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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Robert Parr
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: And do you like to go by Robert or by Bob?</p>
<p>Robert Parr: Bob.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay—</p>
<p>Parr: If I get going too far, Robert is usually a buzzword that causes me to refocus.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. We will have to put out your full legal name when we introduce you.</p>
<p>Parr: Okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: But then I’ll refer to you as Bob from then on.</p>
<p>Parr: Yeah, okay.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, you ready Victor?</p>
<p>Victor Vargas: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Robert James Parr on November 17<sup>th</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name?</p>
<p>Parr: My last name is spelled Parr, P-A-R-R. My first name is Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. My middle name is James, J-A-M-E-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great, thank you. Thanks, Bob. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work at Hanford.</p>
<p>Parr: I graduated from WSU itself in 1973 with a degree in police science and administration.</p>
<p>Franklin: In Pullman.</p>
<p>Parr: Pullman, the big campus. And after I graduated, I went into work into law enforcement. I ended up in the late ‘70s working for the State of Washington State Liquor Control Board, long before cannabis, as an enforcement officer. It was a good agency, both regulatory and criminal enforcement. So it was—no day was the same. But when I looked at it, the pay and benefits weren’t what I thought they would be. And then I noticed—I saw an ad in I believe it was either the <em>Seattle Times</em> or <em>Seattle Post Intelligencer</em> that Atlantic Richfield Hanford—ARCO—was looking for people to work for them in their uniformed security group called the Hanford Patrol. So I checked it out, and I found out that their pay was much better than I was working for the state. So I went and interviewed with them at a hotel—I think it was the Doubletree, or is the Doubletree now at Southcenter in Renton, Washington. So I did the interview, and I noticed that everyone else being interviewed, we were all ex-military or law enforcement. So I took the interview, and then they offered me a job. I had previously applied with ARCO, and of course at that time the transition occurred, so it was now Rockwell Hanford. So they offered me a job starting in—I interviewed, I think, sometime in the December timeframe, and then right after New Year’s they offered me a job starting to work in February 1980. So I was married at the time, so we moved over to Tri-Cities, got an apartment, and I had done my physical and all the screening before. And then I started to work for Rockwell Hanford in February of 1980. My initial employment—my initial job was with Hanford Patrol. So, they had their own—they called it an academy, and it was at what is the 1100 Area, which used to be—one of the activities we did at the 1100 Area was the bus lot. Because we had buses onsite. So at the office where the buses were dispatched from, about the back third of it was the Hanford Patrol Training Academy. It wasn’t much, but that’s where I went to work, and initial training was about seven weeks. While I was there, I received my—I already had had a clearance from the Department of Energy—security clearance. So my security clearance showed up, and since I had a security clearance—many of my peers in this class—there were about 20 or 30 of us—didn’t have clearances, so they were work approvals, what we called WAs. But I had my Q security clearance, so I went right to work. My first assignment was in 200-West, 200-East, and 100-N. So I worked out at the north end of the site for a couple months. And then I got reassigned to 300 Area, which was a composite area of—we did fuels production and research there. So it was the contractors—we had Rockwell providing security and fire services and transportation. United Nuclear was operating fuels production for the N Reactor at the north end of 300 Area. We also had Northwest National Labs, Battelle Memorial who was operating in there; they had several facilities. And then Westinghouse Hanford was doing fuel production and research for the Fast Flux Test Facility, which wasn’t online yet, but almost was nearing completion. So I did that for—I was there for quite some time. And then about less than six months after I showed up, I got promoted. The Hanford Project, the uniformed security and protection onsite hadn’t really adjusted to changing times in society there. They issued us revolvers, and that was when revolvers were starting to be phased out. Automatics, or a more modern sidearm, was being issued. So the big change in technology was their alarm systems. Westinghouse Hanford had led the way. They actually wrote the software. We were using computer-operated security system at 300 and 400 Areas, 400 being Fast Flux Test Facility. So I got to get in on the ground floor of that. I participated in the acceptance test process for both 300 and 400 Areas. We brought the system online. It was state of the art. Westinghouse had gone out and found the best equipment and the best systems, and then wrote their own software for the system. So it was much beyond the old analog systems we used to have onsite. Many of the alarm systems at that point, particularly ones at the Plutonium Finishing Plant were technology from the ‘50s and were probably installed in the ‘60s. And here it was the ‘80s—and the mid-‘80s by now. So we did that, and eventually Rockwell, they also put in a similar system at Plutonium Finishing Plant. But they had a problem: the people that they hired to write their software were two guys in a garage. And it didn’t go well. God bless them for trying, but it didn’t go well. So they ended up buying the Westinghouse software and then they had their software people come in and make some adjustments to it based on their equipment. So they were similar systems. So I got qualified to operate all of them, and shortly thereafter I got promoted again. So now, instead of being a supervisor in an alarm facility on a rotating basis, I was now the coordinator responsible for all four rotating shifts, first at 300 Area and eventually at Fast Flux Test Facility. So I did that until 1993. During that time, Department of Energy was also ramping up its efforts on security, trying to be a little more professional and coming into a more modern era. So they had developed a central