Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Wanda Munn on November 2nd, 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?
Wanda Munn: Wanda Iris Munn. W-A-N-D-A, last name M-U-N-N.
Franklin: Great. When and where were you born, Wanda?
Munn: I was born in Brownwood, Texas, which is 17 miles from the geographic center of the state on September 13th, 1931. I was a Depression baby. So I had all that background and the joy of being a native Texan.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] How and why did you come to the area to—how and why did you come to work at Hanford?
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.
Franklin: Excellent. So, tell me what kinds of work did you do at FFTF?
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.
Franklin: I would love for you to talk about that.
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—
Emma Rice: Overload the circuit?
Franklin: Overload the circuit.
Munn: Cause—yeah, I didn’t mean to overload anything. We—
Franklin: Did we—yeah, I was going to say—so we--
Vargas: No, we’re fine on the camera.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Vargas: It’s battery-powered.
Franklin: Oh, great.
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.
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.
Munn: I’d be delighted to do that.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Munn: Yes.
Franklin: Why was that?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: It’s okay.
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.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Can you describe—
Munn: Did I answer your question? I’m sorry.
Franklin: No—yes.
Munn: Good, all right.
Franklin: You did, and then you actually answered another one I was going to ask you.
Munn: Another eight or ten. Yeah, sorry.
Franklin: So, can you describe a typical work day at the FFTF?
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.
Franklin: And what is the big round thing?
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.
Franklin: How did you transition into nuclear safety?
Munn: How did I--?
Franklin: How did you trans—you mentioned that you had started during construction and that later on you started working in nuclear safety.
Munn: Oh, well, it’s seamless.
Franklin: Seamless, okay.
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.
Franklin: Okay. When did the FFTF shut down?
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.
Franklin: Okay. And so how long did the facility operate for as a research facility?
Munn: It operated about a decade.
Franklin: About a decade.
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.
Franklin: Was this work taken on in the private sector, then? Because you mentioned—
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.
Franklin: Can you—or are you willing to speculate on the political motivations for shutting the program down?
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: It’s not quite as bad as you thought, but it’s still pretty terrible.
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.
Franklin: Yeah. When did you retire from the Hanford Site?
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.
Franklin: And did you win? Did you make it to city council? Were you city council?
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]
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.
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.
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.
Munn: Oh, yes.
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.
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.
Franklin: EEOICPA?
Munn: Yes. Energy Employees Occupational Illness and—
Franklin: Compensation?
Munn: Compensation Act, right?
Franklin: Something like that, yeah. We missed the P, but—
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: Or if you fly on a plane, right, you’re exposed to higher background—
Munn: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
[VIDEO CUTS]
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 You Are There 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.
Franklin: Well, Wanda, thank you so much for such an enlightening and well-delivered interview. I really appreciate it.
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.
Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much.
Munn: Thank you.
View interview on Youtube.
Tom Hungate: Rolling.
Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Keith Klein on February 7th, 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?
Keith Klein: Keith Klein. K-L-E-I-N.
Franklin: Okay. And K-E-I-T-H?
Klein: K-E-I-T-H, yeah.
Franklin: Okay, great. Tell me how and why you came to work at the Hanford Site.
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.
Franklin: Great. Just for those who might not know, could you say what WIPP stands for and what its mission was?
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.
Franklin: When you came out in the early ‘70s as an intern for FFTF construction, what did you do?
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.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Thank you. So you came to RL—Richland—in ’99, then, and you were the site—the DOE site manager.
Klein: Correct.
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.
Klein: That’s a huge topic, Robert.
Franklin: Sure.
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.
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.
Klein: Well, this was not my territory.
Franklin: Okay.
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, 10-6, 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.
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.
Klein: High-level waste was assigned to the separate office, so that really wasn’t my—
Franklin: Oh, okay, so—
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Franklin: Great.
Klein: If we get out of the way.
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.
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]
Franklin: Did you encounter resistance in Washington, DC for—
Klein: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: --for this idea? How did you overcome that, to help to show people the value of this?
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.
Franklin: So you say at the time, which—what time was this?
Klein: This was at the time when we were struggling with, how do we legitimize preserving B Reactor?
Franklin: Do you know around what year or years this would have been?
Klein: I’m going to guess it was 2003, 2004 timeframe.
Franklin: Okay. Sorry to interrupt.
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.
Franklin: It’s okay. I was just trying to get a general sense. So you said Skip Gosling?
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.
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—
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.
Franklin: Great. How did you become involved with the REACH Museum?
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.
Franklin: Okay. Is there—sorry. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? Or just Hanford in general?
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.
Franklin: Great. Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention?
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.
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.
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]
Franklin: Well, thank you, Keith. I really appreciate it.
Klein: Yeah, you bet, Robert.
View interview on Youtube.
O’Reagan: Okay, great. So let’s start off here. First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?
Ballard: Well, my first name is Delbert L. Ballard. Leo for center. D-E-L-B-E-R-T, B-A-L-L-A-R-D. And I go by Del, commonly.
O’Reagan: All right, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview here on February 18th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Ballard about his experiences working on the Hanford site, living in this community. First of all, can you start us off just—walk us through your life in sort of a brief term before you came to this area.
Ballard: Well, I was raised on a dryland wheat farm in Montana, so I know what work is all about. And I was a student in a little high school that was only seven of us in our graduating class. So I was sort of a country boy, and went to college at Montana State University. And I graduated from there in 1951. Just prior to that, the General Electric Company, of course, had been there to do interviews. They were scoping for—recruiting for engineers and I was a civil engineer graduate. There was other recruiters through, too. I had an offer from a San Francisco shipyard, and another from the Soil Conservation Service in Montana. But I wanted to get a job with GE. So I’d had the interview, but no really positive award or recognition that they were going to give me an offer. They were interviewing a large number of people. So graduation day came around and I still hadn’t gotten a letter from GE. But the mail came that morning, and lo and behold, there it was. So I was really pleased at that. So my initial job right out of college was coming to Hanford and working for General Electric Company as a rotational training—in the rotational training program. They had hired that year, the previous year, actually ’49, ’50 and ’51, they had hired about 300 or 350 tech grads. And I was one of the later ones getting here; I didn’t get here until July. So most of the good jobs were assigned. But in the rotational training program, my first assignment was a rather mundane assignment to the transportation department. Next one was a more interesting job with the inspection department. That was over in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, Hanford was undergoing I believed what they called the Korean expansion. The Korean War was underway and in full force at that time when I got out of school. As a matter of fact, I thought I was going to be drafted, but I tried to enlist and—I’m diverting here a little bit, but—tried to enlist in the Air Force to be a pilot, but my eyes weren’t good enough, so I got rejected for that. [LAUGHTER] So when I knew that the GE job was a deferred job, I thought, well, that’s an alternate I’d just as soon pursue. So anyway when I got here on the rotational training program, that’s what it was. Individuals were assigned to different locations for training purposes and for filling job needs. The second assignment was, as I said, inspection department in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, they were fabricating—the shipyard was fabricating the biological shield blocks for the C Reactor. It was one of the expansion efforts at Hanford, increasing the production capacity. So that was an interesting job over there at the shipyard doing inspection and learning a lot about inspection techniques and components and so forth. Another month after that, I was rotating around the Seattle area inspecting other components that were being manufactured for the C Reactor. C Reactor, as you know, was the one that was built right alongside of the B Reactor out at Hanford. It started up in ’53, I believe. But out of the rotational training program, I was assigned into construction area out in the 300 Area. They were fabricating laboratories for building the laboratories out there. Radiochemistry, radiometallurgy, pile tech, machine shop, and a library at that area of the Hanford—300 Area was just under construction. So I got assigned to help in the field engineering in that job. It was an interesting project. I learned a lot there in that job. And from there I went into other project engineering work, including in later years, the K Reactors were under construction and I was involved in laying up the graphite of that reactor, K East Reactors. I stayed in project engineering with GE all my life—or all my employment time was with GE. They left here in ’64. Yeah, Battelle came in ’65. Two of the projects that I followed after K Reactors, one of them was the critical mass lab in the 300 Area, which was a facility for evaluating critical shapes and sizes for plutonium missiles. It was a research job, research facility. That project was a lump sum construction and plant forces for the completion of putting the process equipment in. The next job I had was the High Temperature Lattice Test reactor in the 300 Area. That’s a reactor that probably hasn’t gotten much publicity. It was a small graphite reactor. But that was a job I was very proud of, because I was the sole project engineering function at the time. The design was done by an organization that was just brought on as GE was being phased out. It was the Vitro Engineering Company. They had a detailed design of the job, and the construction was done lump sum, and then J. Jones did the reactor installation. I can tell quite a bit of detail about that reactor, if you’re interesting. [LAUGHTER] But it was an experimental facility also for evaluating different lattice spacings for graphite moderator reactors. It was electrically heated—it operated up at 1,000 degrees centigrade, so that graphite, looking through the peepholes in the reactor, you could see white hot graphite, which is sort of an interesting thing to see. But that project was not large in comparison to today’s funding levels. But it was a three- to four-million-dollar project. I finished the job and closed it out with less than $200 left on the books and no overrun. [LAUGHTER] So I got a commendation for that job, which I was quite proud of. But from there, then I diverted into other project engineering jobs. One was in Idaho Falls. We had a test facility over there, putting in test loops in the engineering test reactor. That was closer to reactor operations type work. We had to modify an operating reactor. But that was some of my interesting project years before I got into jobs later on, which was the FFTF and the FMEF. Fuels and Materials Exam Facility. I always make the statement that every project, or every job that I worked on up until the FFTF was completed and put into operation. Every project after FFTF was shut down and closed down before it was completed. [LAUGHTER] So that was kind of a breaking point for me. Hanford, of course, reached its peak in production, and I can talk something about that as far as reactor operations is concerned. But I wasn’t really in operations, I was in engineering, and had jobs all over the Project. So I never was tied down to one location. It was interesting. So I had an interesting career in a lot of different projects. I enjoyed my work, and had a good time and a good married life and I can go into that, too, if you wish.
O’Reagan: So you say you were with GE this whole time? You didn’t switch over to different contractors as they came in?
Ballard: Well, yes—no. I just with GE until they left.
O’Reagan: I see.
