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Dublin Core
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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
Wanda Munn
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Wanda Munn on November 2<sup>nd</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Wanda about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name?</p>
<p>Wanda Munn: Wanda Iris Munn. W-A-N-D-A, last name M-U-N-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. When and where were you born, Wanda?</p>
<p>Munn: I was born in Brownwood, Texas, which is 17 miles from the geographic center of the state on September 13<sup>th</sup>, 1931. I was a Depression baby. So I had all that background and the joy of being a native Texan.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] How and why did you come to the area to—how and why did you come to work at Hanford?</p>
<p>Munn: Well, in technical terms, I’m a retread. I decided in midlife that I needed to finish a college degree, and I wanted to do it in some discipline that was really challenging and had great contribution capability for the planet and especially for my nearer community. When you make those decisions in your 40s, you have some knowledge of what you’re doing. And it was not an easy one for me to do, although I did an asset-liability framework in my mind of what I could do, what—I was a divorced mother of two children and had the responsibility for a declining mother and a dependent sister. So it was incumbent upon me to do this as quickly as possible. I only had about a year’s worth of actual college credit, most of it at the University of Texas, much earlier in life. When I decided that I was going to go for nuclear engineering, my friends and colleagues were actually horrified. They all could understand my going out to find myself somehow, but a technical degree like nuclear engineering was a real stunner to them. They were fond of saying to me, but Wanda, you’ll be over 40 by the time you get your degree! And my response was, I’m going to be over 40 anyhow. I’d rather have it with this degree than not have it with this degree. So because my prior material was not actually engineering, it had been medicine, I really had to start from scratch. I didn’t have any money and essentially sold everything but the children, and I couldn’t find a good buyer for them. [LAUGHTER] But I tried to do a four-year curriculum in three years and managed to do it. But it wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend it. [LAUGHTER] Nevertheless, by the time I had finished my engineering degree at Oregon State University—I was living in Corvallis at the time—I had fallen in love with breeder reactors. This was in the mid-‘70s, and in the mid-‘70s, the big game in town as far as breeder technology was concerned was right here at Hanford. The Fast Flux Test Facility was in the process of construction at that time, and it was the most exciting technical thing on the horizon. I was delighted to be able to come here and interview for a position there. And that’s exactly what I did. I became a member of the Westinghouse Hanford team that was constructing that reactor. And never looked back. It was a wonderful choice for me. A very exciting time, building on the shoulders of the giants that we’d had here three decades earlier. And I have never regretted a day of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Excellent. So, tell me what kinds of work did you do at FFTF?</p>
<p>Munn: I was—for the most part I was a cognizant engineer. Westinghouse had an excellent program at the time of rotational program where you had an opportunity, if you chose to do so, to work in three different aspects of the construction, design, startup process. I originally chose to go into plant operations. It seemed the most exciting to me and we were actually building the structure at that time. We—I did two other rotations which made it possible for me to go all over the site, actually. When I say the site, the site that I’m talking about right now is the FFTF site, what we refer to as the 400 Area. It did not include the old production reactors and the waste projects that were underway by Rockwell Hanford at that time. I had been the cognizant engineer for the reactor system for a variety of the other head compartment systems. For the longest period of time, my responsibility was the sodium systems, especially the sodium testing system and the gas sampling systems. During a long period of time, I also worked in nuclear safety, which, again, took me literally all over the plant. It was a very exciting time. The Fast Flux Test Facility was a flagship. There’s no question about it. It was the most advanced research and development reactor in the world. Not only at that time, but no one, to my knowledge, has exceeded the capability that we had, nor the type of long-term vision that we had at FFTF. It was a specialized group of men and women. More men than women, obviously. That, of course, was another aspect of the times. And if you want me to talk about that, I can a little bit. It may or may not be interesting to your audience.</p>
<p>Franklin: I would love for you to talk about that.</p>
<p>Munn: As anyone who lived through that era knows, a woman with a technical degree was not welcomed, nor did they actually have access to many portions of the engineering technology. There were a few. I was not what I think of as a first wave, but I was certainly the second wave. The first—whoa. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to—</p>
<p>Emma Rice: Overload the circuit?</p>
<p>Franklin: Overload the circuit.</p>
<p>Munn: Cause—yeah, I didn’t mean to overload anything. We—</p>
<p>Franklin: Did we—yeah, I was going to say—so we--</p>
<p>Vargas: No, we’re fine on the camera.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Vargas: It’s battery-powered.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, great.</p>
<p>Munn: Okay, very good, that’s fine. We just—I had as my mentors women, several of whom had had careers in the military. It was one of the few real engineering doors that were open to them at the time. And the woman who was the technical vice president for Westinghouse Hanford at the time was Lieutenant Colonel Arminta Harness, recently retired from the Air Force and NASA. She had worked on the Space Program and had known me as a result of our interaction in the Society of Women Engineers. We called her Minta. Minta was the last of the two-year-term national presidents for the Society of Women Engineers. And she and her colleagues had been among those who were not allowed to go into other forms of engineering in the public sector, because they had two routine answers that they heard from potential employers. One was, we don’t have a women’s restroom in our building. And the other, that I thought was probably closer to the truth for most of them was, we accept the fact that you could do this work—not can, but could do this work. However, if our clients knew that the work was done by a woman, it would never be accepted. Now, that probably had some ring of truth to it, but nevertheless, it was almost an insurmountable barrier for those women. But as anyone who knows anything about the social history of the United States knows, in the ’60s and early ‘70s, there was a real revolution in this regard. I think it’s a spin-off of what happened during World War II. It rather astonished people that women could take the jobs that men had left and had done such a fine job with them while the men were away from the country. But it was just assumed that when they returned, of course, they would return to their positions, whatever they were, and that the women would go back and put their aprons on. There’s nothing demeaning about that, except it was pretty infuriating for the women who had shown for five years that they could do these jobs and had done it very, very well, to be told now that—not that they—they would no longer accept that they couldn’t do it, but they were told that they should not do it. And therefore were not going to be allowed to. These were the women who had daughters who were not going to accept that as an answer. So as the social process began to move, and the legislative process began to bring itself to bear, more and more employers were finding it necessary to hire a certain number of women in order to fulfill the requirements of a government contract. This was both an enormous opportunity and a terrible detriment for those of us who were living in that time. That social action, as a matter of fact, was a part of the reason why I had decided to go into nuclear engineering. It was the first time the doors were really open to do that. But the two-edged sword was very easy to see if you stood back one step and looked at it. That is, these women were going into a milieu where the individuals who occupied those spaces had thousands of years of history behind them, of being world leaders, commanders of all they surveyed, and they had only two interactions, they—well, I take it back—three interactions they’d ever had with women throughout their entire lives from the time they were infants. The women with whom they had ever interacted had either been caretakers, sexual objects, or clerical employees. There were no other options. That was their interaction. Now, women had been doing reasonably well in small entrepreneurial businesses of their own for quite some time. But this was a different thing. This was high technology. The fact that people like Admiral Grace Hopper were making the beginnings of the Digital Age come to life were not seen by the general public. That was such an outlier; it wasn’t commonly known. But as those of us who came into this profession during this period of time learned very quickly, the people in power were all masculine, as one would expect. But they had no experience in how to deal with a female colleague. Females, yes. They had females around them and a basic part of their lives forever. But dealing with a woman on a level playing field in a technical way was not an experience that they even knew anyone who could relate to them. So the first thing they thought was, one: you’re only there because you got a leg-up; you’re being given a free ride because you happen to be female. And the other thing they thought is: and if the free ride gives you as much power as we’re afraid it’s going to, you’re going to take my job. So as we went in, we had to do two things. One, we had to prove we really were engineers; we really could do the work. And two, we had to prove to them that we were colleagues of theirs, not interlopers who—we all know the general story about how women got ahead in that time. We had to prove that wasn’t on the slate, and that we were not going to take their jobs. This ain’t easy. And I’m very, very glad that I was older at the time this occurred, because I’d been accustomed—you know, I’d grown up with these guys. I knew who they were. I knew what they were like, and I understood what their lives were. So, it wasn’t hard for me to understand the disturbance that was going on in their intellectual world. But younger women coming in at the time didn’t understand that. They saw this as being some kind of real repression of some sort—an attempt to keep them from fulfilling their potential. This, in my view, was not the case. I still see that quite often, that sometimes women in technical fields have a tendency to think that they’re playing the minority card. But that is, in my view, no longer true. The concerns that I had at that time have long since passed, and I’m glad that’s true.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was—I’d like to step back a bit, and thank you for that. I think that was a really illuminating aspect, and I might have you come lecture my US History class on women in the workplace at some point.</p>
<p>Munn: I’d be delighted to do that.</p>
<p>Franklin: What was—so, going—coming back to your motivation to go back to school, what was it—was there a moment, or when did you realize that you wanted to—when and why did you realize that you wanted to go back to school?</p>
<p>Munn: Okay, now this is really getting down in the weeds here, but that’s okay. The reason I left the University of Texas was to marry. [COUGH] Excuse me. As I think I mentioned. I was in pre-med. I had grown up with great ambitions. It had never occurred to me that there was much that I couldn’t do because I was female. It occurred to me that there were limits to what I could do because of my intellectual prowess, but I had always been drawn to medicine as a child, and had actually hoped to go into psychiatry. Which I’m glad I didn’t do. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is, I left the university to marry. I was 18. Because I had graduated from high school at 16. I had chosen pre-med because that’s what had been in my head for a long, long time. It was science, it was technical, it was beneficial: it was all the things that I wanted my life to be. But marriage interrupts that kind of thing. It takes you to a different kind of world, a different kind of setting. My then-husband was in the Air Force, and so I followed him in the Air Force. He was an enlisted man. He was from a working class blue collar family. No one in his family—a large family—no one in his family had ever gone to college. This made absolutely no sense to me—why one would not advance their education in a period and in a place where it was difficult, but it wasn’t all that difficult to find a way to pay tuition. You know, why not? There’s state schools all over the United States. Choose something and go there. So it was rather difficult on my then-husband, because he was not prepared for college work at all, and I was just fairly insistent that he was going to do that. So he had a great deal of remedial work to do, and this essentially meant that I had spent about seven years of my life trying to assist him in his studies, and essentially support the family in doing so. He did finish not only his bachelor’s degree but also his master’s degree and was in the education field. During all that period of time, I was essentially doing professional work of one sort or another for individuals who held authoritative positions, but whose shoes I could have filled easily. I did not have what I call my union card: I didn’t have a college degree. Further, I did not have the technical training to do the kinds of science and technology that really and truly interested me. So in the ‘70s, I found myself the divorced mother of two, as I said, and with considerable family responsibility. I knew that I could not continue to support what is now a rather large number of people on the salaries that I was able to get as a glorified administrative assistant. By the way, there’s been a change of terms. In that period, the term administrative assistant did not mean a secretary, although my secretarial and clerical skills were very high. That was not the real reason I had the post. I actually was an assistant to the person who held the title, whether it was physicians, accountants, insurance people, academics—that’s what I did. But there’s a factor of about two, sometimes three, in the monthly salary of those individuals and in mine. So you don’t have to be a follower of Dr. Einstein to be able to work out the math. You know, it doesn’t take very long. I needed a professional salary. And besides that, intellectually, I had been spinning my wheels for 20 years. And I was tired of it. I was absolutely tired of it. I wanted to be doing something that was challenging me, and in which my contribution was a contribution. Not a contribution to the person who was doing the contribution. It isn’t that I wanted to be recognized for that; I’ve always been of the school that it’s amazing what you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit for it. I didn’t care who got the credit for it. I just wanted to be on the ground floor. That’s all.</p>
<p>Franklin: So for all the degrees—the things you could have chosen in what we now call the STEM fields that would make a solid difference, why nuclear engineering?</p>
<p>Munn: Can you think of anything else that’s more challenging and more imaginative? I can’t. At the time, it took me a while to measure down to engineering. I started with thinking of medicine, still. But when I realized the amount of time and the amount of money that was going to be necessary for me to do that, not to mention the time—the concentrated daily schedule that’s necessary for that kind of thing, given the family duties that I had—it seemed like an impossibility. So I had to rule out medicine. Besides which, it would have taken me seven years to get to the point where I could actually get to hands-on anything. That—I didn’t have that much time. I had to do this in—and I had no money. As a result of that, I really had to do something in a much shorter time. And it seemed to me that three years was all I was going to be able to handle. Now, when you take that away and you start looking at the other science things, the biggie at the time also was computer technology. We were just getting out of the room full of server stages, and every college campus finally did have a computer center where you could go in the dead of night and run your deck which you had typed. [LAUGHTER] It was still unknown to the general public. I happened to own the first 35 that was sold at the Oregon State University bookstore—the first handheld computer. [LAUGHTER] It’s still on my desk, as a matter of fact. But that was—it was an exciting time then, but I—what little I knew about computer technology, I knew the detailed precision that was necessary to do this. I’d already known—had the experience of trying to make a computer do what I wanted it to do instead of what I had told it to do. And knowing that the misplacement of one character could demolish the efforts of a whole deck just did me in. I couldn’t handle that kind of concept. I knew I would not be a good computer engineer. Too much real detail oriented in that. Being a big picture kind of person makes a difference. So I set that aside. The other thing that really seizes the imagination is something that so many people don’t think about—that is the basic requirement for any life anywhere is not food, clothing and shelter. It’s even more basic than that. It’s energy. If you don’t have adequate energy, there is no way you can do any of the things that you have to do to survive. The energy picture right there right then was easily as muddled as it is now, and possibly even more. I had looked—thought about mining, too. It just really sounded dull to me. Just dull. I’d been raised in Texas. Petroleum engineering was a big thing at the time. Oh, for crying out loud, you look around in the dirt, you find oil, you think you might have oil, you drill for oil, you either have it or you don’t have it. Then you either have success or not and you move onto another well. That just—that didn’t sound like much of a thrill to me, either. So long as I couldn’t be there to watch the well come in, what’s the point? This gets—there was, of course, a great deal of hoo-ha about solar, wind, ocean current—all those things were very big in the human imagination at the time. I kept thinking, really? No. Not really. Excellent for specific purposes. Useful? Oh, my, yes. Pursue it by all means. But the biggie? No. I already knew that there were only two concentrations of energy that could possibly serve an industrial society. And I’m all for industrial societies. And I knew that that was carbon-based fuels and nuclear. Well, let’s see. Which is the most interesting of those? Gosh, it didn’t take me long to figure that out. So, to me, it was just a pyramid. You start at the bottom and you work up, and the star of the fleet as far as I was concerned was nuclear engineering. How fascinating can you get?! My word. Totally unknown until less than a few decades before. And now the most incredible amount of power. Energy that we’ve never even been able to imagine, we’ve got it, we know how to control it, we can do whatever we need to do with it. With breeder reactors—hey. The only place I know you can make enormous amounts of electricity and still be creating more fuel at the same time. Don’t know anything else that does that. Highly imaginative, and not getting good press at the time, either.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wanted—and I think you might have answered some of the question, my next question. But you mentioned that your friends and colleagues were terrified that you chose nuclear engineering.</p>
<p>Munn: Yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why was that?</p>
<p>Munn: Too hard. Underwater basket weaving, popular psychology, you know, art, the many of the social sciences, the things that do good things for society but don’t require that much in the way of focused knowledge of some sort. That’s—you know, it takes a lot of work, but it takes a different kind of brainpower. We really live in two worlds, you know. C.P. Snow pointed that out in his books quite some time ago. We live in an enumerate world and an innumerate world. There’s nothing wrong with either of those worlds, it’s just that they don’t communicate well. And a significant number of people are math-phobic. Have been most of their lives and probably will be most of their lives. But the only way you can explain most things in science is numerically. So you either see that as a form of language, or you don’t. And I was able to see it as a form of language. Please don’t misinterpret me; I am not a good mathematician. But I do see the mathematic relationships in things. I see the mathematics in color spectra. I see the mathematics in music. I see the mathematics in what we’re doing here right now. And many people don’t see the relationship between these technologies and mathematics.</p>