training academy down at DOE Albuquerque, at that field office. So they came up to Hanford, and they had developed a training program to teach supervisors on security forces how to train their employees. So I took it, and that worked good. But I was also—when I first moved to Tri-Cities I was on Coast Guard Reserve and I drilled at Station Kennewick, a small search and rescue. It’s the navigation station. So I drilled there, but the Coast Guard started downsizing in the Reagan administration. So I shifted over to the Army National Guard, and shortly after I joined the National Guard, they sent me to a school to learn how to be what the Army called an instructor. So all of the sudden I had two pieces of paper—one from the Department of Energy and one from the Army—saying I was an instructor. Well, in 1993 I was offered a job at Plutonium Finishing Plant with the training department. So in the fall of ’93, I left Safeguard and Security, the Hanford Patrol, and went to work at Plutonium Finishing Plant as a—you could call it instructor, but the official job title was Training Specialist. And then they went through several changes, so I think I’ve been a technical instructor, I’ve been a senior training specialist, and so four or five different job title changes; same job. At Plutonium Finishing Plant, they hadn’t quite—they had a vacancy, so they put me in it, and initially my manager’s idea was, well, you can assist someone on a key training project. So I got assigned as the second instructor on several training projects. And then one day, he walked in—the manager walked in, and he was looking for one of the employees that I was paired up with on one of the projects. And he said, well, where is he? And I said, I don’t know. He said, well, are you running that class today? And I go, what class? Because my peer and I hadn’t even talked about it. So next thing I know, I was now the person responsible or person-in-charge at Plutonium Finishing Plant. And it was a program we set up in response to a finding: when you have an event in those days, they would investigate it and then they would figure out what the corrective actions would be. So the finding, the corrective action, was that we would start a training program at Plutonium Finishing Plant for person-in-charge. So we mirrored it after a similar program at FFTF. And next thing I know, I’m running a training program, and we’re putting all the supervisors—the workforce supervisors in the plant are going through it so they can learn how to perform work at the plant. Almost all our work at the plant was done in either procedures or work package. Work packages were usually maintenance- or construction-related. So I got to be the—my title soon became the PIC-meister. Because not only did I have to coordinate their training, but I also had to develop their certification and qualification. So I did that much of the time I was there. And then other programs started going my way. I also ended up teaching Safety Basis. Because at a DOE facility, it’s somewhat similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-regulated facility, an operating commercial reactor. But their idea is that the Safety Basis is those documents, those commitments that have been made on how the plant can be operated. In other words, to a non-commercial DOE facility, it’s your operating license. So every time we proposed an activity, we had to look—or sometimes even a construction or maintenance package, we had to ensure it was within the Safety Basis. So I ended up teaching that course. So pretty soon my work focus seemed to be emergent training. Anything we had an event or an incident, where training was needed the day before yesterday, it ended up on my plate. So that’s what I did. By that time I was in the Army National Guard, and then after 9/11 happened, the 27<sup>th</sup> of September that year, I got a phone call at work telling me to come in. So I cleared work as fast as I could, came home. My eldest daughter was living with me. She fixed a boxed lunch for me, and I got in the car and I started driving towards Fort Lewis. And that first time I was gone sixteen months. Then I was home and I left again for a year-and-a-half. Went to Iraq twice. And then I came back, and in between that, there was all kinds of little three- to four-week taskings from the Army. And then in 2008, I left for four months, and came back for three months, and then I left in—January 2010, I got a phone call, and the phone call was, Sergeant Major, are you going to be on the plane tomorrow? I go, what plane? Well, you’re flying to Afghanistan tomorrow. Well, thanks, could you send me a set of orders? So they faxed a set of orders, and I walked up to my manager and said, I’ve got to leave. And that was about 9:00 in the morning, and by—before 11:00 I was turning in all my keys, my security badge and everything, and I was leaving. And then I didn’t come home for two years. And I came back, and by that time, President Obama was President of the United States. He used stimulus money to many federal agencies. And the Department of Energy took it, but their approach was a little bit different. While in the Army, we used some of it, but we hired companies to come in to do work for the Department of Defense. Whereas DOE used the approach of having their contractors hire more employees. So I came back and the stimulus money was running out and they were overstaffed. So the next—they offered a voluntary reduction of force, a layoff, early retirement. So I asked my management what my retirement’s worth. And they—so I drove down to, I think it was Stevens Center, not far from WSU Tri-Cities. And I walked in and they went over my retirement with me, and god bless them, they gave me credit for time served. Not like a jail sentence, but my time on active duty with the National Guard. So I raised my right hand and said, I’ll take it. And I left, and my last day was the end of September in 2011. And I had four years of great veteran’s benefits through the VA bill. So I took my veterans benefits and came back to WSU Tri-Cities this time. No athletic eligibility so the university couldn’t screw with me much. And I got another degree.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what’s your degree, what was that degree in?</p>
<p>Parr: The second degree is a Bachelor of Arts in Social Science. So I got to take all those cool classes that—the first time around, I declared my major the first year. And in the early ‘70s, once you declared your major, your goose was cooked, you took what they told you. They offered you a very narrow pathway. So the second time around I got to take fun things like economics and lots of psychology and some English courses. A lot of history. So I think I developed into a better-educated, much broader person.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s really fascinating.</p>
