. I’m trying to think of something that is unusual. A lot of it was—practically all of it was unusual. O’Reagan: How about something mundane, but it’s still kind of unusual? Or maybe a day in the life later on in your work? Goldsmith: Well, I mentioned the general public had to develop their own recreational activities. We have—I don’t know—we have a lot of parks and fields. Like some of those baseball parks are very good. I didn’t appreciate how good they were until—I have some relatives who live in Maryland, and we visited them, and we went to see their children’s baseball game. But they had just an open field, nothing like we have. So that’s been—the recreational things have improved quite a bit. Of course the boating is still a big deal. I really—as I said, there was so much growth going on that it’s hard to pick out any one area. Excuse me. The recreational areas have increased. You know, we’ve grown more; we’ve built at least two new golf courses, and these were very good golf courses. Then the other thing is some of the building of private homes around the golf courses. That has been—we live in a community there that probably has—what would you say, Joyce, about 800 people? Something of that sort. And it’s very nice. There’s two such communities. One of them is called Canyon Lakes, where we live, and the other is called Meadow Springs. That’s been developed—highly developed. We both have very nice golf courses. Joyce: After you retired, didn’t you work with the people from Israel, the First Defenders? Goldsmith: Oh, yeah, that was an interesting little program. That was after I retired, and I was re-hired. Battelle got a program from the State Department to help—to develop ways for the First Defenders on a terrorist site could make a better determination of what happened. And they did this on a worldwide basis. Mainly, underdeveloped countries, but one country that they had and they were anxious to get involved because they had firsthand information—they were anxious to get Israelis involved. Because they had a lot of first defenders. The program consisted of sending a team of people over to Israel and tell them what the program was about. And then Israel was to send about 20 people over here for a month. And then we were using the training—the HAMMER facility to do the training. I got involved because when the Israelis came over, they asked me, since I’m Jewish, they asked me if I would help trying to make them feel comfortable and so forth, take care of their dietary laws. And again, they were very pleased. And it was fun, it was interesting to see how they had become sensitized to terrorism. For instance, they stayed at one of the hotels out there. It’s right outside of Columbia Center Mall. And early morning, a bus would pick them up and take them out to the HAMMER site. After about two or three days, the bus driver said—no, someone said are we going to take any different routes? And the bus driver thought they meant for sightseeing. But they didn’t want to establish a pattern for terrorists to see what their schedule was. So they finally got him to change the route out to Hanford itself. But that was interesting, because the view of the Israelis who had been submitted to so much terrorism and the view of the other countries that we trained but who had not been submitted were completely different. Like night and day. So that was interesting experience. They show you the difference between our view of being careful about terrorism. As I said, these people were housed—excuse me. These people were housed in one of the hotels close to the Columbia Center—close to the Columbia Center Mall. They would go into the mall, and they were appalled to see that people were allowed to go in and out of the mall carrying all kinds of backpacks and all kinds of packages where it’s not being inspected. Because in Israel, they inspected anyone who was carrying a package of any sort. And they would be examined. So that was an interesting insight on how the different countries treat terrorism. O’Reagan: And the training was about how to respond to a nuclear accident, or a crisis? Goldsmith: Well, this program was called the First Defenders. And these people were doctors, they were scientists, they were firemen and so first. They were a mixture of who would come to the site where an attack had been made. That’s why they called them the First Defenders. They—let’s see, what was I going to say? They were very—the ones that were really involved in anti-terrorism were very conscientious and good about it. We had some interesting things that arose as part of this program. As I said, there were nations from all over the world that were involved to a certain extent. And we had the Indians, from India, coming over, spending a month. They were put up in the Hanford House—Red Lion Hanford House. They got a call one day from someone at the Hanford House wanting to know if we could talk to these people about how to keep the shower curtains inside of the showers, because they would keep them out and they would flood the whole area. So there were strange incidences like that. I’m sorry, Joyce? Joyce: About when Bill Wiley was here and you worked at Hanford Battelle in Quality Assurance. Did you share any of that? Goldsmith: The quality--? Joyce: Uh-huh. Goldsmith: Bill Wiley was a very—I think he was very influential and left his mark on the site, because he wanted to develop this environmental molecular laboratory, the rows of buildings out there, the new rows. And that opened up a whole new set of doors for Battelle to grow. They went into more basic stuff. Up to that time, we mainly focused on working on problems with nuclear reactors and nuclear fuels. But this was completely different from that. This was basic science that these laboratories allowed us to get involved in. And it’s opened up a whole new area. I think Battelle, and Hanford in general, has benefited from it, because they get a lot of extra programs that they wouldn’t have before. O’Reagan: Were you involved with these basic science programs? Goldsmith: No, I started in nuclear fuels and nuclear reactors most of the time I was here. But I didn’t get into any of the basic science programs. O’Reagan: Did you want to say anything about this Oppenheimer letter, maybe introduce it for us? Goldsmith: He was a very nice guy, and he was very considerate, and everybody liked him. He was very friendly—friendly in a reserved way. He didn’t go around smacking people on the back, but you knew he was warm and he remembered names. After the peace was declared, I think it was that later date in 1945? No, not 1945. At any rate, after the war was over, and things settled down, he sent out a letter to some of the people who worked on it that thanked them for their effort. And he sent me one of those letters. And I’m very impressed with it, because he knew what I was doing. Because he could mention that in his letter. I’ve been very proud of that letter. That’s what that is all about. It may not be much to many people, but to people who have been involved in the nuclear industry, I think it has some impact. O’Reagan: Did you ever meet any other Los Alamos or other Manhattan Project veterans who weren’t from the Hanford site when you worked at Hanford? Goldsmith: When I went to Hanford did I ever--? O’Reagan: Meet any other people who had been at Los Alamos? Goldsmith: No, there are not too many people here, just a few people here. I’m hoping—I’d like to know—I wanted to put something on Facebook about seeing how many people from Los Alamos who actually worked on the bomb still are around. Because I don’t think there are too many. I was—I got my degree when I was 21, so—and then I immediately went to work and have done that since then. But I’ve lost track of most of the people. I think they’re probably dead by now. [LAUGHTER] But if there’s something that comes up from that, I’d like to see. O’Reagan: All right, well thank you so much. Joyce: Thank you. Goldsmith: You’re welcome. Thank you. <a href="https://youtu.be/yCLXgXa3QdQ">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:13:13 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 F Reactor Battelle PRTR (Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor) Exxon Nuclear FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) HAMMER Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1950- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950-1987 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 Stanley Goldsmith Description An account of the resource Stanley Goldsmith moved to Richland, Washington in 1950 to work on the Hanford Site. An interview with Stanley Goldsmith 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. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03/21/2016 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. Subject The topic of the resource Los Alamos (N.M.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Chemical engineering Nuclear fuels Nuclear reactors Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Battelle Cold War Department of Energy Event F Reactor General Electric HAMMER Hanford Los Alamo Los Alamos Manhattan Project Plutonium River School Theater War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd350b56731c1ee88b8c19079e9a16757.JPG b6e2050edfa97bbc612db21101040b22 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc9d1a57f8d88a0e009add28a9e2ba8f1.mp4 3286c8becf054ce14ec7b2b3b78954f5 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 Maureen Hamilton Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an interview with Maureen Hamilton on January 20th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ms. Hamilton about her experiences working on the Hanford site and her experiences in this community. Thanks for being here. Maureen Hamilton: You’re welcome. O’Reagan: If we could start, maybe—it’d be great if you could just tell us a bit about your birthplace, where you grew up, just a little bit of biography before you got to Hanford, if you would. Hamilton: Sure. I was raised on a farm in south central Illinois, not too far from St. Louis. So I was a farm girl. I went to college at Monmouth College in northern Illinois, which is where I got my chemistry degree—I got a bachelor’s degree there. I worked briefly for Dow Chemical in Michigan, and then I was working at the University of Missouri in their agricultural chemistry lab while my husband was in graduate school. So there I was doing analysis of various environmental and animal products, looking for heavy metal contamination. Then we were in Germany for a couple of years while my husband was in service, and we ended up out here starting in 1972, where we both worked onsite. O’Reagan: Sorry to interrupt. Okay, so you came directly from Germany to here? Hamilton: No, there were a few months finding the job, once we got back. Well, at the time there weren’t a lot of chemist jobs around, I don’t think. So my husband sent out applications to several hundred companies, and Hanford was one of the places that responded. I think possibly because he was a special weapons technician in the Army, they knew—and his master’s degree dealt with some radioactive materials, so that may have been part of why he was hired here. O’Reagan: Were you familiar at all with the community before you moved here? Hamilton: No. No, it was something totally—totally foreign to us, but interesting. O’Reagan: Do you remember your first impressions? Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Well, coming out of Idaho and the green into the barrenness of eastern Washington was a bit of a shock, yes. Because I hadn’t seen it, he didn’t really see that much of it when he came for the interview. But we very quickly learned to love the place. I wouldn’t live any place else right now. O’Reagan: What was the area like in the ‘70s? Hamilton: It was still a small farming community, pretty much. There was obviously—Hanford was the main employer, as far as Richland and much of the Tri-Cities was concerned. O’Reagan: Where did you live? Hamilton: Well, for a couple—we had an apartment off of Van Giesen for a short period of time. Then we moved into a condo apartment out on the Meadow Springs golf course. Then in ’75 we built our own house on Peachtree Lane in Orchard Hills. O’Reagan: So when you were working on the site, you were industrial hygiene chemist, is that right? Hamilton: That was my position, yes. O’Reagan: Would you explain exactly what that is? What’s involved in that? Hamilton: Sure. The employer initially was the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which was the medical contractor onsite. In addition to providing the doctors and nurses, they had the industrial hygiene for the whole site. Industrial hygiene is monitoring of worker health and checking the workplace to make sure that it is safe, that people aren’t being overexposed to things. We had a chemistry lab, and that’s where I was involved. So we would analyze air samples that were collected onsite for things like asbestos or lead or heavy metals or whatever types of materials—non-radioactive. The lab was located here in town at 805 Goethals, so we weren’t onsite. We also did drinking water analysis onsite, and we were doing a little bit of hazardous waste characterization. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So what would a typical working day look like? Hamilton: Oh, it varied, depending on what was going on. Initially, when I started, we were pretty much—I mean, the industrial hygienists were the people who went out in the field and collected the samples and evaluated the data. The lab—we were very small—I started actually as a technician for a year before I actually became the chemist. We had one chemist, one technician. And then we eventually grew to have a total staff in the lab department of about 20. We would run gas chromatographs, atomic absorption, different types of equipment, analyzing those air and water samples that were being brought into the laboratory. I also eventually—well, initially at least—was functioning as partly a quality person as well. In 1974, the lab became one of the first in the country to be accredited by the American Industrial Hygiene Association. So, while I wasn’t listed as the technical manager or the director at that point, I was kind of the technical expertise for that portion of the company. Eventually, expanded that I did manage the lab component as well as function as their QA coordinator. O’Reagan: Is that similar to the work you were doing before you came here? Hamilton: No, my experience before was strictly laboratory. Had no management responsibilities. And while I was using spectroscopy equipment at the University of Missouri, it was more on things like goose livers and grain and things like that. It had nothing, really, to do with human health. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So you said you went out to collect samples at some point, especially in the early career? Hamilton: Just for a few months, I actually—Hanford had some offsite monitoring systems across the river for nitrogen oxides and I think sulfur oxides. It was things that would have come out of the production facilities. It wasn’t radioactive, again, it was chemicals. So once a week, we’d drive out there and change—they were liquid impinger type samples. So we’d change them out and bring them back and analyze them. O’Reagan: I’ve read some accounts of local farmers who grew up remembering people coming from Hanford—scientists, to come gather samples from their farm to test for various things. Is that the type of--? Hamilton: That might have been part of it, because at least one of them, I know, was set up near a barn on the top of the bluffs there, across the river. We weren’t doing any—there were a lot of other people doing radiological monitoring, that was nothing to do with what we were doing. But it’s possible that some of the people where the sites were located would remember. Because they were on private property. O’Reagan: Did you ever find any safety hazards? Hamilton: None of what we were—no, we never found anything that was exceeding any kind of limits in those. O’Reagan: Could you describe the ways in which the security or secrecy of the Area impacted your work? Hamilton: I mean, since I wasn’t doing radiological, it wasn’t as much so as like what my husband was doing. But if we wanted to give a paper or anything at a technical conference, it had to go through DoE for approval for release. So we worked with very little classified material where I was. O’Reagan: Can you tell us about what your husband did? Hamilton: He worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, PFP. He was a non-destructive assay chemist, where he was monitoring the plutonium that was being either produced or stored there at PFP. O’Reagan: That was—did his role change over the course of time he was working there? Hamilton: He had a few months, initially, where they rotated him through different sites to pick a spot where they wanted to end up. But, no, he spent most of his career there. O’Reagan: Let’s see. So the first few decades you lived here were during the Cold War. Did you feel that impacted your time here, or was that just something in the background? Hamilton: I was not nearly as aware of it as some people seem to have been. No, that just really didn’t—was some place off, had nothing to do, really. I didn’t feel like we were in danger because we were close to Hanford or anything like that, no. O’Reagan: Do you have any impression of whether the community around you also felt that way? Do you know if there were—I don’t know quite what I’m asking here. Was there more of an impression of that, or did people just sort of go about their lives? Hamilton: I think people here were just used to Hanford as a secret place. You don’t talk about what you’re doing out there, that’s just the way it is. We did our thing and didn’t worry about the rest of the world much. O’Reagan: Tying back into—tell us a little bit about life in the ‘70s here. Do you feel—I don’t know—the social scene or the feel, the life in the area has changed much over the ‘70s to ‘80s to ‘90s? Hamilton: Yeah, I would say that’s for sure. For instance, when we built our house out there in what’s now called South Richland, which is across the river, near<a>[EM1]</a> Meadow Springs—the road from there to Columbia Center was still gravel. Gage didn’t exist as a paved road. We were like the second house in the subdivision where we were built. It was mostly still orchards around us, so it was a lot more rural there. There was probably one, maybe, movie theater, the Uptown. And I guess Columbia Center maybe always had one. But there’s a lot more for people to do now, and there’s certainly way more people to do it. O’Reagan: What was it you liked about living here? Hamilton: Well, being a country girl from the start, I guess we liked the feel of a small, close-knit community. The job was good. It was very comfortable living. We had good friends. So it was pleasant. We didn’t have a lot of traffic to deal with. O’Reagan: What sort of things would you do in your spare time, or with the friends in the area? Hamilton: Oh, one of the things that became a big interest for us was the growing wine industry. We came just about the time it was getting started, and we stumbled into making friends with the Rauners at Yakima River shortly after we got here. So we got to actually help them at times with crushing things, to get to know all about the wine-making process. And we quickly joined the Tri-Cities Enological Society, it was called then. Now it’s just the Wine Society. So we were very much involved with that. We also enjoyed the variety of types of scenery here. Whether you wanted to do something, you were close to the mountains, you were close to the ocean, you had this nice dry, arid climate here, where you could go hiking or do things. So it was an easy, comfortable place to be. Have lots of things—options to do. O’Reagan: You ever get to use your chemistry knowledge in the wine--? Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Learned enough about the wine making process to know I didn’t want to do it. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: You’re—since 1999—a consultant, a public safety consultant. Is that right? Hamilton: Yeah. When I retired from Hanford, officially, then, basically, I continued for five years going back, doing the same thing for them onsite that I had done as an employee on a part-time basis. But it was in ’95 that I started doing these laboratory assessments for the American Industrial Hygiene Association, which is one of the organizations that had accredited our lab here. So I still do that through—this year’s probably about the last year I’ll do that, but I’ve been doing that for 20 years. O’Reagan: What’s involved in that? Hamilton: It’s going to these various lab sites and making sure that they have all the documentation, the properly trained people, that they’re following the procedures and doing it in accordance with the now international quality requirement. O’Reagan: So you’ve been involved in some of the historical organizations around here. When did you first start getting involved in those? Hamilton: Pretty much after I retired from Hanford. I knew I wanted to do something locally, too. And I had visited the CREHST Museum from way back when it was still in the Federal Building. So that was the first thing I did. I started out reviewing some of their oral histories and then gradually, as I had more time during the day, I would serve as kind of a fill-in docent for them, and did various projects for them. Then when they were transitioned out and replaced by the REACH, I moved over there. O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What is it about that work that you find rewarding? What is it that draws you to work with them? Hamilton: Well, I think it’s extremely important to maintain the history of what was going on here at Hanford. This is certainly a unique and important part of our country’s history. I’m very pleased that the National Park has been designated. That will be an important part of preserving all of this. I like—people need to know their history. So I think the Hanford history is—as well as the exotic geology we have here, the effect of the Ice Age floods and everything. This is unique area, both geologically, and historically, I think. O’Reagan: Mm-hm. I guess it’s more common today, but do you ever feel you are treated differently as a woman scientist over your career? Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, yes. I had to do a little fighting to get some equal pay when I first came out here. But it was easy enough to do. And in the field of industrial hygiene, women have been moving in quite a bit, actually, there. Probably almost equal number of women as men in this field now. O’Reagan: Interesting. Anything else about your time working on or around Hanford that leaps to mind that you’d like to talk about? Anything that was particularly unusual, or just sort of curious, or otherwise noteworthy? Hamilton: No, I can’t really think of too much that at least I wouldn’t want to talk about. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Sure. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in this area over the course of time you’ve been here? Hamilton: Well, I feel it has been a very rewarding experience, a very good place to live. I think it’s environmentally very pleasant. The work at Hanford is certainly important. The fact that the first commercial scale nuclear reactor in the world was developed here. The speed at which things were done back then. The government regulation has become extremely burdensome since then and it’s much harder, but when Hanford was a production facility, it was something you felt like you were contributing to the society and to the world. O’Reagan: What haven’t I thought to ask, or should I be asking? Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Anything? Anything come to mind? I try to go for the open-ended questions. Hamilton: Yeah. I think the culture at Hanford really changed when they shut down. And now that it’s just a cleanup site, the loyalty, the sense of responsibility to the site, I think, has gone away. There’s a lot more disputes, unhappy employees, some of which may or may not be based on fact. There’s just not the continuity there was when people could work there for 30 years and know that’s where they were going to be for their lifetime. There was a lot more dedication to it. You felt like you were accomplishing something. O’Reagan: Of course, the cleanup may be still going in 30 years! Hamilton: Well, I don’t—do not print this part—but as far as I’m concerned, it’ll never get done. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: So were those documents you brought— Hamilton: Well, I brought some articles out of some of the Hanford newspapers and things. I didn’t know if you have access to some of those types—I assume you do. But I just thought I’d show you some of those, if you were interested. O’Reagan: Yeah, we’d love to go through them. Any of them in particular that would be worth talking about now? Hamilton: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, it’s mostly things like the history of what was happening there with the environmental health. You can take a look at—one of the things that I think was important when I was there yet, and the industrial hygiene function—the health and safety function was focused in one company, it was better controlled, there were records that were kept, and everybody knew where they were, and they were being maintained. The first thing they did was they took the hygienist away from—well, first they took the respirators away from HEHF. Then they took the hygienists, separated them, and moved them, spread them out all over the contractors onsite. Then they moved our industrial hygiene lab out with the environmental lab, and we became a very small thing, compared to a bigger thing. Now, if you go out—we repeatedly would do things that had already been done, because the contractors changed, they lost the records, they have no history. That just added to the jumble. I feel sorry for the workers who have to try and recreate their health histories. Because I don’t think the records since the early to mid ‘80s are anything like they used to be. O’Reagan: Do you feel safety was a priority on the Hanford site during your time there? Hamilton: I think it was. They did what they could to the best of their ability with what they knew at the time. So I think it really was a very safe place to work. Yes, there are things that have happened. Yes, there were exposures. But then that was happening in any industry, no matter where you go. People learn because they see what’s happening. They don’t test animals on everything before they put it into practice. No, I think it was a very—you would hear of very few accidents, per se. There were asbestos exposures, there’s beryllium, there’s radiation, but it’s just part of industry. So I don’t think it was any different. O’Reagan: Okay. Anything else we should look through that you have? Hamilton: Well, you can keep that. That’s my resume. I’d like that other—if you want a copy of that other, I can send it to you. This one had some information just about the industrial hygiene lab being recognized. I don’t know if you want any— O’Reagan: Is that a picture of you? Hamilton: That’s me, way back when these were—and these are all Hanford-taken pictures. So they’re ones you could get, but I could make copies of those for you, too, if you wanted them. These are just—there’s Dr. Meader, these are some of the people at HEHF. That’s about all that’s in there. O’Reagan: Great. Yeah, we have—we’re just setting up our scanning stations, so we might see if we could get copies of some of the pictures. Hamilton: Okay. I know these I have on the computer. I can send you. There are three of these early ones of me in the lab. I could send you those. O’Reagan: Yeah, I know there have been a number of oral history interviews and interest in some of the women who were assigned to this, around the site, or to work on the site. Hamilton: Mm-hmm. O’Reagan: So I think it’d be very interesting for that as well as the safety aspects are very interesting. And then also just everyone’s experiences in the area-- Hamilton: Yeah. O’Reagan: --are worth knowing. Hamilton: One of the unique things I got to do were I got to go on one of the first People to People occupational health trip to China back in the early ‘80s. O’Reagan: What was that like? Hamilton: Fascinating! [LAUGHTER] There were 23 of us, I think. We stayed in places like the Royal Palace in Beijing. We definitely had Chinese people who told us where we could and couldn’t go. [LAUGHTER] We were not allowed on the street by ourselves. When we were there with the group, people were just awed by us, because we looked so different. They were all still in their blue suits and not much else. One of our people had a Polaroid camera and having an instant picture was just amazing to them. We got to go to hospitals and factories and things that normal tourists wouldn’t see. O’Reagan: That was all sponsored through Hanford, or part of your job? Hamilton: No. HEHF paid my way, but I’m not sure—I mean, I belonged to the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the professional organization, and somehow, they put my name on a list, and HEHF said, yes, they’d pay for it. So I went. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: That’s very interesting. Hamilton: Yeah. O’Reagan: Did you get to do other travel over the course of your time? Hamilton: Well, I went to conferences and things, but nothing as exotic. Yeah. O’Reagan: Okay. I think that’s most of the sort of set questions that I had down, but anything else you think is worth the time to chat about? Hamilton: I can’t think of too much else. I think you’ve got the overall picture. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: All right, well, thank you for speaking with us. It’s been very interesting. Hamilton: Sure. Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:27:17 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1972-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1972-2005 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 Maureen Hamilton Description An account of the resource An interview with Maureen Hamilton 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 01-20-2016 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. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/21">Maureen Hamilton Oral History Interview</a> Cold War drinking Event Hanford Park Plutonium Plutonium Finishing Plant River War https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdf5707b65c796346957cfed411914d46.JPG 94e537086907f482c5fde0d65917e12f 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 Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Stephanie Janicek Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Victor Vargas: We’re rolling. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Stephanie Janick? Stephanie Janicek: Janicek. Franklin: Janicek. Janicek: Just like it’s spelled. Franklin: Okay, Janicek. On January 24th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Stephanie about her experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Janicek: Stephanie Anne Dawson Janicek. Stephanie is S-T-E-P-H-A-N-I-E. Anne, A-N-N-E. Dawson, D-A-W-S-O-N. Janicek, J-A-N-I-C-E-K. Franklin: Great. So tell me how and why you first came to Richland. Janicek: My family came to Richland in 1949 when I was seven years old and I was in the first grade. My father had been a Montgomery Ward’s manager in the ‘40s and he managed stores all over the state of Washington. And he was so successful that they wanted to promote him to a regional position where he’d be traveling a lot, and he said I don’t want to do that. So he and another Ward’s manager who decided to be a silent partner talked to officials in Richland and decided that they were going to be the first store to open in Uptown Richland. The area had been set aside, there were no buildings; it was just empty lot. And the downtown area was too small and crowded, so they wanted to develop Uptown as sort of an outdoor mall, if you will. Dawson Richards was the first store built and opened. And it opened in June of 1949. Franklin: What was your father’s name? Janicek: Grover Dawson. Franklin: And was Richards the silent partner? Janicek: Jim Richards was the silent partner. He owned an orange grove and walnut trees in California, and so he was down there. They owned the store 50/50 for many years until my brother bought out Mr. Richards. And he would come up occasionally to see how things were going. But Dad was doing a great job, and everything was going well. Franklin: So tell me more about Dawson Richards store. What kinds of products did it sell? Janicek: Dawson Richards started out as a men and boys clothing store. And they had a little logo of a man wearing a suit and a hat and a little boy with a cap and a coat, because boys wore coats in the old days, you know, when they went to church. It said Dad and Lad. That was one of the early symbols of the store. And so it was a really interesting store, because my father wanted to cater to all the men in the area, most of whom worked at Hanford, regardless of their station in life. And so, for instance, he had two lines of suits; the expensive suits were made by Kuppenheimer and the less expensive were made by Timely. He had two lines of shoes. The good shoes—or the more expensive shoes, rather, were Florsheim’s, and he had Winthrop shoes for the everyday guys. And he did the same with sweaters and pants and shirts and neckties and pajamas and socks and everything you can think of. He also had—because there was almost nothing. Everybody had to go to Seattle or Spokane or maybe Yakima—I don’t know what was in Yakima in those days—to get their clothing. And especially the managers at Hanford. So they were tickled to death that they had a store that they could shop at and be very finely-clothed. And he—my dad—specialized in, oh, talls and shorts and stouts. He catered to every single size, and if he didn’t have your size, he would get it for you. And I remember one of the signs in the store said, OshKosh, because my father carried OshKosh B’gosh overalls. He really wanted to have clothing for everyone. Regardless of their station in life. And it became a wonderful gathering place. People would just come in to talk. My father was very outgoing, and we would have gatherings of high school kids, because he also carried letterman jackets, letterman sweaters. He sold the chenille letters and numbers for the cheerleader and song leader outfits. When Christ the King opened their Catholic school for kids, the students wore uniforms, and my father sold, at very deep discounts, the corduroy pants and white shirts and navy sweaters that the boys wore at the school. He really wanted to provide whatever the community needed and it worked out quite well. Franklin: Okay, great. So there wasn’t—were there any men’s stores or stores of a similar type in Pasco and Kennewick at the time? Janicek: There was—I don’t know how old the Sid Lanter’s store was in Kennewick; I think that was probably there most of the time. I don’t know if it preceded Dawson Richard’s or not. There was a small men’s store in downtown Richland. I might be able to remember the name of it later on. But just at this moment, it is—oh, was it something like Harvey’s or—I don’t recall. But my father’s was such a good sized store that he had wonderful variety. He had Pendleton woolen shirts and jackets, and he had Jantzen’s sweaters and swimsuits. Carried a lot of name brands that people were comfortable with. Franklin: And you said that was the first store in the Uptown area? Janicek: Yes, it was. And the next store that opened was a sporting goods store right next to Dawson Richard’s and it was originally called Frank Barry, which was the name of the