<p>Franklin: You had mentioned earlier some of the challenges that women of your generation—or in the generation—the time at which you entered the workforce, you mentioned some of the challenges that women were facing. Did you—were there any of those challenges specifically at FFTF, or can you kind of describe how that was to be a woman at this newly—this brand new reactor?</p>
<p>Munn: Yes. One of the things that was very frustrating about it was that we did have a number of women who, in their lexicon, were breaking barriers, and I was glad they were there. They were doing semi-technical jobs. Many of them non-professional jobs, but nevertheless requiring interaction with the hands-on people who were on the floor putting things together, and doing cool things, like being able to stand over the open reactor before it was filled and feel how far it was from one wall to the other. Those are the kinds of things people don’t get to do. I got to do those things. It was wonderful. But we had a couple of things. Women had never been taught anything but dress codes. And knowing how to dress in a true working engineering facility was not a common thing. We would, for example, one of our Society of Women Engineers sections when I was visiting had a woman come and talk—a popular topic of the day was dressing for work. Dressing for work essentially meant dressing like the woman who was speaking to us who was an attorney. Now, the toughest physical barriers that she faced in her workplace were the carpet in the courtroom, trying not to slip down on marble floors. This is not the challenge that we faced in the workplace that we were talking about. So clothing alone became a big item for many of our young women who were coming in. They had been taught to dress attractively and a little bit sexy, you know. Always that little bit of come-on. And it was a bit of a challenge to convince them, first of all, that if you were going to be working in a plant, you don’t even consider wearing a skirt. I’m sorry, you just don’t. You’re not going to be able to walk across the grids. You are not going to be able to climb ladders. You are not going to be able to go where your male colleagues have to go to do their job. If you’re going to do this job—you can’t do it while you’re worrying about your femininity. I’m sorry. You can do that if you want with color. We lucked out there, didn’t we? It’s okay for women to wear any kind of color they want to. So you can be very feminine in your clothing, in terms of color. But I’m sorry, the long tresses that are so popular today? You’re not going to go in a working plant with this lovely, flowing hair that looks so good in a commercial, but is rotten when you’re walking around operating machinery. You don’t want to get pulled into that headfirst. No kidding. So—and there’s the business of the shoes. Even after my plant—the plant that the FF team put together—even after that was completed, in order to get there, if I didn’t want to walk two-and-a-half miles around the plant on concrete, I was going to have to walk across crushed rock. This is an operating plant. You know, we’re not dressed up for Sunday best. We’re working here. So why do you have on those heels? You’re going to have to walk across crushed rock. Why would you do that? I know it looks nicer with this particular outfit—fluff, fluff. But I’m sorry; that’s not why you’re here. So I had—the woman that I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite mentors, Arminta Harness—had what she called the Ten Commandments for a Woman Engineer. Most of them were humorous, but none to me was more humorous than what I believe was number seven, which said, Thou shalt not be sexy at the office, even if thy cup runneth over. I thought that was extremely humorous, and it still remains my favorite commandment to young women going into engineering. Thou shalt not—that’s—wherever else you want to be sexy, you may, but please don’t bring that to the workplace. So I have had one or two confrontations with—in each case, they were a technician or a runner for some of the construction people—but young women who insisted on wearing provocative t-shirts, especially. I’ve made a couple of them rather angry by telling them that I spent a great deal of my life trying to teach the men who are working here that I am their colleague, I’m an engineer, we’re building something together here. What I may think of you or what you may think of me otherwise has no bearing on why we are here. We’re being paid to do this very important job, and it will be done right. Don’t distract these guys with something like this while I have to come along behind them and tell them that this has to be done in a different way. And they’re not listening to me. They’ve still got you hung up in their mind. Tsk. Don’t do that. Those are—they seem a little strange now, given what transpires in today’s workplace and given the clothing that we have now. Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed as an individual that we as women have finally been allowed by the males who occupied those positions to allow us to use the capabilities that we have to perform the same kinds of functions, and yet you have—it never occurred to me that dress, as we see it now, was going to devolve into this, and to me devolve is the appropriate word. Never occurred to me that we would get so far afield from keeping our eye on the ball and staying focused on the task at hand when we’re in professional positions. But, hey. The world moves on. Brave new world.</p>
<p>Franklin: Indeed. Were there any—did you face any kind of discrimination or attitude from your male colleagues at FFTF at first? Or was it—it sounds like you’ve described a pretty congenial relationship. Were there any instances that stand out?</p>
<p>Munn: Well, there were one or two. But they only happened once. When they happened, I felt it was my responsibility both as an older female worker and as a real professional person to clear the air and make it very plain—not try to send double messages ever. And I think—when you’re dealing with human—rational human beings, you don’t have to keep doing the same thing over and over again. All you have to do is clear the air, make the straight statement that needs to be made, and you’re fine. And I have had to tell a couple of my—of people in my management chain, look, the last thing I want to be is where you are. At the time, it was assumed that a woman with a technical degree and an MBA was a really hot ticket. So of course, naturally, what the idea was—came to work at FFTF, and a year later started working at the Joint Center for Graduate Study, which is the origin of the facility we’re in right now. It’s now morphed into Washington State University Tri-Cities. It’s wonderful. But at the time, there were four regional colleges that had been pulled together, interestingly, by one of the people that was very instrumental in that was a man named Leland Berger, who was just—we just lost Lee last week. He was one of the people who were instrumental in putting together the conglomerate of universities to make it possible for the people who were working on the Hanford Site at the time to be able to pursue graduate degrees. It was a difficult proposition for someone who came here, especially if they were going to be a long-term worker, individual leader, here on the Hanford Site. They’re very far removed from any campus. So doing master’s work was very difficult to do. The whole concept of the individuals at the time who put together this consortium of universities was so that people could live here and, sure, it takes longer because you’re working full-time, but evening classes that are taught by fully-accredited universities made it possible for us to do that. So my MBA’s from the University of Washington. Go Huskies! Sorry about that.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s okay.</p>
<p>Munn: Nevertheless—I’m not forgiven. Nevertheless, it was a concerted—a really concerted program, and it was almost impossible to take more than six hours a term, because you’re working full time. And at the time, we were in acceptance, testing and startup at FFTF, which meant that my days were easily ten hours long, and I don’t mean four tens. [LAUGHTER] I mean, work days were easily more than ten hours—ten hours or more. And whenever we had actual tests running, when we had things that were going on 24/7, quite often through the holidays and through weekends, we worked. But that meant classes were relegated to evenings only, and you didn’t have any spare time to do a lot of off-campus work. So we did have a challenge in that regard, but I think most of the people who were trying to do all of those things at the same time recognized that the benefits outweighed the problems that we were having to face in doing it. Scheduler problems are very hard. I was a fortunate person in being able to get by with about five hours’ sleep a night. Did that for a long, long time without any real detriment. But you do burn out on that after a while. We’ve been fortunate in so many ways in this region. The academic opportunities that we’ve had, despite the major problems that we have—not the least of which was isolation, geographically. Not isolation, but harder to get from here to there than it is a lot of places.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. Can you describe—</p>
<p>Munn: Did I answer your question? I’m sorry.</p>
<p>Franklin: No—yes.</p>
<p>Munn: Good, all right.</p>
<p>Franklin: You did, and then you actually answered another one I was going to ask you.</p>
<p>Munn: Another eight or ten. Yeah, sorry.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, can you describe a typical work day at the FFTF?</p>
<p>Munn: Yes. Typical work day. Up at 5:30 or 6:00, something like that. Breakfast for the kid or kids still at home. Out the door before 7:00, because the traffic was terrible. The traffic was not just the work folks going out to Hanford; we also had three private sector commercial nuclear plants being built at the same time. So the construction traffic going out to the Hanford Site was pretty scary. You needed to take plenty of time, because heaven knows what was going to happen on the way. By 7:15, needed to be through security. Security is not often a time-consuming thing, because you do it every day and it’s routine. But you know that anything that you’re carrying has to go through the x-ray, and you know that you, yourself, have to go through x-ray. You are likely to need steel-toed shoes whether you take them on or off—whether you put them on at work or whether you put them on beforehand depends on whether you want to take off heavy boots and walk through barefoot or not. And it depends on whether or not there’s any real hang-up on the way in. Usually there isn’t. But, nevertheless, you have to take time to assure that you’re going through security or not. Then the place that you parked was never—it was impossible to park in a place that was near to the security gate that you had to go through. So, there’s a little bit of a walk to get to security, and then from security, there’s a little bit of a walk to where you’re going to be. You’re expected to be in your workplace and working at 7:30. Not just arriving at the facility at 7:30. So if you’re going to get coffee or if you’re going to have to wait a little bit for your computer to boot up, any of those things, you need to be in your office by 7:15, because at 7:30 you are truly expected to be ready to go. Much of the management in my part of the world was ex-Navy nuclear trained, and precision, as far as time was concerned, was important to them. So you learned fairly early that it became important. You didn’t have the enormous amount of flex hours that I observe people having now. That just didn’t exist. By 7:30, you had either documents that you were having to deal with on your desk, or you were dealing with the material that was being incoming by that time on your computer. If you had a computer on your desk, interestingly, it was—I had been onsite for probably five, six years before engineers actually had computers on their desks. That was—we’re so accustomed to that now, it’s interesting to think back, how—in my lifetime--comparatively recently, it’s been. And I was one of the few people who was ranting and raving about that, because most of the new engineers who were just coming out of school had just learned—they’d just been computer-trained. This first batch of computer engineers who were computer-trained at school. The others were completely on the ground for those. So there were very few literate people in terms of computers around in the mid-‘70s. There just weren’t a bunch. We had access to the computer facility down the hall, but you had to get computer time much the way you did in college. There was only one real server, and you had to go there to do what you needed to do. One of the first things I did in the circles that I moved in—the engineering circles I moved in—the first thing that we did at FFTF was the Plan of the Day. We called it the POD, and the Plan of the Day was usually at 8:00, which meant you had time to get your hardhat and walk from wherever you were to wherever the POD was being held. And I took—I had a hardbound journal about this size that I kept notes in. You had to keep notes, because too much was happening in too many different ways and it affected you in one way or another. You need to remember who said that and when it was going to be done. So you took your journal, you put on your hardhat. You had to have your hardhat everywhere you went. I’m sorry about the hairdo. That’s tough. You had hardhat hair if you were working onsite. POD could take anywhere from half hour to 45 minutes. They didn’t like to tie people up, because they wanted—the object was to try to get you to your workplace with your instructions for the day by 8:30. But that’s sometimes hard to do. Nevertheless, Plan of the Day, POD, was first thing. After the POD—not everybody attended. It was rare for me not to attend, for one reason or another, whatever position I was in, something was usually happening and I was required to be there. Certainly, after I went into nuclear safety it was a daily thing. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to be there, had to be there. And the plan of the day often—the individuals who were way up the management chain from those of who were there, quite often would appear to give specific instructions about some aspect of what we were doing at that time which was very crucial. We all were aware of what the timeline needed to be. Project management was key to how things were done in that particular facility. And they were done on time and in budget. There wasn’t any question about it. It didn’t matter what it took, you stayed and did it. And it was a team effort. I was never privy to any discussion about doing it any other way. This was an enormously devoted team. So, after the Plan of the Day, you had your marching orders for the day; you knew what you had to do. And you went to wherever the action was for you that day, and you did that. We took a half-hour for lunch. Depending on where you were, for a brief period of time, you had access to cafeteria food. We had a cafeteria in the 300 Area when most of the planning and engineering was going on there. We had a cafeteria for a short period of time in the 400 Area during construction. It didn’t continue. As many people brown bagged as not. Almost all of us had a lunch pail, and it was not uncommon for an entire group, an engineering group, to remain at their desks and working through the lunch hour—through the lunch half-hour. It was expected that you take a 15-minute break for coffee, twice during the day. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It was expected, otherwise, that you’d be at your desk, or if you were going to leave your workplace, in every engineering group I was in, we had a sign-in/sign-out board at the door of our group structure, wherever that was. And you always wrote where you were going. If you weren’t going to be obtainable at your desk, then you had to be reachable at wherever you were going. So you signed out at the time, and when you signed back in, you erased it. I got tired of writing Reactor Facility when I was going to the reactor, and started writing BRT. This was an enigma for about a week, until finally my immediate manager couldn’t stand it anymore, and he said, all right, Wanda, we know where you’re going but what does BRT mean? It meant Big Round Thing. But it became a common usage. We were going out to the big round thing. We were very fond of the big round thing. We were going to make sure it was built right and that it operated right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what is the big round thing?</p>
<p>Munn: The big round thing is the containment dome in which the reactor—the Fast Flux Test Reactor itself was located. It’s quite a structure. Probably the safest place that I could find myself. I can’t think of a safer place to be, actually, than in that particular facility. I was—there was never any trepidation about going there, either in terms of construction or machine activity, or in terms of nuclear safety. Never concerned.</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you transition into nuclear safety?</p>
<p>Munn: How did I--?</p>
<p>Franklin: How did you trans—you mentioned that you had started during construction and that later on you started working in nuclear safety.</p>
<p>Munn: Oh, well, it’s seamless.</p>
<p>Franklin: Seamless, okay.</p>
<p>Munn: Absolutely seamless, yes. During the first years, we did not have an engineering building where the engineers themselves could work and stay. It was all constructing the facility itself. It’s a very exciting time, because just moving the huge vessels that had to go inside that containment building had to be barged up the river, offloaded here in North Richland, and taken by tractor across—directly across—the desert to FFTF. Because they weighed so much that it was impossible to do it in any other way. They were in a J sling, transported across. And the lamps and cranes were some of the largest and most spectacular in the world at the time. Those lifts were—placing those huge vessels was a sight to see if one has not been privy to that, then you’ve missed a very exciting—it’s slow. It’s like molasses. Nothing happens quickly. But it was done in a remarkably precise way. But it was entirely seamless. If you were in engineering at FFTF, then as the actual operation of the facility proceeded, your location and what your responsibility was likely changed as well.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. When did the FFTF shut down?</p>
<p>Munn: Shut down in the late ‘80s. Only operated for about a year. We went critical for the first time in early 1980. And we did our first power demonstration later that year. So 1980 was the key year for startup at FFTF. You bear in mind, we didn’t operate the way a commercial power plant operates, because we were a research facility. And what we had going on inside of the reactor was experimentation. We were proving that all of the materials and all of the equipment that were necessary to operate a fast reactor could be done safely and within the bounds of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing agreements. So that this could move from a research and development technology to a commercial technology. That’s what we were doing at the time. So we started up and shut down according to what the tests were in the reactor at that time. It was very important that those materials have the length of exposure and the density of exposure that was necessary in order for us to show how that particular equipment or that particular material reacted under the worst possible conditions.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And so how long did the facility operate for as a research facility?</p>
<p>Munn: It operated about a decade.</p>
<p>Franklin: About a decade.</p>