<p>Parr: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Good to see someone come in the social sciences, too, as a historian. So I see here on some of the notes Emma had written up that your father worked at Hanford as well?</p>
<p>Parr: My father was an Army officer. Hanford started out as an Army project. Corps of Engineers and the DuPont Corporation, which was quite a corporation back in the day. It still is. But they did a lot of work for the government in the ordnance field. And the Navy used the approach—because the Navy was heavily involved—not heavily—but involved in the Manhattan Project, and they were doing some of the uranium research. So the Navy ran it through their Ordnance Corps. The Army ran it through the Corps of Engineers, but the Corps of Engineers didn’t have all the resources. So one of the things was, because at the time Hanford was believed to be a viable target in the event of total war. So initially we sided—my father was Coast Artillery which later became Antiaircraft Artillery. So my father was one of the officers that was detailed here temporarily to site the guns. And they did some site work, and eventually that siting work, when they put one of the Nike systems—the missiles, to ring the Hanford Site and I believe around Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane. Some of the siting work that they had done in the ‘40s was used to site the missiles when, I believe, they were being placed in the ‘50s. So my dad was here temporarily. He was one of a lot—a lot of Army personnel came and went. I think people get the—we even had MPs here. We of course had antiaircraft artillery which later became air defense. So for many years there was a heavy Army presence here. It wasn’t totally—it wasn’t like you’d see an Army uniform everywhere, but Colonel Matthias was the commanding officer. And a very unique approach, because his approach was that—and Dad told me about it—his approach was that he was the commanding officer, and he was responsible. Later, when I came back to work here, I didn’t see that same attitude with the Department of Energy. Because one of the things I noticed is—I worked for a lot of contractors. First started looking at ARCO, then it was—when I came here it was Rockwell Hanford, then it was Westinghouse Hanford, then it was Babcock & Wilcox, which a lot of people think of them as the maritime boiler company, but they’re also heavy into the nuclear business. A great company to work for. They were only here for a year. And then it was with Fluor. Then eventually when they broke up all the little contracts, I worked for a company called NREP, which was the training contractor—one of the training contractors onsite. And then eventually after I left, after I retired, NREP went away and they consolidated back. One of the things that I noticed about DOE is a contractor will be—of course they don’t screw with Battelle. It’s hard to screw with those guys because they do great work for a lot of different things, and they’re on the cutting edge of so many different technologies and they’re so important to our national wellbeing. But DOE would start beating up on the contractors. So you know that contractor’s probably going to be on its way out. And Department of Energy over the years—god bless them. They’re great Americans. But they can’t seem to make up their mind how they’re going to run. Sometimes it’s—when I first came here it was five or six principal contractors, and then they went to one big contractor, and then they broke it down again, and then they subcontracted out a lot of work, and then now they’re bringing it back.</p>
<p>Franklin: Do you think that has to do with the fact that DOE—higher-ups in DOE are subject to political appointments?</p>
<p>Parr: Not only the political appointments but also the budget process. But I don’t see that constant shifting—you see it in other federal agencies, cabinet-level agencies, but not the extent that DOE does it. It’s almost like, well, we can’t do it. And then oftentimes, I’ve known—I think one of the things that’s responsible for a lot of—for some of the problems—we didn’t have a lot of problems—but some of the events we had out at Hanford were directly related to the field office, Department of Energy Richland. They’re great people and everything, but sometimes I think the guidance they gave, and oftentimes the funding for the program was stopped at the end of the fiscal year, we were told, don’t spend any more money on it, leave it as-is, do something else. Well, that’s kind of what happened at the PRF explosion. But it wasn’t DOE—it wasn’t the field office’s fault? Strange.</p>
<p>Franklin: Can you talk a bit more about that event? That was in ’97?</p>
<p>Parr: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Franklin: And you were working at PFP—</p>
<p>Parr: I was in a training group. It occurred on a weekend. So got to work, and you could actually see the—some of the—you had to know what to look for, but you could see the external damage to the facility. And of course, I had been involved in training the shift supervisor. I was at his oral board when he qualified as shift supervisor, because I supported oral—one of the things I got assigned with was supporting the oral boards. So I was at his oral board, and I’d known him for several years, and I thought he was probably one of our better shift supervisors at Plutonium Finishing Plant. But I had—I noticed, as we did it, and then they came looking for the training packages, well, we never—we did initial training on operating of PRF, but it got stopped, they withdrew the money from it. So I don’t even know where the training packages were. But they were concerned—and I noticed that our emergency response to the event was flawed. We didn’t respond well. We hadn’t trained on it, and we hadn’t really devoted a lot of time and effort to emergency preparedness. It hadn’t been a focus. So I got involved in the corrective action. I ended up teaching. We now instituted a drill program at the plant. So I got involved in the drill training program. In other words, how to train people that are working the drills. Many of us were ex-military, so we understood how to run a drill. No big thing. But we had a formal training program. I ended up adding some material to the PIC training program. So there were a lot of corrective actions, and eventually we demonstrated readiness to go back to work. But the issue still was we were told to stop working at PRF. So it just—and we didn’t really devote—we should have devoted time—we should have had the resources to look back at that and figure out what the hazards were that were still remaining in PRF. But we were told not to spend any more money on it. So when it’s the end of the fiscal year and you’ve got no Costco to charge activities to, you don’t work.</p>