owner. And a few years later that was sold and it became BB&M Sporting Goods, which was owned by three gentlemen with the last names of B and B and M. And then some years later they moved up the street. Dawson Richards was on the Jadwin side of Uptown Richland, and they moved farther up the street. I don’t know—is there a—I don’t think there’s a BB&M now, is there? No, it’s gone. Okay. Franklin: I’ve only been here a year, so— Janicek: Oh, okay. Franklin: My memory is— Janicek: Okay. Franklin: I don’t have a long institutional memory. Janicek: And you know, if we had time, and I’m sure we don’t, I could walk you around the entire Uptown area and tell you most of the stores that originally were there. The other oldest store was the Spudnuts shop. God bless them, they’re still there. Franklin: Yes, they are. Janicek: And still the same family owns it. Franklin: And still very delicious. Janicek: Yes, yes. Franklin: So the Uptown was the first commercial—major commercial district in Richland, right? Janicek: Yes, it was. And because they had wonderful, big parking lots all the way around the stores, people could just park and walk all the way around the square and get everything they needed. We had Stanfield florists and Parker hardware, and banks, and there was once a grocery store there, we had a theater—we had—everything you needed, you could get somewhere. And several shoe stores, jewelry, china and silverware—just—they just filled in everything that a person would need so that nobody had to go to Spokane or Seattle to shop anymore. Unless they really wanted to. Franklin: How long did your family own Dawson Richards? Janicek: Let me think. My father sold to his manager, his long-term manager, George Anderson, and George’s family. They bought out my father in the early ‘70s. And the store actually closed—ironically, the store closed in 1999 on its 50th anniversary. Franklin: So it was open for exactly 50 years. Janicek: Yes. And the gentleman who bought it—it’s now a much smaller store. The gentleman who bought it retained the Dawson Richard’s name, which tickled me to death, and he still sells tuxedos and letterman sweaters and jackets. And he also rents out tuxedos for weddings. Franklin: Oh, okay. Janicek: Then there were years when my father bought out the building—oh, I don’t know, bought or rented—the building next to Dawson Richard’s and they opened a women’s department called Lady Dawson. And so from inside Dawson Richard’s, you could just walk through to the ladies’ department. That was successful for a number of years. Eventually, they closed the boys’ department and then they closed the women’s department, and in the end, Dawson Richards was just men’s clothing. Franklin: Was that, probably, just because of competition from larger department stores? Janicek: Yes, we knew when Columbia Center was built that there would start to be more competition. Just a lot of people were going over to Columbia Center and while they were there they did all of their shopping. So a lot of people made a point of coming to Dawson Richard’s for one reason or another, but not necessarily for kids’ clothes. Franklin: Ah, it stopped being the destination in terms— Janicek: Correct. Franklin: Because there was now competition. Janicek: Yes, yes, yes. Franklin: Whatever part of Richland that is. Janicek: Yes. My dad had a policy of hiring as many high school kids as he could to sweep the floors, giftwrap at Christmas and Father’s Day and special events. So it was a really interesting gathering place not only for high school kids, but also they would come home from college and come back to see everybody. You know, if you wanted to see who’s who. And my father’s birthday was on Christmas Eve. And so everybody would come back and anybody who had ever worked at the store and not goofed up too badly, he would hire them just for two weeks. And they would see each other, and it was—and everybody came to see who’s home from college. And they would stand around and sing Happy Birthday during the day, and he’d have cake and punch in the backroom. It was very celebratory. Just lots of fun. A lot of fun to work at Dawson Richard’s or to just hang out there. The girls came in to get the chenille letters and numbers for their pep club and cheerleader outfits. People came in whether they bought anything or not. And he didn’t care, because he just loved people. It was a fun place to grow up. Franklin: Did anything change in terms of the store, Uptown, or—when Richland became a private—yeah, a privately-owned city? Janicek: Not specifically that I can think of. I was in high school at the time, and I remember that Richland became a Model US City. We had a day at Richland High School where a number of the seniors shadowed a Richland official for a day. So we had somebody shadowing the mayor and each of the city council members and the fire chief and the police chief and the city engineer and all of that. And went to—I was the city librarian for a day. And we all went to the city council meeting, in celebration of Richland becoming an independent city. And the other thing that I remember is that we were able to buy our house. Because always we rented. Richland was very much subsidized by the government. We had free garbage and free utilities and—I don’t know if the phone was free, but—just a lot of things that they took care of for us in the good old days. Franklin: Right. But you said they—do you think the attitude was more celebratory, or did the people miss some of those amenities that had been provided for? Janicek: I’m sure that people missed some of the amenities and realized it was going to cost them more money to live than it used to. But they—I think they also appreciated having choices. Originally, when we came, you can’t live in Richland unless you had a job, because everybody rented their house from the government. If you didn’t have a job, you left. So if people went to jail or were alcoholics and just didn’t—excuse me—[COUGH]—didn’t measure up, then they were booted out of town. So there were a lot more choices for people. We—old Richland, no one had a garage, because the city—the government didn’t build garages; they just built houses. And so nobody had an attic. Nobody had grandparents living there. It was all young families. Which was interesting way to grow up. I’m sorry. [COUGH] Franklin: It’s okay, and there’s water right next to you, too. Janicek: Oh, splendid. I didn’t even see it. Franklin: What other kinds of civic activities or business activities was your father involved in? Janicek: Well, as I said, he started out with being on the city council and being elected mayor, because he was very outgoing and because of his experiences as a store manager for Montgomery Ward’s, he was kind of a natural leader. So he was involved for a few years with what later became United Way. He got on the school board in about 1951, and he was there for 13 or 14 years. The people on the school board kind of took turns being the president, but he got involved in a lot of school things. He was a co-founder of the Bomber Boosters. He was instrumental in the first and the second remodeling of Richland High School and the building of the Dawald Gym. And he was one of the schoolboard members who advocated for building Hanford High School, which was very controversial, because a lot of people just wanted all their kids to grow up as Richland Bombers. That was kind of a sacred thing to be in the old days. It was sort of like, those other people, they have to go to Hanford. But that worked out. Hanford was an unusual school, because it was high school, junior high, and grade school—all 12 grades, well, plus kindergarten. Then later, when Sacajawea was torn down and rebuilt up in the Richland Village, then they removed the grade school from Hanford. And then Chief Jo Junior High School had been closed for a number of years, and they remodeled it and reopened it. And then moved the junior high kids out of—I don’t think—I think Hanford is just high school now, and all the junior high kids are back in either Chief Jo or Carmichael, which is what it was when I was growing up. So he was mostly involved in things having to do with kids and families. He sponsored a Little League baseball team, he sponsored and after-high school basketball league for young men who lived and worked around the Tri-Cities, and—what else did he do? Oh, his business sponsored all of the broadcasts of the Richland Bomber football and basketball games. He was very close friends with all of the coaches at Richland High School. In the old days, when the Richland Bombers went to the state basketball tournament, they were driven in cars. And so my dad and the coaches would put a couple of boys in the back of the car and drive over to Seattle. It was a four days, double-elimination, huge tournament at the Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the UW campus. So, he got to know all of the players as well as the coaches. Just loved that—more of getting to know everybody in the community. He just was that kind of guy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Well, that’s great. So tell me about growing up in the government town of Richland and what kind of—what your impressions were when you first moved— Janicek: My earliest impressions—we lived in south Richland for the first year and a half. We lived in an F House, which is a single-family two-story. And our street was only one block long—Atkins. My first recollection is that there were no garages, so everybody parked in the street. But everybody—families only had one car. The men didn’t drive to work at Hanford; there were buses that came through. There were three shifts, so Hanford was running 24 hours a day. There were three shifts: the day shift, the evening shift, and the overnight shift or graveyard. So the buses would come through and pick up the workers at corners and guys would all be there with their metal lunch pails and you’d see them going off. And then they’d come back, I don’t know, nine or ten hours later and drop them off, because it was quite a drive to Hanford. So the family car stayed at home, but a lot of them—and most of the mothers stayed at home. Very few women worked; some of them worked at Hanford or in some of the businesses, but most of them didn’t. And a lot of them didn’t drive. So the cars just sat there all day and were only used after Dad came home from work, or to go shopping on Saturday, or to go to church on Sunday. There were a lot of churches in the community, which I thought was kind of interesting. Lots of denominations. My family was Episcopalian, and it was a few years before we got our own church, and so the Richland Lutheran church let us have our services in the basement of their church. So our services were on folding metal chairs with little kneeling pads on the cement floor. It was a little chilly, but it was very kind of them to let us do that until we had our own church. But there were—and we had a lot of Protestant churches called Central United Protestant, Southside United Protestant, Westside United Protestant. But actually, if you asked someone or looked carefully, one of them was more Methodist, one of them was more Presbyterian; some of them, I didn’t know what they were. They weren’t in my neighborhood and I didn’t know kids that went to them until I got to high school. It was a very insular community in a lot of ways. You knew all the kids in your neighborhood, and all the kids in your school, which was—they were neighborhood schools. If you went to church, and most people did, you knew the kids that were in your church. But as a young child, we had no idea what everybody’s father did. We knew that most of them worked at Hanford, but we had no idea whether the father was a truck driver or a manager or a clerk or a—you know, scientist. That was beyond us. We never asked, and nobody ever talked about it. So, the kids in my class—when my class graduated in 1960, there were about 417 of us. And for the most part, if you didn’t ask, you didn’t really know what the other parents did. I knew most of the business community and a lot of those people had kids. People that owned the stores, and groceries and gas stations. One of my best friends in high school was the step-daughter of the man who managed the Desert Inn, which is now the Hanford House. It was neat to sleep over at her house, because she lived in the hotel. [LAUGHTER] And you could swim in the pool, and you had all your meals in the hotel dining room. Franklin: Oh, wow. Janicek: It was really different. Most of the time, there was no public transportation. There were a few years when there was a city bus, and I don’t know—I was young; I was maybe fourth grade, fifth grade, and I remember taking the bus in the summertime to the city library. And I would sit and read books all day in the library, and then I would come home at dinner time. It was one of the things I loved to do, because I was a very bookish person. And then one year, they stopped having the buses. I don’t know whether they—and it only cost—I don’t remember if they were free, or they cost a dime or something, but it was certainly not restrictive in any way. That was fun. I remember just—even as a pretty young kid—that the Richland Community House on George Washington Way had pool tables in the back for the adults, but every Friday night they had square dancing for the kids. So all the kids would go and learn to square dance. There were a number of callers and you’d be there for a couple of hours. That was a really fun community thing to do, and that was a way to meet people who didn’t live in your neighborhood or didn’t go to your school. The town was full of young families with young children. I think the only older people who were there were either highly skilled technical men who came with their wives and either they didn’t have children or the children had already left home before they moved to Richland. Then some of the older couples, the man was in management. A few of the older couples, the women were scientists or engineers or technologists. There were some, you know—we now are learning—some highly skilled women out there that kind of disappeared into the woodwork. Nobody knew anything about them. One of the curious things that I did not realize for many years is how—I don’t know what to say. Almost everybody in the community when I was growing up was—I hate to say it—but they were white. And I didn’t know any—I didn’t know any, any blacks, any Asians, any—well, there was one Hispanic family that went to my high school, two girl cousins, that were in my class in grade school. And then I guess they must have moved to another part of town, because then I didn’t ever see them in junior high or high school. There were a few black families that I got to know, partly because they would shop in my father’s store, and partly because—when I went to Chief Jo Junior High, the PE classes were separate: girls’ PE and boys’ PE, and they had a big curtain they drew down the middle of the gymnasium so that we wouldn’t see each other in our shorts or whatever it was. But there would be a six-week session where we danced. And we all learned how to waltz and, I don’t know, whatever the jitterbug had evolved to in the ‘40s—or in the ‘50s, rather. That’s when Fats Domino and Chubby Checker were coming out, and eventually Elvis. So we were all learning to do the twist and all those things—they were fast and loud. And that was fun, because if you had that in PE for six weeks, you learned how to do that stuff, and you didn’t feel like such a dorky wallflower. There was one boy in my PE class who was black. And so when it was time for the dancing, everybody would choose their partners. And I was the tallest girl in the school and wore glasses until the ninth grade when I was the first person to get contact lenses. But anyway, so he and I were usually left close to the end of who choses who for a dance partner. Which was perfectly fine with me. I didn’t care. I didn’t have any prejudices, any reasons to feel any different about him than about anybody else in the class. And he was actually polite and nice and, you know, dressed nicely and cleaned up. He didn’t talk much; I think he was probably more shy and scared than I was. But it was an interesting experience, because—it was fine with me, you know? We danced, talked a little bit. But it was the only time I ever saw him. I didn’t—I don’t think we had any classes together. So I didn’t run into him very often. Franklin: Did he go to the school with you? Janicek: Oh, yeah, he went to Chief Jo. Well, you have to remember that when I first moved to Richland, there was Camp Hanford that was a military camp north of town. And there was a—at one time Richland had the largest trailer park in the country. And I’ve forgotten now—I think it was 50,000 trailers. I think, for the most part, those trailers didn’t have kitchens or bathrooms, because people ate in—maybe they did. I don’t remember, because I wasn’t in them. But they had big mess halls where people ate and they fed—I mean, they had constant food. They were either cooking or cleaning up all the time because they couldn’t feed everybody at once. And then they had bathhouses in among the trailer camp where people—just kind of like when you go to an RV park, you go to the toilets and sinks and showers. And I don’t know—maybe some of the larger trailers had those things. But I know there were small trailers that didn’t. They looked like campers, with no plumbing and—I don’t even know what they did for lighting. But between the military and the construction workers who lived north of town, there were some black families. And so I have no idea what that fella’s family did. But then we had the Brown family. When I was in junior high and high school, we had two basketball stars. And basketball was as big at Richland High School as it was in the state of Indiana. [LAUGHTER] We were Hoosiers West, maybe, I don’t know. But Norris Brown and his younger brother, CW Brown, were outstanding basketball