<p>Munn: Uh-huh, yes. And it was closed down in increments. There were a number of individuals and organizations that tried very hard to persuade the Department of Energy that the Fast Flux Test Facility should be continued to be operated as a producer of medical isotopes. It was one of the few facilities that could do that, because of the enormous range of flux that we were able to provide to the material inside. Although it had not been built specifically for that purpose, we were able to show that we could have produced a number of very unusual, very rare, very much needed isotopes. And could pay for about 70% to 80% for the operating costs of the FFTF. The response that we got back was, no, we won’t consider that unless the entire cost could be covered. This didn’t make any sense to me, because the many—there was no other facility in the DOE complex that paid its own way completely. You know, that just—that wasn’t why. The organization was funded by Congress. But we never quite understood the politics. There was general consensus among the folks that I knew that the shutdown was a political activity and not really and truly a technical one. Because we had fulfilled our mission. The original mission was to prove, as I said, that the materials and machinery that’s necessary to operate an advanced reactor could be—could meet NRC requirements. We’d proved that we could do that. And what we were attempting to do was to convince the establishment that there were other extremely beneficial uses for this machine and that we should continue to run it. But since the decision had been made not to pursue the advanced reactor concept in the US—I really shouldn’t get into that, because I get pretty rabid when I think about the terrible destruction that was done to the nuclear technology in the United States during that particular period. But that’s water under the bridge and can’t be undone. But because that advanced program had been shut down, and we had fulfilled the original purpose, then the position was, you’re toast.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was this work taken on in the private sector, then? Because you mentioned—</p>
<p>Munn: It would have been taken on in the private sector. Now, what we do in this country is a little odd. We have over 35,000 procedures a day in the United States that require manufactured isotope of some kind. We get over 90% of those isotopes from other reactors outside the United States. So, we in our medical profession and maintaining the health of the nation rely heavily on other nations’ ability to produce these and to transmit them to us in a period of time where they’re still useful. Because when you’re talking about medical isotopes, you’re talking about short-lived isotopes. They have to be—they have to give off their energy quickly in a precise way in order for it to be useful. If you’re going to keep them for long periods of time, the high density of energy that you need has dissipated because of the half-life of isotopes. Now, we could talk about that for a long time, too. But the sad thing is that we could have had that facility operating right up to this day, in my personal opinion, producing isotopes. And we opted not to do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you—or are you willing to speculate on the political motivations for shutting the program down?</p>
<p>Munn: I think the political motivation is—was then, and still is—more fear than any other single thing. The most commonly misunderstood physical phenomenon in this world, of which I’m aware, is nuclear radiation. We have—we, being the technical community and the nuclear world—have allowed other people to define our terms and define our reality. It was a serious mistake. We spent the first 20 or 30 years of our existence telling people that this was an extremely technical science they shouldn’t worry their heads about; we’ll take care of it. And then when you’re dealing with an educated public—and we do have an educated public here—you’ve sold them short. And you’ve allowed them not to be learning on the same curve you’re learning on. That—to me, that should have happened. And we have technical people arguing about whether or not one additional millirem or gray or whatever unit you want to use is more dangerous than it actually is. And how one of anything can begin a huge cascade of cancer in anybody—this is all statistical garbage. It’s not true. It cannot be. But that aside, you know, we send people to policy-making positions—we elect people to policy-making positions who attempt to do a good job but who don’t know how things like radiation work. And when we have folks with concrete financial agenda going to them saying, these frightening things are happening to people and they’re happening because of this dreadful thing we call radiation, and it needs to be stopped. Then how can you expect a policy to allow an advanced technology to continue when the basic response to the word is fear? We’ve done it to ourselves to some degree. But we’ve allowed policy to continue when it just should not be—perhaps I’m overstating the case, but I don’t believe so. I truly believe fear of radiation is what has hamstrung humanity’s best hope for a continuation of adequate energy supply indefinitely.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about the linking between nuclear and weapons, that was strengthened—started in World War II and strengthened throughout the Cold War? Do you think that might have a role in people’s perceptions of nuclear power?</p>
<p>Munn: Oh, of course it does. One of my favorite comments is the one made by someone much more observant than I that if the electric chair had been invented before the electric light, we would have no electricity today. And I think that may be an apt comparison. We also have a tendency to believe that the effects of that—of nuclear weapons—are much more long-lasting than they actually have been shown to be. But that’s not a good headline, you know? Why bother with that? That doesn’t raise anybody’s ire and doesn’t even start a good argument.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s not quite as bad as you thought, but it’s still pretty terrible.</p>
<p>Munn: It’s pretty terrible, yeah, there’s no question. So are wars of all kinds. I wouldn’t want to be in Syria right now, either.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. When did you retire from the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Munn: I left with Westinghouse. I always said that I would. The political and managerial aspect of what transpired changed rather radically when Westinghouse took over the large responsibility for the full site in 1986. Prior to that time, Westinghouse Hanford had been a rather small organization. We only had—what—3,000 or 4,000 employees, and we concentrated in the 400 Area. We were research and development. When the bid was made for the larger contract that covered all of the Site and took in the waste sites, the old production reactors, took on all of the legacy of the World War II—of the original Manhattan Project, a great deal changed in how things were operating. Then, later, in that period when we—when the decision was made to go back to having multiple contractors rather than just one or two, then it became very uncertain in my mind what one was likely to be able to expect to do to fulfill their job requirements. And I had said, always, I came here for research and development on advanced reactors. I have been a part of that throughout our ability to do it. That’s now gone; Westinghouse is leaving the area, so am I. So that means that the end of 1995, I retired and ran for city council.</p>
<p>Franklin: And did you win? Did you make it to city council? Were you city council?</p>
<p>Munn: Yes. Yeah, I was. The next four years, which was a very interesting period in Richland city planning, as well. That’s another whole program. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you tell me about some of your professional service? I see that you are a member of Health Physics chapter and a member of the American Nuclear Engineers and a member of the Society of Women Engineers.</p>
<p>Munn: Yes, I’m a fellow of SWE—of the Society of Women Engineers. In 1976, when I became a senior in the department at Oregon State University, I was carrying an incredible load, trying to get through that last third year. But we had been, for a couple of years, we’d had a group of females—female engineering students—on campus that we had wanted to morph into a student section of the Society of Women Engineers. I was elected chair of that group, and that year we did become a full-fledged student member—full-fledged student section. So I was the initiating chair of that student section. The same year, the fellow who had chaired the American Nuclear Society’s already very well-established student section just made the announcement, oh, Wanda will take this for me next year, because we’re having a regional conference and there’s a whole lot that needs to be done. So Wanda can do that. Oh, good. So I was chair of both student sections on the Oregon State campus during the ’76-’77 year. And we did, as I said, we chartered the SWE section and we held the regional meeting for the ANS section. And somehow I managed to survive that. I’m not sure how. But when I came to—I came here—the Joint Center for Graduate Study had an interesting program that allowed an internship during summer for students. And so, as an, actually, still as a sophomore in the summer of ’76, I was here as an intern working in the FFTF offices at the time. And that was the year that this professional section, the Eastern Washington section of SWE was chartered as well. So I happened to be here during that charter. So for all intents and purposes, I’m a charter member of the current section. The Health Physics Society—in both organizations, I have been active throughout my life, both locally, regionally, and at the national level. I was inducted as a fellow of the Society of Women Engineers a few years ago. And I’ve served as—on the nominating committee and a couple of the other national committees for that organization. The American Nuclear Society—I’ve held all of the local offices and still remain in the position of—I’m called the historian. It’s kind of an honorific sort of thing. But I’m still very active in the local ANS section. I’ve chaired the National Environmental Sciences division for ANS. And I’ve received the national award for public information from ANS, along with a couple of other accolades of one type or another. The Health Physics Society, I’ve never belonged to the national organization, but stay closely connected to the membership and to the local Columbia chapter of Health Physics. The two—the American Nuclear Society and Health Physics Society overlap each other in interests so strongly that it’s almost impossible to be busy in one and not busy in another. So those three organizations have been a constant in my life since the mid-‘70s.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Can you talk a bit about—I understand that you were invited to—that you’ve had your hands in both helping with the NIOSH and the EEOICPA.</p>
<p>Munn: Oh, yes.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so I was wondering if you could both tell us what those are and then kind of talk about your involvement. And I guess we’ll start with the NIOSH.</p>
<p>Munn: Okay, NIOSH I think is an acronym that I think is familiar to most people in the technical world. It’s actually the National Institute for Safety and Health that applies to everybody who works—has a workplace—in the United States. NIOSH was chosen to be the governing agency—I should say the administrative agency for a bill that was signed into law during the very latest days of the Clinton Administration. It was put together as a legislation to compensate workers in all aspects of the Department of Energy’s weapons sites during the entire period from the 1943 early activities here to the present. One thinks of the weapons complex as being the three major DOE sites: Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge. The truth of the matter is there are over 230 sites that are covered by this particular act, because there were institutions that ranged from just over a mom-and-pop shop to Bethlehem Steel that were involved in one way or another in what we term the weapons complex. PANTEX in Amarillo is a huge facility as well. The Portsmouth facility. There are—you know, it—as I said, it goes on more than 230 sites. The concept here was that there were people who had been seriously—whose health had been adversely affected by their work in these communities. And of course, there is some of that that’s true. But the real impetus of this bill was to compensate people who had cancer as a result of radiation exposures that they had suffered. Now, one needs to begin, from my perspective, by understanding that there is no evidence of a statistically significant increase in cancers in any of these populations. And yet our Congress says—states that they believe folks have been dying like flies as a result of having been exposed to the radiation that they worked in. This organization was then, in accordance with the law, put together during the first years—first two years of this century. And President George Bush was charged with the responsibility of putting together an advisory board for this group as required by law. So, that was done in 2001. Our first meeting—I was requested by the White House to be a member of that group. I accepted, and became one of the original members of the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. This is supposed to be the citizens’ advisory portion of the energy employees act with the long name to which you referred.</p>
<p>Franklin: EEOICPA?</p>
<p>Munn: Yes. Energy Employees Occupational Illness and—</p>
<p>Franklin: Compensation?</p>
<p>Munn: Compensation Act, right?</p>
<p>Franklin: Something like that, yeah. We missed the P, but—</p>
<p>Munn: Yeah, that’s—I’m not sure. That activity has gone on now from that time to the present. I’ve been a member of it during that entire time. It has now distributed more than 13 billion, with a B, dollars to people across the United States who have a situation where they both have cancer and they also have worked at one of the complexes for more than 250 days. And this is not the appropriate place for me to state my real concerns about that. But I do not believe that this is a reasonable approach. The local newspapers are—I shouldn’t say newspapers—the local newspaper is a member of a national newspaper chain. And that newspaper chain just last year or the year before ran a series of articles about this particular action with a great deal of really, really heartrending material about people’s lives that have been ravaged by cancer. And there’s no way one can shortchange that. But I take issue with the assertion that those things are a result of workplace when there’s no evidence to show that’s the case. Nevertheless, that’s a continuing concern, and one of the frightening things that people continue to say over and over again with respect to our technology.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War and afterwards?</p>
<p>Munn: It was, I like to remind people, a cold war. The purpose of all that was the assumption that if you work from a position of absolute strength, that you can deter the use of the weapons that we don’t want to use by someone else. And that if we’re assured, ourselves, we’re not going to be first strikers, then it gives us a feeling of protecting ourselves by being strong. That is a reality of the time in which we live. It can be changed in a number of ways. And politically, probably will morph into other things continually throughout human history for as long as human history continues. But being here during that time, was—would seem frightening to many people. It was never frightening to me; quite to the contrary, it was interesting in the extreme. But you must bear in mind that I actually was not involved in the nuclear proliferation issues. Quite to the contrary, the technology that I was dealing with was utilizing plutonium—we used mixed oxide fuels—was utilizing plutonium as a fuel to create electricity and to make nuclear isotopes—medical isotopes. And it used the plutonium and the other weapons materials as a fuel to create energy that we needed domestically and at the same time generate more fuel that can be used to continue to generate electricity ad infinitum. That seems like pie in the sky to so many people, but it is not pie in the sky. It’s a technology over which we have control, and we can do it. So, the way the weapons program is viewed is not something I can truly address appropriately, simply because that wasn’t a part of my life. I didn’t—I wasn’t horrified by it. I felt that it was a necessary part of the historic time in which we were living. I agree that we’ve done a good job of ramping that down in terms of nuclear arsenals. But the concept of not maintaining strength in that regard is extremely unwise to me. Being in Richland is living in a cocoon. It’s very much like living in an advanced university community. The people with whom you interact and the things about which you talk, the way your lives are lived is connected to, but not the same as, what transpires outside the cocoon. Because it is so densely populated with people and with ideas that are concentrated on a limited number of activities. So I’ve never felt anything but extremely safe in Richland. I have a hard time getting my mind around the fears that we—in my efforts to provide information to folks, I’m continually running across people like educators and physicians, especially in the Seattle area and in the heavy-population corridor on the west side of the state who are fearful of driving down Highway 240, for absolutely no reason except that they think there’s a mysterious ray of some kind that reaches us all. And they can’t understand what I’m talking about when I say, hey, the heaviest radiation you’re getting is—you’re absolutely right, it’s from the biggest reactor. We can’t control it; it’s completely out of our hands. You call it the Sun; I just call it a great big reactor. Yeah, that’s where you’re getting your radiation. Whether you’re driving down the highway that surrounds the Site, or whether you’re on the beach in Waikiki. It doesn’t really and truly matter. You’re being irradiated.</p>
<p>Franklin: Or if you fly on a plane, right, you’re exposed to higher background—</p>
<p>Munn: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Munn: If you live in Denver, hey. Or I can move from Richland to Spokane and almost double my external exposure. Because we have very low exposure here in Richland, contrary to popular belief. But the sad thing about this entire time, from my perspective, is the facts don’t matter. What people feel in their gut matters. That’s what’s driving us as human beings; apparently, it always has. Living here is a true experience. I’ve enjoyed it. I’m always surprised when people say there’s nothing to do in Richland. My problem is—probably because I’m continually invested in technical activities of some sort—my problem is, I don’t have enough time on my calendar. But it’s true. It’s an interesting, interesting place to live for a technical person, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. It’s been a fascinating period of life. I’m very fortunate to have lived to be an ancient old lady. Very long in the tooth. And unfortunate that so many of my colleagues have already gone to their reward. Many of us feel highly rewarded, however, for having been here, having been a part of history. I have no feel for how much of this history is going to be written and how much of it’s going to be accurate. We all know, history’s written by the people who write history. And that’s very rarely the technical folks. So, what you’re doing with these oral histories, in my mind, is exceedingly important, not just to the technical community, but I think it’s very important for us now and in the future to hear the actual words of the people who were there. Remember the old—you may be too young to remember the <em>You Are There</em> little snippets of history that we used to get in the movie houses from time to time, and later on television. It’s nice, I think, to see the folks who were there, hear their words, and get some feel of the perception they had of their reality. It’s been a great ride, all the way from Model As to joint activities and the space crafts.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, Wanda, thank you so much for such an enlightening and well-delivered interview. I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>Munn: Thank you. It’s been a wonderful, wonderful time to be here. Appreciate you, appreciate what Washington State University, and the national system are doing. It’s been a delight. And thank you to the long-gone Westinghouse Hanford Company. That was—and the Fast Flux Test Facility was and will always be an outstanding member of the research and development community. A facility like no other. We were very honored to be a part of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much.</p>
<p>Munn: Thank you.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/RXmA9oJF9IU">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Duration
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01:35:43
Bit Rate/Frequency
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317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
B Reactor
K Basins
K Reactor
T Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
late 1970s-today
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1980-1995
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Minta
Admiral Grace Hopper
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
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Interview with Wanda Munn
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Wanda Munn 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
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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11-02-2016
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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.