Ballard: And then Battelle came in ’65. So I was with Battelle for ’65 until ’70 when Westinghouse took over the Breeder Program. Initially, Westinghouse was just brought in for the Fast Flux Test Reactor, to manage that. And I happened to be working on a development job. That’s one I haven’t mentioned yet. [LAUGHTER] When Westinghouse came in, I was assigned—that was my first manager job. I had a group, or a section in the 321 Building in the 300 Area, and a job which was identified as the hydraulic core mockup. And we designed, built and operated models to evaluate the design configuration for the FFTF. So we built water models to look at a lot of different features: the reactor vessel arrangement, and the core arrangement and the structure. And the inlet planning and outlet planning. We built several models. The two biggest ones were the inlet model, which evaluated the sodium distribution in the inlet planning and feeding characteristics for the fuels channels. I worked on that job for seven years. And then during that time, of course, FFTF came under construction. Our group actually influenced the design which was being done by Westinghouse back east. There was a lot of the features in the arrangements and shapes of the vessel and the flow distribution and the core that was determined by that hydraulic core mockup test facility. Then when they started putting the reactor together, I was assigned to construction out in 400 Area. I spent the whole year inside the reactor vessel, helping the engineer put the parts together. One of our humorous comments about FFTF was, from our perspective was FFTF, do you know what that stands for? Yeah, it sounds for feel, file, to fit. [LAUGHTER] Fill all the tight tolerances and all the arrangements necessary to make everything fit and throw it together. It was well-engineered and well-designed, but it was still—engineering problems had to be resolved in the field. So that was another interesting project. Following that, then I spent seven years on the FMEF, the Fuels and Materials Exam Facility, designing and coordinating the design—the management of the design, which was done by an off-plant architect engineer. And there, again, that was a project that was not completed. It was shut down when the Breeder Program was curtailed. So, following that, I could go into more details where we did for various and sundry work, but it was all toward the new mission for the Hanford site, which was cleanup, starting in that field in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I retired, officially, in ’89. But I worked consulting for four years after that. So my career actually spanned from 1951 to 1994.
O’Reagan: How disappointing was it when FFTF got canceled?
Ballard: Pardon me?
O’Reagan: Was it disappointing when FFTF got canceled?
Ballard: It was very discouraging, yes, that they were going to close it down. When they drilled a hole in the core support structure, like drilling a hole in my heart. [LAUGHTER] Matter of fact, I’ve got some pictures to show that I was the last person in the FFTF vessel before they closed it up and started it filling it with sodium. Matter of fact, after that closure—after the photograph that I have, I’ll be happy to show you—they had an accident with the fuel charging machine which went up to the top of the travel and the upper limits which failed and it dropped down on the core and broke some of the components that I was so—[LAUGHTER]—proud of getting installed properly. Core support structure. And we had to go in there and do some repairs. But then I, after that, I left the FFTF and went to work on the design of the FMEF. [SIGH]
O’Reagan: Did life sort of change day-to-day when you switched these contractors? How different was it working for these different companies?
Ballard: The only change that I could see was the difference of the color of the paycheck. [LAUGHTER] As a matter of fact, when we transferred from—let’s see if I can remember which contract that was—was it GE to Battelle or Battelle to Westinghouse? I don’t remember, but the end of that day, we were terminated and I happened to be at a party down in one of the local pubs which I didn’t very often frequent. But somebody said, who do you work for? And I said, at the moment I’m unemployed. Because that was the day we left one contractor and started with the next one. But the transitions were quite smooth, I would say. I mean, of course, policies changed and your managers changed. At one time, in a two-year period when Westinghouse came in, I think I had 13 different first level and second level managers above me change without in those two-year period. So there was a lot of personnel changes. But a lot of us working closer to the ground floor, there was very little change.
O’Reagan: So, let’s back up a moment. What were your first impressions of Hanford and the area?
Ballard: Well, I came here in the summer—it was in July. I got here on July 3rd of 1951. I was assigned to the barracks out in North Richland—women’s barracks as a matter of fact. That’s when all the dormitory rooms were filled up in Richland for the men’s dorms. So I was assigned out there for my quarters. The next day, I learned that you didn’t have to drive the buses around, you could ride the city buses or the plant buses. Plant buses, to ride to the area was five cents, and city buses, I don’t remember whether they were five cents or free. I rode that bus the next day that I went to work, and it was 105 degrees that day. And I thought, my lord, what have I gotten myself into? [LAUGHTER] This is horrible temperature! But I was young and willing to accept anything that came my way, so I guess I didn’t think it was too serious a problem.
O’Reagan: How aware were you of the mission of Hanford before you came here?
Ballard: Very little, probably. I knew that it was working on the war effort, but at that time, nobody really—well, yeah, I guess it was known they were producing plutonium or weapons for atomic weapons, but as far as the details concerned, I knew very little. As any engineer—young man right out of college might be. Because I didn’t know what the plant—the structure was. But they gave—they told us and we got the information from the co-workers and the other students. It was quite interesting, because all the youngsters that were working, everybody—not the majority of people, but a large percentage of them—were fresh graduates. The older bunch were the 30- and 35-year-olds working on the site. That’s when I met my wife shortly after that in ’53. But we were married in ’53. But I met her in ’52 at a social that was put on by YWCA, Young Women’s—YWCA organization. They had church-sponsored dinners one night a week and that’s where we met. So we’ve been married for 62 years now.
O’Reagan: Were there a lot of those sort of social events?
Ballard: A lot of those that happened. As a matter of fact, the organization—I was the third set that the president and the secretary of that organization got married. [LAUGHTER] She was the secretary when I was the president of the organization. [LAUGHTER] Which was sort of comical, I guess.
O’Reagan: What sort of things did you and your wife do in your spare time in the ‘50s and ‘60s?
Ballard: Well, I guess bridge playing was one, and social events. We went—there was—they had a group that she was involved in called the Fireside Group that had functions and went camping and things like that. But we played a lot of bridge then.
O’Reagan: Where did you live?
Ballard: Well, I was living in the dormitories, of course, when we were married. I lived in North Richland in the women’s barracks for a short time until the rooms became available in the dormitories in Richland. That’s where I was living when we got married. Of course, housing was another whole story. You had to put your name on a list to get a house. They were all assigned by the government. All the housing was, of course, controlled and owned by the government. So you had to get your name on the waiting list to get a house. We were fortunate; we got a duplex, a C house up on Wright Avenue. I got that assigned in less than a month before we were married. So when we were married, we had a two-bedroom duplex house up there available. That’s where we moved in and lived there until 1957 when the government decided to disperse the property. They started selling vacant lots in 1957. We were a junior tenant in the duplex, so we couldn’t make an offer on the duplex. The senior tenants had the right to buy the duplex. So I was quite aggressive in my ownership philosophy, decided to buy a lot. We purchased the lot on Newcomer, the first property that was sold. And we built a house. I started building in March of 1958. As a matter of fact, we built—our house was the third privately built house in Richland. We had a house and were living in it before Richland was incorporated. They incorporated the city in July of ’58. That was of course the second official designation as a corporation because Richland, of course was a corporation—I mean an incorporated city before the government took it over in ’43. We built that house and I have pictures that I brought of the fact it was one of the first ones in Richland. And we’re still living in the same house. I don’t know what that says, but [LAUGHTER] I guess stability for one thing.
O’Reagan: Were you involved in local politics at all?
Ballard: In what?
O’Reagan: In local politics at all?
Ballard; No, not really. They asked me a few times if I wouldn’t run for the city council, but I never did. No, I’m not a politician. I didn’t want to get involved in that.
O’Reagan: So you described a number of different jobs you were doing over the first two decades or so that you were here? Could you walk us through, at least for one of those, what was sort of an average work day like?
Ballard: Well, let me see. There was one—I guess all of them were similar in a lot of respects. I was doing—on those jobs, I was doing project engineering. And that meant the coordination of, and the I guess you’d call it management, although there was, of course, the organization like GE, there’s so many levels of management that comes through that it’s a little hard to say you managed it, because you have so much supervision and overhead actions that are taken on a project, for example. But on most projects, the engineer—the project engineer would write the project proposal based on what the technical department would have as input for a required facility, for example. Like the high temperature lattice test reactor, the physics department had specified the programs that they were involved in would want to look in more detail at the lattice spacing in graphite reactors, for example. So they would write a document which would specify what their objective was and what their basic criteria was for that facility. And project people would issue—maybe take that and issue an order for another group to do the detailed process—conceptual design, or do it themselves. We’d do it sometimes on small projects. We had projects all the way from modify one laboratory all the way up to a whole facility. So it’s hard to describe the same process for all of them. But it was office work, engineering work. Some of the times I was in a design group where we actually doing detailed design work. But most of my work was in the project engineering field where we were seeing the work done by others. Or specifying details or managing the people that were doing the detailed design work. But it was office work, and of course when construction started, that’s when the project engineers were more in control, because they were directing the contractors as far as the field work was concerned. It was always an interesting job, an interesting challenge, I thought, preparing contract bid packages. Office work, lots of times the projects were out in the field, of course, out in the Area. We’d drive government cars to go to work. That was an advantage. Of course being in engineering rather than operations where you had more control of your time from the standpoint of individual management. Because we’d use government cars for transportation. We didn’t have computers in the early stages, obviously. When they came out with DSIs, Don’t Say It In Writing, that was a big move, too. [LAUGHTER] But certainly a lot of progress and a lot of technology changes over the years.
O’Reagan: How much were security or classification a part of your work?
Ballard: Well, it was certainly in overview all the time. All the documents, if a job had classified work on it, you had to get the documents classified, and follow the restrictions for those particular elements or documents, whatever’s involved. Most of the time, of course, construction was not too rigidly controlled or administered, I guess. In later years, because the, for example, research work was not really high classified. Most—a lot of it wasn’t. But it was something that was always there. Of course the badging was always—I remember one time incident I had which was funny—rather humorous. I was in a meeting out in one of the hundred areas, in a back room in some building and we were having a discussion. All of the sudden a door burst open and two patrolmen came in and said, where’s Del Ballard?! I’m over here. [LAUGHTER] Hey, come with me! They took me by the arms and whisked me outside and outside the badge house. I said, what’s going on? What’s the problem? They said, you don’t have a badge! I said, what do you mean I don’t got a badge. I looked at it and it was somebody else’s badge—name on it. They had given me the wrong badge! [LAUGHTER] So they were, I guess, vigilant in their control. But some of the times you thought it was a little overreach. It was always there, that’s for sure.
O’Reagan: You mentioned a couple jobs not necessarily at Hanford—I think you said Idaho Falls at one point, or other locations around?
Ballard: Yes, we had a project—I guess I sort of skipped over that—in the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho Falls. The fuels people here—research people—wanted to do some testing in the Engineering Test Reactor with certain issues or problems that they were trying to develop from the fuel technology. So we put in two high pressure loops over there. Again, I was the project person on it. I didn’t do the design work, I did the procurement and the construction management. Philips Petroleum was the operating contractor over there at the Engineering Test Reactor. So I went over there and saw that those loops were completed and put in place and in operation. It was in 1958. I spent, well, most of that year over there, back and forth. My wife was really unhappy, because that was the year that we had started our house. So I had—coming home on weekends and trying to keep that sorted out. Because we had a foreman working with the carpenters building the house. So it was kind of stressful for her. Yeah, and then I had to go back for the next year after that for some cleanup work on the project. It was another project that was managed by Hanford, but installing a reactor over there.