players. They played on the Richland basketball teams, and they were among those basketball players that my parents and the coaches drove to Seattle for the tournament every year. They were the nicest guys. Now, the—I don’t think there were any black girls in Richland at that time, but there were a lot of black people who lived in Pasco. And so they did their socializing, I think, with people who lived in Pasco. And I didn’t know for many years that Kennewick was a—I don’t know, they call it, now they call it a sundowner town, that all the blacks had to be out by the time the sun went down. Had no idea! But there was a place where kids went to dance on the weekends and it was called Hi-Spot. And they would advertise on the radio, and everybody listened to the radio. That’s how you found out what all the popular music was. And so they would advertise: everybody come to Hi-Spot for dancing and—I don’t know. I never went, so I don’t know, but I’m guessing maybe they had light refreshments there. Anyway, everybody was invited to come. So, Norris and CW Brown went with girlfriends who I’m assuming were from Pasco, and they were thrown out because it was after dark, and this was in Kennewick. Richland was horrified. I mean, number one, we had no idea that Kennewick had these laws. And number two, these guys were our heroes. They were winning basketball games for us, and they, number three, they were extremely nice and polite and good students and—you know, there was absolutely no reason that you wouldn’t want to have them at a teenage gathering. I think—and this is only my person opinion—but I think that that’s where a good deal of the Richland/Kennewick rivalry started. Because the Richland people were so incensed that our heroes were thrown out of town. And that was in the late ‘50s. Let’s see. CW was one or two years ahead of me—two, I think. So that would have been, like, I don’t know, ’56, ’57, ’58. And Norris had graduated, but CW was on the team that in March of 1958 won the state basketball championship, which was just the hugest thing that had happened to Richland, probably since the beginning of time. It was just a really big thrill. And I was at that tournament, and I was at that game. And it was the biggest thing that had happened to me, too. I was so excited for my team. Because always the state had been dominated by all of the Seattle and Tacoma teams, for the most part, and sometimes a couple from Spokane. And so poor little old Richland that was stuck out in the desert and nobody knew about Richland in particular and nobody wanted to go there. [LAUGHTER] What are these kids doing in our sacred basketball tournament? And we won the whole thing. And that was just very exciting. And CW Brown was on that team. Another member of that team was John Meyers. John Meyers was this—he was built like a Douglas fir. He was just big all over—tall and large. And he was the star of my dad’s Little League baseball team. His father was the assistant manager. And he regularly hit homeruns and broke the bat. Regularly. I used to go to a lot of the Little League games, and that was really fun to watch. John Meyers was a star on the basketball and football teams at Richland High School. He played at least two sports—I’m not sure about baseball—but at least he played two sports at the University of Washington where he went for four years, and then he was drafted into the NFL. He played most of his career for the Philadelphia Eagles. So we had a local celebrity. One of several local celebrities that we had. So that was a really—I just loved following sports, and then, I, myself became a Washington Husky. Went with them to the Rose Bowl which John Meyers played in, in January of 1961. And then I ended up marrying a guy from Notre Dame, and so we’re big football fans. [LAUGHTER] We’ve had Seahawks tickets for 19 years. [LAUGHTER] Just was destined to be, I guess. Franklin: Yeah. What do you remember about civil defense in the Tri-Cities? Do you remember going through defense drills at school? Janicek: What I remember—there are two different aspects that I remember. When I was—most of the time, after the first year-and-a-half of living in south Richland and going to Lewis and Clark, we moved to north Richland and I went to Jefferson grade school, and then Chief Jo Junior High and Richland High School, which we always called Col High, and most of us in our hearts, it’s still Col High and not Richland. But we would have air raid drills maybe once a month at Jefferson. And we would—every class would march out into the hallway where we would lie down on the floor next to the wall. We would lie absolutely flat on our stomachs with our head resting on one arm, and I think maybe that was partly to protect our eyes. And then the other hand behind our necks to protect our spinal cord, I guess. I’m not sure that would have done any good if the Russians had actually bombed us. Because we truly believed that there was a good chance that we were going to be bombed by the Russians. We truly did. And so those were serious, civil defense drills. Franklin: You mean we as in you believed the Russians would bomb America, or Hanford specifically? Janicek: Well, we thought that the Russians would bomb America, but that Hanford was a really good target. Because of—by then it was known that we were creating the plutonium for bombs and all of the nuclear activities going on out there. And we thought that, if Russia really wanted to take over the world, that they would want to take out all of the nuclear facilities so that we wouldn’t be able to fight back or build up our defenses to eventually fight back. The other thing I remember—excuse me—[COUGH]—about civil defense is that every so often, we would have drills where every neighborhood was told where to go, get in your car and drive out into the desert to get out of town, get away from Hanford. And they would have those—I don’t remember—maybe once a year. I don’t think we had them more often than that. But you were always cautioned to keep your gas tank at least half full, because there wouldn’t be time to go fill up if we all had to evacuate town. Now, I suspect that there was a second reason for those drills, and that is in case anything went wrong and something blew up at Hanford, like Chernobyl. We had an inordinate amount of faith in our government and our scientists and engineers and our leaders at Hanford, and believed they would keep us safe. And Hanford actually has an amazing safety record. Very few things went wrong and caused any difficulties. But I suspect that if something had happened at Hanford, that those evacuation routes would have—and those evacuation routes were marked for a number of years. Eventually the signs all disappeared. But you knew where your neighborhood was supposed to drive to. Franklin: Interesting. Where was your neighborhood supposed to drive to, do you remember? Janicek: Well, it was long before I was old enough to drive a car: I was in grade school. And I didn’t even know where I was when I was out of town. I didn’t know which way was up, down, or west, or south. I’m guessing, since we lived on McMurray in north Richland, we probably went west. Franklin: Ah. And when we moved up to north Richland, did you also live in an alphabet house, or did you— Janicek: Yes, we lived in a Q house. The houses on McMurray were all Qs and Rs. And they were all three-bedroom, one-story houses with a full basement, whereas the old houses—the old alphabet houses, As and Fs and many of the others—had a half-basement and then a three- or four-foot high wall in the basement of cement blocks, and then there was dirt behind that. And then some people, after they bought their homes, would dig out—it was called digging out—the basement. But we had a full basement, and really nice backyard. Franklin: And is that the house that your parents bought when Richland— Janicek: We were living in that house and then bought it, yes, when Richland sold. One of the tough things about living in Richland is that there was no air conditioning. The houses had swamp coolers, which also were called squirrel cages. They were great, big, huge things that attached to a window and made a lot of noise. It sounded like metal blades going around, very noisy, and water ran through them to cool the air. Well, that made the houses not—it didn’t cool the houses that much, but it made them very humid. So, sometimes, you forgot you were living in a desert or a semi-arid desert, because it was very humid along with the heat, and very uncomfortable. But my father’s store had refrigerated air conditioning. It was one of the first buildings to have that. I’m guessing that the hospital and—well, no, the hospital used to be little funny buildings. I’m guessing maybe the hotel had it, and maybe some restaurants. But, yeah, that was another reason that people liked Dawson Richards, because it was cool inside on hot days. [LAUGHTER] But that was difficult. And we had a lot of summers when the temperature was over 100 degrees. And, like now, we had some winters when it got down far below freezing, down to -10 or even 0 a couple of times. One of the other interesting weather things about living in Richland in the olden days is when you had the big dust storms, or the termination winds as some people called them, you would have great big huge clumps of sagebrush flying through town about five to ten feet off the ground. And one time, a sagebrush—I have never seen this since—a sagebrush as big as a Volkswagen lodged in front of our front door, and we couldn’t get in and out our front door. Because it had blown in and was kind of stuck to the doorknob and whatever we had around the front door. And we couldn’t budge it. We couldn’t grab a big enough piece, or reach in far enough to grab one of the main stems or limbs of the sagebrush to pull it out. So we’d all have to run around and go in and out the back door. But the worst part of the winds, or one of the worst parts, was the dust, because it got in your eyes. And people were starting to get contact lenses. And that was just absolutely murderous, to have all that dust blowing in your eyes and getting behind your contacts. And people would go around with tears running down their faces from--[LAUGHTER]—from how painful the dust was in their eyes. And people wore sunglasses day and night to try and protect their eyes. Of course, as Richland built up and got more civilized and more of the empty lots became houses with yards and grass and trees and flowers, then the dust was not as thick as it used to be. Some of the dust storms were blinding. They were like blizzards. Oh, and that reminds me. My first winter in Richland, the winter of ’49-’50, we had a blizzard that was so bad they would not let any children leave the school until their parents came and picked them up. Well, the dads worked at Hanford and travelled by bus, so it was a while before—I imagine they probably let them go home early to get their kids. I don’t know that, but I’m guessing. And we would all be waiting at the school until the parents showed up. It was not a problem for my parents, because I’m sure in a blizzard they weren’t selling any clothing, so they just came and picked us up. But it was really bad. I just read—the old Richland Bombers have an online Sandstorm. The Sandstorm was the school newspaper, and we have an online Sandstorm that comes out every single day of the year. And it mentions birthdays and anniversaries of people—married classmates—and announces deaths of classmates and also of favorite teachers. Somebody in the online Sandstorm only a day or two ago wrote about—and I never heard this story before, so I do not know if it’s truly true—but wrote about a father who came and picked up his little boy at school during the blizzard, and didn’t have a car. And so they were walking home and they got lost in the blizzard and were found frozen to death the next day. I had never heard that before, but I could believe that, because you could not see anything. Absolutely. It was dreadful. I remember that. I have a real good visual memory, and I remember exactly what that looked like. It was fearful. Franklin: Wow. Janicek: Yup. Franklin: Wow. Janicek: Yup. Franklin: So you said you graduated in 1960. Janicek: Yes. Franklin: And then later on you came back to Hanford? Janicek: Yes, I went to University of Washington for four years. And I developed this passion for Afghanistan. So I decided the only way—and I had spent a summer in Europe and did all of that and had a good time. But I don’t know why, I really wanted to go to Afghanistan. I had studied about it, I had written reports, read books. So I joined the Peace Corps and I said, don’t send me any place but Afghanistan. Well, in those days, you took all the tests and if they decide you were qualified—they’d never had anybody ask for Afghanistan, but they had programs in Afghanistan. So I went through Peace Corps training for three months and then went to Afghanistan. And I taught English in a girls’ high school. While I was there, I met and married my husband, who was from New York and Notre Dame, and I never would have met him if I’d stayed in Richland or even in the state of Washington. So we had this very unusual Afghan wedding that was written about in the paper last year when we celebrated our 50th anniversary. So we came back and he went to graduate school at Purdue. So we lived in Indiana from ’66 to ’78, twelve years. And our three children were born there. And then we lived in Indiana. His parents were in New York and mine were in Washington, and the kids never knew any of their relatives, they never got—and we said, well, this isn’t good. So we want to go one way or the other. There were a lot of reasons why we didn’t want to live on Long Island. It was overcrowded with traffic and polluted air and polluted water, and just a lot of reasons it didn’t appeal to us. So we came out to visit my parents, and my husband interviewed at Hanford and got two job offers. So we ended up moving to Richland in 1978. So for marrying a guy from New York who you met in Afghanistan, I never would have thought that my children would graduate from my high school. But they did. So we had three little Richland Bombers in the family besides their mom. Franklin: And where did you live when you came back to Richland? Janicek: When we came back, we moved into an A house on Thayer. And it was an A house—that’s the two-story duplex—but it had been converted by the previous owner into a one-family house. So we had more bedrooms and more living space and an unusual-shaped yard, and lived on Thayer, a half a block from Van Giesen. Franklin: What did you and your husband do at Hanford? Because you said you— Janicek: Well, he’s a mechanical engineer. So he started out doing mechanical engineering things. He was involved in robotics. He spent most of his career in the Tank Farms and was a design authority for a number of years before he retired. I began as a tech editor. Became a tech writer editor, and then had several stints as a manager of editors and word processors. And we were producing all of the huge reports coming out of Hanford, mostly reporting on cleanup. Cleaning up spills in the ground, cleaning up buildings—goodness. I worked on documents that were 6,000 pages long. Mostly online editing. When—at the height of the publications flurry at Hanford, we had 100 employees in our department. About 50 editors and about 50 word processors. But as time went on, the editors started editing online, and then we didn’t need word processors. Originally we would edit with a red pen, and then the word processors would type in all of our changes. But that morphed into just editing online. I absolutely loved my job. For 27 years, I worked with engineers and scientists and technical people. I felt like it brought me closer to my husband, because I had no technical background at all. But I had very good communication skills and had studied three other languages, and so I have a lot of good ideas about how English should be spoken and written. And really enjoyed doing that for 27 years. Franklin: 27 years. So then you retired in 2005? Janicek: No, I retired—he went to work in ’78; I went to work in ’80. So I retired December 2007. Franklin: Okay. And how many different contractors did you work for? Janicek: Well, when I originally came, we both worked for Rockwell. And in fact I worked on the Rockwell proposal when their contract was up. And that was a fascinating experience, because I got to work with national vice presidents of Rockwell. We spent the last three months at a secret facility in Downy, California putting the proposal together. I got to walk through a mockup of the shuttle—the space shuttle that they had built. Oh, now I forgot the question. Franklin: The different contractors. Janicek: Oh, yes, yes, yes. So after Rockwell ended up—it was a political thing, and Rockwell lost that contract. The contract went to Westinghouse and Boeing. Westinghouse was already here, but they won the larger contract that Rockwell had. And then the computer functions, including the editing and the graphics and all of the communication things were given to Boeing as a subcontractor to Westinghouse. So then my second employer was Boeing Computer Services. And then the next eight years or so later, the contract was up again, and that was when they went to about 13 different contractors, half of them inside the wall so to speak, and half of them outside. And at that time I went to work for—my job was still the same, and all of my management was the same, but it was just a different name on the paychecks for the company that owned us, and that was Lockheed Martin. And I was still working for Lockheed Martin when I retired. Franklin: How had Richland changed from when you had graduated to when you came back and began to work for Hanford? Janicek: Well, first of all, when I came back, a lot of the business had moved to Columbia Center, and there were empty buildings, and aging businesses in downtown Richland. It had spread out a lot in