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
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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
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<a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/24">Wanda Munn, Oral History Metadata</a>
300 Area
Atomic Energy Commission
B Reactor
B Reactor Museum Association
Bechtel
BRMA
Cold War
Department of Energy
Flood
Floods
Hanford
K Basin
K Basins
K Reactor
K-Basin
K-Basins
Manhattan Project
Mountain
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Park
River
Safety
Savannah River
supplies
T Plant
War
Westinghouse
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe569ea39d2b6ee7a52c2712dfe05f0ad.JPG
eb77089662d22082b1f797feab5fac35
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Title
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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
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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
Keith Klein
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Tom Hungate: Rolling.</p>
<p>Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Keith Klein on February 7<sup>th</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Keith about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Keith Klein: Keith Klein. K-L-E-I-N.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And K-E-I-T-H?</p>
<p>Klein: K-E-I-T-H, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, great. Tell me how and why you came to work at the Hanford Site.</p>
<p>Klein: Well, I suppose it started as—born in the early ‘50s, and at that time, atomic energy was the stuff of comic books and intrigue and power. It was, you know—whenever the planet was threatened by alien beings, they’d always convene a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission. So I think in the back of my mind, I always had an inkling that I’d end up somehow dealing with atomic energy. The path that got me here was actually as an Atomic Energy Commission intern in the early ‘70s. One of my assignments as an intern was out here doing FFTF construction, I think in ’73. After that, a series of assignments, most back at headquarters dealing with all aspects of the fuel cycle. Mid ‘90s, I was dispatched to Rocky Flats, and that’s where I gained experience dealing with plutonium and contaminated facilities and the work force and this kind of the field experiences as a deputy manager out at Rocky Flats. One of the obstacles to getting Rocky Flats cleaned up was getting rid of the transuranic waste. So I ended up getting dispatched down to Carlsbad, New Mexico for a six-month stint with the assignment of getting it open and recruiting a permanent manager. Opening WIPP had eluded a number of people and brought in lawsuits. There were a lot of different combination of technical issues, operational issues, regulatory, political, perception, communications issues—you name it. But I guess I impressed the secretary with that assignment, and next thing you know, he asked me to come out here to Richland. That was in 1999. So I came out here as a manager of the Richland Operations Office then and was here until I retired from federal service in 2007.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Just for those who might not know, could you say what WIPP stands for and what its mission was?</p>
<p>Klein: WIPP is the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, and it was the first deep geologic disposal facility in the—well, in the world, really. It’s in a geologic formation, about a half-mile under in salt beds that are several hundreds of millions of years old and have been—just their very existence shows a lack of moving water, because salt being soluble. And of course disposing of nuclear waste and particularly of things—plutonium-bearing waste, transuranic waste falls in that category. Lot of folks afraid about transportation and is it going to leak out and so forth. But the community there was actually very supportive. The scientific community was as well. But of course there was a lot of—you know, this is falling on the heels of nuclear power, a lot of opponents of nuclear power. It seemed like we’re similarly opposed to solving the waste problem. So it had some similar characteristics as the challenges being faced up here. But that was a very big deal for those of us in the nuclear waste community. It was recently shut down for some operational issues. And when it shuts down it shuts down for a few years. But it was key to emptying out this category waste called transuranic waste from sites around the country including here at Hanford and the national laboratories.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you came out in the early ‘70s as an intern for FFTF construction, what did you do?</p>
<p>Klein: Well, it was FFTF construction. Actually first assignment was dealing with electrical systems then. I was assigned to—it was a Bechtel Corporation doing work out there in the field. I was being mentored by a fellow that was actually in a responsible for the crafts, pulling wire and routing things. So you know that was all part of giving us on-the-ground experience. And this in particular was construction. Later went to a Westinghouse subsidiary that was placing the large vessels, setting the pumps and the heat exchangers and that sort of thing. It was an incredible amount of stainless steel. And quality assurance, obviously, building a reactor is very important. Had to have good records and had to know that things in fact were welded like they’re supposed to be, tested like they’re supposed to be and so forth. And it—of course—you know, then I was part of the AEC Breeder Reactor Program and I think that was what really attracted me to the Atomic Energy Commission, is the idea that a source of energy could make more fuel than it used. And it seemed environmentally benign at the time. I still happen to believe it’s one of the more benign forms of energy, but it’s obviously been beset with a number of challenges in terms of the times—and this comes back to Hanford, actually. The time it takes to do things now and the number of layers and checks and so forth. In the commercial nuclear business, time is money. And the more time it takes, the more costs. And then things getting held up in the regulatory process with interveners, it basically got priced out of the market and became uneconomical. It had also gotten very complicated at the time, and that’s another example. You start adding layers of safety and things like that, you can end up—things getting more complicated and difficult to analyze and manage and deal with. So it kind of collapsed under its own weight there for a while. But there is a new generation of reactors that are coming that are more inherently safe and simpler in a lot of respects. So I think there’s still some hope out there for sources of electrical energy that, in my mind, can be very benign.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm-hm. Thank you. So you came to RL—Richland—in ’99, then, and you were the site—the DOE site manager.</p>
<p>Klein: Correct.</p>
<p>Franklin: For the Hanford unit. Can you talk about some of the progress you made in that position, but also maybe some of the setbacks as well? Because that’s during this kind of shift into this more modern phase of cleanup, right, where most of the production and reprocessing of fuels had stopped by that point.</p>
<p>Klein: That’s a huge topic, Robert.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Klein: But it’s actually one I love to talk about because it was indeed a very daunting challenge. I understand you’ve interviewed Mike Lawrence and he signed a compliance agreement out here, the Tri-Party Agreement. But then he left and left it to others to implement that and get the work done. So he made the commitments and everyone else was kind of left holding the bag. John Wagner, I think did his best to get the ball rolling, but I think during that time there was just a lot of norming and forming and trying to figure out things. There wasn’t a whole lot of on-the-ground progress. I learned a lot at Rocky Flats and at WIPP about what it takes to get work done in these kind of environments. That included both technically and in terms of dealing with the workforce and dealing with the contracts. You know, the people that do the real work here are really contractors to DOE. And depending on how the contracts are written and things are incentivized and how much—just the whole dynamic between receiving the money—you have to go out and get the money from Congress, so you have to convince them that you have a plan, you know what you’re doing, you can deliver, that you’re investment grade. And then you have to deliver, because if you don’t, the money will dry up and lots of other problems. So giving this cleanup some focus, some momentum and just making it manageable, if you will, was one of the biggest challenges. Technically, there were two urgent risks—well, there were actually three urgent risks at the time. Of course the high-level waste that I think everybody knows about. But we had about 18 tons of plutonium-bearing materials that were unstable. These were things that when they shut down after the Cold War were left in various forms: alloys, residues, oxides, pure metal. And plutonium can be very reactive and exothermic. So it really needs to be stabilized, lest your—you have some real problems. Recall high school chemistry, you put a little sodium in the water—it’s that type of thing. So dealing with the plutonium—and again, I had the experience there with Rocky Flats—was a second urgent priority. And the third one was the spent fuel that was left in the K Basins. There were about 2,000 tons. That was about 80%, 90% of the DOE inventory that was left in the K Basins. This fuel was prone to oxidizing dissolving. And as a result of that, just deteriorating. So it was losing its integrity and creating a lot of sludge on the bottom. So even the act of moving it would create these clouds and you couldn’t see. The Site had been experimenting with different things to try to package up and dry out this—and stabilize this spent fuel so it could be stored in a dry, inert, stable, stable environment. So that was a second major challenge. And then of course there’s all this contaminated groundwater underlying the Site. Billions of gallons that had been dumped into the soil. You know, the soil here is something called a vadose zone where it’s got this dry sand and gravel mixtures and then there’s—can be basalt layers under that that are relatively impermeable, and you know, the water table that’s about where the Columbia River level is. So the center portion of the Site is built up. But long story short, waste in both liquid forms and then solid forms of waste have been buried in several hundred sites around the Hanford Site. So figuring out what we’re going to do with all those waste sites and with the contaminated groundwater was another set of challenges. And then of course there were, depending on how you count them, 700, 1,500 contaminated buildings out there that needed to be dealt with. This coupled with—right when I came, a legislation had been passed setting up a separate office of river protection to deal specifically with the high-level waste and the high-level waste tanks. So part of my job was helping to get that set up and transferred. Dick French was my counterpart dealing with that. The national lab, PNNL, was also actually under the Richland Operations Office at that time, but after a couple years it was decided similarly that the office of science—you know, it’s such a different focus that it was better off separated out. And from my standpoint, these were all good things, because there’s plenty of challenges to go around. So when I came, I guess my biggest challenges were how do you help manage, mobilize, organize efforts to get confidence that you have a plan for dealing with these things. We had these regulatory commitments, but it’s people that clean these things up. It’s not paper. You can sign anything you want; it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. So this kind of comes down to contracts, understanding the workforce, what motivates them, and basically how to enable them. So my job is one of enabling. I mean, there’s so many smart people out here, it’s intimidating. And impressive and inspiring. And given the latitude, they’ll figure out how to do things. You compare when I came here it was different than it is even now, what, 16, 18 years later. But when I came here compared to like the ‘40s, a world of difference in terms of what it took to get work done. In the ‘40s, they could learn by doing, experiment, play with things, and they didn’t have to get multi layers of permission, or—they didn’t have emails or cell phones or computers. I mean, it was slide rules and hand-written notes and so forth. Which comes back to just how amazing they were. How creative and innovative. Of course, it was under a wartime environment. But contrast that, when I came here—a lot of different regulatory structures put in place—something called the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to oversee DOE. The Atomic Energy Commission was self-regulating. And when environmental laws were passed, which has led to the Tri-Party Agreement, the Department of Energy was out of compliance with a number of these national laws, like the Resource Recovery—RCRA—and the Comprehensive Environmental Liability—CRCLA. So this compliance agreement, the Tri-Party Agreement was basically—this is how DOE was going to come into compliance with these things. Of course, there’s money that’s associated with that. DOE, like other agencies, lives on an annual budget. So you can’t get multi-year appropriations; you never really know how much you’re going to get from year to year. So to make commitments hoping you’ll get the money is part of the whole dynamic of getting work done here. But back to what it takes to get work done. It’s understanding these different laws and regulations. In my mind, I was fortunate, then, that I had good relationships back at headquarters and the trust and confidence of the leadership. So I was able to basically authorize more things on my signature based on my discretion than, certainly, what can be done today. Unfortunately with problems, you get more oversight and more second guessing and so forth. So it’s kind of success-begets-success. But in any event, my focus—and before you can clean up the buildings, you have to deal with the urgent priorities first: things that can go bump in the night. And again it comes back to the top three at the time were high-level waste and the plutonium, and the spent fuels. So the focus was really on the plutonium and spent fuel until you can get these things out of the different buildings, you can’t take down the buildings, that’s—stabilizing these things more important than—you know, the ground water was contaminated. I mean, the contamination was spreading, but you had to remove the sources, otherwise you’re continuing to feed—you can continue to clean up the groundwater, but there’s still stuff coming in, then you’re just kind of halting some progression but not really cleaning it up. So dealing with these different sources was the focus. But long story short, we had some brainstorming sessions with all the contractor heads, KEA, you know, folks that were working for me—how can we make this a simple, compelling, understandable vision? Make this, our task, more manageable? And what we came up with was basically featured three things. We came to call it the river, the plateau and the future. And said, our job is going to be to transition the central part of the Site into a long-term waste management area. The central part of the Site is where the high-level waste tanks are, the reprocessing canyons, a lot of these burial grounds. I mean, we were going to be here for a long time. And that’s also the stuff that’s farthest away from the river. So if you can sort of encapsulate and stop the hemorrhaging there, then kind of in a triage approach, then, that gives you—allows you to start cleaning up the rest. The second part was restoring the river corridor. And there the idea was to clean this up as good as is practical as we could and to make it available for other uses. So these are the reactors along the river, the other waste sites, burial grounds, the areas around the 300 Area where all the research is taking place and things like that. And the third part, the future, was—I guess I viewed this whole challenge out here as one of managing change and transition. And considering that we have 10,000 folks working out here, they need a future. It’s hard enough to ask someone to work themselves out of a job, but to work themselves out of a job without the prospect of other jobs, so—and that’s not something the DOE, the Atomic Energy Commission or others had a whole lot of experience at or are very good at. We’re a scientific and technical community. And most of us, myself included, is engineers. We go into these disciplines because we like numbers and quantities and we’re typically introverts and that sort of thing. So dealing with something as amorphous as the future is tough. But we convinced ourselves it was important and we had all these resources like the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and university systems and all these smart, talented people. There’s