O’Reagan: I’m curious how sort of insular Hanford was, versus how much it was common for people to get advice from outside of the Area, or to travel to different facilities and learn what they were doing, or share what you were doing with others?
Ballard: Well, I think that’s probably more prevalent in the technical field than it is in the construction area. Yeah, there certainly was in a nuclear complex, there was—and we did have travels. I did visit some other sites. Occasionally the laboratories on some of the projects we had. But most of that was done by the technical department, not the engineering department.
O’Reagan: How much has the community changed, and in any particular ways during the time you’ve lived here?
Ballard: Well, it’s gone from a small community to a much higher-traffic area than it used to be. But the people say it’s still pretty mild. Of course I’ve traveled to Los Angeles quite a bit; I had relatives in Los Angeles. And I’d grow accustomed to that mainly down there too. But it’s still—the Tri-Cities is still a nice place to live, I think. It doesn’t have a lot of the big city hubbub that other places do, but it certainly has changed a lot from what it was when I came. My wife came in 1944. Of course that was when it was sand and dust piles and no trees and no grass. It was a lot like that when I came, too, although it was developing. But the first few years that the Manhattan Project workers were here, they had some pretty rough goes. Of course the government would operate a city was an entirely different situation than we have now with private ownership and private management of the company—or local management of the company there. When the government operated the city, it was—you’ve heard these stories before, I know. Even lightbulbs were changed by the employees of the government. [LAUGHTER] So that was a big change. But when we got married we were renting from the government but as soon as they sold the houses we built our own and were on our own. So we’ve lived pretty much as a private city in all of our married life. So that hasn’t been a major change.
O’Reagan: Anything else—nothing else in particular I’m fishing for here—did anything else come to mind, as far as changes in, I don’t know, spirit of work at Hanford or changes in the communities?
Ballard: Well, the government management of the Hanford site has certainly undergone lots of changes, much as our society has, I think, over the last 50 years. When GE operated the plant, I felt and a lot of us felt that the program was defined in general in scope and the contractor was given a block of money and there they went. They did the job. They didn’t have the oversight or the detail management or the daily exchange as much with the government, I think, as they do now. I think that’s been a change in philosophy or change in detail of management more. A lot of it is because the public’s been more closely involved. Like the different committees that are involved in the oversight with the DoE that they didn’t have at that time. Of course when the Manhattan Project started, it was even further away than that. Nobody outside the Project knew what was being done. They were building the atomic bomb and nobody knew was done except the organization involved in it. Now, anything the government does it’s public knowledge and has 100 different reviews over a period of a decade before they get anything done. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Of course all these decades we’re talking about here are during the Cold War, and nuclear weapons are wrapped up in a lot of that and nuclear power. Was that ever something that was on your mind, or that were you aware of? Or was that just something that was going on far away?
Ballard: No, I think the Cold War and the conflict with Russia was well-known because of all the cautions and concerns about the atomic weapons and people—during the crisis that peaked in the early ‘60s and we were in hard conflict with Russia. A lot of concern about what might happen. It was a different era and there was a lot of awareness of the potential that there could be a nuclear conflict.
O’Reagan: Did it ever impact your life, or your wife’s life more or less directly?
Ballard: Well, I don’t think we—we thought we were protected, we thought we had the national security to take care of it. And I guess we didn’t really worry about it—it was something you didn’t really dwell on, I don’t think. Although they told the students and the kids—some people did build bomb shelters. My neighbor, Dr. Petty, they had one at their house under the lawn in the front yard. When they built the house, they put in a bomb shelter.
O’Reagan: [INAUDIBLE]
Ballard: Nobody knew about it but them, but I knew about it. [LAUGHTER]
O’Reagan: Did you ever see the inside of the shelter?
Ballard: I never was in it, no. But I know it’s there.
O’Reagan: Let’s see. So I guess we’ve sort of covered this. Could you describe the ways in which security and or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?
Ballard: Well, I guess from the work that I did in the engineering specifications and drawings and documents that related to projects, we had to worry about the classification on them. You had to worry about the access—access to different projects at different facilities. Of course you had to have the right clearance. So it was a restraint on work in some respects. But it wasn’t a major impact, I don’t think.
O’Reagan: In more recent years—well I guess I don’t know how long—you’ve been working with the B Reactor Museum Association and other groups interested in the history of the local community. Can you tell me how you got involved with that and sort of the history of that?
Ballard: Sure can. I retired in ’89. And then as I said, I went back to work on a part-time basis. But during that period, the Environmental Impact Statements had been written, and the mission at Hanford was changing from production to cleanup. All the documents and all the philosophy that was being disseminated was, we were going to tear everything down and dispose of everything in the Project. I was the representative to the Tri-City Technical Council. It was a group of only local affiliate—all local agent—sections or groups from the technical society’s engineering—civil, mechanical, electrical, nuclear, women’s organizations—all the technical organizations had what they called a Tri-City Technical Council. And we met monthly and addressed the issues for technology dissemination or issues that might affect the community from what we might recommend or so forth. From that group, we learned—we knew what the DoE was getting into, transition-wise into the cleanup of the site. They were going to tear everything down. And we said, well, we don’t want that to happen to some of these historic facilities. The B Reactor, for example, was the world’s first production reactor. And it was very consequential from the history, both of our nation and the world, as far as that. And also the kick-off for nuclear power. So we said, we ought to do something about that. So we formed a committee. I was one of the people of that committee. And we met in July of 1990, was our first meeting. We talked about an organization and how we might form a group that would lead toward the preservation of B Reactor. We decided to form an association. So we had an attorney draw up our bylaws and we formed an organization called the B Reactor Museum Association. We got our state corporate action—I forget what word they use to describe the initiation of the organization in January of 1991. But I consider the organization being formed in 1990. And our objective was to educate the public about the historical significance of B, and to do what we could to preserve the reactor, to see that it was preserved. To gain access and to develop exhibits and so forth for the exhibits. So that was where we started, was way back in 1990. And all during the decade of the ‘90s, we were meeting and fighting with the Department of Energy because they had milestones after milestones that were established on the cleanup and disposal of all the reactors. B was put into the list later on, but it was always on the list for cocooning, as all the reactors would be. We got those milestones extended over the years. And finally, with persuasion and meeting with legislators, Sid Morris and I met with Sid Morris and—I don’t remember the year now, but it was one of the first times that he was sympathetic for the theme that we preserve the historical relic. And of course, later on Doc Hastings. We had many meetings and persuasions with all the legislators. Of course, Cantwell and Murray got on board over the years. It later progressed into the fact that we want to have a study to see if the Parks Service could preserve it. One time during the late ‘70s, I believe it was, several people thought that the REACH would be the only chance of preserving the B Reactor. They would be the ones that would sponsor the tours and provide for the access and so forth. I said, no, I said, I don’t believe that. I said, I think we want to get the Parks Service involved because I don’t know that even the REACH is going to have the muscle to do it. So we got meetings with the legislators and we got a study authorized for the Parks Service study. That was after two or three years of trials and tribulations. It was finally approved. When the Parks Service first came out—you’re probably aware of the fact that they didn’t have—they just had Los Alamos as the sole main site for the park. And we said, that would never sell. It had to include all the sites: Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford. So they revised their study and made it a three-site park. It was eventually approved and then later legislation—Doc Hastings and Cantwell got the park legislation authorized. BRMA of course has been involved—has been the agency chipping at their heels all the way through all this. [LAUGHTER] We finally got credit for it. For many years, they didn’t really recognize BRMA as the organization that made it happen, but I think we had an awful lot to do with what made it happen.
O’Reagan: Were you ever associated with any of the other local history-related groups?
Ballard: Well, yes. We were affiliated with the CREHST museum. We worked with them and the REACH also. But we were the ones that were pushing—BRMA—the B Reactor specifically. We still have a lot of partnerships. We had memorandums of understanding with DoE and the CREHST and with—I guess we don’t have one with the REACH but we still meet with them. Matter of fact, they’re working on this new exhibit for the Cold War exhibit. Of course they’ve got—there’s four of us from BRMA that are on those meetings, but there’s a lot of other community leaders involved, too, obviously. And that was what happened is we were the—BRMA was the organization that was in the trenches early on. But later on, the whole community and the region and the legislators all got on board. So there was a lot of emphasis and support for getting it preserved and getting it converted, or made into a national historic park. Have you seen the plaque out there at B Reactor that says we’re the ones that initiated the plan to preserve it. So, yeah, I’m quite proud of that. I was one of the founding members of the organization.
O’Reagan: Why did it matter to you?
Ballard: Well, it’s important, I think, to preserve the history. It’s a significant part of the nation’s history. And if it’s going to be educational for the—a good place for the students, the young kids to come up and learn what the nuclear industry’s all about. I still say—and I’ve said for twenty years—that—I don’t know how many years down the road it’s going to be, but I think nuclear power’s going to be a major source of energy. Commercial electrical as well as all the other fields—medical and research. It still has an important place to play in our total nation’s history, I think. And we need to know how it started and what problems it caused. Let’s not generate those again.
O’Reagan: What would you—
Ballard: So that’s the story that’s going to be told in the park, and I think a lot of people—that’s some of the emphasis. People come out and see the comments in the paper, all the negative comments. Well, that’s true, but the story’s still there and needs to be told.
O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Ballard: Well, I don’t know. It was a challenge, I guess. The success—I’m glad that we developed the bomb rather than Hitler. Like how Fermi said, he said when he was working on fission in Italy in the late ‘30s—the 1930s, yes. He always said he was eternally grateful that he didn’t learn how to control fission then. He said if he had have, Hitler would have started the war with them, rather than us ending the war with them. So I think they need to know what the conditions were at the time that the Manhattan Project was built and what the world was undergoing at the time.
O’Reagan: What else should I be asking about? What else is there that we should discuss?
Ballard: I don’t know! I think I pretty well spilled everything I know. Unless—I don’t know. I could mention about my—as you know, I was not here during the Manhattan Project. It was over when I came in 1951. My wife and her family was a different story. They came with DuPont in 1944. So her dad was a DuPont employee and he came out here at that time and saw the conditions in employment problems that they had at that time. He was a machinist and had actually directed the tech shops out there for many years. So he probably—that family has more history of the Manhattan Project than I do. Mine is just history. It was—I’ve had an interesting career and I guess I’ve enjoyed it here and it’s been a wonderful place to live. I think it will continue to be if we have people that keep our city from growing into something that it shouldn’t be. [LAUGHTER] But I guess I don’t have any new subjects to talk about unless you have new questions.