all directions. People were living in West Richland and in South Richland and in North Richland and all over the place. And that’s just Richland. I mean, Kennewick grew enormously; Pasco has grown enormously. So I had to kind of get used to driving and living in a much bigger city. And I have to laugh at myself, because even today, I mostly drive—I have it in my mind, a skeleton of the roads that I used when we lived here, when I first got my driver’s license in high school and drove around the Tri-Cities. And I kind of stick to those roads, because they’re the ones I know the best, and you know, they’re my old favorites. But one of the things I noticed is that a lot of people moved into the Tri-Cities who didn’t necessarily work for Hanford. And so you didn’t have that little small town, we’re-all-in-this-together feeling. You know, when people first came to Richland to work at Hanford, as I said, there were no grandparents, no relatives. We all kind of stuck together because nobody knew anybody; we all came as strangers and we came from all over the country. And so there was a real closeness. And I see that in the older classes that write into the online Richland Bomber Sandstorm every day, the alumni newsletter. By the time my kids were in high school and graduating, a lot of that closeness was gone. You didn’t know everybody in your neighborhood; you didn’t know everybody in your church if you went to church; you didn’t know all the kids in your classroom; you didn’t necessarily know the parents; you didn’t know whether your friends had younger or older brothers and sisters. It just was a lot more socially scattered, I would call it. One of the things I’m pleased about is there’s a lot more diversity in the Tri-Cities now. You have people from all parts of the world, all races, colors, creeds, religions. Which is really good. I have to laugh at my kids, because we made sure they grew up without any prejudices. They have had friends—they’re all adults now in their 40s. They have had friends of all different colors, races, and creeds. It tickles me to death that we succeeded in raising them that way, because it’s only right. What else is different about the Tri-Cities? Well, every day I open the paper and I read about businesses I didn’t know were there. All the years I worked at Hanford, I didn’t have time to go driving around and shopping and looking around. So I—there are dozens and dozens of restaurants I’ve never been to. One of the things that really confuses me is, because the Tri-Cities has grown so rapidly, there are many, many, many neighborhoods that I’ve never heard of the street names before. And when I hear about something being on a certain street, I have no idea where that street is. I have to get out the phone book and hope I can find it on the map. And I’ve also noticed that there are—in the old days, there was a lot more respect for Hanford than there is now. There are a lot of people in the Tri-Cities who are very anti-Hanford. They think either it’s evil or—well, it’s dangerous. That’s always true. We had—when I lived—when I worked at Hanford, we had a really good safety culture. We had safety drills, we knew what all the different sirens meant, whether they meant shelter-in-place or get out and run for your life. What’s going on and what are you supposed to do about it. I think some of that safety culture is lost, because the people who lived and worked here forever have been laid off or have retired or moved on one way or another. We don’t have that close confidence anymore that we’re all doing the right thing for the right reasons, and keeping each other safe. Some of that has been lost, and I see sometimes that people—new hires come in—and I saw this when I was working there—that sometimes new hires would come in, and they wouldn’t take safety as seriously as we thought they should. And, you know, once in a while somebody does something careless that gets them in trouble. There were very strict rules, and I edited a lot of those safety documents about procedures: how you did things, how you had to do things, double-checks and triple-checks on things that sometimes people kind of rolled their eyes and thought, oh, yeah, here we go. But in fact, those things kept you safe if you followed them correctly. Franklin: It only takes one accident to— Janicek: Yes. Franklin: Do you think that that record of safety or the view of safety and the approach to safety changed as Hanford’s mission changed from one of production to a little more kind of opaque mission of cleanup? Janicek: I don’t think so, because the people actually involved in the cleanup or, like me, I was reading about all of the dangers in all of the cleanup as I was editing the documents. I think that a lot of us were always impressed with how dangerous it could be and how close we were to somebody goofing up and causing an accident. And certainly, I think right before we came here was when they had the McCluskey incident where Harold McCluskey was badly exposed. It’s just astounding to me how well they were able to clean him up and keep him alive and how long he lived, and he actually died of a condition that he had before the accident ever happened. And that actually boosted my confidence that they were doing all the right things. I’ve been in buildings—I had a Q clearance for a while—I’ve been in building that were very restricted and—not passwords, but keypads and patrol and safety people and intelligence people and all kinds of things to try and prevent terrible things from happening. Whether it was just luck or whether it was good management, those things, for the most part, didn’t happen. I mean, Harold McCluskey was the only one—there have been some accidents where people have fallen and died or have been badly injured. Or I remember one time when they were cutting into a pipe that they didn’t—either they didn’t have the correct information or they didn’t take it seriously. And they cut into this pipe that was supposed to be empty and harmless, and it was full of hot burning steam. It hit these two guys right in the face. I don’t remember if they lived or not; I’m suspecting maybe they didn’t. But I’ve—that was a few years ago when—I just don’t remember now. Many of us have always been aware of the potential for accidents. Sometimes people coming in from other places, if they didn’t work in dangerous situations before, they had to adjust their thinking or they might get in trouble if they—every once in a while, either a person or a company self-reports that we screwed up and didn’t do something right. And they don’t do that often enough. I mean, we have whistleblowers with personal issues, and we have whistleblowers with true concerns and who have honestly seen something that needs to be corrected. I’m sure it’s very difficult to keep all of that in mind. We recently toured B Reactor, which was a fascinating experience. When you look at that huge, big thing and all of those fuel rods. And if you think about what little, innocent thing could have happened or some switch accidentally flipped and what it could have caused. You know, we all remember Chernobyl. I worked—I was in a volunteer group called the Hanford Family that was formed when they were shutting down N Reactor and it was about the same time that Chernobyl happened. A lot of people were really scared and concerned that the same thing could happen at Hanford. So I became their editor and communications person for this group. And one of the things I did was research and interview an expert and find out why it couldn’t happen here. And one of the things was the difference between boiling water reactors, BWR, and pressurized water reactors, PWR. And what they did at Chernobyl, you couldn’t do here. The reactor would not let you do it or it would shut down. And how these guys had overridden their own safety controls. Again, they didn’t take safety seriously enough or they didn’t understand the principles behind what they were doing and what they were causing. It was a terribly frightening time. But I published this lovely three-fold pink brochure about why Chernobyl can’t happen here, what’s different about our reactors from—and then we were just down to N Reactor and the power reactor, the Hanford Generating Station at Energy Northwest. It was an interesting experience to learn that stuff and to put it in language that regular people could understand and to hand it out at functions. We went to a fair in Yakima; we had a couple of things—big—I don’t know—exhibitions or shows that occurred in the Tri-Cities, and we had our little booth and handed out our information and told people about why that couldn’t happen here. That was an interesting experience. For a non-technical person, I appreciated getting information and putting it into a form that regular folks who didn’t work at Hanford or have any technical background could understand. I have no idea how effective the brochure was. But it was interesting to do. Franklin: Interesting. Did you do any other public relations work when you—at your job at Hanford? Or was that a— Janicek: Well, most of the time, I was editing big reports. I started after a very short period—I worked for several years with the BWIP project—Basalt Waste Isolation Project. That was the concept where we were going to bury the waste deep in the basalt. I first edited and then managed the editors who edited the environmental restoration—no, environmental assessment document and the—oh, goodness. Now I’ve forgotten what it was called. Two different versions, one of them was six volumes long about how we were going to safely contain the waste, and some of it had to do with Nevada, which has since [LAUGHTER] In fact, a lot of the waste was going to go to Nevada, and Nevada shut that off. I did have a very interesting experience. I was on a national committee that worked with DOE orders and directives. It had to do with information management, because Hanford and the other government facilities that did things nuclear had to send copies of their reports to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were kept and managed by the government. Some of them were classified and some were not. Most were not. This group would get together sometimes once a year, sometimes two or three times, and go over the DOE directives and bring them up to date on how to manage all this information. And I ended up writing parts of a DOE directive and editing other parts. I think you can still get those online. And I can open that up and see my very own words there. It kind of tickles me to see that. That was a really interesting project. And I got to go see—I got to go to Bethesda, Maryland and see where all of the energy reactors, like the one that we have at Energy Northwest—how they have to report in—I don’t know—I think every hour to let them know that everything’s all right. And I got to sit at this huge, big console where all of these Hanford and Oak Ridge and Argonne in Illinois and WIPP project in New Mexico and the Nevada Test Site and—anywhere there was a reactor, all the lights flashing and the buttons and the hourly reporting in. They actually monitor that to be sure that nothing—there are not going to be any surprises or any Chernobyls. That was kind of an interesting thing to see. Franklin: Oh, cool. Janicek: It was. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about in your interview? Janicek: Oh, I remember the Columbia River floods. Before we had all the dams and maybe even before the dikes were built—I’m not sure when they were built. The year before we moved to Richland, I lived—we lived in Vancouver, Washington. And there was a little community on the floodplain between Vancouver and Portland on the Columbia River called Vanport. When the river flooded, the spring of ’48, the water came up—maybe to the roof lines of those—it was low income housing and I suspect it was for guys who had just gotten out of World War II and were trying to build their lives and they had young families. The flooding was—it was just really terrible. I remember that and the pictures, partly because my father was one of many people who volunteered to patrol against looting. They would go out at night in motorboats. And he had a pistol that he kept for years. [LAUGHTER] We knew where it was hidden, but we never told our folks that we knew. [LAUGHTER] And we never touched it. Because they had to evacuate everybody, of course. And I have no idea whether people died or were injured during that flooding. But one of the memorable aspects of it was that there was a Jantzen Knitting Mill in that same area. And Jantzen’s old logo was of a woman in a one-piece bathing suit and a swimming cap diving. And she was—it was a huge sign and it was on top of the Jantzen building, and when the flooding came, the Jantzen Knitting Mills flooded and she looked like she was diving into the water in the flood. It was just really cool! [LAUGHTER] It was a picture they showed all over the United States. So then the next year, we came to Richland in the spring of ’49 and people were all talking about the ’48 flood and how bad it was. But I remember a couple of floods that were just about as bad after we moved here. At that time, the only way to get between Richland and Kennewick was on what we called the old river road, which goes through Columbia Park now. And so that road completely flooded. You couldn’t get through there. So leaving Richland, you would have to drive south over the hills and there were just—I don’t know, farm roads, probably—and go all the way around to get to south Kennewick and then come back into Kennewick. And even worse if you had to go to Pasco. Because the flooding really messed things up. And then some of those river floods would pick up a lot of trees and limbs from the shoreline, as the—and they would have rattlesnakes on them. For some reason, because of how the Columbia River turns when it gets to what was then called Riverside Park and is now called Howard Amon, a lot of those trees and tree limbs would lodge into the bank and all of the sudden we had rattlesnakes all over the park. So that was kind of interesting. [LAUGHTER] Scary! Opportunity for people to go out and see snakes or capture snakes or get rid of them, because rattlesnakes are serious business. But that was one of the things I remember about some of the problems with climate that we had in the good old days. Franklin: The good old days. Janicek: Oh, goodness. What else do I remember? Franklin: Did you go to any of the Atomic Frontier Days? Janicek: Oh! Yes! Well, especially after we moved to McMurray and I was going to Jefferson School, because Jefferson was right across from the Uptown area and I walked that area every day, knew it very well. And we would have parades for Atomic Frontier Days on George Washington Way. And in the really old days, when there was still a Camp Hanford in North Richland, that parade included—I remember a huge, big—I think it was called Red Dog—looked like a missile or a rocket or something. And then there were some smaller rockets, weapons. And they would haul them through town as part of the parade. And that was kind of fun and interesting to see, because my dad didn’t work at Hanford and wasn’t involved with the military. So that was all new to me and fascinating to see. They had a beard-growing contest. I think the Richland Atomic Frontier Days were usually in August and all the guys would grow beards for the month of August, and they had—I don’t know, some things for kids to do and things for adults to do, and clowns and a few floats. You know, you always had a Miss Atomic Frontier Days, which later became Miss Tri-Cities. That was a rather special event that happened. People would go by and throw candy on all the kids—kids would be there with their tricycles. We would decorate our tricycles with crepe paper strips, or put playing cards in the wheels so they would go click, click, click when the wheel went around and decorate. Sometimes they would decorate up the wagons and put wagons behind the tricycles. So we’d have a lot of tricycles and some bicycles lining the streets of George Washington Way as the parade went by. That was a fun thing to do. Franklin: Neat. Janicek: Yeah. Franklin: Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing your stories about growing up in Richland and working at Hanford. They were wonderfully detailed and I really appreciate it. Janicek: Oh, well, thank you. I love to think back to the old days and just reading the online Sandstorm everyday kind of tweaks my memory and—old teachers and old friends, and like to pass these things on to my kids who grew up in such a different time and they don’t understand about being afraid the Russians were going to bomb you. [LAUGHTER] Some of the other things that went on that led to me being who I am today and led to Richland being what it is today. And I enjoy talking about it, and I realize that because of my father’s position, not as part of Hanford, but very much as a part of a community, that I have a lot of great memories. Because I’m fortunate to have a good memory, I still remember a lot of people’s names, a lot of businesses’ names, a lot of things that went on. When my father was on the school board, there was a little town and school at Mattawa, which—and those people served—that was when they were building Priest Rapids Dam and Wanapum Dam. So the school board, once a year, would get special, special, special permission to drive—they probably were escorted—to drive through the Hanford Site and go out to Mattawa and they would have one school board session that the teachers and the parents could attend who lived at Mattawa because they had no way of getting in to town for it, and that was part of the Richland School District. Now, today, Mattawa’s completely gone. I mean, everybody left and the buildings are pretty much all gone and doesn’t exist anymore. But I always thought that was very nice and very thoughtful that they arranged to be able to go out there once a year to meet with the staff and the families and see—address their concerns for educating the kids. Franklin: Yeah. Neat. Interesting. Well, thank you. Janicek: Welcome. Franklin: Okay. Vargas: That it? All right. <a href="https://youtu.be/js2YwuGWbrw">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:12:24 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1949-1960 1978-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1980-2007 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Grover Dawson Jim Richards Sid Lanter’s Stanfield Parker George Anderson John Meyers Harold McCluskey 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 Stephanie Janicek Description An account of the resource An interview with Stephanie Janicek 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 01-24-2017 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. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/28">Stephanie Janicek, Oral History Metadata</a> B Reactor Boeing Cat Dam Desert Energy Northwest Event Hanford Kennewick N Reactor Park River Rivers School Sport Sun swimming Tank Farm Tank Farms War Westinghouse https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdff2838652d98539e2d337d50bc2bb24.JPG ee6cb6157ca5d2dcadedfa2b78bd3f2d 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 Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ronald Palmer Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Ronald Palmer: Yeah. Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Ronald Palmer on October 26th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ron about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Palmer: Ronald A. Palmer. R-O-N-A-L-D; A for Alan, A-L-A-N; Palmer, P-A-L-M-E-R. Franklin: Great. So, tell me how and why you came to the area and to work for the Hanford Site. Palmer: I came to work at the Hanford Site to work on glass for immobilization of radioactive waste. I came here in 1979, November, and worked in the 222-S Building out in the 200-West Area. Franklin: 222-S. Is there another name for that building? Palmer: It was next to the REDOX building. It was the laboratory that supported REDOX in the early ‘50s. Franklin: Okay. And what drew you to—or how did you become a glass person? Palmer: My technical background. Went to Alfred University in Alfred, New York. Earned a degree in Glass Science. My first job out of school was in Jersey City, New Jersey working for Metro Containers, a firm that made glass jars for beer bottles, mayonnaise jars—those kinds of things. As a quality control engineer, I mainly broke things. I got interested in why glass broke, why and how it fails, and in order to learn more about that, I went to graduate school and did a dissertation on fracture and failure of glass. My thesis advisor at the University of Florida was Larry Hench. Dr. Hench had been the chair for the National Academy of Sciences on what it is we thought we should do with radioactive waste. Turns out, if you put a glass guy in charge of figuring out what to do with nuclear waste, glass gets involved. So I wound up talking with the folks at the—the company running Hanford at that time was Rockwell. They asked me to come out and work on the glass project then. Franklin: How long did you work on the glass project? Palmer: I worked on the glass project for just a couple years. Then the funding for that disappeared, and I joined the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, the repository project that was going on at the time. Franklin: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Palmer: At the time, the Department of Energy was looking for an underground repository site to permanently dispose of the radioactive waste. There were other sites involved, but the basalt project was one looking at the geological formations underneath the Hanford Site as a place to store the radioactive waste. The basalt flows, which are basically the lava flows left over from the Cascade volcanoes. We built a laboratory in 2221—I’m sorry—2101-M Building in the 200-East Area. It had been a big warehouse and we built a laboratory there with electron microscopes, spectrometers of various types. We were basically a geochemistry laboratory. We were looking at the properties of the basalt rock underneath, in the formation underneath the Hanford Site and the relationship of the properties of those rocks with the glass compositions that we expected to make. So we did some experiments that involved glass and the rock, and simulated ground water, those kinds of things. Franklin: You mean storing glass in the rock, or--? Palmer: Well, the glass was expected to be the waste form. So, when you dispose of the waste, you put the waste form—which, what they’ve eventually done is they make the glass and they pour it into stainless steel canisters. The design we used were two foot in diameter by ten feet tall stainless steel canisters. So with the glass in there, you expect, after several thousand years—[LAUGHTER]—the canister has become compromised, and you worry about the reactions between the water, which may come in to the repository, and the glass, and the rock. Franklin: And so what did you find about that situation? Or can you describe a little bit more the work or the results of that work? Palmer: We were looking at ways to perhaps slow down the in-flow of water into the repository. One suggested method was to backfill the holes that you’d drill into the ground to put the canisters with a bentonite clay. The water would come in, and it would first see the clay, and the clay would have a tendency, when it gets wet, to swell, and to slow down—if not stop—the in-flow of the water, and therefore extend the life of whatever waste form you’ve put into the ground. So-- Franklin: Okay—oh, sorry. Palmer: So we looked at various options that we might design into the repository to minimize the eventual damage that you will expect to have happen from water coming into the repository. Franklin: So that clay, then, would kind of act to plug the leak of— Palmer: Yes. Franklin: Interesting. Palmer: The term we used for that would be engineered barriers. Franklin: Engineered barriers. Palmer: So you’d basically find materials that would help keep the water out, and design that—that would be an integral part of the repository design. Franklin: And were these results adopted here on the Hanford Site or elsewhere, or--? Palmer: The repository program—the basalt project continued, I think, until 1987. Let’s see. The original Act of Congress that was involved with nuclear waste was in 1982. And that provided for the investigation of three different repository sites. The basalt site underneath the Hanford facility; a formation of a material called tuff outside of Las Vegas, which is called the Yucca Mountain site; and they were looking at various salt formations in Texas and New Mexico and Louisiana and other places as a third potential site. By 1987, they had determined that it was too expensive to look at all three. It’s not cheap to do that sort of research. And they narrowed it down to the Yucca Mountain site outside of Las Vegas. So at that time, I think the other repository sites’ projects disappeared. I was gone from the project by then. I left the project in 1984, so— Franklin: Oh, okay. And where did you go when you left? Palmer: I went to—I was out of the nuclear waste business and went to 3M in Minnesota. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do there? Palmer: I did research on new glass compositions. In particular, a material called bioglass, another topic of research for my former professor, Dr. Hench. He invented a material called bioglass, which chemically bonds to bone in the body. And as now, it’s being used as a dental material. Not as a solid piece, but as a powder to help with the bone’s—recession of your bones if you’ve got gum disease and that sort of thing. You can place a powder of the bioglass, and then it will help the bone grow back a little bit. Franklin: Oh, wow, interesting. Palmer: It’s also being used in toothpaste to help fight gum disease and that sort of thing. So. But I did a little bit of that work for 3M, but not—I also worked on some composite materials that they were designing. Franklin: So now you’re kind of back in dealing with—later on, you returned to dealing with radioactive—nuclear waste. So can you describe that transition back? Palmer: I joined West Valley Nuclear Services—there’s a site that’s now called the West Valley Demonstration Project thirty miles south of Buffalo, New York. And I spent 15 years there. During that time, we tested a mockup of a glass melter and how we would run the process. And then built the actual melter and closed that in a hot cell where no one would go to work on it inside. So we had to make sure that the melter would operate remotely without having to send someone in. The West Valley site had only one tank of radioactive waste, compared to the 177 here at Hanford. So it was a fairly straightforward project. We were able to determine the chemistry of the waste in the tank, and that made it easy to just design one glass composition that we used. We made glass—we made radioactive glass from 1996 to 2002. And made 275 canisters—the canisters being two foot in diameter by ten feet tall. And those canisters are now stored—they remain at the West Valley site. Eventually they’ll go into a repository, assuming some repository is eventually made. Franklin: So did it take six years to vitrify—or sorry, I guess I should ask you—that process is vitrification, right? Palmer: Yes. Franklin: So that’s the right word to use? Palmer: Yes. Franklin: Okay, so it took six years to do that for one tank of waste? Palmer: We designed the process to be small and relatively slow. To fill a canister when everything was up and running smoothly was about two-and-a-half days. Whereas the facility running at Savannah River right now—Defense Waste Processing Facility, DWPF, they fill a canister in less than a day. At the Savannah River site, if I remember correctly, had 53 underground storage tanks. So they’ve got quite a bit more than we had at West Valley. And also a variety of compositions, so they had to change the glass composition as things went along. They’ve now made over 4,000 canisters since 1996. Franklin: Wow. So then it does really depend on the chemical makeup of the tank as to what type of— Palmer: Yes. Franklin: So which is why, I guess Hanford’s waste poses a problem in that aspect. Palmer: Yes, yes. Franklin: Because of the unknown nature of— Palmer: Yeah, and at Hanford there’s also a wide variety of compositions in the waste tanks. So the glass compositions can be very different. So you really need to know what’s coming in from the tank the next day in order to make the right mix of raw materials to make the right glass composition. And it’s tricky. Also, if you have to go from one composition to another, you have to know what you have in the tank before you add the new stuff, because the composition is going to change. It’s hard. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Do you think that vitrification is the right choice for Hanford’s waste, given its myriad of compositions in the tanks? Palmer: When Dr. Hench did his analysis of materials to use to immobilize waste in general, glass is clearly the most versatile. There are other waste forms. There are crystalline ceramic waste forms, there are composite waste forms—a wide variety of things that you can use to immobilize the waste. But the processes for those waste forms are much more complicated. It would be very difficult to, say, design a—one of the waste forms is called a tailored ceramic, where you design crystalline components of the ceramic to immobilize specific radionuclides and that sort of thing. It’s hard enough to do for one composition, but to do for 177 compositions, that would have been very difficult. The glass is clearly the most versatile. Is it durable enough? The expectation is that the glass—the waste form in the repository will stay—the radionuclides are supposed to stay within the repository boundaries for 10,000 years. That’s the bureaucratic boundaries that we have to design for. Some people say, yeah, it ought to be a million years. But who would believe us if we predicted a million years? [LAUGHTER] We have trouble believing ourselves when we’re predicting 10,000 years because it’s tough to run that experiment. From the standpoint of glass lasting that long, there are some researchers out there that have been looking at archaeological glasses that maybe may have been in the ground, say, 1,000 years. And try to look at what glass composition—what the glass started out as. In fact, somebody has done an experiment where they’ve excavated the dirt around the glass object and analyzed what is in the dirt that might have come from the glass leeching out and that sort of thing. They’ve also discovered in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, glass bottles, amphoras, those kinds of things that have been at the bottom of the ocean for 1,000 years. And you can still drink wine out of them. [LAUGHTER] So we like to think if the folks 1,000 years ago made glass that lasts at the bottom of the ocean for 1,000 years, maybe we can on purpose design glass that will last for 10,000 years. Franklin: Interesting. Why was there the shift—so you started to—you came to work in glass immobilization, and then you said the funding for that program ended. Why was there that shift there in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s? Palmer: Well, if I remember correctly, the project I was working on was sort of under the table. [LAUGHTER] If I remember—the Pacific Northwest Laboratories—this was before it was a national laboratory—had the responsibility of developing the glass waste forms. And what we were doing was just a very small project compared with what was going on at Battelle Northwest at the time. I think somebody caught us doing that, and they said, you shouldn’t be doing that; that’s Battelle’s job. So they found something else for me to do. Franklin: Oh, right. So Hanford’s vitrification plant is in the news a lot and is kind of plagued by cost overruns and delays. Being a vitrification expert, is that kind of—I mean, I’m not looking for you to criticize them or anything, but is that kind of the norm? Should we have been prepared for how complex this process is? Do you think maybe that that wasn’t communicated or are there actual kind of real problems with the processes being instituted here, in terms of efficiency and actually handling the mandate? Palmer: I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long. I was back here after we finished the work at West Valley, I came out to the Project that was—let’s see, Bechtel had just taken it over along with—it was the Washington Group then. And I came out—the Washington Group was the organization that was running the West Valley Project, so we were brother organizations. So I came out to work with some of the folks in the group to try to put together procedures, figure out what we expected to have happen over the project. So I remember coming back here and I think I still have a bumper sticker that says Glass in 2007. [LAUGHTER] I probably got that in 2003. So I’ll hang on to that. For it to have gone out this long, I don’t know. I do know for having spent a lot of time at West Valley, the West Valley Site, instead of—well, here the Hanford Site is 570 square miles. The West Valley site is 200 acres. [LAUGHTER] The Department of Energy folks, who were our overseers, were right down the hall. They’re not miles away as they are out here. West Valley’s also in the same time zone as the DOE headquarters in Washington. It’s not 3,000 miles away and three time zones away. I think geography means a lot. [LAUGHTER] When you’ve got the folks you’re working with and have to solve their problems, when you’ve got them down the hall and you can talk to them day in, day out, it makes it so much easier to get the job done. And then when they can call their folks in Washington where things have to get done in a relatively straightforward manner, I think that helps quite a bit. So it’s the fact that Hanford is so big and it’s so far away from the people who ought to be thinking about it more. But they’re in Washington, DC—what do they care about what happens in Washington State. It really—it’s not primary in their minds. So you sort of get sent to the back of the room. Franklin: Oh. How does that compare, though, with—you said the Savannah River site has created about 4,000 canisters. How long has that process—has there been similar delays or situation there? How come that process is kind of up and underway—or can you describe—I guess my question is, can you describe the similarities or differences between what’s being attempted here and what’s being attempted at another large site like Savannah River? Palmer: Savannah River always seemed to have priority over Hanford. Probably because it’s closer to population. And the environment around the Savannah River Plant is a lot wetter--[LAUGHTER]—than the desert out here. So if the tanks leak out here, they leak into the desert. If they leak at the Savannah River Site, they leak into the Savannah River, which feeds several million people. So the Savannah River Site did get more attention in the early days. They’ve done a very nice job getting their plant up and running. We worked closely with them when I was at West Valley. We talked with them all the time in terms of their day-to-day almost troubles and tribulations. We designed—the melters were designed a little bit differently and the canisters were a little bit different. The West Valley canisters had a large mouth and it was a 16-inch opening. Pretty easy to hit the hole with the glass coming out of the furnace. The Savannah River canisters had a much smaller diameter hole and that led to different processes for welding the material shut. But we could compare notes in how you’d do that and how the melters worked. We were operating in parallel, I think—let’s see, if I remember right, Savannah River started their process up in March of ’96 and we started in June. Franklin: Okay, so you were doing the same thing at the same time. Palmer: Right. Franklin: So they’ve vitrified a lot of their waste, but there’s still no current long-term repository. Waste is still being stored at individual sites, waiting. So really, that’s kind of the other step of this process, right, is finding a—or what are your thoughts on that situation, on the—do we need one or two major long-term repositories to kind of collect all the waste in one area, or is better to keep it spread out at its separate sites? Palmer: It’s going to be wonderful when we get all the liquid waste out of the tanks and immobilized somehow. I’d like to think that—I’m a little prejudiced—that glass is the answer to that. And now that we’ve got the tank empty at West Valley and the material in glass, and Savannah River will get there eventually—they might be halfway through? I’m not quite sure how long they’re going to take to get it done. But it’ll be nice to have those canisters of high level waste somewhere, and the high level waste out of the ground. And with any luck it’ll happen here at Hanford, too. There’s no rush to get those canisters of glass into the ground. We expect that they’ll be stored safely somewhere in some kind of a building, some kind of a structure, that will keep the water out, keep the animals away and whatever else. So you kind of hope that that’s going to happen. And if there—there’s talk about reopening the Yucca Mountain project again. It was always kind of funny—everybody complains that they shut it down a few years ago, and that that was a political action. Well, picking Yucca Mountain was a political action in the first place. In 1987, when they decided to go to just one repository, if you look at the state of Nevada versus the state of Washington versus, say, the state of Texas, Nevada has the least number of representatives in Washington. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Ah, a-ha. Palmer: So it basically was a political act to create that there. So it doesn’t bother me that it was a political act to have shut it down. It may be reopened again. Harry Reid, who’s the senator who asked President Obama to shut it down—Harry’s retiring. So maybe it’ll reopen. I remember, maybe 25 years ago, I went to a PTA meeting, the New York State PTA meeting, and the national president was there. She was from Las Vegas. And I asked her about Yucca Mountain. She said, you and I need to talk. [LAUGHTER] She was not happy about Yucca Mountain, and she was amongst those who were really fighting against even looking at the site. There was a—let’s see. When I was in Minnesota, it was about 1985, I believe, the Department of Energy was looking at a potential second repository. They were looking, first of all, at those sites out west. And then they started to look at granite formations, say, in New Hampshire. The Canadian Shield, which is outstate in Minnesota. So there were folks agitating in Minnesota—oh, my god, they’re going to bring nuclear waste here. And I remember going to a meeting of the local congressman and hearing people shouting about it. And I sort of—on the way out, I mentioned to him, I said, why don’t you just let DOE come in here and discover that it’s really not the place to put it? One of the main things you need to worry about is how do you get all the materials that’s elsewhere to the repository? And the weather in Minnesota in the winter’s not so good. [LAUGHTER] It would make it difficult to bring material in. And in addition to the weather interfering with construction of the facility to begin with. So there were a lot of good reasons not to put it in Minnesota. So it was just a lot of fun to watch the action going on with the anti-nukes, locally, and as well as the people who might have been more in favor of it. I also remember there was—one of my colleagues at the basalt project was back in Boston. I think he was at MIT, giving a talk about the repositories. And he said he noticed some of the kids in the back were sort of dozing off when he was talking about repositories in Nevada and Washington and that sort of thing. And then he suddenly mentioned that—maybe in New Hampshire. And he said—the kids sat up and paid attention all of the sudden. It’s up the street. [LAUGHTER] In New Hampshire. Yeah. So it gets people’s attention when it’s close at hand. Franklin: It’s a real nimby issue. Palmer: Yes. Franklin: How did the work at Hanford—your work at Hanford—kind of inform your later work? Because you started your private sector career at Hanford, right? Palmer: Yes. Franklin: So how did that inform your later work? Palmer: One of the most important aspects of handling radioactive materials is a quality assurance program where you—those of us were doing research on the basalt project, our first thought was how do you do quality control, quality assurance on research? How do you ensure that your experiments are right? Because you’re supposed to be investigating unknown things, so maybe quality control, quality assurance, is too much controls on your process. When it first was imposed on us, we were very concerned about how we can do that. But then we talked to the folks who were quality assurance experts, and they said, oh, what we really have to do is control the process. Control—make sure if you’re using a particular instrument, a spectrometer, whatever, make sure it’s been calibrated, make sure it’s working properly, make sure you have standards to compare against your unknowns. So the quality assurance aspect of it actually made our work a whole lot better. We had to think about it a little harder, but that’s okay. [LAUGHTER] In fact, when I moved from here to 3M and did research there, I kept those thoughts in mind: okay, I need to do research on new materials, on new products, that sort of thing—but how do I set up my experiments so that I know I’m getting the right answers? Or defensible answers, if not the right answers. Franklin: Where at least you know the process is defensible. Palmer: And that turned out to be an important part of my work at West Valley. So learning that quality assurance was a good thing has been a big help to my later career. Franklin: Can you describe Hanford as a place to work? Palmer: [LAUGHTER] It’s a different place. It was first very strange to get out here and you see people on the corner waiting for the bus and everybody’s wearing a badge. That was a—coming, especially from a college campus—that was a very different experience. I guess I got used to it, but I wasn’t happy with the atmosphere that that sort of creates—having to wear a badge and that sort of jazz. And I remember when I was at 3M, there was somebody coming in and wanted to make everybody at 3M—I worked in their research facility in St. Paul, which was several dozen buildings. They wanted everybody to wear—somebody was coming in proposing that everybody at 3M wear a badge, for corporate security and that sort of thing. My opinion of that was that would change the atmosphere of the research park. Later in my career, I worked for Corning, Incorporated in Corning, New York, and they’ve taken it to an extreme, I think. [LAUGHTER] When you get up from your desk, you’re supposed to turn your computer off. Because even the guy next to you isn’t supposed to see what you have on your computer screen. And you have to wear a badge, and you need the badge to go from building to building. Or from parts of the building to other parts of the building. It created an atmosphere that I wasn’t happy with. I felt that it’s necessary at Hanford, where you’re working with hazardous materials all the time. But I wasn’t—I thought that in a corporate world, I thought it was a little bit of overkill. But the folks at Corning, Incorporated have decided that—[SIGH]—they need to have everybody keeping their mouths shut whenever they needed to keep their mouths shut. Although if you go out at night and you sit in a bar, and you listen to the guys talking at the table next to you, you might find out some things that you—[LAUGHTER]—you wouldn’t find out hanging around the quarters of the research park. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Palmer: Most challenging, I think, was—some days, getting to work. Taking the buses out to work. Although that, eventually, once you get used to it, you get reading done on the bus. There was—for a couple of years, I lived in Kennewick, and I took a van pool. So I would get up in the morning walk to the corner, and pick up the van, and spend an hour and then spend another hour at the end of the night, coming home. At the time, I subscribed to two magazines: I subscribed to the New Republic, which was weekly, and on the left side of the political spectrum, and I subscribed to William F. Buckley’s National Review, which was every two weeks, and on the right side of the political spectrum. I was obscenely well-informed. [LAUGHTER] Because I read them cover-to-cover, because I had the van pool time day in and day out. I worked with a lot of interesting folks. And I’m spending this week here getting together with some old friends. Since we were done making glass at West Valley, a number of those folks are out here now. And about a dozen of us got together last night, and it was a lot of fun to see some folks that I hadn’t seen for ten years or so. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Palmer: The aspect of working on a project that the whole world thinks they know about—oh, nuclear waste. One of the things—the most common comment you get is, do you glow in the dark? And it doesn’t matter—that happens at technical meetings, that happens at PTA meetings, that happens on planes going back and forth. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It happens to me every time I go to a conference. At least once. Somebody thinks that they’re the first person that thought of that joke. Palmer: Yes. [LAUGHTER] So it does make for interesting cocktail party conversation. Because everybody has an opinion. Franklin: Yeah. Palmer: And—why don’t we just put it on a rocket and send it? Well, rockets never explode, right? Franklin: No! Palmer: [LAUGHTER] And even before Columbia and Challenger had their problems, I went to a meeting in Cocoa Beach, Florida down the street from the Cape, and remember talking to someone who worked at Cape Canaveral for a long time and some of the tests that they did. They had one rocket that they called the Titusville Express. Titusville is the next town over, and the rocket went up and hung a right, and fortunately went over the city of Titusville into the water. But that’s not what it’s designed to do. So if you put radioactive materials on those kinds of things, you’re going to make a mess in the water someplace or wherever it comes down. So one of those—a glib, easy answer to—the further away you are from the project, the more answers you have to solve it. That’s true in a lot of different ways. People have—oh, we can solve that problem. It’d be easy; just do this. Ah, well, no. [LAUGHTER] So that makes a lot of fun. And now, as we’ve been talking about now writing a book on the history of this topic, and it’s a lot of fun digging in the background and trying to figure out how people 100 years ago were treating radioactive materials. As they started to understand that, yeah, we ought to take into account time, distance and shielding and those kinds of things. It took a while for them to figure that out, and people got hurt, and died from not knowing. Franklin: Right. Palmer: And in some cases, though, I’m finding as I read more, there’s a lot of cases where they did know, but they just left the door open [LAUGHTER] on the cyclotron, that sort of thing. Some of the guys who were working on that were basically cowboys. They just treated it like your standard, old—oh, whatever’s going on in the laboratory, and okay. The stream of electrons in the cyclotron, if they left the door open, somebody was getting irradiated, but they didn’t think—you couldn’t feel it, so what’s the big deal? But you need to keep that door closed. It’s kind of funny to read about the people who—smart people, gone on to get wide renown in physics and that sort of thing—but they left the door open on the cyclotron because they didn’t figure it was a big deal. Or they were just careless. Franklin: Right, or maybe had a sense of invulnerability-- Palmer: Yes. Franklin: --when it came to their own mortality. Palmer: Physicists have a way of thinking they’re invincible. Franklin: Were there any major events that happened if the Tri-Cities while—I guess you only lived here for five years? Palmer: Yeah. Franklin: Were there any major events in the Tri-Cities when you lived here that stand out to you? Palmer: Mount St. Helens. Franklin: Oh. Palmer: It was May 18, 1980. And we had been watching—over the previous year, we would be able to see some of the minor eruptions that had been going on. And I think—if I remember right—it’s 160 miles from here. It was Sunday morning when it happened, and somewhere around 8:00 or something like that. My wife and I were in the grocery store. We were way in the back of the grocery store, and a friend came in and said, wow, did you see what the mountain did this morning? And—no. We’d been inside whenever it happened, and came out and you see these puffy clouds. It kind of looks like cauliflower. The ash falls in like pockets. That day everybody basically stayed inside, because our cars outside got covered with dust. I talked to a friend who went to work that day and took the bus out to the 200-West Area. And he said you couldn’t see the front of the bus from the back of the bus inside the bus. Franklin: Wow. Palmer: So it was a dusty day. They had just bought a new fleet of buses that were all air conditioned. The ash chewed up the air conditioning. So we didn’t have that new fleet of buses that summer, so we all rode un-air conditioned buses that summer. And a lot of people wore the face masks for most of the summer going out on the bus during that summer. Franklin: Oh, wow. So how—did that impact the work at Hanford at all? Palmer: I don’t know that it impacted the work to speak of. It certainly woke us up to Mother Nature’s power. I remember there was someone here who had—a photographer—who had been going back and forth to Seattle, and he would stop at the St. Helens area and take pictures. He’d gone over the Saturday before. I saw him give a presentation on this afterwards, so this is all secondhand sort of thing. He stayed—he decided he’d stay the night on the south side of the mountain. He took some wonderful pictures the day before from that particular angle. The next morning, it blew, and when it blew, he was facing south, away from the mountain. He didn’t hear a thing. Because the explosion went north and all the sound and all the ash went north. He was talking to somebody and the guy said, look around. He turned around and he could see the plume going off. And he went back to the same places where he’d taken pictures the day before, and had the same picture as the explosion is going on. So it was quite an opportunity for that guy to get those kind of photographs. Franklin: No kidding. Palmer: Then the police were coming through, chasing people out. You got to get out of here. Because the snowcap was melting and the floods—the Toutle River, I believe, was being overflowed. He had to get out of there in a hurry, although he kept stopping every once in a while, taking pictures. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As any good photographer would. Palmer: Yes. And the cop would come and say, you’ve got to get out of here. And I remember we—later that summer, my father came out to visit. My father was an eighth grade science teacher. So we had a good time taking pictures and collecting ash for his science class and that sort of thing. We drove around the south end and came up Interstate 5 and saw the destruction from the flood, and drove over to where the Toutle River had washed out some small bridges. And you could see where—the river had gone down to its normal level, but you could see it was ten foot up on the banks, and then there was a mark about ten feet up in the trees above that where the water level had been. So it was mighty powerful. Franklin: Do you have any memories of the social scene or local politics or other insights into Tri-Cities life? Palmer: We were part of the Jewish community—Temple Beth Shalom. It’s a small temple. There’s not a whole lot of Jewish folks here. But they had been here along—from virtually the beginning of the Project. The temple was founded in 1950. When we were here around 1980, there were still people who were part of that founding organization. Franklin: Wow. I’m sorry, where was that located? Palmer: Thayer Street, south of Lee. Franklin: Okay. Palmer: I haven’t been there for a while, so it’s—and I understand they’ve remodeled it. So I’m not sure I would recognize—I think I would recognize the building if I were to drive down it, but I haven’t done that yet. I may do that later this week. There were quite a few interesting people who were part of that organization. There were chemists and engineers who worked out at the Site, and were also part of that organization. There were doctors in the local community who were part of that congregation. And I still have friends who are part of that here, and I expect to see them this week. We didn’t do a whole lot of other things. I was—it was just my wife and I when we came out here. We had a son—my wife’s named Ellen Goldberg Palmer. My son was born here. My older son, Michael was born August of ’82. So he has roots here, but I don’t think he’s ever been back. [LAUGHTER] So one of these days, we have to bring him back and see where he was born and that sort of thing. We later had a second son born in Minnesota. So my sons are connected to the two biggest rivers in the continent. One the Columbia, one the Mississippi. Although neither of them really remembers having been near them. They were both raised in Buffalo, so they don’t remember much about either Minnesota or Washington State. We were very much involved with the synagogue. There were also quite a few mixed marriages. I’m not Jewish. We decided we’d raise the kids Jewish, but that’s all right. That wasn’t a problem. But there were a lot of other mixed marriages as part of the synagogue. Because of the wide range of beliefs of the synagogue, it was always an independent organization. There are a variety of Jewish movements—the two major ones are Reform and Conservative. Reform being a little more liberal; a Conservative rabbi would never have married my wife and I, because they just don’t believe in that—in intermarriage. And we had some trouble finding a Reform rabbi that would do that. But the synagogue remained independent for many years. Until something—it was never clear to me exactly what happened. We took a vote and it was always 50/50, and they decided not to affiliate with either the Conservative or Reform movement. But then somebody decided, we really need to do something. So they had another vote, and it went Conservative. So they needed to have—they felt they needed to do something with the Sunday school and have some sort of official imprimatur of one of the movements. And that caused a split. [LAUGHTER] Especially among those of us who were mixed marriages. And we had a meeting a couple of weeks later in our house, mainly because we hadn’t had enough money to buy furniture for the living room yet, so we had a place where we could have lots of people meet and have chairs around. We actually created another synagogue for those of us who felt we should be more liberal than the conservative end of it. And that went on for a couple of years. I think it’s consolidated again. But I don’t know exactly what the status of the synagogue is now. So even amongst small congregations, you can have big divides. There’s a joke that somebody told me. They sent a Jewish astronaut to the moon to establish a community. And they ask him, why two synagogues? And he said, well, that’s the one I go to, and that’s the one I wouldn’t go to on a bet. [LAUGHTER] So you can always expect—three Jews in a room, you’ll have ten opinions. [LAUGHTER] But politics? I don’t remember much about—I wasn’t much involved in that. I was too worried about day-to-day working and family life. Because I was new at both. I didn’t worry too much about other things. But, yeah, Mount St. Helens was the big one, and our relationship with the Jewish community. That was the two big social parts of our life while we were here. Franklin: Okay. Could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Palmer: Not very much. The work we were doing was publishable. We did have to worry a little bit about the composition of the waste. I think some of that might have been proprietary. Because knowing what was in the waste would give information about what was in the material that created the waste, which was for plutonium to make bombs. So I think some of that information might have been proprietary. I didn’t have to worry about it because I didn’t work on that part of the business. I do remember, at the Battelle library in the 300 Area—which was a wonderful place to go; the books there were—it was just a fun place to look around—there was a room down the hall that you had to have special permission to go in that had a lot of the processing information that was proprietary. And I always wanted to go in there, but I don’t think—my clearance wasn’t high enough. We had Q clearances then, and I don’t think they even have that anymore out here. Franklin: Yeah, not to my knowledge. Palmer: But the secrecy aspect didn’t affect me very much. Franklin: How has the attitude towards nuclear waste disposal changed from 1979 until now? Both within the industry and without? Palmer: I think a lot more people know about it than before. Especially because of the national hullaballoo over Yucca Mountain. People worry about that a little more than they—they probably didn’t know they had to worry about it. [LAUGHTER] and suddenly there’s a big squabble over it, so, gee, maybe I should worry about this. The other facility that’s been in the news lately is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, WIPP. About two years ago there was an accident there. It was a small explosion underground and they needed to figure out exactly why it happened and now what can they do to prevent it from happening again. So I don’t think it’s up and running just yet. They’re still sorting out new procedures and that kind of thing. But, yeah, people are hearing about it more. I don’t remember anybody really—I mean, if I talked with old friends about nuclear waste in 1979, they’d say, say what? They really didn’t know what was going on and they had no idea of where the materials were located. But nowadays, they do worry about it more. There are folks with the nuclear power plants, we all know that there are the spent fuel being stored at all the nuclear power plants and folks are starting to be aware that—is this the right thing to do? There may be—it seems to take time for people to want to solve problems. [LAUGHTER] It’s just—it’s like the kids in the MIT classroom. Okay, that’s Washington State, I don’t need to worry about it. You know, wait a minute, it’s in New Hampshire; maybe I do need to worry about this. And if you suddenly realize that, yeah, that nuclear power plant down the street? Okay, there’s no radioactivity coming from it, but there is this other stuff that maybe can cause a problem. Franklin: There’s spent fuel being stored there in the area that wasn’t designed as permanent storage for it. Palmer: Right, right. Franklin: How has the approach to nuclear waste disposal changed from 1979 until now? Or has it? Palmer: I don’t know that it has. I’d like to think we’re smarter about it. I’d like to think that we have better solutions for it now than we did then. Franklin: Such as? Palmer: The immobilization processes. Eventually we’re going to have to ship the materials from one place to another. They’ve done tests on shipping casks and designed them so that they’re not going to fail. And there are folks who are still working on new designs for shipping, say, spent fuel—I’m sorry, I think it’s called used fuel now—from reactors where they’re stored now to—there may be some intermediate storage facility, or some permanent storage facility. I suspect that we may eventually go to some kind of an intermediate storage facility. And where that would be is a hard question to answer. They’re now looking at the process of siting a repository at—I forget exactly what the buzzword is for it, but it’s basically an informed—that’s it—informed consent of the community. For instance, in order to site the WIPP project at Carlsbad, New Mexico, they basically got buy-in from the community. From the mayor to the chamber of commerce, to the local citizens. There are other folks in the state of New Mexico who would rather it not have been there. But they live in Albuquerque, and that’s a couple hundred miles away. So now you worry about, what do you define as community? Is it the people who live in Carlsbad? Is it the people who live in New Mexico? Is it the people who live in the Southwest? So the concept of informed consent is absolutely necessary. But defining it is very hard to do. Franklin: Right. Because you don’t always get to choose—as a project planner you don’t always get to choose who has buy-in or who feels like they should. You don’t get to exclude some people just based off of your own—they get to choose whether or not they feel— Palmer: Yeah, and in the past, we’ve done horrible things where we just ignored people. There are places in the Southwest where they had uranium mines. And downstream from the uranium mines were the Navajo. There were—I’ve read somewhere, I’m assuming it’s true—is that there was never cancer in the Navajo Nation until there was uranium mill tailings nearby, coming in the water supply from upstream. The informed consent, will hopefully help us not ignore some people who ought to be part of the process. Franklin: Right. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War? Palmer: We tried. We tried really hard to do the right things. I do remember—hmm—early ‘80s, Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 as President. He was a little more hawkish than Jimmy Carter before him. I got promoted to a manager’s position, and I got invited to—the vice president of the Site, who every once in a while got new managers together to give them a little lecture and welcome to management. [LAUGHTER] And I remember him saying something about—yeah, Reagan’s going to put us back to work. We’re going to build more bombs and do all that sort of thing. And I think I said at that point to myself, I got to get out of here. [LAUGHTER] Because if that was going to be the attitude—I mean, cleaning up the mess is one thing; building new stuff that goes boom in the night? Nah, I didn’t want any part of. And that was—some of the reputation that those of us who worked at Hanford is that, you know, yeah, we want to make more bombs. No, a lot of us are here because there’s a mess to clean up. And we were chemists of all kinds of varieties who wanted to know: okay, what is it that we have to do to make this not a problem anymore? And it’s a good intellectual problem to try to solve, and an engineering problem to solve. And we don’t want to make new things that disrupt the community. We want to take care of the mess. Franklin: What about the—there’s kind of an inherent contradiction in there, though, right? In that you find joy in solving the problem and fixing the problem, but without the bombs—without the desire to make the bombs, we wouldn’t have the waste to clean up, and you might not have come here. You’re certainly—your life, part of your life’s work is encapsulating waste, which—there is waste from energy plants, but you seem to have spent much more time dealing with waste from production plants. So I understand maybe not wanting to see new—more new waste being produced, but that’s kind of an interesting relationship that I think you have with waste. Palmer: Yes. I wasn’t around to make the decisions in the first place. I’d like to think that I’m around to make some personal and professional decisions now. Let’s say, when you go to the grocery store, you have these plastic bags. I—in the back of my car—I always have with me the reusable fabric bags when I go to the grocery store. Franklin: Yeah, me too. Palmer: So I don’t create the mess in the first place. I think that may be one thing that I’ve learned, looking at the history of what we’ve done with radioactive materials and radioactive waste, specifically, is that we could have done better if we’d have just thought about it a little bit. There’s new problems all the time coming on. There’s new industries coming on. Genetically designed organisms—genetically engineered organisms, those kinds of things. There’s nanomaterials. All these are new industries, and we hope that they’re thinking about the potential for problems. Having worked a little bit with some of the folks in the nanoparticle business, they were looking at those problems from the beginning. When they’re designing their materials, especially in the ceramics field. I know people who were there, at the beginning of designing new materials, and they were absolutely looking at potential harm that the materials might do. Franklin: Do you think that same kind of forward-thinking was there at Hanford, during the World War II or Cold War, but that the importance of the initial mission overweighed concerns about the legacy of nuclear waste? Palmer: Yeah, they were in a hurry. So cleaning up garbage was, at best, a second thought. They got it out of the way, and put it somewhere where it wasn’t going to bother anybody for a while. They’ll worry about it later. And it took them a while for later to show up. They suddenly noticed—I think it was about 1973, when they noticed, oh, there used to be 100,000 more gallons of waste in that tank than there is now. I wonder where it went. That was also the time when organizations were created to look at environmental issues. The EPA was founded in—what, I think it was about 1970? It was one of Nixon’s— Franklin: That sounds about right. Palmer: One of the good things that Nixon did. EPA and OSHA for that matter. I remember doing things as an underground in the laboratory that you cannot do now. I mean, using benzene to clean glassware. Not going to happen now, but it happened in the ‘60s as a routine thing. That’s how you cleaned the glassware, was boil it in a pot of benzene, because it did a nice job of cleaning the surface of Pyrex. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m sure it did. Palmer: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Palmer: Yeah. That was another thing, is that I probably got exposed to more dangerous materials working in a chemistry lab than I did working in a radioactive lab. [LAUGHTER] I know we took care of doing things in 222-S. Although there were some laboratories I didn’t really want to go into. [LAUGHTER] But you learn how to do good science and good laboratory experiments from the folks—the woman who worked with me as a lab technician, Sadie Kunkler, had been there since before I was born [LAUGHTER] in that laboratory. She started working there in 1950. So she had 30 years of experience of how to work in a laboratory, and how to— Franklin: This was here at— Palmer: At Hanford, in 222-S. She taught me a lot, an awful lot, in terms of how you work in a laboratory. There were parts of laboratory experiments that I was not competent to do. [LAUGHTER] But she was very, very good in the laboratory in terms of making sure things were clean. And when you’re doing experiments where you’re trying to measure small amounts of material being leeched out of a glass with water, everything needs to be clean. The water has to be pure. If you’re looking at dissolving glass, it’s mainly sand, silica. If you know anything about the dust that’s in the air, it’s also sand. So your materials—in order to do a proper experiment, you need to keep the dust out. Otherwise, your experiment is not going to be a— Franklin: Well, you have to purify your water, too, so there’s no silica in the water. Palmer: Right, right. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we—? Palmer: We covered a lot of stuff that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. [LAUGHTER] Thank you. Franklin: Yeah, thank you. Palmer: I’m going to be talking to some other old friends this week, and I will—I think you know some of them. Steve Buckingham is one who’s been part of this program. Michael Kupfer is another one that I worked with at 222-S. I hadn’t—I called him yesterday, and he wasn’t sure who I was—again? What? We haven’t talked in—I haven’t talked to him in over 30 years. So, we’re going to get together and talk some more. And I’d like—Mike was here and had some very interesting experiences in the lab, working in glass and other projects. I think he might have some interesting things to say. There was one thing I think that actually got me the job. Working with glass at high temperatures is a tricky thing to do and one of the crucibles that you use is platinum. When I was in graduate school, somebody in the laboratory was making glass and used, as a centerplate in the furnace, silicon carbide. Silicon carbide can take the heat okay. But if you happen to drip a little bit of glass on the silicon carbide centerplate and have it next to the platinum crucible, the platinum crucible will dissolve. What happened in this particular case, the guy left the crucible with glass in it in the furnace, and he came back several hours later and it was gone. You allow the furnace to cool and you take out the centerplate, then you can see a ring of platinum that had been the crucible. It was now part of the centerplate. When I came out to Hanford, and went out to dinner with the folks who were interviewing me, they mentioned that they had a problem—they weren’t sure what happened. They had a bunch of—maybe half a dozen crucibles on a centerplate. And some of them dissolved. They caught it before they were all disappeared, so I eventually got to see it. But some of the crucibles had been eaten away. Because I had that experience before, my response was, oh, you used the silicon carbide centerplate. And they said, yep. And I think that got me the job. The fact that I had had that experience and so—that was the kind of experience they were looking for. Someone who would not make that mistake. Because those little platinum crucibles are, you know, 1,000 bucks a piece or more. Franklin: Yeah, that’s not a cheap material to work with. Palmer: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Kind of a happy accident, huh? Palmer: Yeah. Well—a happy experience for me to have that available in my list of things that I’ve done. Franklin: Yeah, especially during an interview. Well, great, well thank you so much, Ron. It’s been a great interview. Palmer: It’s been good, thank you. Franklin: Okay. <a href="https://youtu.be/81_pUoreaDo">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:16:48 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 2-East Area 300 Area K-West Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1979-1984 2007-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1979-1984 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 Ronald Palmer Description An account of the resource An interview with Ronald Palmer 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 10-26-2016 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. 2018-31-1: 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. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/19">Ron Palmer, Oral History Metadata</a> 2-East Area 300 Area Battelle Bechtel Cold War Container Containers Department of Energy Event Hanford K-West Area Kennewick Mountain River Savannah River Street Sun War