no reason why the things we’re learning here, lessons learned and businesses that could develop around here couldn’t be provided for a good socioeconomic environment here, too. And I think the Department of Energy and its predecessors always wanted to be a good community citizen. So just scrubbing out all the molecules but leaving this place an economic ghost town is not the right thing to do. Certainly, we want to get it as clean as we can, but you want to leave the community whole. And it comes back to the sacrifices that were made here going back to the tribes and the folks that were evicted in order to do this and the people that lost their lives helping to build the facilities and operate the facilities in the early years to produce the weapons material. Certainly the communities paid a price here. So the river, the plateau, and the future was kind of our mantra, and that’s how we organized things. Tried to fashion over the years that followed contracts that did that. But in any event, what I did was I sold—as for meeting with Doc Hastings, he was the congressman at the time. Sat down with him. I remember it very well, I was still—had become a—because of Rocky Flats and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—I had some experience dealing with elected officials and high level stuff, but it’s still intimidating. You know, it’s like, I’m a freaking engineer. So but went to him with—at his office over in Pasco and laid this out. And he liked it, and we had some very good discussions and a rapport. But he lives across the river from the 300 Area, is where his house is. So he looks down, and he can actually see a lot of these things. And of course he’s committed to the community and Hanford and he wanted to give me the best shot possible as well. And I should say, too, due to my homework before I came in here, I learned about folks like Sam Volpentest and Bob Ferguson and I went around and met them and got their ideas, perception of things, and how things work. So I think I was fortunate, had a lot of good support from different corners. Doc went to bat for us, as did the senators, for the funding. They’ve been great supporters here, appreciative of the history and the challenges that remain. We put in place contracts. I brought a contract type they used at Rocky Flats successfully that’s different than the conventional contracts that the Atomic Energy Commission was used to operating under. The traditional contracts are management and operating contracts. And in that kind of contract, it’s for a certain period of time and the contractor’s pretty much graded by how their DOE counterparts felt about how they were doing. And it was a lot of one-to-one counterparts with the contractors doing whatever DOE said at any particular time. So, it can work well when you’re in kind of a steady environment in a production mode, like churning out nuclear weapons material and operating. But at Rocky Flats what we learned is you need a lot more incentive to be creative and innovative. What worked there was having an agreement with the contractors and the contract type and the regulators about, this is the scope of work that’s going to get done, and as long as we stay within this box, basically—you know, leave us alone. And that was my philosophy in this contract that’s called a cost-plus-incentive-fee contract, CPIF, versus MNO which is a cost-plus-award fee. And the amount of money the contractor makes is tied to how well they do this tangible piece of work that you can actually see and feel. So we have an official government estimate that this is how long it should take based on our historical experience; this is how much it should cost. So every dollar you save bringing that in sooner and earlier, you get to save 30 cents on that dollar. So when you’re talking about contracts that cover, you know, five- to ten-year period, you’re talking about potentially a couple hundred million dollars in fees on the table there. Well, at Rocky Flats, what we learned is, particularly the contractors can share that with the employees, that they can get quite creative about how to do things. And they are able to learn by doing. You know, the envelope is a safety envelope; you can’t do anything unless you know it’s safe. So that’s where we focused our attention, is making sure we had a good safety basis and watching that through facility reps and other things. But basically, not trying to micromanage or giving them the freedom, as much as we could, to do things. And having a very good scope. So that’s what we put around the river corridor contract. The idea there is we’re going to blitz the river corridor. And we need this tangible progress, too, to further build confidence that we can do this. Of course, you can’t demolish buildings and excavate sites unless you’ve got something to do with the waste that’s coming out. So that comes back to things like ERDF and the different disposal grounds in the middle of the site—the energy—Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility—huge facility in the center of the site. So this whole thing becomes a huge chess game of sorts where the different pieces are the money and the contracts and the people and the labor agreements and the different technical pieces that have to fall in sequence before you can do things. And in some way, the icing on the cake is actually taking down the buildings. Because by that time, you’ve had to take the materials out. And you can’t take the materials out unless there’s something you can do with them. So whether there’s plutonium and having the equipment in place to stabilize them and then package it and put it somewhere. That’s basically the plan we had: the river, the plateau and the future. And I think the results, I’m pretty proud, speak for themselves. We packaged up all that spent fuel, got it off the river, from out of the K Reactors into the central part of the plateau. We got all the plutonium stabilized. And that ended up being able to—my successor able to ship that actually offsite to Savannah River. And put in place the river corridor contract, which I think has been pretty widely acclaimed and recognized as being successful. And it meant a lot of good things are happening. The folks dealing with high-level waste and the Waste Treatment Plant I think have had some different kinds of challenges and still dealing with a lot of that. But I think you see excellent progress on the rest of the Site.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was wondering if you could speak about the challenge of vitrification as a—I mean, it’s a proposed way to isolate and deal with the waste and it’s been successful at other sites, but seems to have hit snags at Hanford.</p>
<p>Klein: Well, this was not my territory.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Klein: I know a fair amount about it, so I’m tempted to give you opinion. But I did not have responsibility for that, and so—Kevin Smith is the current Office of River Protection manager and he’d be a better one to talk to about that. But vitrification in general was a form preferred by the state and others for stabilizing some components of the waste out there that’s very highly radioactive. It’s interesting—back in the day, some of the components in these tanks that generate the most heat are strontium and cesium: fission products, versus the actinides. The actinides being plutonium, uranium, those type of things. And there’s not a whole lot of that in this high-level waste. But in the old days, they started taking out the cesium and the strontium so the tanks weren’t generating as much heat so they could put more waste in. And we put—before my time, they put the strontium and cesium into capsules. And they’re stored in a water pool up—attached to one of their processing facilities and that was under my purview. Now the process moving that to dry storage. And I only say that because, you know, in my mind, there are alternative forms for managing these different wastes that they can be used. And with fission products, 30-year half-life, rule of thumb is if ten half-lives—these things reduce to a millionth their radioactivity or less, 10<sup>-6</sup>, and basically are innocuous at that time. So thirty years, half-life of ten years, that’s 300 years. In geologic time, that’s nothing. So do you really need geologic disposal for things with fission products with 30-year half-lifes? And if you don’t need geologic disposal, do you really need to vitrify the wastes and put them into these glass waste forms? I mean, basically what’s attractive about glass is it’s not as susceptible to dissolution and water and dissolving. So things can stay pretty much contained, is the thought. But even these high-level waste logs, they’re just going into dry storage anyway. You know, I’m a proponent, I guess, for a lot of these different wastes, that dry storage, I think, is the most economical, efficient, and—I think there’s a reasonable chance our civilization will stay intact for 300 years. You can put these things in dry storage casks and things like that, they’re basically tamper-proof and they cool themselves. It’s just keeping people away from them. I mean, I can talk more about vitrification if you really want, but like I said, it’s really not my bailiwick.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, that’s fine. So you said your three major challenges were dealing with high-level waste, dealing with unstable plutonium-bearing materials and then the spent fuel.</p>
<p>Klein: High-level waste was assigned to the separate office, so that really wasn’t my—</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, so—</p>
<p>Klein: --biggest challenge. So it was plutonium and the spent fuel were the two urgent priorities. But the third is really getting on with the cleanup and giving the whole cleanup some momentum and direction and some legs.</p>
<p>Franklin: What do you see as the future of Hanford? Because the focuses of the river, the plateau and the future. And the river and plateau seem to have these concrete goals applied to them. The future does seem harder to diagnose or kind of see, because eventually there is an idea that cleanup will be performed. And then so what do you think the future of the Tri-Cities holds after the danger’s mitigated?</p>
<p>Klein: Science, technology, engineering and math. I think this is, at its heart, a STEM community. And I think that we are very well-suited to grow that identity. We have a great STEM education that’s getting recognized nationwide [UNKNOWN] leading that. We have, I think, STEM employment opportunities. One of the things—my interests after retiring is running something called Executive Director Tri-Cities Local Business Association. And it’s looking at helping build local businesses with a high-tech nature that can help accommodate transition of employees. I’ve been active in promoting provisions in the DOE subcontracts that encourage the prime contractors to contract out more and better pieces of work to companies. So, I mean, I think there’s always been a good support for small businesses, but oftentimes that can be for janitorial supplies or this little thing, that little thing. There’s basically a huge workforce embedded—we call it in the fence—that does a lot of these other things. I’d like to see more, bigger, better chunks of that work able to go to local businesses that can then use that to develop their resumes. I mean, they’re highly incentivized to perform if—one, this is their backyard, their neighbors; two, you don’t get invited back to the party if you don’t do well. And they’re small and they’re very manageable. I think it would be very efficient. We have a number of examples of companies that have grown out of Hanford business or out of PNNL inventions or the expertise that people develop here that’s applicable to environmental challenges around the globe. So I think capitalizing on the lab and its high-tech things they do. We have BSEL right here and WSU Tri-Cities is a good example of kind of the collaborations. But PNNL is in a number of different sectors, and so the leveraging that more to help grow STEM businesses, employment opportunities, research opportunities I think is good. You’ve got the viticulture and the science of wines that is, I think, grown appreciation. Tourism, things like the Manhattan National Park, where people will come and see and appreciate the remarkable things that were done here. And the consequences, good and bad. But I mean it’s just—the stories to be told, people come here from around the world, I think, to see firsthand B Reactor and learn more about what that meant, what it took to get there. You’ve got the Reach National Monument, you have Ice Age Floods. There’s even STEM tourism. So you’ve got STEM education, STEM employment, STEM entrepreneurship. STEM tourism, I think, could really change—when people think of Hanford, instead of a stigma and high-level waste, oh my god, and the images that are conjured up there, I think are somewhat overblown. But instead of that, thinking of Hanford as science, technology, energy and math. This is the place to come to start a business, to get experience, to find good, smart people. I think it would do a good service for the community. And I think the national park would be one of the crown jewels in terms of STEM identity.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Speaking of high-level waste, has most of the danger been mitigated, to your knowledge, of the waste that’s out onsite? Or where—yeah, that’s my question.</p>
<p>Klein: The urgent risks have. I think, for the most part, the High Level Waste Tank have been interim stabilized, which means they’re—most of the things that are a threat of getting out and leaking, they basically got as much water, liquids, out of them as is possible in the single-shelled tanks. Leaks there, without a source of water, something to drive it further down into the water column or out, is mitigated. Double-shelled tanks are getting old and, of course, that’s a—had some leaks there. But even there, they’re double-shelled, so you can detect it and they can be emptied. Of course running out of space there. But the problem with nuclear waste, again, is until you know what you’re going to do with it, you can end up just moving it around. So the idea is you really need to put it in a better form and move it to someplace where it can be more easily managed or basically almost be semi-maintenance-free. We put a lot of stock into deep geologic repository, Yucca Mountain, that’s what we need to manage this high-level waste. But as I said before, I think, a lot of these can be managed quite safely for as long as may be necessary in dry storage still. So in terms of urgent risks, I think they’ve been for the most—mitigated. Now we’re dealing with more chronic, the longer-term risks and there, I think it’s a matter of being smart and getting a more productive. I think the red tape and the bureaucracy and the second-guessing, it’s almost become like a spectator sport with all the different oversight agencies and folks that are from King 5 over on the west side that seems to—and others, they’re really just focused on I’d say the things that can scare people or that might reflect badly on here but without appreciating it, I guess. I mean, there’s—yeah, there’s some mistakes that have been made, are being made, but the bulk of the people here that are good-hearted, well-intentioned, hard-working—you know, we live here, we drink the water here. If something was acutely dangerous, we’d know and we’d be able to deal with it. So I think things here are a lot safer than we appreciate.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you find that, in general, the public is misinformed about both the nuclear materials production process but also the waste and the dangers of nuclear waste?</p>
<p>Klein: I would say, for the most part, the general public is apathetic about it. That there are segments of the public, the media, and others that—with different agendas, whether it be attention or profit or others, that put their own slant on it. But I think that with each new generation of people and understanding the atom that things are getting better. With radiation, you can measure it. It’s very easily detectable. Unlike gasses and chemicals and other things. We as a society put up, well, what are you going to do with the waste? Well, you look at the volumes of waste that are being involved and so forth, it’s really small. But we don’t seem to ask that same question about carbon dioxide and some of these others, yet we’re perfectly content to continue driving our cars and so forth. So I think there is a lack of perspective on these things. In some ways, it’s—the attention to them is important because they’re not going to just go away on their own. I mean, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done and we need to have the resources to do it, and it’s kind of the squeaky wheel gets greased when it comes to budget things. But on the other hand, those things can get out of hand. So I don’t know what the public thinks, but I do have—[LAUGHTER]—I guess I’m an optimist at heart and think that each generation, like I said, is going to be smarter about—you know, what are the real hazards of these things and what really makes sense in terms of dealing with it? But one of my concerns is the less productive, the more inefficient we become: people with hands-on experience are retiring or dying. We can’t afford to lose that expertise. So I’m very much in favor of getting on with these things while we have these people around that know their way around and can deal with these things. Otherwise, we’re going to be wringing our hands and analyzing everything to death and actually doing less work. So that’s one of my biggest fears about all this stuff getting stretched out and prolonged.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you were—it was eight years you were head of—for eight years you were head of DOE RL. How did you deal with the critics? Hanford detractors or critics of the cleanup operation. Were there protests in Richland? I know Mike Lawrence talked about protests, and I’m wondering if you—how did you deal with either the protests or media scrutiny of Hanford?</p>