O’Reagan: I think—that’s my list for now, but thank you so much for being here.
Ballard: Well, it’s been a pleasure.
O’Reagan: All right, great.
Tom Hungate: I had a question.
O’Reagan: Please.
Hungate: One of the jobs you had—you had a wide variety of jobs; all of them sound fascinating to me.
Ballard: Oh, they’re interesting, yes.
Hungate: One caught my ear, because I’ve seen these. Tell me what it was like when you said you worked on the K Reactors to lay—you said you were laying up the block. Tell—describe what that process was.
Ballard: Well, I wasn’t involved in that deeply as a lot of the fellows were. I can’t remember his name right now, but the primary engineer that had the graphite technology. That graphite was machined in the 101 Building. Well, actually the old reactor’s was in the old 101 Building in White Bluffs. They built a new building, the 2101 Building in the 200 East Area which was specifically for the graphite machining and layup—test layups. Those blocks were built to very tight tolerances. The graphite came in in square blocks from the manufacturers and they had to be machined to the final configuration. Those tolerances were very, very tight, like plus or minus two mils or five mils at the most. The blocks were basically four-and-three-quarters inches by four-and-three-quarters inches by 40-some inches long—the main block. After they were machined to very close tolerances, they were test stacked in the 2101 Building, laid up ten tiers to be sure that the tolerances of the assembly were precise. And from there they were packaged on pallets in sequence that they would go in, in reverse sequence, so when they took them off they were ready to be stacked up. And then they were shipped—brought into the reactor vessel, lowered down into the open process area in the center part of the core and pulled off the pallets and just stacked, piece by piece. There’s pictures available that you see of the old reactors. There may be some of K Reactors too, I don’t know, but show inside the reactors when they’re laying up with the blocks. Of course everybody’s in whites. Your cleanliness control’s very important. And of course, obviously, sequence was very, very important, to have all the blocks in there. But from my perspective, I just watched—I wasn’t doing the work, I was just part of the process that was putting them in there. It was very closely controlled and very temperature controlled—well, no, I don’t know about the temperature. The building was under limited temperature control. But the cleanliness was strictly controlled, and the workers of course had been assigned with each pallet that came in, they knew where it went and how it was to be laid. But that was the same process that was used in all the reactors for graphite layup. But that’s amazing, the way they built those things. You have all the penetrations, like—I can’t give you the numbers. K Reactors were bigger than the old original reactor. The original reactor had 2,004 process tubes. You probably all know the story of that, too. [LAUGHTER] But what I started to say was, the alignment of the holes in the blocks, of course, had to line up with the holes of the penetrations of front and rear faces precisely when they put them in. So it was like putting a watch together on a 40-foot-square [LAUGHTER]—40-foot cube. Very precise work.
O’Reagan: Were there any mistakes?
Ballard: Pardon?
O’Reagan: Did you ever see any mistakes?
Ballard: Well, no, but if there were they were corrected as they went, because they had two or three levels of inspection verified that they were going in properly. There may have been some, I don’t know. I was not in direct control of that job. I was more on the K Reactor, I just was in oversight. I don’t remember what my position was at that time, but—the B Reactor, for example, you know what happened there when they started it up? It died because of the xenon poison. They didn’t have enough neutron flux levels to override that poisoning effect. That’s when they had to add the additional fuel channels outside the original 1,500 that they had that the physicist said was adequate to drive the reactor. So that was an interesting job. They had to—the later reactors, they had more knowledge of what the requirements were. So the design wasn’t—it didn’t create a problem on initial startup like B Reactor did.
O’Reagan: We were trying to outline or highlight—what sort of innovations came out of Hanford, what sort of inventions did you see—what new knowledge or techniques did you see created at Hanford?
Ballard: Well, there again, you need to talk to the physicists and chemists and people that were in the fuel design areas. There were so many changes made to the fuel designs. They went from—of course these were only applicable to the graphite reactors the modern fuel originally were eight inches long when the distortion that occurred in the graphite, that was because of the structure change due to the radiation in the graphite. The channels were distorted to the point where some were so crooked that the eight-inch channel—the fuel wouldn’t go through the channel. SO they went to four-inch people—four-inch long fuel assemblies in some of those bad channels. And then of course another knowledge was the design of fuel assembly, you went from strictly external core where they just had an annulus of water around the outside cooling the fuel assembly. It went to a center core; they had internal cooling—a flow channel through the center of the element. But as far as the physics of the elements, they went from totally natural uranium, originally 238, all naturally derived with 0.7% 235. They went to some enrichment in the reactors to increase the power level. But there was physics changes all along, as far as being able to control and just knowledge of impurities and what the effects were in the nuclear physical—the physics involved in the reactor. But of course, then the Breeder Program, we didn’t talk about that. There’s a lot of advancements made there. FFTF was a marvelous machine and it produced a lot of new information from greener technology. That FFTF was—I spent ten years on development—seven on development and three on construction, so. But I wasn’t—I’m not a physicist and wasn’t into the technology as much as the people—I was more into construction, design and construction.
O’Reagan: A lot of knowledge there, too, that you—hands-on knowledge.
Ballard: Well, I always pride myself on being able to fix problems. We had a lot of things on assembly or putting the stuff together that just—problems or interferences or arrangements that weren’t thought of in design that we were able to resolve in the field, and that’s why I got into—I’ve been building houses for Habitat now for the last 15 years. [LAUGHTER] It’s a little different from putting reactors together, but I get a lot of comments from the instruction people in Habitat. This is not a reactor; we don’t need to have those tolerances. [LAUGHTER] But I say if you make it right, it looks a lot nicer and it goes together better.
O’Reagan: All right, I guess that’s the list of questions I’ve got. I guess we’ll end it once again.
Ballard: Okay, well, appreciate.
Northwest Public Television | Stratton_Monte
Camera man: Okay. I say we record.
Robert Bauman: Yep. All right. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Get some of the official stuff out of the way first. My name's Robert Bauman, and I'm conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Monte Stratton. And today's date is July 16 of 2013. Our interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Stratton about his experiences working at the Hanford site. So first of all, thank you for coming in and letting us talk to you today.
Monte Stratton: Well, first off, you can call me Monte. I like to go by my--
Bauman: Will do.
Stratton: --nickname.
Bauman: All right. Well, Monte, I wonder if you could start by just telling us how and why you came to the Hanford site and when you came here.
Stratton: Well, going back to the early days of my working career, I was at an ammunition plant in Kings Mills, Ohio. This would have been in 1943. And at that time, the war was in its heyday and actually beginning to wind down to some extent. And I had been given a deferment up to that point, because I was at an ammunition plant. But they needed some personnel here at the Hanford site which was being built, and I was interviewed by the person who eventually became the plant manager to start with. That would have been Walt Simon. They were looking for people that had backgrounds similar to mine. I was an amateur radio operator and had some electronic experience. I'm an electrical engineer by profession, and they needed someone with that background for the instrument field. So as I said, I was interviewed and accepted the offer. I came to the Hanford site in February of 1944, and that's when I got started here at Hanford.
Bauman: And what was your very first impressions of the place when you arrived?
Stratton: A long ways from home. [LAUGHTER] I don't recall any particular impressions. I know that I arrived in the wee hours of the morning, came in by train into Pasco. And were met by plant personnel who escorted me over to Richland, and I was given a room in the—trying to recall what—the hotel that was originally in Richland. And I spent a week there and then I was given a room in the last men's dormitory that was built. This was K8. But my first impressions of this place were so different from the East Coast, where I'd grown up. So it took me a while to get used to it. But I soon learned to survive.
Bauman: And so you stayed—you were living in a dorm, a men's dorm at the time then. Could you describe that, like--
Stratton: For--
Bauman: --the size of it, or anything along those lines?
Stratton: There were eight men's dorms here in Richland. And there was a two-story building. I don't think any of them are still around, but they used some of them for facilities afterwards. I was on the second floor, and it was--I don't remember too much about any particulars of the dormitory. At this point, I might mention something about the dust storms that were prevalent in those days. They were called termination winds, and I recall one day I was laying across my bed. This was probably a Sunday afternoon, just resting, left the window open, and one of those termination wind dust storms came up. And when I woke up, I was covered with dust. [LAUGHTER] That was one experience that I had in the early days. Another experience that I had while I was there in the dormitory, and this relates to security—in those days security was very prevalent. There were a lot of security agents assigned here as everybody knows. And one afternoon once again I was laying across my bed and I got this strong knock at the door. When I opened the door the person walked right past me and came over to a radio receiver that I had on the table. And this receiver had a send/receive switch on the front. And he says, we have to put a seal on that. This happened to be the receiver that I'd brought out with me. Being an amateur radio operator, I brought my receiver along. We were taken off the air, of course, during the wartime, but I had my receiver just to listen to whatever was of interest. Well, I had a hard time explaining to this security person that this switch on the front of this receiver did not do any transmitting. That's what he wanted to make sure, that there was no transmitting involved. So I opened it up and let him look in and explained as best I could. Actually, the switch only controlled some external device if you wanted to hook it. But I managed to get past that one.
Bauman: And how long did you live in the dorms then?
Stratton: About one year. As I recall, I was in the dormitory for approximately one year. During that period, I met the person that I ended up marrying. And when I married this person, I moved from the dorm into a house that had been assigned us.
Bauman: And where was the house?
Stratton: The house was a duplex, a B-type house located on Judson Avenue in Richland. And we ended up having two children and we moved out of that B house to where we're presently living, which is an H-type house, [INAUDIBLE].
Bauman: And how did you and your wife meet? Was she working there as well?
Stratton: Oh, now you've asked a nice question. [LAUGHTER] It just so happens that I had a crew of people maintaining doing repair work on some of the instrumentation which I was assigned to. We had a shop in Richland, and one of my personnel was this girl that I became acquainted with affectionately and ended up marrying her. She was one of my, actually one of my workers.
Bauman: And where had she come from to work Hanford?
Stratton: She had come from Denver Ordnance Plant in Denver under similar circumstances that I came. At that time—this is a matter of interest—ammunition plants in different parts of the country had stockpiled their ammunition to the point where they were slowing down. A lot of the plants were either closing or slowing their operations. And the girl that I married had been working at one of the ammunition plants, and she was transferred here to the Hanford plant under very similar circumstances that I was.
Bauman: So, let's talk about the work you did then at Hanford when you first arrived. Could you describe the sort of work activities you were involved in?