<p>Franklin: Our project’s grant funded.</p>
<p>Parr: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: We’re a subcontractor, so I understand. Can you talk a bit about—so you would have been at Hanford during that—and I think on patrol during that transition period when the Cold War ended and when production wrapped up and we shifted into this new phase. I wonder if you could talk about that transition.</p>
<p>Parr: Well, the big transition initially was—and the one was much harder to discern—was the transition from the Carter administration to the Reagan administration. All of the sudden—it was much easier to see in the National Guard, because all of the sudden, new equipment started showing up and you started getting money to train with and send soldiers to schools. But here at Hanford we started getting new equipment. That’s when we—security had pretty much done—we’d upgraded all our alarm systems. But then we started getting money for communication systems, Hanford Patrol’s initial entry training started changing. And I noticed it elsewhere onsite, because we went from kind of a standby mode as far as defense work then, to actively producing material. Really significant change. And that went on for several years. As the Reagan administration ended and we went into President Bush’s administration, the level of effort kind of reached its maximum, as far as funding for defense work. And then I remember when the wall came down, we kind of backed off defense work. And then, okay, stop that, we’ve got enough plutonium. We closed down PUREX. FFTF was going away because they decided that that type of reactor wasn’t going to be it, even though we had received funding from the Japanese to do work. And they couldn’t find research work for FFTF, so they started shutting it down. Even though it was, at the time, it was probably the most modern reactor the Department of Energy had. But we had never, never gone to the idea of making a dual-purpose reactor and producing power. We’d done the engineering studies for it, we’d done some of the preliminary design work, but we never installed them.</p>
<p>Franklin: I thought N Reactor was.</p>
<p>Parr: N Reactor was, but we were going to do that to FFTF. So we’d actually—there was actually a piece of ground at the Fast Flux Test Facility where they were going to do that. And the engineering and preliminary design work had been done. So we kind of shifted from that, and it’s as if we were struggling for a national energy policy—where are we going to go?</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Parr: So we kind of—and the N Reactor—when Chernobyl went, the N Reactor, I believe, was in a fueling outage—its annual outage. So then we began to look at the fact that the N Reactor was a unique reactor. Very effective, very economical to run. Washington Public Power Supply System had built their generation plant next to it. But the political—Chernobyl caused a lot of—well, obviously, it was a severe blow to the Soviet Union. And the Ukrainian people are still having to deal with it. But the ramifications and fallout from any event in an industry, and nuclear’s probably one of the more visible ones, causes a ripple effect elsewhere. And our ripple effect was we never—we did the engineering analysis, but I think the political outcry was a little bit too much to reopen—or resume production at the N Reactor. Then also we really didn’t need any more plutonium; we had sufficient for national defense. So it kind of became the issue. There’s a lot of politics. So let’s go into that for a minute. Let’s talk red and blue states. Red being the party—a red is a Republican state; a blue state being a Democratic state. We are a blue state. Both US Senators come from the other side of the mountains. In this area we have one voice in Congress that speaks for us, the local congressman. So when even Spokane, which is Republican, too, when it begins to turn against this industry and this area, then politically it becomes no longer viable. Then of course we had—the congressional delegation from Oregon was speaking out against it. So it becomes politically unviable.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. It was kind of—Chernobyl kind of kicked off like a perfect storm to just kind of hurt the nuclear industry and Hanford.</p>
<p>Parr: And then—I believe it was 2000—there was an event in Japan, a criticality at a production facility. And that also caused a wave of consternation. Although it was interesting, because one of the subjects I instructed at PFP was criticality safety. And we were very diligent about it. We did refresher—everyone got a—you got your initial site training and then because you worked at PFP, we had a PFP specific class talking about the risks we had for criticality safety. And then we had an annual refresher course. So we looked at what was going on in the industry, using the lessons learned, and some of the changes in process we were doing to plan. It was usually a one- to two-hour refresher class every year. So we looked at all that. But when the Japanese had their event it was kind of interesting. Some of the experts—or the people I depended on to give me advice on what to put in the training event—were criticality safety experts from Northwest National Labs. And all of a sudden, I’m calling someone—well, he’s not here. Well, where is he? Well, he’s in Japan. Then I realized, okay. So, some of our top people in our industry from right here at Hanford went over to deal with the issue.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. You worked for a lot of different contractors. That’s always kind of a—it’s interesting to me how, you know, because we say Hanford Site, but that really obscures the organization of the site and the work. I’m just wondering if you could talk a bit more about that—shifting between contractors like that, and how that affected the mission of the site, how that might have affected employee morale, and how it kind of affected you personally.</p>