<p>Klein: You have to develop a thick skin. I mean, it still hurts. You feel it personally, you feel a disservice to all the folks that are working out here, putting their heart and soul into this. They get maligned so easily. How do you deal with it? It grates on you. It just kind of contributes to the stress. But it’s like, we’re all people with feelings and it’s—but the media typically focus on what’s going wrong and what’s sexy or what’s—get people’s attention, either sell viewership, readership, whatever. It just comes with the territory.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. Thank you. Do you—you mentioned something pretty interesting a few minutes ago and I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on it. I understand that you probably don’t have an intimate—you might not have an intimate knowledge of the oil and gas industry, but do you feel that the nuclear industry has more unfair restrictions on it than oil and gas does in terms of energy production? Because you mentioned that oil and gas production, people don’t think about their emissions from their car the same way they kind of get this emotional response to nuclear energy. And certainly oil and gas producers don’t have to plan for 50, 100, 3,000 years into the future for the byproducts of the product they sell. I’m wondering if you could ruminate on that a bit more, or if you feel like there’s an undue burden on the nuclear power industry that’s not on other forms of energy.</p>
<p>Klein: I do think it has suffered unfairly for a number of reasons. Some of which I touched on before. I mean, I’m all for renewables, but I think they can only go so far. And it’s about the economics. I think the strength of our country is a lot about our economy. If you have cheap natural gas or—you know, the regulations on coal don’t take into account the cost of these different emissions, whether it’s CO2 or others, then I think those penalize the alternatives. Things like solar and wind have gotten tax breaks and different credits that I think have helped them come to market. Now you can get very inexpensive solar cells and things. And like I said, I’m all for using those where it makes sense. But from my standpoint, I think there’s still a need for some baseload. I think regionally distributed baseload, like small modular reactors, makes tremendous sense. So that you don’t have these vulnerable interconnected, largescale grids, but local communities could live on that, I think. In some areas of the world, they’re able to use the bypass, the residual heat, for steam, home heating and others. So I think, you look into the future, I think there could still be a very useful role for clean, safe, nuclear power without it being stymied by what about the nuclear waste? I think that can all be managed very well. So for future generations, I think—reducing dependence on fossil fuels and making the renewables—and I would consider nuclear power a renewable source—there’s lots of energy in those big atoms. It can and should be economical.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Klein: If we get out of the way.</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I’d like to switch topics to the historic preservation angle of your work. And I’d like you to talk about your involvement with preservation and saving of B Reactor from—and where you started. I know it was originally scheduled to be remediated and that was postponed and then eventually, I think due to pressure from B Reactor Museum Association and other groups, it gained a different kind of status, landmark status and things. I was wondering if you could talk about your role in that effort.</p>
<p>Klein: Well, you know, nine different reactors operating here along the Columbia River—really, nowhere else in the world is it like that. B Reactor being the first large industrial scale reactor in the world. The DOE office, back under the Office of Environmental Management. And their job is to clean up. DOE does have an historian. So you have a bureaucracy that’s basically goal in life is to remediate these sites and facilities and get the liabilities down, the mortgages down and so forth. There’s a lot of pressure to do that. We’re on a course of cocooning these various reactors, putting them into cheap-to-keep mode where basically you’ve removed all the ancillary facilities and reduced it down to a core building and sealed that up and basically [UNKNOWN] that went through all the regulatory processes. If we seal these up, put these into a mode that’s good for 50, 70 years, keep the critters and people out, and have monitors in it and then we’ll come back and the radiation levels will further decayed by then. And we can dispose of these, finally—these graphite blocks and cores. So we’re on a roll in terms of cocooning these reactors. But the—I guess the people—and you can’t help but work at these sites or go out to these facilities and not be in awe of the magnitude of what was accomplished out here from an engineering and scientific standpoint. I mean, to me, it was just remarkable and first time I went out to B Reactor, it—like most people, as nuclear engineers, it’s kind of like Mecca. It strikes you and it just—really, it just hits a chord emotionally. And certainly the folks at BRMA, the B Reactor Museum Association, and others felt—knew that. I think they were instrumental in raising some community consciousness about it. I had a person on my staff, Colleen French, who is now running the national park, who is communications, and she and I, basically, strategized as to how can we stop this freight train from running over B Reactor, considering that I had a mandate to proceed, basically, and cocoon it like the others. Folks on my staff, to be honest with you, were split. There were some people that saw it as an asset and others not—it’s a liability. Come on, get on with it. I lean towards the wanting to preserve it, and I guess, feel guilty almost taking it down. So Colleen and I strategized as to, how do we give this the best shot possible? So we went back and met with the DOE historian and talked to some others, and basically were able to prepare some memorandum decisions that said that at a minimum, we should give this more time and think this out. At a maximum, we should just bite the bullet and preserve it and do what we can and try to be careful. I mean, you can only spend money for things that—it’s government money. DOE goes to Congress, it’s appropriation and it’s money to x, y, and z. It’s illegal to use it for r, s, and—you know. It’s for this purpose and this purpose only. So it started with, I guess, working with the DOE system and other laws and rules that say, you know, under preservation—there are some preservation responsibilities and others and exploiting those to create room to keep it open until folks could get a better sense of, in general, just the role of the Manhattan Project in history and DOE’s role in preserving that, and working with other institutions, the Park Service and others to formalize that. And of course Park Service is struggling with their own—they don’t have enough money to take care of things they already have. So you get into that whole realm of things. But at least we were able to stop the bulldozers, if you will, or the momentum—the cocooning momentum, at least for B Reactor. Potentially with even T Plant and some other things. And I really give Colleen a lot of credit with how hard she worked, too, to help us put together that strategy and create that opening or stay of execution. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you encounter resistance in Washington, DC for—</p>
<p>Klein: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: --for this idea? How did you overcome that, to help to show people the value of this?</p>
<p>Klein: Well, I guess, fortunately, I had enough—what—backing and credit or chits that I could dissent, disagree with my management agreeably and get things elevated to a higher level. So it was, I think, agree to disagree. And I credit with my management back in DC in the Office of Environmental Management with how they dealt with it too. And letting higher powers basically decide this, with the help of the historian and others. And I think that’s—you know, the other thing that I did is I listened to Skip Gosling. Clay Sell was the deputy secretary at the time. He was a history buff.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you say at the time, which—what time was this?</p>
<p>Klein: This was at the time when we were struggling with, how do we legitimize preserving B Reactor?</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you know around what year or years this would have been?</p>
<p>Klein: I’m going to guess it was 2003, 2004 timeframe.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Sorry to interrupt.</p>
<p>Klein: Yeah, no, I just—so much of this is a blur in terms of who was where when. You start dealing with DC, it’s like—[LAUGHTER]—all look alike after a while. You know, I can come at it from different angles, Republicans, Democrats, you know, different folks’ emphasis and so forth. So I’m having a hard time recalling who exactly that was. But I remember Clay Sell and I can easily get back to you on when that was.</p>
<p>Franklin: It’s okay. I was just trying to get a general sense. So you said Skip Gosling?</p>
<p>Klein: Skip Gosling was the historian that we were working with. Clay Sell was the Deputy Secretary of Energy that was a history buff and who, I think, just, in the end, prevailed and was a decision-maker that enabled preserving this and working with Park Service. Colleen and I had a few different trips back to DC talking to these people and encouraging them—I hesitate to use the word lobbying, because it means something very, very particular, and we weren’t lobbying Congress; it was really within the Department. Although we had, certainly, allies, I think, with Patty Murray and Doc Hastings and others who, again, appreciated the Hanford history and what was done here and its significance.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did the Hanford collection—the array of historic objects and artifacts gathered from Site—was that part of your—what you were in charge of when you were heading the DOE or was that a different—</p>
<p>Klein: No, it was—I mean, that was under my purview. And we certainly had staff. But I must confess that of all the alligators that were surrounding the boat, that was the least of my—it wasn’t high up. I mean, that wasn’t—just too many other things were chomping at me and having to deal with. But I always felt comfortable—I mean, when you get in these positions, you kind of look at what your people are doing and you trust them in doing the right thing and you try to set a tone and direction and values and that sort of thing. So I was very fortunate—we have a very competent staff in environmental analysis and preservation, conservation. Paid attention to the different rules and governing those things. And they took care of it. They were, I think, good stewards.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. How did you become involved with the REACH Museum?</p>
<p>Klein: Ah! At first it was as an ex oficio member of—it was called the REACH Board at the time. I think Colleen actually suggested it to me and them and set that up. I mean, it was an easy fit for me. As long as I was with DOE, I couldn’t be an actual member of the board. So the job was more of advisory and helping them. Of course, by that time, I think my feelings were well known that I did have a soft spot for appreciating the heritage here. Even predating the Manhattan Project, going back to the basalt flows and then the Ice Age Floods. There’s something very special and unique about this area, both the land and the people. And it’s those circumstances and things that gave rise to—I mean, the geology and the setting here is what gave rise to this being a great location for the Manhattan Project and the plutonium production mission. Which in turn brought all these incredible people here and formed a national laboratory that’s self-sustaining and a wonderful thing in its own right. And now lands are getting turned over to the port and being made available for other uses. I think it opens up opportunities for the tribes. But anyway, so the REACH was an easy fit for me to get involved in. And I’m proud to say I’m still—now I’m one what’s called the Foundation. It’s how the management structure of the REACH is set up. But they’ve overcome some very big hurdles. But I think the fact they have is—it’s meant to be, and it’s going to grow and prosper. But we still have some heavy lifts.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Is there—sorry. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? Or just Hanford in general?</p>
<p>Klein: I guess I’d like future generations to appreciate both the sacrifice and the significance of what happened here. That goes back to the tribes and what they sacrificed to what the early settlers that were evicted sacrificed, what the men and women involved in the construction, design, that relocated out here sacrificed, and the significance being with what was done. I’m still in awe. B Reactor up and running from nothing to up and running in 18 months, come on! I mean, it’s just—without computers and slide rules. These were adventurers, technologically, engineering, scientifically, and even management-wise. People come together. And at the same time, this is all under—because of threat of war. And creating something where people came and did this remarkable thing and have it used to kill people. There’s so many conflicting things about this to be learned so we don’t repeat the lessons of the past, yet showing what we’re capable of doing when we do come together with enough motivation and incentive and liberties. It’s just remarkable. So it’s a tough one to answer, what do you want people to remember? I just hope they appreciate the whole thing. The sacrifice and the significance.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention?</p>
<p>Klein: I feel drained. [LAUGHTER] If there’s something in particular that you’re interested in. Yeah, no, I just feel like I’ve been spouting out all over the place here.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, it was great. You really touched on a lot of really pertinent topics and it’s really nice to have your interview next to Mike Lawrence—you know, just this kind of documenting this post-production change. I think it’ll be really crucial to help people figure out—this is all part of the same story, and how people figure out, okay, what happened when that singular mission was kind of over, and how did this place kind of find its identity after that, that the whole mission had changed. So thank you. And thank you for talking to us today.</p>
<p>Klein: Well, I’m just—it comes back, like the STEM identity. I’m just hoping and optimistic that we can have a future that’s as distinctive and worthy as the significance of our predecessors did out here. Because it really changed the world, when you—it really is mind-blowing in a lot of respects. I’m just grateful to have the opportunity to be a little part of that continuum. Yeah, the fastest eight years of my life. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, thank you, Keith. I really appreciate it.</p>
<p>Klein: Yeah, you bet, Robert.<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/MAy7K26aMgY">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:09:55
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
FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility)
WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Project)
K Basins
PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
ERDF (Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility)
K Reactors
ORP (Office of River Protection)
B Reactor
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1970-
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1973-
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Sam Volpentest
Bob Ferguson
Kevin Smith
Skip Gosling
Patty Murray
Doc Hastings
Mike Lawrence
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 Keith Klein
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Klein first moved to Richland, Washington in 1973. Keith worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and later the U.S. Department of Energy from 1970-2007.
An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
02-07-17
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
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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
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Rocky Flats (Colo.)
Carlsbad (N.M.)