Stratton: Well, when I first got here, I was assigned to a shop activity in the 300 Area. It was an instrument shop. And they were maintaining instruments that were being used throughout the project. And after that latter part of 1944, I was transferred to a new shop that had just been built in the 700 Area, an instrument shop. And that's where we were maintaining instruments that were being used throughout the project.
Bauman: Okay. And how long did you end up working at Hanford, and what other sorts of jobs did you have?
Stratton: Oh, I worked at Hanford here until I retired in 1982. I worked in all the different areas, starting at the 300 Area, then to the 700 Area. I was sent out to F Area at the startup of that reactor. And then came back to the 700 Area and was there for several years, and finally was sent out to the B Reactor. The B Reactor started up and operated for a short period of time. Then it was shut down—I don't recall for how long—a year or so maybe. And I was sent out to the B Reactor about that time--or was at B reactor about the time that it started up on its second run of operation.
Bauman: And about when would that have been?
Stratton: I'm guessing, and I was looking at my notes the other day, trying to figure out exactly when that would have been, but I'm guessing around 1949. I could be wrong on that date, but that's approximately.
Bauman: And what was your jobs at B Reactor when you were there?
Stratton: To start with I was actually a mechanic doing maintenance activity. But after being there for a while, I was elevated to a supervisor again. And I worked in B Reactor and several of the other reactors over the years. I went to the K Reactors when they were just being built and followed those from ground up, spent about roughly ten years, either as a supervisor or in maintenance engineering at the K Reactors.
Bauman: So you worked at several different areas then on the site.
Stratton: I did. I sure did. After the K Reactor started slowing down and—I'm trying to recall the date. I think it was 1972 when my work in the K Reactors had gotten to the point where I was no longer needed there. And so I came to the 200 Areas and spent another ten years there in field engineering.
Bauman: So could you maybe explain a little more, what would field engineering entail? Like, what sort of things might you typically do on a work day when you were working in the 200 Areas?
Stratton: Well, for instance in the K Areas, it would be going out and checking on the operation of the equipment, seeing that it's functioning properly and making repairs if they were minor, or otherwise I'd call a mechanic to come and do the repair work. In the 200 Areas, I was doing both field engineering and field inspection for new instrumentations that were being put in place.
Bauman: I want to go back a little bit to you said you first started working in Hanford in 1944. Right?
Stratton: Correct.
Bauman: Did you know what you were working on? Did you know it was--
Stratton: I've been asked that question many times.
Bauman: A lot of times?
Stratton: When did you find out that the—what they were doing here at Hanford? I might say this. My background being an electrical engineer and ham radio as a hobby, I had enough electronic experience in my background to begin to figure out from the instruments that we were using pretty much what was being done here at Hanford. So it took a while before I got all the details, but I started figuring out in the early days what was really happening here.
Bauman: And do you remember when you first heard the news that the war had ended, anything along those lines?
Stratton: I might relate one interesting experience. When they first made an announcement of what was being done here at Hanford, it was just a limited amount of information that was released to the news media. It so happened that my wife and I—this was in 1945—my wife and I were on a vacation trip, and we were at Mount Rainier. And when the news came out, of course, being the closed-mouth person I am, I didn't even say, boo, that I had worked at Hanford. However, my supervisor back in Richland was so afraid that I was going to start talking and say things that I shouldn't about the work that was, that he frantically got hold of me there at the—I think we were at Paradise Inn at the time. He was all concerned that I'd start talking. And I let him know right off the bat that I know not to keep—to keep my mouth shut and not talk—[LAUGHTER] other than what's official or released.
Bauman: So he called you while you were on vacation to make sure you--
Stratton: He called me to make sure that I didn't blab my mouth, something I shouldn't say.
Bauman: So you sort of mentioned a couple of times the security at Hanford, obviously. I wonder, and you lived in the dorms initially and then lived in a house in Richland. So in terms of security, getting onsite to work every day. Did you drive your car? Did you take a bus? How did that work?
Stratton: As I recall, I was using the transportation that was provided, bus transportation. Speaking of security, reminded me of another instance. I might back up a bit here. The people that I had working with me in the 700 Area were available to maintain instruments out on the Hanford Project. We had certain instruments that we would go out and take a look at. So one day I sent one of my personnel out to look at this equipment out in one of the remote areas. And she had a run-in, so to speak with the guards at the gate. She had been doing this job quite a bit, got to know quite a few of the guards at the gate, and she would kid them going through. And this particular day there was a guard at the gate that apparently she had not become acquainted with. And she made—when he asked her something about the equipment that she had—some of the equipment would be taken out for maintenance purposes. He asked her what she was carrying, and she made some remark about it being explosive or something along that nature, which—that was the wrong thing for her to say. And she had quite a hard time explaining herself out of that one. Another instance of security that I can recall—we had some instruments that were manufactured and when they arrived, the meter on the front of the instrument read millirankines. That was a no-no from an information standpoint. We did not want people that were not familiar with what was going on—that was the very early days—what we were actually measuring. And we had to take every one of those instruments out of the case and blank out the word, paint over the word millirankines to keep people who were not privy to the information to be able to read it, know what we were measuring. That gives you an idea of how strict security was in those days.
Bauman: And did you have to have a special security clearance to do the job that you had?
Stratton: I was issued what was called a Q clearance at the time. I think it was the popular security clearance for most people that would have access to classified information.
Bauman: Sure. I want to go back a little bit, again, to that first period during the war when you were living in the dorm. What sorts of entertainment was available on site for all the workers who were living in the dorms? Were there things to do for entertainment?
Stratton: [LAUGHTER] I don't recall too much that I got involved in as far as entertainment is concerned. I was never much of a entertainment type person. I didn't do carousing around like some people did. I don't recall too much in the way of entertainment. I might say took some hikes. Four of us actually climbed up the side of Rattlesnake Mountain. That would've been in the early part of 1944. And on another occasion I got out and hiked up to the top of Badger. But I don't recall too much in the way of entertainment that I got involved in in those days.
Bauman: And you said that you moved to Richland. You and your wife got married and moved to Richland. What was Richland like at the time as a community in the 1940s and the 1950s?
Stratton: Well, in the early 1940s, it was a closed town, of course. And you had to have a reason to be here. I don't remember too much about the details. It just wasn't a lot of interest from my standpoint in the early days.
Bauman: Can you think of any events or significant happenings, things that happened at Hanford while you were working there. I know President Kennedy came in 1963 to visit the N Reactor. I wonder if you were there at that time or any other events that stand out in your mind?
Stratton: I remember going and seeing Kennedy when he came. I was off at a distance. I was working out in the 100 Areas at the time. And I remember going and seeing him at a distance. I'm trying to think of any other events of particular interest. I can't think of anything to mention right at the moment, Bob.
Bauman: Okay. Were there ever any emergencies, fires or anything along those lines that happened while you were working that stand out at all?
Stratton: Gee, I can't think of anything of particular interest at the time, Bob.
Bauman: You worked, so you worked at Hanford basically from 1944 to 1982, right?
Stratton: Right.
Bauman: That's almost 40 years. My math.
Stratton: Almost 40.
Bauman: Long time. You must have seen a fair amount of change take place on the site, in the technology that was used or maybe some of the procedures or policies. I wondered if you could--
Stratton: Probably the biggest change would be in policies—that I can think of. Of course, equipment was updated tremendously over that period of time. And what we started with in the early days was antique by the time I retired. But I think maybe policies were some of the biggest situations that I can relate to.
Bauman: Are there any particular policies or practice that stand out that changed?
Stratton: Nothing that I can relate to right at the moment. I can't think of anything in particular, but—
Bauman: Hanford obviously at some point, it was for years about production and at some point shifted to clean up. Had that started to happen when you were working there?
Stratton: Not really. No. There wasn't a whole lot of that activity. Clean up pretty much started after I retired.
Bauman: I wonder if there's—what you would like future generations, people who never worked at the Hanford site to understand, to know about working at Hanford during World War II and the Cold War era?
Stratton: Well, the thing that some of the people wonder about—we were producing plutonium. Was that a good thing? Well, you have to look at it from the standpoint that the war effort was brought to an end primarily because of the work that we started here with the production of plutonium. It undoubtedly brought the war to an end. That's what the way we have to—the way I would like to look at it.
Bauman: And you said you worked there almost 40 years. There were a lot of people who didn't. The termination winds sent a lot of people packing.
Stratton: Those were—that’s true.
Bauman: You know, what was it that kept you here for almost 40 years?
Stratton: Probably getting married. [LAUGHTER] That would be probably the main reason that we decided to stay and raise a family here. I was working in a field that was of interest to me. Like I mentioned, I was a ham radio operator from way back. And I was in the instrument field and the work that I was doing was of real interest for me. And so I had no particular desire to move away from here. So I think that is one of the things that kept me here. Of course, we started our family and from then on this was home.
Bauman: So overall, how would you describe Hanford as a place to work?
Stratton: Well, for me it worked out to be a very good place. Young people that came along after I'd been here for a few years, like tech grads coming in for a short stay and they wanted to know, do you think this is a good place to try to continue working here? And I would always encourage them to go ahead and apply for employment here at the Hanford Project. Because I think if it was in their field of interest or field of training, that would be a good place for them to work.
Bauman: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you think would be important to talk about or any special memories or specific memories that you think would be important to talk about?
Stratton: I think you've covered it very nicely. Well, I can't think of anything in particular to add to what we've covered so far.
Bauman: Well, great. I want to thank you, Monte, for coming.
Stratton: Oh, you're sure welcome.
Bauman: I really appreciate it.
Stratton: Only too happy to do what I could to--I don't know whether this will help the cause very much.
Bauman: It's terrific. Yeah. Thank you very much.
Stratton: Oh, you're sure welcome.
Northwest Public Television | Cheyney_Ed
Laura Arata: Plus, if you make him mad, he's got a cane now he can smack you with.
Ed Cheyney: Well I got one I’m not doing with.
Arata: Nice.
Man: I guess it just--
Arata: That would be our first on camera cane dueling.
Cheyney: Right. [LAUGHTER]
Man: Okay, whenever you're ready.
Arata: Okay, we’re ready to go. All right. So if we could start out by having you say your name, and then spell it for us?
Cheyney: Sure. My name is Edwin Cheyney. C-H-E-Y-N-E-Y. It's also been pronounced chee-nee, with the extra Y in it. I was corrected many years ago that you're pronouncing it wrong. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: Really? So you learned about it, too?
Cheyney: I said, I didn't care, as long as it didn't get any worse.