<p>Parr: Well, I think that the big transition—because I got here after Rockwell had come in. So I’m working for Site Safeguard and Security. And I get my paycheck from Rockwell. But I work at 300 Area, which in those days—United Nuclear was about 10 to 15% of the puzzle. Because I knew—I saw what our funding was for security services coming from. But most of it came from Westinghouse Hanford, Northwest National Labs, Battelle Memorial. And I noticed that, working with their security staffs from all four companies, that they were very—Northwest National Labs was very, very different. The people they had working their security programs were security professionals. They were very much into assets protection. Not only people, but information and also property. So assets protection was very big for them. One of the things that I—the first thing that struck me was when I went to work at 300 Area, they’ve got a book—a three-ring binder—and it’s got every one of their facilities with a floorplan and a description of what’s there, is there any special nuclear material there, are there any classified document storage areas? You know, what is the security force protecting? Incredible. No one else had one. Westinghouse was pretty much on the same level. Very much an administrative security. Had great programs. If you needed—if something unusual happened and you needed their management’s approval on it to get it, you were talking on the phone with those people and usually within three to five minutes, they’d be calling you. Incredible. They had a different mindset. They were building FFTF at the time, and they were very much—their corporate and company philosophy was very much on operating reactors. Because they built reactors, they built reactor vessels themselves, so they were very much into that commercial power production. They were a large government contractor, not only for DOE but other agencies. They did a lot of defense work. They did a lot of work for other federal agencies: Department of Treasury, Department of the Interior, Department of Justice. So there was a big mindset of meeting the customer’s needs. Westinghouse was very employee oriented. Of course they were only about 1,500 employees, whereas Rockwell was several thousand more. So it was very interesting working for Rockwell but being in a Westinghouse Battelle UNC facility. So I kind of—we kind of felt like orphans. It’s like—no, I’m very serious. Each one of the contractors had their own company newspaper. So, Rockwell, we’d get it two or three days later. Westinghouse, the day it was published, it was brought by our building, too. Even though everyone that worked in that building except for the janitor—the custodial staff—was a Rockwell employee, Westinghouse delivered it. They reached out to us. And then when they ran the big—at that time, and that’s when DOE field office went to one big contractor—of course Battelle had their own thing. So that didn’t change. But all of the sudden, it’s like the management of my own group was very—they worked in a Rockwell facility at the north end of the site. They weren’t too happy. But we didn’t have any problems making the transition, but they did. There was a lot of turmoil—not a lot, but a significant amount of turmoil in the north end of the site, particularly in Safeguard and Security, because all of the sudden Westinghouse had a successful program and they went out there and they weren’t impressed by some of the programs they found.</p>
<p>Franklin: So that’s the reason, then, for some of that turmoil or hard feelings?</p>
<p>Parr: Oh, yeah. Westinghouse, you didn’t want to lose control of special nuclear material. That’s really a bad thing. And Westinghouse’s standard, how they did their administrative program and their controls, was much more developed, much more thorough. So when they moved in—so now they’re taking over Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had a large amount of plutonium back in the days. They weren’t—it was kind of a shock to Westinghouse. Oh, we’ve got all this—before it was just fuel components. Now they’ve got weapons grade material that’s designed for ultimate defense work—the end use being defense work. So there was a little turmoil there, but then in about six months it all kind of evaporated. And then employees were actually sad when Westinghouse left. Because Westinghouse was much more attuned to employee communication, employee benefits. Rockwell—it was kind of interesting. I remember one time I had to go to east. This is where Rockwell Hanford’s corporate office was. I go out there and I’m walking around and I look, and in all these offices—even in cubicles—because there was some offices, but there was also cubicle land. You’d walk out and you’d see pictures of the B-1 Bomber which was a Rockwell aircraft, when Rockwell still made aircraft. And I’m looking around, and down at Westinghouse, everyone was an ex-Navy nuke or ex-commercial power nuke. But out at Rockwell, they were all refugees from when the B-1 program got canceled, so Rockwell moved all these engineers out here. So it was a very different mindset: the aviation versus naval nuclear and the commercial nuclear industry.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. So you said Rockwell was the aviation.</p>
<p>Parr: Yeah, North American Rockwell, the old aviation company. Probably the most famous aircraft that—I’m sure that they made other ones—but the one that comes to mind is the P-51 Mustang. That was their biggie.</p>
<p>Franklin: You’ve mentioned of the older security systems that were still in place in the 80s and you said analog. Can you give me an example of an analog security system?</p>
<p>Parr: Well, it was a system where the point of where the actual, shall we say, sensor, whether it’s a magnetic or whatever, when contact is broken it sends—you lose connectivity, so it would send a signal and it would—the little mechanical panel would go red and make an audible tone and go red. So kind of a dated technology, whereas--</p>
<p>Franklin: How would you track that from a central area?</p>
<p>Parr: Well, it’d be hardwired, usually to a facility that would be nearby.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Parr: At PFP, the alarm facility—the central alarm facility was a little wooden building—no, I’m serious—</p>
<p>Franklin: I believe you.</p>
<p>Parr: --that was near the main entry point into the plant.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Parr: But a more modern system would—you could actually, you’d get—the signal would—you could actually query the signal to see the strength of signal and is it because the system—there’s a power problem? In other words, is there a problem with the system, or is it an actual alarm? So you could query it back. And there were no microwaves, there were no—they were usually—their presence detectors were very limited in capability and obviously, no cameras—or very few cameras.</p>