Breeder reactors
Radioactive waste disposal
Radioactive waste sites
Hazardous waste site remediation
Columbia River
300 Area
Atomic Energy Commission
B Reactor
B Reactor Museum Association
Bechtel
BRMA
Cold War
Department of Energy
Flood
Floods
Hanford
K Basin
K Basins
K Reactor
K-Basin
K-Basins
Manhattan Project
Mountain
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Park
River
Safety
Savannah River
supplies
T Plant
War
Westinghouse
-
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8c6a9bb1b96c15e52e5e257665176a13
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0f2c69c8057ad2de89bc821a77371c1e.mp4
a98291ac678ac0e576af292cdf1abeae
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
Danny Henry
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
220 kbps
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX133128238">
<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><strong><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Northwest Public Television | </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">Henry_Danny</span></span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span></strong></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">My name is Danny Henry. Spelling is D-A-N-N-Y. Mid</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">dle initial is R for Ray, R-A-Y</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, Henry, </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">H</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">-E-N-R-Y.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: All right. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Tha</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nk you. And my name's Robert Bau</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">man, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">State University</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Tri-Cities on July 2</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="NormalTextRun SCX133128238">nd</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> of 2014. So let's start maybe by talking about how and when your family first</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">came to the Tri-Cities. When that was, and why they came.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Okay. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Actually, my father first of all came to the Tri-Cities. And he came to the Tri-Cities</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> I believe it was somewhere</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">around '48. It was in the mid or late 40s. And he actually came out from the South, from Arkansas</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Atkins,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Arkansas, Polk County. And he was married to my mom at that time, but she stayed back in the South, and he</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">came out to work for the government during the war effort. And he worked out here for some period of time. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">don't know how long, but he liked it out here. And so once his mission was </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">done, he went back to the South. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nd</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">then later years, came back out and found work with the railroad. And then eventually he started working</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">construction.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And he became a laborer, and worked construction. Then he came back ou</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">t to the site, and worked at N R</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">for some period of </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">time. And I can even remember back in the 60s when John Fitzgerald Kennedy came out here,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> the P</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">resident</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, to give a speech about the N R</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eactor. I was a kid. I think I was probably about seven or eight years</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">old, maybe 10, somewhere around there. And then he decided to stay out here. When he came back out to the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Northwest, back out to Washington, decided to stay out here and got work, and then sent for my mom, and she</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">came out. And so they made a life and stayed on.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Hm. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Do you know how he originally heard about Hanford? It's a long way from Arkansas.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">My understanding from my older brother, which is 20 years older than me, he said that he actually received</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">direction from the government, or allowance from the government, and received gas credit, or chips, or whatever,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">in order to drive out and to show up at the Hanford site at some designated time. And so him and another one of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">his friends both drove out, and they went to work out here during in the 40s.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">S</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">o he was recruited in some way or something, right?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yes. Yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So then you were born in the Tri-Cities?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yes, I was born in Pasco, Washington in 1953, May 7, 1953. And I graduated Pasco High School, went on to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">college, and graduated from Evergreen State College, and then returned back here to the Tri-Cities and found</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">employment out at Hanford. First of all, it was with Rockwell, and with the fire department. I'll back up a little bit.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">During the summer of when I was in high school, two summers, I did work out for J.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">A. Jones at that time in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">300 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rea, and I actually </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">worked as a printer, or learned—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">as a summer job, and learned how to print on these old,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">offset printers. And did that for two summers. And so</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> when—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually I had graduated from college and came back.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">While I was at college, I did receive an emergency medical technician certificate through the State of Washington,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> and so it was a good </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">shoo-in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> to go to work for the fire department as a firefighter. So let's see. It was Chief Good</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">at that time who hired me. And at that time there was only a few that had EMT certifications. And Chief Good had</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">told me that there was no intention at that time to actually have the fire department respond for emergency care.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">They ha</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">d always call</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ed</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> the Richl</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and fire department, or Kadlec</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, or some other emergency services. And so I didn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">really see a whole bunch of future in staying there at the fire department. So I heard that they were hiring down at</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> N R</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eactor for reactor operators, and the pay was a bit better. So I thought that would be a challenge. And so I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">applied.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so you got a job there, then?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah. I started working</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> at N R</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eactor, I believe it was late 1978, and went into the reactor operator program, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eventually</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">w</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ell,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> started in the fuels department, and then had the opportunity to get into the certification</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">prog</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ram for the control room. And </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">decided I would take on the challenge. There was a lot talk back and forth</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">with the other operators. Some was pro and some was con. No, it's not really better to work in the control room.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">It's better to work in fuels. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">But I </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">seen</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> a challenge of being able to actually operate a reactor. And I really wanted that certification. And so I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">did go in the certification program. And afte</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">r, I think, two years, two and a half</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> years</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> think the class started out, I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">think it was like 24, 26. And the final certified reactor operators, I think there was six of us. I could probably name</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">them. Yeah. And all the other operators dropped out, and they went back to fuels, or </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">they got into the trades, or</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">just left the company. But I stayed on and was certified. It was very, very challenging, very hard.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Right. And s</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">o how long was that training program</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> again</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">The training program, I think it was about a year and a half, two years. With all of the qualifications, you had to be</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">trained on all the different systems. You had to get checked out by the senior operators, and they would ask you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">questions, and make sure you were proficient in every one of those before you got the sign-off. So you had to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">complete all of that, as well as take tests, periodic tests, on the systems. And when you had finished all your actual</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">qualifications, then you were allowed to take the eight-hour exam.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Oh, okay. Hm.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so once I had finished up mine, there was testing. And I took the eight-hour exam, and passed the eight-hour</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">exam. I think I probably took about 10 hours to finish it, but that was fine. And passed the exam. And from there,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">you were then allowed to do a walk through, where a senior trainer would take you out into the facility, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">basically ask you anything he wanted to, all the way from the front face, to the rear face, to </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">confinement valves, to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the emergency cooling system, and anything in components or valves, and circuitry, and all of that. And I passed</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that, and did quite well.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I spent a lot of time actually</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">when I was an operator, the duties primarily was laundry, because there was a lot of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">SWPs, or radioactive clothing that was used. So someone always had to maintain laundry. And then also some of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the duties was housekeeping. Some of the duties was actually patrol, where actually you went through the reactor,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and made sure all of the outside systems and everything was in correct alignment, and there wasn't any out-of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">-</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">spec</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">conditions. So I spent a lot of time out in the reactor. At the time when I was out, I took it upon myself to take</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">prints with me, and actually verify and look at a lot the systems out there, so I knew them pretty well. So that was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">one of the things that really worked fo</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">r me when I did my walk-through</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. I was really ready for that. And I think I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">scored highest in my walk-through of the three tests.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">The final test was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> oral exam. And the oral exam consisted of a senior person from training, senior person from</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">operations, senior person from nuclear safety. And they all sat on your board. And I think there was one other</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> individual also, I think</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> may have been quality assurance, maybe. And basically they sit in a room like this, and you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">sit in front of a table, and they ask you questions, and you answer the questions. And they had the choice of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">asking you whatever questions they chose to, as long as it related to reactor operations, up to and including the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">electrical distribution systems that powered or brought power to the reactor, as well as the power going out, steam</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">systems, all of </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the different auxiliary systems</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> part of the plant. But anyway, I passed that exam also, the oral</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">board. And so then I was granted my certification.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">A pretty grueling process.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">It was, very much.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: And s</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">o how long were you an operator, then</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, how long did you work</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Actually, as</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> a certified operator</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I maintained my certification, I believe, for a year and a half, maybe two years.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">There was a requalification. I think it was about a year and a half. I did operate the reactor, the nuclear console,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the AA console. That probably doesn't mean anything to you, but the water systems, or the actual nuclear panel,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">where you actually pulled and maintained power, and adjusted </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">power, and also a lot of the air balance systems,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and the secondary systems, where the steam was produced and sent over to Washington State Public</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Power. We sold steam. It was a du</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">al purpose reactor. And worked</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> on all of the panels.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so before you were an operator, you worked in fuels, you said.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: So w</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">hat sort of work did that entail?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">The fuels operation</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--[COUGH] excuse me—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was actually</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the fuel that would come, that would be the spent fuel that was discharged out</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">of the rear of the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">reactor would come out,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> go down, and go what was called a trampoline, and go into the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">water, and hit this metal mesh chain type of trampoline to slow it down. These fuel elements were, I think, as I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">remember, somewhere around 50-60 pounds. So coming out of the back of the reactor, they were there pretty</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">heavy. And so then they would roll down into conveyor carts, and that's one of the duties as a fuel operator, doing</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">charge discharge. You'd basically take the fuel after it went through the cart, move it out, index it, take it out, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">then place it in various different storage compartments in the back face of the reactor, or actually in the basin,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">what was called the fuels basin. And then also</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that was the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">primary job of a fuels operator, yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: And s</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">o how long total did you work at Hanford, then?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Total time at Hanford is 35 years. I've been out here 35 years. It's been a long haul.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yeah. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so you started in the late 60s?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">'78 or '79. I believe my actual start date was 8/1/1978.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So you w</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ere there for a little while, and at</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> s</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ome point the mission shifts </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">to clean up.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Yeah, yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> How did that impact the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">sorts of things you were doing?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Well, one of the things about being</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">as an operator, is that you work shift work. And so I actually worked shift</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">work, I think, for like three years, rotating shift, A, B, C, </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">D</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">; graveyard, swings, days. So I never got used to that. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">had a family. I was just starting a family and stuff, and I wanted to be able to spend a lot more time with my kids</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and my wife on normal hours. So I looked for another job at </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, and there was an opening for actually a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">process standard engineer/</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nuclear safety engineer.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so I applied for it. I got the job, and was responsible for maintaining standards, process standards, which is</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">day-to-day operations. If there was any changes or deviations to the operations, there had to be approval. There</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was an approval process. And so I was kind of responsible for maintaining that, reviewing it, and then approving it</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">through the control room, through my management</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> in order to make any changes to reactor operations. Pretty</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">much that was that job. It was straight days. I liked that. Five days, I was off the weekends. It was great. And there</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was some other opportunities also during that time in that position.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I wanted t</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">o mention, I had a very good m</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">entor. His name was John Long, and he was the nuclear safety</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">engineer, or nuclear safety manager, manager of nuclear safety at that time. And John was very instrumental in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">assisting and helping me, and I really do appreciate his efforts. He's deceased now. But anyway, John helped me</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">quite a bit when I was in that position. There was other opportunities also. I moved from there, and became</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually went into the planning aspects of </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">outages. And so the reactor would run for so long, sometimes there was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">a planned outage, sometimes an unplanned outage. Unplanned</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> outages usually were because the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> reactor scram</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">for some reason. Maintenance had to be done, something had to be fixed or repaired.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So for the actual planned outages, I became a planner/scheduler, or took a position as a planner/scheduler, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually planned to do various different maintenance. What that consisted of was drawing out a long-term plan,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and when the reactor was down, to manage that plan, and for the systems to be fixed, repaired, coordinated for</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the least amount of time so the reactor could actually come back up and running. We were being paid. And it was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">one thing I wanted to mention about </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. There was a lot</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, a lot</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> of good spirit. The people who worked out there,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">they really knew that they were on a mission. This was during the Cold War, and we knew what we were doing,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and it was just a lot of good spirit. You know, when you'd ride the bus out</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">by the way, I rode the bus back and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">forth.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And when you'd be on the bus, and the reactor was down, and you'd get past the fire department, and you'd</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">make that last left turn, people would just kind of wake up. And they'd be looking, and they were looking to see if</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that green light goes on. There was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">on the bo</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ard, there was a green or red</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> light. And someone up front</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">would say, yeah, we're up. And it was just a lot of that kind of spirit of wanting the reactor to run. I really, really</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">liked that. So being a part of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">doing the planning and scheduling, or a position as planner/schedule was a real</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> shoo-in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> to going to work as outage manager. I then became an outage manager, where actually I managed the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">outage center.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And the outage center basically coordinated, on a daily basis, on a shift basis</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">there was six of us, and I guess</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">you could say we were kind of elite, we were very picked to run that, because it was so critical to the mission</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">your responsibilities was to make sure that things got done as scheduled, as planned,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> and that you had the craft</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> resources to do them. You coordinated with the operations folks, the fuel folks, the engineering. That was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">your job, to coordinate all those efforts. A lot of the things that happened in the plant and the repairs actually</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">required that you have engineers in place in case there was questions, technical questions, changes to paperwork</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that had to be authorized, and so on and so forth. So that was part of the job as outage</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">primary job as</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> an</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> outage</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> manager is</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> to make sure of that. And you reported directly to upper management, and sometimes DOE. So you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">were responsible on a daily basis to coordinate and have those meetings, and ensure that work got done and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">statused</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> at the end of the day.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So shortly after that, they announced that</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">or probably, I guess, maybe about six to eight months in that position--they announced that </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">after Chernobyl</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">they announced the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> would no longer be on the same</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">mission, and it was going to shut down. So I moved from there to another job. I actually left </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, and went to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rea, and worked as a nuclear safety engineer</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, over for—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I'm trying to think right now. I can remember who I worked</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">for. I worked for Arlen Shade. But actually, </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">my responsibilities was over B P</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">lant WESF. And at that time they had</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">just started to bring back the capsules that was basically sent down to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I forget exactly</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Decatur, I think. Yeah.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And anyway, these capsules, there was some problems with them. But anyway, they were bring them back. And</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">so I was right as part of that. I don't know what happened to that mission, but I served there as a nuclear safety</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">engineer with oversight responsibilities over people at WESF for a period of time. And then after that, let's see. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">almost have to look at my resume to think.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">It's really been</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">it's actually been that long. Of course you're going to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">be cutting and doing</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> clips and stuff.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> So I can just--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Oh, by the way I have a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I actually pulled this out. This was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually my certification. Wally Ruff's name over to the right there kind of faded. It must have got</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ten</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> wet.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Oh, yeah, huh.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> That's the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">original certification.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: [INAUDIBLE]</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> What's that?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--the control room on the--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't know exactly what you guys would want, but I just grabbed some stuff. This was my 30-year recognition with Fluor. I don't have a 35. I don't know. They didn't give out</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> 35-year recognition. I don't know</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">why. Let's see. Where am I? Process standards, senior outage planner, outage manager of nuclear safety,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> principal engineer. Oh! Y</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eah. Then after that there was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually, when I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">as the nuclear safety principal</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">engineer oversight o</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ver B P</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">lant WESF, there was a position that came available for a manager for OSHA</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">compliance, OSHA safety and health program.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">We had previously been benefited, let me say, with headquarters coming out, and they were called the tagger</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">team. And they basically came out to the site, and they went through the whole site, and they were doing</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">assessments. They had a very, very large group, and they assessed the site, with the effort to give feedback to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the improvements that needed to be done at Hanford. Well, part of the actions, or corrective actions, was to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">develop an OSHA type of assessment program that would look at occupational safety and health, industrial</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">hygiene, and in some aspects, I think, fire protection.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Anyway, there was a position open, and I did not have the background in occupational safety and health, but I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">talked to my manager, and talked to my manager, and finally I convinced him to put me in as a temporary</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">position, just as an acting manager. And so he went ahead and authorized that. So I then moved from the outer</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">areas down to 300 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rea, and f</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rom there, he basically said, okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, Danny, you want this position. You think you can</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> do it? He says, okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, here's a stack of resumes. You have two staff and tha</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">t's it, and a student worker. Okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, so you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">need to first of all hire and find some people that are qualified to be inspectors in occupational safety and health,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and hygiene. And then you need to have all this done, by the way, and a program developed in four months.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so that was quite a challenge. It was really a challenge. I did hire</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">went outside and hired some people, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">they were good people. We were a very good team. I didn't know about occupational safety and health, but they</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">taught me. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> knew I could hire</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> people that were smarter than me. And I actually hired</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and maybe for reference,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">one of the people was Judy Larson I don't know if she still is living. But she was a certified industrial hygienist. She</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was working for PNNL, and she transferred over. I also hired a student that</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">well, no, he actually had graduated</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">with a mechanical engineering degree, and he wanted to do fire protection. So I said if he came over I'd get him</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">trained up. And so he came over. And I also hired another individual that was an industrial hygienist</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">or two other</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">individuals, a Clinton Stewart, and the first occupational safety and health person I hired, his name was Steve</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">Norling</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. And he would be a good person to interview in the future. I would recommend that you do that.