Arata: Fair enough. My name's Laura Arata. Today is November 12, 2013, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start off by just having you tell me a little bit about when you came to Hanford, and what that first experience of coming to Hanford was like, and why you initially came here.
Cheyney: Okay, well, first of all, at that time, I was going to Spokane Technical and Vocational School, which is now Spokane Community College. And basically, the only way you could get out of class time is to go interview. Well, I was on—it’s three and a half years, and so, I was on the, actually, the last few months of my course. And this guy says, hey, let's get a carpool going, and go down to Hanford. Well, where's that? And he says, well, they're looking for employees. I think it was 13 at that time, for a special program with General Electric. So we get down there, and the first thing, and we got here early, at seven o'clock promptly. We were all escorted back into a room that had separate booths, and we were given time tests from seven o'clock till 12 noon. We were tested on about every kind of conceivable test that I could imagine, but it all related to my field of electronics and instrumentation. So anyway, it was about two weeks later. The ones that were in the carpool with me said they already got their rejection notice. And my teacher--I wasn't one of his favorite ones--and he just says, came to me, and says, well, you'll get yours. And I said, well, I'm sure I will. A month later, I get a call from my grandmother. I was living in Spokane and taking care of two of her apartment houses. And she says, you've got a registered letter. So I went to my teacher, and I said, I need to take my grandmother to the bank. He said, I've never heard of that one before. [LAUGHTER] So he let me go, and I got there, and I had a registered letter from General Electric. I really got excited. And it says, offered me a job. And I went back to the school. I plopped it down to the teacher, and says, well, there, I got my letter. He says, so what? And just turned his head. So, well, that's fine. At least I got proof. And I went to my two other instructors from previous years. They stopped everything. He said, look it. He's the only one out of the whole school's that's been offered a job down in Hanford. I still didn't know what I was getting into. [LAUGHTER] But I figured it was worth it. And we had to agree to the fact to go to three and half years more to CBC to special programs that GE selected. And that was no problem either. And then we worked only an eight hour shift, except on weekends, we could work overtime if that case came up. So basically, that's how I got in the front door. And it's sort of interesting that when I first came down here, my mother wanted to make sure that I got in a decent environment because I'd never cooked or anything. And so, GE, they'd recommended the best place where most go is the Statler Hotel. Well, I thought, well, let's go there. Well, we went in there, and my mother, of course, with me. When she saw the three gals there wearing mini-skirts and the whole thing, she almost ripped my arm off, says this isn't the place for you. I didn't see any problem with it, but she immediately took me up to the parish house, and says, is there somewhere decent that I could live? And she introduced us to this woman that was very motherly, very heavy set, very good cook. And said she'd board and room me. Well, of course, I got out on the project. There was lots and lots of indoctrinations that this is classified work, and you're not to discuss anything whatsoever. And the home then I was staying in, her husband was one of the managers out at D Reactor. And so first thing, he asked me, he says, what do you do out there? I says, I just work out there. He says, I know you can't describe anything, but he says, you can at least say your title. You're not getting yourself in trouble with that. I says, well, are you sure? He says, I wouldn't put you on the spot. And I says, I'm an instrument and control technician. And so, he didn't push me any further. And the one thing, before I left the neighborhood of Spokane, the FBI was checking up on me. And I had neighbors say, what kind of trouble are you in anyway? And I says, what do you mean trouble? And they says, the FBI was out checking on you. And I go, that's great. He says, what's great about it? I says, I think they're interested in me. [LAUGHTER] So that's basically how I got in the front door. And I started in the 300 Area, basically the canning lines. And with GE, you were only in a spot roughly three months to six months, and they rotated you because they wanted you to get the full feel of the different expectations that they had of you, and the way you could handle your so-called position, as far as instrument control calibration of all kinds of instrumentation, which, to me, I found really exciting because it was a new challenge. There was never, seemed like there was never a day that it wasn't something different. And I like that. And the challenges were quite different. And riding that bus for a nickel a day. You couldn't afford to drive anywhere. The only thing is, those buses didn't have air conditioning or anything. And when it started, when they moved me to the K Reactor--first it was B, C Reactors. When you had 100 degree weather, it was no fun after a shift, getting on the bus about 4 o'clock. It's good and hot and everything. About all you could do is just sit there and bear it. I usually just closed my eyes, and just figured, well, I'll get home pretty quick. And I just figured, well, it's good for a common cause. Also at that time, the salary was real good for someone that was just out of a tech school. My dad had a master's degree, was teaching five solid subjects, and the superintendent of schools at Hogan, Montana. And the first year, because I was living with the landlady's, their home, she also made use of me, and took me to grocery stores to help her carry stuff. And she took me to Zale’s and talked me into buying a men's diamond ring, which that's the last thing in the world I was really interested in, but I got talked into it. Well, I go up to see my dad, and he sees that. And he says, is that real? And I says, of course, it's real. But I says, it was stupid that I bought it. And I took it off, and said, you can have it. And he said, well, what kind of money are you making? At that point in time, I had made a little over $2,500 more than he'd made. And that really changed his whole attitude about tech school because when I graduated from school, I had to be in his classes, and I took lots of insults. And when he asked me when I graduated, what are you going to do? I says, I'm not sure yet. And then, when I told him I was going to tech school, he says, you just will be a grease monkey. Well, that changed his whole attitude, that maybe--He says, I just can't see why and how they can pay you that kind of money. I says, Dad, they pay you for what you can do with your hands, too. And from then on, he had a whole different feel about it. So that's getting off of what I was doing in Hanford. But going to the different sites, like I said, the challenges were always different. And I think the thing that really impressed me the most is the feeling of the power and energy that was going on. And especially when I was given the tour to go, first, up to the water treatment plant. That was massive enough. I was told could easily take care of the whole city of Los Angeles. And they showed me a wet well, and in it was all these lights with no insulation or anything. And they're on. I says, how come they don't short out? He says, in pure water, there's no conduction. And the mass of water that was going down through the pumps, and through the reactor core itself, the ground just vibrated. I'd say it was at least a good two city blocks, if not longer. You just feel the rumbling. And it's just a massive power. And you go in the reactor area, you just hear all this rushed water. Another thing that was impressive, you look outdoors at this big million gallon tanks of boiling water coming right off the reactor. It could be 100 degrees outdoors, and it had a 200 foot plume at least. And it really made me think, especially in later years when you start realizing what all is going on. It was a graphite core reactor, the same kind of reactor that Chernobyl had. They were foolish in what they were doing. They weren't using nuclear engineers or physicists, and doing all kinds of dangerous experiments. But they reminded me that when I went in to watch, and a lot of times we referred to it, we're controlling a nuclear bomb. And when the operations, especially at operations, they start pulling rods, waiting for things to go critical, it got real exciting, real quiet. And they had two to three guys watching everything, all the instrumentation to see when things were starting to go critical. And it just really amazed me how smart they were, and how careful they were in their operations. And at the same token, it made you well aware that we're really controlling something really massive. And later, roughly, I'd say about every six months or so, they rotated you. They moved me to the K Reactors. Now those were the two world's largest producing plutonium reactors. And that was even more exciting. And of course, a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot more things going on. And eventually, I don't know if it was because of my interest, or my attitude or what, they gave me the opportunity to go into the irradiation testing group, which was a whole lot more involvement. And that was going into, I won't go into a whole lot of detail. They were putting, I'll say samples, into the core of the reactor during operation for different tests for Atomic International, NASA, and there was a few others. But they had a lot of instrumentation, monitoring, and analyzing what's going on. Of course, because being rotated around, actually, what happened then was I just became journeyman, and General Electric announced that they're phasing out. That was a real scary thing for the simple fact they were laying off thousands of people, not hundreds. And being that I was on their special training program, they had an agreement with the union, only take a certain percentage of us to lay off. And go off, like, they lay off 2,000 workers, they might take three or four of us. But when it got down to the last two weeks at General Electric, I was down into the last group. Now when they put me on that status, then they immediately transferred me out of the K Reactors down to the canning lines. And that's where they actually had, oh, what do I want to say, molten metal for sealing the canisters for the fuel for the reactor. And so, when you knew when you were down there that you were on your way out--Well, on Friday, the last Friday of the second week of GE, I got my lay-off notice. Well, this probably about does it, but I put in my name. I thought, well, I want to stay nuclear. I put in my name for the nuclear bomb testing down in Nevada. I immediately got results back. We'd like to hire you, and the only thing is, they're offering me basically the same salary, but I had to move myself. And I thought, well, to heck with that. The following Monday, so I got a notice on Friday, the following Monday, my supervisor comes to me, and he says, how would you like to work for Douglas United Nuclear? I says, I'd love to work for Douglas United Nuclear. He says, well, you'd be doing the same thing you're doing. And so, tear up your lay-off notice. So I stayed with Douglas United Nuclear. And not to go into a whole lot of details of the same thing, it wasn't long they announced shutting down more reactors. The handwriting was on the wall. You aren't going to be here very long. And so, I put my name in with Battelle Northwest, and I put my name with KEPR TV station, because at school I had earned a commercial FCC license, so I could go that way. I thought, all right. I'll get out of government. I'll go into this. Well, it was on a Thursday night. I got called by both Battelle and by KEPR. And I said, well, I wanted to—to Battelle, I told them I wanted to just check into this one job first. Well, it turned out real quick that that didn't have anywhere near what to offer that Battelle. So I went to Battelle. It was through Battelle, then, I got into a whole lot more avenues of the nuclear field. And they moved me everywhere where they felt that they wanted me or needed me. I worked--first, they were going to move me out in the areas, or that's what they promised me, and the first day on the job, they put me in the 300 Area again in the fabrications department. Well, Battelle's in everything. And the next thing, I was assigned on an engineer. He basically gave you a schematic, or a drawing, of what he wanted, and you had to from there, get everything you need, put it together, wire it up, test it, and turn it over to the engineer. Well, that was really exciting because it was a whole different challenge, including making your own printed circuit boards, which I'd never done. Basically, it's a photographic process, and I've always been interested in that. And so, it wasn't long—they wanted, the engineering department then wanted me, and moved me down to the sand castle. And of course though, when they have a contract that ends, so does the job. But in the meantime, they had the computer lab at the sand castle for the FFTF mock up. And I guess, my understanding was the first time they ever had analog digital computers working together to simulate FFTF. That went great until Governor Dixy Lee Ray came down and removed that job, that responsibility from Battelle. Well, I got moved out into the 300 Area again, and different labs, and HTLTR, PRTR, and all the different ones. But again, every one of them was exciting. Every one was a different challenge. Well, in the meantime, there's a gentleman that got hurt at home. And he worked out at the 200 Areas, and that was top secret work. And so that required having more checks on me. And then when you were approved, you had a blue tag on your badge. The only thing that I really feel comfortable disclosing was the fact that, again, it was really exciting. The big thing was that they assigned you to specific cells only. And no one had the same cells, and no one was-- basically, I was told because this way, you'll never try to put things together. You just do your job, and mind your own business. And that's fine with me. And then, as soon as this gentleman was able to come back to work, then I was put on with, they asked me if I'd like to work at the weather station. That's out at the 200 Areas also. That, I was to work on the telemetry stations. I thought that's really neat because it had weather stations at a 65 mile radius that I traveled every day, checking stations, and setting them up for monitoring radiation, temperature, wind speed, and et cetera. And the only thing is, it was a great adventure, watching, or being at the different areas. And that's when it came to my light, I didn't realize that during the time I was out in the 100 Areas, I don't know when because I never saw it, that they had Nike missile sites. And where that refreshed my memory is when I was out a K Areas one night, on graveyard shift, and I was with a gentleman. And we were outside, and we had just got through with, they had stack flow monitors to see what kind of effluents are going through, to make sure we're staying within limits. And he says, you know, it was really sort of funny. One night, he wouldn't say who, and I can see why, inflated a big air balloon, a weather balloon, and tied a flashlight to it, and set it up. Well, after it went up so far, next thing, a big—I think two military jets came flying over to see what the heck that was flying in the air. So some people had ways of—no one wanted to be identified on that one because they did have missile sites. I found that one out on my weather stations out at the Wahluke Slopes, but they pretty well destroyed everything. And I thought this was really, really, was pretty well covered and protected. Which thank God it was, but we weren't aware of that stuff. So it was full of excitement. And I never knew what I was going to be stuck with the next day. The only thing is, like with Battelle, and that's while I was doing the weather stations, I was watching--one of the sites I had was right out on the Hanford site, and it was right out there where they were starting up Whoops, and they were digging this massive, massive hole in the ground. And we had to set up a weather station there. And so I got really interested in that, and basically, I thought, you know, I've always wanted to see something like this being built from the ground up. So I put my name in there, and three months later I was hired in, and spent the last 27 and a half years there. But that's basically in a nutshell what I was involved with. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: Sounds like you were involved in a lot of different jobs, and I wonder--you mentioned that you worked at B, C, and K Reactors. So I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what maybe some of your different jobs there were. Whatever you're comfortable with.