<p>Franklin: So like CCTV would have been a big introduction.</p>
<p>Parr: So when they did install CCTV, there was—the fuels production facility was the first one to bring it online. They actually had—you could see the entry point into the secured area, you could see the hallways, you could see the primary rooms where the primary points of value were. And then on the perimeter, they normally had fixed cameras, pan-tilt zoom, but then they also had cameras with low-light capability, with flood lights on them. So it was much—and then there was actually a perimeter fence line and security system. Although at the 300 Area it was kind of dicey, because we were retrofitting a security system into an area where there’d been none. So there was some areas you couldn’t put a double fence line, so we ended up with a single fence line, supplanted with motion detectors—microwave motion detectors. And then they also had a fence that was monitored. They called it a taut wire system, because it was a weapon that if it ever were touched—and sometimes by small animals or tumbleweed—we seem to have some of that out here at Hanford—it would go off. So you’d take a look on the camera, see what it was.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah I bet that would help you reduce a lot of false alarms.</p>
<p>Parr: One year after a fire—we seem to have fires out at—well, range fires at Hanford are not unknown. But we had one fire, and I can remember at FFTF that the debris from the fire kept plugging up our perimeter system for several days thereafter until we got a work crew in there to actually pick up the debris and partially burned pieces and the full tumbleweeds. Because the fire would generate a lot of heat in the air, so not only do you have debris from the fire itself, but you also have debris being moved by the air currents. And the way the wind was blowing off Rattlesnake Mountain.</p>
<p>Franklin: Did you—sorry, I’m just looking over some of my notes here, and I wanted to ask you about—oh, shoot. It says here that in the 1980s, you helped during an anti-nuclear protest at the Federal Building?</p>
<p>Parr: Oh, I remember that. No, I didn’t do it. I was on duty that day. And what we’d done is, in the ‘80s we had anti-nuclear protests. And we believed that one was going to be big. So Safeguard and Security and the Hanford Patrol being the uniformed service, they pulled a lot of us in to work that day, and then they took key people—and they actually had buses from Site Transportation, they were going to take care of the demonstrators. Because once they crossed onto the Federal Building property, that was DOE’s area of responsibility, no longer the city’s. So anyway, there’s about—there weren’t that many protestors, perhaps 20 or 40 at most downtown. So there were all these people, and we probably had 50 to 70 people staged and ready to go. Get the buses, put them on the buses, and take them to the federal magistrate. Then all of the sudden, there’s a call come out. There’s people without badges inside West Area at the north end of the site. And apparently—we’re down—I think I was at either—I can’t remember if I was at the 300 Area in the alarm facility or 400 Area—but I’m listening to this, and all of the sudden the frequency’s going crazy—patrol’s primary operating frequency—and then the second frequency, the tactical frequency, is getting busy too. You can hear the voices on the radio, a little bit of stress going on. And we’re all laughing like hell, because, you know, hey, that’s where the weapons-grade material is. Aren’t we protecting that? Of course, we were heretics. We’re giggling, you know. It’s funny because it’s not happening to us; it’s happening to someone else. Because we had additional staff at 300 Area and we had additional staff at FFTF because it’s an operating reactor at the time. So apparently what the demonstrators had done is they walked in from Highway 240, and West Area isn’t that far in. They’d walked in, hopped over the outer fence, a single fence line in West Area—hopped over the fence line in West Area and they’re marching towards—and of course, unless you know West Area, the big, tall, long buildings all look alike. They’ve all got stacks and water towers. You can’t tell the difference between one of the old canyon buildings—one of the old production facilities—and PFP. So, all of the sudden, they’ve got protestors in West Area, but all their resources, except for the bare minimum, are downtown. But then it gets even better. When they got the protestors, they put them on a bus, and they thought they’d just being going to the district court in Kennewick. No, took them to the federal magistrate, out of town.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Parr: Yeah. So, it was kind of funny. But we had gone and—the funny thing was, because of the—they actually, in those days, most of us wore tactical uniform, camouflage or whatever. But the people who were actually going to detain and transport the protestors all had to be in full uniform, you know, pants and shirt and badge. So it was one of the better events.</p>
<p>Franklin: I interviewed a gentleman a while back who worked at PFP who talked about when they would load the product up, and there would be very heavy security and people that almost looked like they were in black ops, or like very—I was wondering, were you ever involved in any of that or did you—</p>
<p>Parr: The Department of Energy had a courier program, and they were based, I think, at Albuquerque at the time. And they usually had a transport vehicle and escort vehicles. They were specially trained to protect the shipments. There’s other ways to move things, but usually once a weapon is produced, it’s turned over to the military, and their transport is their responsibility. But components—whether it’s plutonium or whatever—would usually be transported by the courier group. When they took all the material out—and that happened while I was—probably most of it was done while I was in Afghanistan. It was the same courier group. They had extremely good communications, so it’d always be known where they were, and there were contingency plans in case there was an event. And I don’t think they ever—other than a mechanical failure of a vehicle, I don’t think they ever had an event. And of course protestors were always fixated on, you know, the media was always fixated on the white train. Yeah, okay. [LAUGHTER] I’ve never seen one, but—[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of working at Hanford?</p>