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">How do you spell the last name?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">Norling</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. N-O-R-L-I-N-G. Steve. He's a good guy. He still works PRC. I haven't seen him in a few years, but I think</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">he's still out there. But anyway, we developed a program. We put the program </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">together, hired a contractor to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually help us with the writing of the program, and we set it up. And we actually went out in the site, and first of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">all, we had to compile all of the buildings, because we were basically responsible for all of the Westinghouse</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">people, and all of their facility.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So we had to figure out all of the facilities in the whole site. And then we had to have some kind of system to figure</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">which ones we would go look at first, based upon risk. And so we developed that program, and to make a long</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">story short, the tagger team came back out to check the corrective actions on all of the site, and when they got to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">us, our program, they had no findings, absolutely no findings, zero findings. And they only had one</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">recommendation, in that we needed to involve the employees more. And so then we transitioned into the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Voluntary Protection Program</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. But that was very outstandi</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ng. And that really impressed</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> my management. So</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">then from acting manager, I was made manager of the organization, and proceeded on to continue my career.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So what time frame was this, roughly, then?</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Oh, let's see. That was May 1991 to September 1992.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Okay.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Okay.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Let's see. From there, I transitioned into basically manager</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">of safety programs assessments, which developed. And basically our mission at that point was to develop</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">baseline hazard assessment programs for facilities. And basically, for each facility that you had operations in, to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">go and do a baseline hazard of everything, both the occupational safety, industrial hygiene, the nuclear aspects of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">it, and any other types of hazards, so that for that facility, all of the known hazards of that facility would be known</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and could be communicated, and basically programs and systems set up in place to keep the workers safe.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">From September 1992 to February 1994, I worked in that position. And after that, I worked as the manager of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Voluntary Protection Program, or actually manager of Industrial Safety P</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">lanning, which consisted of managing the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Voluntary Protection Program</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> for Westinghouse and for Fluor Hanford, doing their contract transition. And of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">course the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Voluntary Protection Program</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> is still out here on the site, as you probably well know, and there's</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">different</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">but I was very instrumental in getting that program off zero.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">After that, I worked as operations engineer. I transitioned and went back out to the site, to 105 K-East and K-West.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I worked as an operation sp</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ecialist in development of the Canister Storage Facility and the Cold Vacuum D</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rying</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Fa</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">cility out at K-Basins</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> and at 200 </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">East</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, is where the C</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">anister</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> S</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">torage B</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">uilding is. And then also K-East and K-West</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">storage facility. I was assigned to the shift office, and worked as an OE, Operating Engineer, basically under the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">dir</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ection of a shift manager. And</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> basically manage</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">d</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> the facility's work activities, coordinated those on a daily basis</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">to get work done, assigning work to the craft personnel, releasing work packages during lockout/</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">tagout</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">various different aspects of operations for that facility, managing that facility.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">After that, let's see, that was from</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> 1998 to 2002. And from January</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> 2002 to present, I've worked as a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ma</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nagement assessment coordinator. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nd responsibilitie</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">s are primarily to develop the Management A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ssessment</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Program and Integrated Evaluation P</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">lan database for DOE-RL. And let me explain</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, that Integrated Evaluation P</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">lan</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">is basically a database that takes RL's assessments and our assessments, and basically puts them together, so</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">we have one integrated plan.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: I see.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> And that effort is to actually benefit, or to alleviate, or eliminate redundancy in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">assessments, teaming with the site and doing various different assessments, rather than they doing one and we</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">doing the same one. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So that's currently where I'm at right now.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So you've had several different sorts of positions. You've worked at </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">s, and K-Basins, and different parts</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">of the site. Of the different jobs you had, over the 35 years, different places you've worked, what was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was there</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">a specific job or place that was sort of the most challenging and/or most rewarding, that you got the most sense of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">accomplishment or reward?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah, there was. I would have to say probably the reactor operations was probably, I'd say, number one, because</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I know there was no other African Americans that had ever certified at </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, and then later on I found there wasn't any others in any of the other facilities of the plants. So I felt very good about that. And it was very</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">challenging. The second area would have been in developing the OSHA compliance program, because that was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">basically, I knew basically nothing.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And I had to go find people in order to work that were much smarter than me, and be able to develop a program</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that would actually meet </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the mu</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ster of headquarters when they came back out. And it was very challenging. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">stayed up quite a few nights thinking about it and worrying about it. And yeah, it was very challenging. But it was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">very, very well-put-together program, and it met everything that they were looking for. So I'd have to say those two</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">positions were the most challenging, yes.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">When you were talking about working at the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, you talked about riding the bus, and the sort of spirit, the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">sense of mission, I think</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, in the Cold War</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yes.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So when the Cold War ended in 1989, 1990, did that sort of sense of mission change? Did it shift somewhere?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I guess I co</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">uldn't really expound on that, because w</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">hat I was speaking of was during the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">time I was working at N Reactor. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nd once the Cold War ended, I was at that time working</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">when did the Cold War end? That was--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Well, I guess it depends, right? The Berlin Wall came down in '89.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: When the wall came down. Okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. Yeah. I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">where was I at </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">at</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> that time? Yeah</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, I was actually up in the 200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rea. I was oversight. I was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">part of an appraisal team doing integrated sa</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">fety appraisals out of the 200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">rea. So I had transitioned away from</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> N R</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">eactor some years before that. So I didn't really feel a difference with what I was doing. The real thing that I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">seen</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> that really affected a lot of the people at </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> was when they announced that it was not going to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">t no</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">longer had a mission. It wasn't going to be restarted. The reactor was run very hard, run very well, and produced</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">a lot of power, and was very good in its mission. And there was just a lot of pride there. And when that was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">announced, there were a lot of people that really was hurt by that, because it was a reason to come to work. It</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was really a reason to come, and a reason to work for something.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I want to go back to something you talked about early when you started talking. And you mentioned President</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Kennedy's visit when he dedicated the </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. So do you remember that?</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Did you--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I actually remember that very well. And in fact, it was my father, and my mother, and my sister, and me, and my</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">friend, Ronnie Brown. I haven't seen him in years, but I understand he's doing well. My dad brought us all out to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the site, and drove with all of the, what seeming like thousands and thousands of cars, you know, we were just</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">kids, and all the way out to </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">N Reactor</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">. And yes, I definitely remember that. I can remember the helicopters coming</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">in, and the dust flying, and all that. And I didn't know that President Kennedy's hair was red.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> But on that day,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">seeing him that close, because me and my friend, we kind of wormed all the way up as close</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">we were just little</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">tiny kids, so people let us by.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And we got up there, and we were able to stand up on</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">there was like different seating that people had brought.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And we just kind of stepped up on one of the little seats that were there, and we had to get our heads up over the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">crowds. And we could see him when he stepped out of the helicopter, and he walked over to the podium. I can</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">remember that, just like the yesterday. I also remember that day very well because my sister</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">t must've been</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">over 100 degrees there</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">my sister was suffering from heat exhaustion. I remember when we actually came back,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">my mother was taking care of her. She was getting water into her, and everything. That was a very vivid day. That</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was a very, very, very good day.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">What I also wanted to ask you was, like growing up in Pasco in the 50s and 60s, was it a segregated place?</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Or was it—what was it like?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Not when I came along. Not actually in the 60s. I hear stories about the wa</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">y it was, but I don't know. I we</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nt to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Pasco High School. I went to Stevens Junior High School. It was all integrated. My grade school was Whittier. It</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was integrated. It just was East Pasco, and it was primarily blacks. But also the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">re was Hispanics and whites all </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">went to that school, but it was predominantly black. Then after, actually, when I finished sixth grade, they divided</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">sixth grade, and then seventh, eighth, and ninth. It was junior high school.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I was selected, because of where I lived in East Pasco. I was assigned to go to Stevens Junior High School, which</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was, at that time, way across town, and nothing, hardly anything around it. So we rode the bus over to Stevens.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">But prior to that, the majority of blacks, African Americans, H</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ispanics, basically went to McLo</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ughlin Junior High</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> School. But McLo</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ughlin at that time was what is now Pasco City Hall. That used to be McLoughlin.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> But my brother</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">goes back, I mean my brother's deceased. And he passed away, in fact, about a year and three months ago.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: This was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> your brother who was about 20 years older?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah. He actually went</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the high school at that time was McLoughlin, which then became City of Pasco.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Okay. [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> And</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Whittier was the grade school, junior high school when he went to school. I do have some pictures of him. He was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">part of the patrol that went out and let the kids across the street and stuff. Yeah, he had the little patrol hat on, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">all that. I have all those pictures of him when he was really young. And by the way, my brother, he is 20 years</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">older than me, but he graduated from Pasco High. He then entered the Army</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">or no</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> he was drafted. He was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">drafted, and he actually fought in the Korean War. And he corrected me. Every time I said Korean War, he said,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">no, it's the Korean conflict. It was not a war.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> And he served two terms in Vietnam, and was wounded.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">What was his first name?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Thurman. In fact I have a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—here—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">obituary out of the paper. But he had what I consider a pretty impressive military</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">career.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yeah, </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">20 years of active service.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yes. Two terms in Vietnam, a very unpopular war. Me growing up in the 60s, it was, gee, I've got a brother that's</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">overseas fighting, with all the racial strife and stuff here in the United States. But he was very proud of his country,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and he was willing to go and do whatever he was assigned to do.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so you had an older brother, and how many other siblings did you have?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I had </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">a sister. I actually had a half-brother and a half-sister, that—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">they didn't live here. They lived</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Margie lived in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Wichita, Kan</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">sas. And my other brother, half-</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">brother, lived in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I think he lived in Wichita, Kansas, too. I didn't really</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">get to know him that well. I got to know Margie pretty well. Then I had my sister, Marilyn. She graduated from</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Pasco High School. A teacher for 34 years in Yakima. She just retired about three years ago, I think. And still living</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">in Yakima. But she taught school. And those were all of my siblings.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So would you say that Pasco, Tri-Cities was a good community to grow up in?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah, I think so. I really think so. No, I don't have any</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I have to just</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">not so much the community as much as</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">pointing back to my parents. I think I had very</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I've seen other people, my friends with different parents and stuff.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And I think I had some pretty good parents. My dad was very industrial. He worked construction as a laborer, but</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">he had rentals. And he had</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and of course, I came along much later. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">But he had houses and rentals, b</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">ut he</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">worked construction.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">him and his best friend, Mr. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span class="SpellingError SCX133128238">Louzell</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Johnson. He was a bricklayer. My dad was a laborer. They kind of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">was a team. And they worked, and they built a lot of houses throughout Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland back in</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the 50s and 60s. And he worked on a lot</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> of the dams on the Snake River.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Oh, really?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: T</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">he building of a lot of the dams. And I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">can just remember</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">well, I can remember my mother talking, and also my dad. And on Sundays we would take</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">drives, and he would take</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> us way out to where the dams</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> were being built, and stuff like this, for</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">something to do on Sunday for the family. And I didn't pay any attention to it really. But I can remember. I can</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">remember. Those were very good times. My mother, she worked at the Navy base that was in Pasco.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Have you heard</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yes!</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>:</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that there was a Navy base there? She worked in the laundry at the Navy base. And then we</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">came along, my sister and me, and so she just stayed home and took care of us, and my dad worked. But I spent</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">a lot of years painting, and fixing hot water tanks, and unplugging sinks when I was a kid. I was very cheap labor.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So I learned to do that stuff really early in life. So that's pretty much my parents. They were very good people.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Anybody you ask, the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">y were very good people. There’s</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> the obituary of my mom. I didn't get the obituary of my dad.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I didn't find it. I have it somewhere, but there's this picture here. Anyway, go ahead. I just</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—I’m</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> kind of rambling. So</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">you can</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">it's a good thing you're editing this, and you can cut out all the--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Are there any other events? You talked about the JFK visit. But any other events that sort of stand out in you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">r</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> mind</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">from growing up, or from your</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> years working at Hanford?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">You know, I can't really</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">not really. Not really anything that really, really stands out.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">So overall, then, in looking back at your 35 years working at Hanford, how do you assess it as sort of a place to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">work?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Overall, I'd say that Hanford, for me, it's been a very good place to work. I was given opportunity. You know, I had</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">opportunity. And anyone that's going to achieve anything in life, if they prepare themselves, </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">when the opportunity</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">comes, the</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">y step forward and they take it.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> I mean you can't much ask for much more than that. My dad gave me</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">some advice, of course, when I first started working out there. You know, he said, make sure you keep your eyes</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">open, and you watch everything around you. And do not worry about if there's people against you, because God</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">will always put one person there for you. And I always remember he told me that. And so I think about that, that</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">different times during the time I worked out there, the people that have been there, that have assisted me and</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">mentored me, and helped me to continue to do better work, a better job, and basically to feed my family and keep</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">on living, as my mother would say.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Yeah.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> I can't think of any other outstanding</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">there's been a lot of accomplishments, just small little milestones that</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">have been made in safety and our management's commitment to safety, and our management's commitment to</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">the workers, and making sure that they are heard, and that they're actually dealt with, and talked to, and gotten</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">back to when they have safety concerns. And I guess there's a lot of pros and cons about that. But I see safety as</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">being not just the number one thing at Hanford, but being integrated in all that we do at Hanford, is how I see it.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And so I know there's a lot o</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">f things—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I've seen the media. I've </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">seen there are things that are</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> going on out there that I don't</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">know about. I have not worked in some of those areas. But for all of the areas that I have worked and been in,</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that has been the primary concern, is safety.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">And you compare to what we have out at Hanford, compare it to out in the real world, and we have a lot of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">commitment and concern, and actually management standing up, and taking responsibility for things, and actually</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">dealing with them, trying to correct them, and working to try to make events or things that happen not reoccur. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">actually brought a</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">you can get back to your question</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">s</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, but I'll forget. But I actually sent off</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">you know, I seen it on</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">television, and then a fellow emplo</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">yee told me about the Cold War Patriots?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Oh, yeah.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: And you probably know.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> I got my little</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">certificate. And I got, actually, the pin.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> Whoops!</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> I actually got this pin that came with it. And I have it</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">of course I can't bring</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">my badge in here, because it's a Hanford badge. But I stuck my little pin on the badge, and so I thought that was</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">kind of neat.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yeah. Actually, I talked to the Cold War Patriots last week </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">about the project here. Well, I don't have any other</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> questions for you.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Oh, okay!</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: U</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">nless there's something else that we haven't talked about</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> yet</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, or I didn't ask you about that you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> think is important, to--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> We can</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Eric can actually</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> film some of this sort of</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> once we’re done talking.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Eric</span>: Yeah, anything that you showed him we’d want to get photocopied.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Okay, sure</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: They</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> could always integrate</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">that, then, into the interview.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: Okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">, sure. Sure.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Anyway, thanks very much for coming in--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henr</span>y: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">You bet.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--and doing the interview. I really appreciate it.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Henry: Okay, yeah. </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">You know, if you don't step forward and make sure that you're a part of history, you won't be.</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Absolutely. So how did you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">I was going to ask you, how did you hear about the project? </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Did </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">[INAUDIBLE]</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> contact you</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">?</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">Actually, I was at a PZAC meeting</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">President's Zero Accident Council</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">—</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Oh, okay.</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX133128238"><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Henry</span>: --</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">meeting</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">and there was an individual that</span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX133128238">works--</span><span class="EOP SCX133128238"> </span></p>
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Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri-Cities
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
200 Area
N Reactor
105 K-East
105 K-West
K Basins
200 East
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1953-2014
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1978-2013
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald)
Long, John
Ruff, Wally
Larson, Judy
Stewart, Clinton
Norling, Steve
Brown, Ronnie
Henry, Thurman
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:52:04
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 Danny Henry
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Danny Henry conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2016-06-1: Metadata v1 created – [J.G.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
6/2/2014
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Hanford (Wash.)
Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site.
Nuclear instruments & methods
Pasco(Wash.)
Richland(Wash.)
105 K-East
105 K-West
200 Area
200 East
300 Area
B Plant WESF
K Basins
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963
N Reactor
Washington State Public Power Supply System.