Cheyney: Oh, sure. Well, especially in the B, C Reactor Areas, like I say, while I was going to school, you weren't allowed any overtime. But on weekends, you were. Another interesting thing when you're back home, if they wanted you, like, for a reactor goes down, they call you up, you say yes, they send a person out in a car. They pick you up, and take you out there, and they also bring you back home. Some of those jobs, I actually was out at the plant for two days at a time. But one of them, like in the B, C Reactor, especially now that we can go visit and everything, it brought back the recollection of the reactor had gone down, and they were doing repair of thermocouples. That's temperature measurement. And you had to go to the rear face of that reactor in a wetsuit, and, of course, PCs under that, and go in there, and go behind where those tubes are, pull out this little two conductor wire, and take and cut it, splice it, and basically bond it together, and then solder it there. And here you've got water's dripping from 100 feet up. You're trying to heat this thing up enough to make it bond. And then call the control. Now are they getting an indication? And then, of course, you'd have to re-insert it back down into the well it was in. That was one of the things I'll never forget because it was so dark back there and everything. You did not want to be claustrophobic. You could easily touch the back of the wall with your back, and you'd have the tubes in front of you. Of course, the interesting thing there is before anyone ever goes in there after a shutdown, they discharge all those tubes down into 15 feet of water, and you see all this blue going down there below you. That never bothered me either, other than thank God, it's down 15 feet under water. Well, in the K Reactors--the B Reactor, I just had a lot of general routines of, like in the powerhouse, there's all kinds of instrumentation for controlling those big boilers. Of course, that was coal fired. And the water treatment facilities, measuring the pH of the water, and the chemistry that goes into it. And then K Reactors, I got to go in. Now they were putting in the high speed scanning system for measuring temperature. And instead of using thermocouples, they used RTDs. And they were going into, I think it was about the second year I was at K Reactors, that again, they shut down to replace all those. Well, again, I get called, I come out there. It's at midnight. I'm well over 100 feet up in the air running these thermal bulbs down through in between the tubes while there's another guy riding the elevator down to the point of what tube it was to be installed into. And it was sort of relaxing up there. It was interesting, but it just seemed like forever. Another incident—of course, as soon as you finish your college requirements that they put on, I was immediately put on D shift. And it just--I didn't like shift because it was one day a week, swings, days, and graveyards on a continuous cycle. I was with the technician this one day. We were up in full operation at this point in time, but they were wanting to check—they were having problems. And so, he and I were assigned to go into the control room. They had—I won't give the exact number; I'll say there was well over 3,000 pressure gauges called panel gauges. They're monitoring the pressure of the water of the tube itself, and that's 3,000 plus. And this panel, you're in the control room, you hear all this click, click, click, click. And they're all moving. If anything, if any one of them goes over pressure or under pressure, immediately, it dumps that whole complete plant. Everything comes through a massive—you hear lots of equipment slamming shut, and the control rods drop. Well, anyway, I guess I was still considered a trainee at that time. We had to change out one of those little pressure gauges. Behind the panel, it's all full of tubing and wiring. They're all in series with each other, so that means if any one's interrupted, it dumps everything. So to get around that, to replace a gauge, you had to take, you had jumpers. So you put a jumper, and you jumper off that gauge. And then when you're all ready to try to dismantle, and pull it out and put another one, you pull the jumpers out of it. Well, the gentleman that was taking me through this, showing me and telling me how careful, as soon as he pulled the one jumper, boom. The plant went down. [LAUGHTER] Oh no. I don't know what color I turned, but I know that he says, oh no. He went out, he says, we did it, we did it. They says, hold on. They had to check it. And it turned out it was something else, but it happened at the same time that we pulled that jumper. So there was times that it made you plenty nervous because you don't make anyone happy if you dump the plant. You don't get fired, but the embarrassment of it—you try to take a lot more pride in it than that. And so, that's basically, sort of in a nutshell the B, C Reactors. It's really interesting to go out there and look at it now. I certainly encourage anyone that has the opportunity. It brings back a lot of memories. The biggest thing I remember is you go in the control room there, the first one that they let off. You go in the control room there, it looks like a little dinky space. It didn't seem that dinky to me then. But if you go into the K Reactors, it looks like a gymnasium compared to that, as far as the size of the control room and the equipment that was there. So a lot to compare it with, but the things that just always impressed me was you could feel from the tremor of the grounds and everything, that there was massive power. And it had to be to generate that much heat, and have that much steam coming out of those millions of gallons—I don't know exactly what. The only thing that disturbed me, and I questioned it at the time, riding the bus, going past the 200 East Area, a lot of times, the winds would bring down that brownish plume. And it'd come right in the bus, and your nose would burn. And I'd say, isn't that bad for you? Why is it on a big stack, and it's coming down here? Oh, nothing to worry about. Well, thank God, I don't think I ever got anything from it. There was a lot of things that went on that you could question, but you probably wouldn't get much for an answer. In fact, when I—I get bounced around on things—when I was doing the weather system for them, in the winter time, we were given snowmobiles because we did Rattlesnake Mountain, and the whole bit. And so they had their own trailer with the snowmobiles. Well, I had to go into the Two West Area, and immediately, this one guard, he must have been new. He says, pull over there, and don't go anywhere. Well, this is new. And he comes up, he says, sir, I hate to tell you this, but you can't be bringing your recreational vehicles in here. I said, sir, would you mind reading what's on those snowmobiles, and read what's on the trailer? It says property of the Atomic Energy Commission. He looks at it. He thought it was crazy. He says, well, I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER] So you're all the time being tested. But in general, I always considered it probably one of the greatest experiences. I'm really thankful to the good Lord that I worked 44 and a half years. I'm not trying to brag, but I was never unemployed. They kept me plenty busy.
Arata: It sounds like it. It sounds like you had many different jobs.
Cheyney: Well, with instrumentation and monitoring everything under the sun, temperature, pressure, level, et cetera. Even one, that reminded me—not to go on and on and on—but in the 300 Area, while I was down there, they sent me to the so-called bursting facilities. And I thought, now what the heck's that? Well, we'll find out. And I go there, and they had these different cells, and they had high pressure systems. And they take different materials of piping, and they hook up all these apparatuses on both ends. And they put it in a cell, and put on all kinds of monitoring equipment to test pressure, temperature, et cetera. And what they do, when they get ready to test, you get out of there, you go back in the control room, and they run up until that pipe virtually breaks open. And again, for studies. But they had a lot of studies going on before they ever used a lot of material. So it was, like I say, always exciting. I enjoyed it, but you never knew what you were going to be assigned with. And it seemed like they didn't mind sending me around.
Arata: Sounds like it. I wonder if I could have you talk just a little bit about starting in the '60s, and then having this great 44-year career unhampered. Certainly, the technology changed a great deal in that time. Could you talk a little bit about what sorts of technology changes you encountered working there?