<p>Parr: The most rewarding one was—I think the people. When I worked in training, I got to know everyone—almost everyone in the plant would come to one of our training events. Some groups needed—the higher-risk job, the more training you got. So it was working with the people. And then some people, it was just a paycheck. But the employees who took pride in their work and enjoyed their work, those were always the fun people to be with. Not that they were there for fun, but just, it was very rewarding to work with them. Now I’m retired and I still see some of them around the community. So it’s always fun to see someone that I spent—you know, worked with. I still see the vice president of the Steel Workers’ Local, because I worked—I got to work closely with him. So to see those people, and to see their successes and to do that. The difficult part, sometimes, was employees who were just there—or people who were just there for the paycheck. Or struggling through personal issues. Being able, trying to help them, or to get—a shift, a work crew doing a work package, they’re people. And the strength of any group is always at the level of the lowest performer. So the performers who were struggling, those were the tough—or the ones who were—sometimes you get cynical. People get emotional. And dealing with the cynicism. I think one of the toughest things I ever had was—I wasn’t involved in the project; I was training, but I wasn’t the trainer for that particular project, but I was doing some other training. They worked hard, they were staging the materials—I think it was the Pencil Tank Reduction at PFP. They were about to take the pencil tanks, clean them up, reduce them in size, and then shift them off to scrap. And they were making hard to get the materials to write the pre-procedures to do the job, get their training in order, and get ready to go. In the aftermath, when Department of Energy said, well, we’re not going to do that right now. But materials had already been—a considerable amount of resources had been pushed in that project to get it ready to go. But then Department of Energy said, well, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to take that money and we’re going to use it for something else. Planning at Hanford is always one of our toughest things. Has been for years. There’s so many things we did that—where it never came off, or things changed. Not too far from here are the bus lots at 1100 Area. And the parking lot’s at 300 Area. We spent a lot of money—or the government spent a lot of money improving those parking lots, making sure they had the good drainage and so on and so forth. Improving the bus lot and making it a much safer, much more efficient operation. And then we canceled bus service. A couple years later, I know that our local law enforcement—I think Richland Police Department—used it for a pursuit driving course, that piece of ground, and now it’s gone commercial. But all the things we do, and then all of a sudden—boom—we never realize the full value of what we had spent money on.</p>
<p>Franklin: You kind of—I’m sensing from that and the comment you made earlier about the lack of energy focus—maybe do you see kind of a lack of focus at Hanford or kind of surrounds some activities at Hanford?</p>
<p>Parr: I think when Congressman Foley—Tom Foley—was speaker of the House, and he was from—let’s see, we’re four, I think that’s 5<sup>th</sup> Congressional District, in Spokane. Speaker Foley—and this was probably about the time of the Chernobyl issue and all of that—Speaker Foley proposed, in a public statement, transitioning Hanford from Department of Energy back to Corps of Engineers. And knowing a lot of engineers, Army engineers, they’re great people and they do great things. And I looked at that, and I go, I don’t think that’s the right move. But now looking back on it, and having worked with the Corps of Engineers in both the reconstruction of Iraq, before we withdrew, and then a lot of the work—there’ve been some mistakes—a lot of mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But looking at some of the work they’ve done there, I hate to admit it, but I think Tom was right. We should have switched. Because I think the Corps of Engineers is a lot more focused and a lot more planning. Because they don’t look at—oh, we’re going to—I think the Corps looks at the long-term: five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. And looks for a strategy. Whereas I see Department of Energy, particularly—and I know the field offices are all different. What I saw in DOE Albuquerque was different than DOE RL, was different than DOE Rocky Flats. I think the Department of Energy field offices, particularly Richland, focused on the near-term, not the long-term. The near-term being this fiscal year and maybe next. But I see that in working with Northwest National Labs, I noticed they were always looking at where we’re going to be in four, five years. And I think—because with the Army I got to support a couple projects. Then I was in Afghanistan. We were doing something and I needed some reach-back capability. So unofficially I reached back to Northwest National Labs to give me help with something in Afghanistan that I was encountering. And it took me a couple days to find the right person and then get him up on a secure—I’m not Hillary. So I used a secure—all my emails were in a secure system—and to reach out and get that information, so how we could be more effective in Afghanistan. So I saw that kind of work, and I see—dealing with them and watching what they’re doing, they’re looking at the—they look at, they forecast out in the future. What’s it going to be like in ten, 15, 20 years? What’s the end state? I think RL has gotten, or particularly in my time, they were in the survival mode, reacting, rather than planning. I think one of the key losses we had—we had the DOE RL manager one time was a guy by the name of Mike Lawrence. And later he left, but I noticed when he left—I think Mr. Lawrence was—he planned, he looked at things. He tried to anticipate where the federal budget was going and what the program was going to be. And I think after that, it became a more reactive group. And now I continue to watch, and I watch them—we were spending money—apparently taxpayers were spending money on upgrading the Federal Building, because they’re the primary occupant there. And then they said, no, we’re going to move our office—move our staff out to the Stevens Center Complex, which is right off—between George Washington Way and Stevens. So we’re going to move out there. So you figure, oh, okay, that’s going to cost a little money. And then what’s going to happen to the contractor employees there? Well, they’re going to just—the taxpayer owns the Federal Building, but the Stevens Center is leased facilities. So I can’t—I can’t figure that one out. God bless them, but I can’t figure it out.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, we exist in a similar thing here at WSU. Our project is in a leased facility and it seems to be the way that—I would agree with you that that is—there’s more focus recently on our near-term solutions, especially here in Richland, but ignoring the long-term solutions. Maybe because the long-terms are scary. I don’t know. But—</p>