Cheyney: Well, sure. It's sort of interesting. When they first put me out in the 300 Area, of course, I was assigned with different technicians almost every day. And anyway, this one technician—and you've could sense when right off the bat, well, you're a fresh one from out of school, so you probably don't know much or anything. And I was given this elderly gentleman, and he takes me to his own little shop area he had. As a matter of fact, it happened to be where the bursting facilities was, and he says, what do you know about recorders? I says, well, I was thinking of electronic recorders, a magnetic tape type recorder. I says, well, if you're talking about magnetic tape recorders, I says, I think I know quite a bit about them. What do you got? He says, well, what do you know about recorders? What do you know about L&N recorder? And I says, not a thing! Can you show me what you're talking about? He brings out this great, big, heavy, old chunk of iron. It's an L&N recorder. It has a galvanometer movement in it. I knew what that was. But I thought, what do you with that piece of junk? I'd use it for a boat anchor. [LAUGHTER] But I didn't say that because I knew it would disrupt him a lot. He says, do you know how to calibrate—or wind your own resistors for the bridge that it requires for it? I says, no. You give me a formula, and I'll work it out. He said, great. So he gives me what values he wanted. Okay. So then he hands me this spool and this wire. He says, all right, make your own resistor. I said, what is this? [LAUGHTER] He says, you've got to make your own resistor. So I kept going down on wire until I got exactly the resistance, cut it off, then I had to treat it and the whole thing. I just followed along with him. And I make these several spools of resistors, and put it in. And then he had me taking, apply a signal to see where the galvanometer would move, and the whole thing. I thought, now just how antiquated can this get? [LAUGHTER] He didn't like it too well or anything, but I thought, I could learn something from everybody. And it was really interesting because as I got out into the K Reactors, well, now they had all, at this time--that time--they had vacuum tube amplifiers. And yes, they had their own bridge circuits and stuff, but you didn't go winding your own resistors or anything. In fact, it all came from the factory pre-certified and et cetera. And so, I saw a big change there in the counting type equipment, and the measuring of temperature. Things changed tremendously. Now in the pneumatic end, that's air-driven instruments, which I never really was fond of. I liked electronics. It was a lot faster. Air-driven, even though that is very accurate for monitoring pressure, and the whole thing, is very slow. You make a move. You wait. Electronics, it's right there. And that was a big change I've seen. And of course, as they got—especially like that K Reactor—so much more massive and everything, they had to be a lot more sophisticated. And so, I could see one heck of a change. And poor old B Reactor was about as old-fashioned as you could get. But it amazes me how they handled the whole thing from the ground up, and we didn't have any major catastrophe. They did have at K Reactors—and I didn't realize the possible danger I was in—they did have where the core did catch on fire. And at least with the monitoring equipment they had, it was where they could respond fast enough to start changing control rods. But it took them a while to get that out. But at least it wasn't like Chernobyl. Chernobyl, they had no chance. In fact, we had videos of--and I'm jumping clear into--where we were shown videos. The fact that when they cut off all the safety systems, they apparently had no knowledge of how fast, when a chain reaction starts, how fast could it be when it goes critical. Because it totally blew everything up, and that's with a graphite core. And unfortunately, people think that, like Energy Northwest out there, that has water as a moderator. There's no graphite whatsoever, a whole different thing. And graphite does burn. And the sad thing is, understand, I've heard that there wasn't a single person that was around Chernobyl that was trying to save the area that is alive today. At least, thank God, we do have a lot more safety concerns. But I don't know if I've totally answered what you're looking for, between the difference, but it was a massive difference. Of course, then when I went over to Energy Northwest, the equipment, as far as recorders, they didn't even have vacuum tubes. Everything's solid state. Pretty much, the current state of the art, or even making changes to be more current, to the more current methods. So it always gave you a different challenge. But I like the changes. And I learned real quick. No matter who, you learn from everyone. And I know my first supervisor, he was sort of like a dad, and he'd, after about two weeks there, he called me in. And he says, I see that you were really raised strict. I says, why do you say that? He says, you don't let anyone disturb you, but you don't come back with any smart aleck remarks. I says, everyone's got something to offer, good or bad. I says, I'm not here for that. I'm here to learn, and I'm here to carry out what you want me to carry out. It was always exciting. And I have no regrets. In fact, most thought that I would never even quit. I quit when I was 66. I figured, well, maybe I should take time out to enjoy life. And I'm glad that I did. I don't miss it. I never tried to think about retirement, or play it into my mind until, I think it was about--well, the last day, I even went out, worked regular assignments until the last four hours. And then, finally, my boss says, well, come on in. There's no use to go any further. And I thought, well, now I can lay everything down, and walk out that gate, and I won't feel like I'm in a pen. [LAUGHTER] It was a great experience.
Arata: It sounds like it. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the K Reactor shut down. And I understand there was some talk of maybe starting it back up, and that ultimately didn't happen. Since you worked there--
Cheyney: Right. Well, I heard mostly about that, of course, when I was away from there. And I thought, it was really, really a disappointment. It was really sad. In fact, I think it was pretty much getting into that process when I was down at Battelle. And they were doing some tests out there, and I got to go with an engineer. He wanted me to go out there and help with some equipment. And going in there, everything's stone cold. Everything's stone quiet. Such a massive structure doing absolutely nothing. I thought, what a waste. And what are they going to do? Like I said, I didn't hear a whole lot about it, but it came and really hit home when I went in there, and they're worried about rodents and everything else. That isn't the reactor that I saw. And the excitement that was behind it has just, all is dead. And going back through some of the corridors, and into one of the areas they were experimenting with, just hardly could see around. They had some test equipment. I didn't question exactly what are they monitoring. I'm sure a lot they're looking for, is there any possible contamination concerns or anything? But speaking of contamination concerns, it's just like when any of those reactors had what they call a rupture. That's where a fuel element breaks open, and the material’s going out into that water stream. And what they do is they immediately divert it to, they had a big open area, a pit area where all that high contaminated water went into. And guess what's out there in the winter time? Ducks are swimming in that hot water. And I thought, I wouldn't eat anything around here. [LAUGHTER] But I think there's quite a bit that substantiates all that. In fact, Battelle's doing a lot of research in animals and stuff, and even the materials that they've, the feces material and everything is, like, up in the 5R range, which you wouldn't even want to be near that. And I thought, they've got a lot to learn out there of studying the habitat around there, but I wouldn't want to eat anything. [LAUGHTER] Again, I'm off on another subject. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: That's okay. So overall, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about any aspects of your work that you found the most challenging, and sort of the most rewarding. Or just overall, how Hanford was as a place to work during the time you were there.
Cheyney: Well, during the time I was there, as far as—I was really impressed with General Electric. They always gave me a feeling of a positive attitude. Also, a very strong feeling that you don't talk about your exact work because it's for the security of the country. And at the same token, I think where it became more rewarding and more relaxing to me is actually when I went to work out at, at that time, Whoops. And at that time, seeing all of the things that go into making a plant, you learn to respect things different. When I went to terminate from Battelle, they says, why in the heck do you want to go there? They're never going to ever operate. I says, well, I'm young enough yet. I want to see what I can learn out of it, and if it don't work--They says, if it don't work, come back here, we'll give you a job. I thought, I bet you will. [LAUGHTER] But I think maybe they were sincere, but I found it really rewarding there. I got involved with--and I never dreamt that I would—is working with robots, going into highly radioactive zones to do monitoring, and to observe what's going on, like steam leaks or anything. So you're not putting anyone in any danger. Out of that, I was surprised, I got an award from, I can't think of the name right now, from the company that was behind it. It was back east, and they sent a plaque awarding me that I contributed to something that basically made things safer, that didn't expose man to. And yet, I found it really exciting because I've always been excited about cameras, and this was working with cameras and with remote control of a little robot. And I made quite a few improvements, and so, I considered maybe that was one of the highlights. It was rewarding. I wasn't expecting anything. I just enjoyed that they let me go on it. And I also worked—I wore two hats in the last years at Energy Northwest, in that I volunteered because they couldn't get anyone else that would go there to write procedures. There was five originally that volunteered, and we all five took on the challenge. And inside of a couple months, it was down to two of us. It ended up, it was down—it was basically myself. And the main reason is, is because you're writing the instructions for that technician to go out and perform a function. If that causes anything like dump the plant, or any kind of danger, you go before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and you may be serving time. Well, to protect myself, I always went before engineering, and discussed, and made them put their name on the dotted line with me that, yes, this is right. This is the only way to go about it, or the best way to go about it. And it was rewarding to me from the standpoint that if they needed an extra hand, they'd pull me right off of that, and I was back out on the plant. So I got away from it, just continuing. Like I say, the challenges seemed to never end. And I really, for a while, thought, I don't know, maybe I won't quit. They always teased me that I would be there when they shut the lights out. Well, I'm glad I didn't because getting away from it, as I get older, different medical issues. But I'm still blessed with the fact that I can get around. [LAUGHTER]
Arata: Mm-hm. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about, that we haven't had a chance to hear you talk about that you'd like to share? Any other humorous incidents? Or just anything that stands out in your mind from that time?
Cheyney: Well, it wasn't a humorous incident, but one thing that GE pointed out, well, I guess it was an incident as far as, and of course, it was to teach everybody a lesson, is this one gentleman saw this real neat tool in his eyes. So he decided he'd take it home with him. It turns out it was a contaminated piece of equipment. And so, when they detected that it was missing, all they had to do was they got out their radiation monitors. They had an approximate idea. They could go right to his doorstep. And they went in, and they cut out chunks out of his carpet. Everywhere he'd been in his house, they were cutting out samples. And so I think it was a lesson well learnt. Keep your hands off of it. [LAUGHTER] In a way, I thought it was sort of funny. It's not really funny, though. But taking that kind of, obviously, carelessness, at least it really hit home. It isn't worth it.
Arata: All right. So I wanted to ask you, for general purposes, most of my students were born after the Cold War. They don't remember this time. So what would you like, sort of, that generation or future generations to know about working in Hanford, as this very important aspect of America's place in the Cold War, and winning the Cold War?
Cheyney: Well, I think the main thing is, the big thing is, I'm just trying to figure out how to put it. You shouldn't be afraid of nuclear. If you really know all the facts behind it, and all of the precautions behind it, it is one heck of a rewarding career. And it is something that I think I'm probably a whole lot healthier, and a whole lot that I know that have never had anything to do with nuclear, and yet, my whole life, basically, has been out there. And it definitely is rewarding in regards to the financial side. Well, I can relate it to my older son, when he was graduating, I says, well, what are you going to do? Because I'd never heard him discuss anything. He says, I'm going to be an instrument tech. I said, where'd you get that idea? [LAUGHTER] And he says, well, I want to do what you did, and I want to make the money you've made. And he went to Perry Tech, and he did real well. And I even, through my supervision, of course, was instrumental, and got him on a few outages out here. But he went on down to the only place where you got a permanent job. But again, instrumentation, the same, similar type of equipment for different purposes down at SCH, where it was making silicon wafers for all these integrated circuits. All the latest technology, it's a Japanese firm. They're very stern, very strict. Well, he had the most seniority and everything there, I think it was 12 and a half years. When it came to lay off and cutbacks, because they're very competitive, he was one of the first ones to let go. Now to try to find work, well, he's been able to get on to outages all throughout the country. So, even though he's had nothing there, right now he's in Raleigh, North Carolina. A month ago, he was down in Florida. And he's getting to see country that I haven't seen, and there's a lot of adventures yet, but he's still dealing with nuclear. It’s definitely, it's nothing to be afraid of; it's something to respect. And I'd say it definitely has a lot of opportunity if a person really wants to make the good money. I know, like I say, it's what you can do with your hands. Of course, you have to use your head too, but there's opportunity that you can really do well.
Arata: I want to thank you very much for coming in, and sharing your memories with us. We really appreciate it.
Cheyney: Well, I hope I've contributed something that's--I enjoy talking about what I can talk about it. It's left me with memories I'll never forget. And I thank you for the opportunity.
Arata: Well, we are very happy to have you. I love your description of standing behind B Reactor, and looking down in those kind of cool, glowing--