<p>Parr: You’ve got to—what do they say in the Army? Oh. Embrace the suck.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to cover?</p>
<p>Parr: Well, it was interesting being at Hanford Patrol initially and watching them come from a more security force that was designed just to check badges and check classified repositories and respond to alarms, become more a professional force. It was really exciting watching their training group. When I first came here, they’d get up and read a manual and that was your training. Their firearms training was superb. Best I ever had. Probably better than anything I’ve seen, even in—I would put their marksmen up against the best of the best. Whether it’s HRT and the Bureau. I definitely think they can out-shoot the Ranger, but—not criticizing the Army Rangers—but their people can out-shoot Army Rangers. And perhaps, Force Recon in the Marine Corps. I think they’re up there with the more elite organizations. And I think that firearms training was incredible. They took people who couldn’t shoot, and they teach them theory and technique and then work with them and find the faults and get them to correct it to that point. I’ve never seen anything like that in any law enforcement academy or any military training. It was incredible. But the rest of it, there was no lesson plans. Training is always analysis, design, development, implementation where you get up and teach it, and then evaluate it to see if the training took. I didn’t see that in Rockwell’s training program for the Safeguard and Security team force. But eventually to see them as, when Westinghouse took over, they started putting those standards in. And I think Department of Energy did it nationwide. So I think watching that change and transition was exciting. Was great stuff. It was an exciting place to work. And right now they’re tearing down the Plutonium Finishing Plant where I spent, what, 17, 18 years of my life—except for some trips elsewhere. But to see it come down, but then to realize what we achieved there. I was there the day a button caught fire, a plutonium button. That was exciting. Because we were testing out the security system, and—why do we have employees taking off their clothing on camera? What’s going on here? And then call up to building emergency, is something going on inside the plant you kind of should let us know about? And why is the fire department coming? And then watching it go through things, and then eventually watching the cleanup process, stabilizing plutonium, and seeing where that goes. So I’m glad I had the opportunity to come in today to talk a little bit about what it was like to work at Hanford. I remember when he had buses and then we didn’t have buses because they decided we didn’t need them anymore. And then watching the density of vehicles on the highways going up to work onsite. I can remember when they decided that—there’s a four-lane road; Stevens is a four-lane divided highway out to the Site. You know, when you’re doing remediation and you’re constructing the Vit Plant, there’s a lot of trucks and trailers with heavy loads that are in the right-hand lane. So then somebody came up with the bright idea of—and they’re slower-moving. So we’re going to have that traffic in the left-hand lane going northbound, and everyone going, they’re driving the speed limit or those going beyond the speed limit would drive in the right-hand lane. Excuse me? Really? Really. And then there was a thing where we decided to put—you know, how far it is from this place to this place. And we’re going to do it both in the English system and also in metric. Good idea, that makes sense, because a lot of the world is metric. Makes a lot of sense. So then they put the signs up, and they put—the letters are about that high in a 55-mile-and-hour zone. So how close do you have to be to read a sign that’s got letters that are about two inches high, going about 55 miles an hour? Excuse me? [LAUGHTER] And also that’s now—isn’t that kind of like a visual impediment to traffic safety?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, seriously.</p>
<p>Parr: The other one is right up on Stevens in the 300 Area. You’ve got 300 Area—I can’t remember the name of the street. It comes out and goes onto Stevens—we used to have our own highway system out there, so that’s called Highway 4 South. So the traffic is going west onto a north-south—onto a road that’s in the right-hand side is going north. But you want to turn left and to head back into town. So they put a stop sign on a wooden post right at the stop line. Well, that’s right on the edge of the traffic—it’s right on the traffic lane. So about every week or so, low lights, not well lit, you get weather, so all of a sudden, about every, once a week, you’d see the stop sign about ten meters over with the pole broken off—the big four-by-four wooden post. So I remember one time, I go, jeez, that’s not very bright. So I put in a safety suggestion. So they thanked me for my safety suggestion. Rockwell Hanford gave me a little product worth 50, 60 cents. Thank you! Okay, but we’re not going to do that, and we’ve already considered it, and it’s safe. And I got that, and I was working shift work. So I’m going home about 7:00 in the morning. And there’s the stop sign over there, the sign sheared off again. So all of the sudden—it never get installed again. They painted a stop sign, they painted stop letters, they moved the sign back. [LAUGHTER] But my suggestion wasn’t going to—so that was kind of fun.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, thank you so much, Bob.</p>
<p>Parr: Yup.</p>
<p>Franklin: I really appreciate you coming in and giving us a slice of it.</p>
<p>Parr: You know, thank you for doing this, because the Manhattan Project was such an important piece in our history. And being—I’ve been taking a history course and being a former—retired National Guardsman, and the son of a World War II veteran from the Pacific Theater, and seeing the carnage that was Okinawa, and then realizing what the invasion of Japan would have been. I think that puts it all in perspective. And then the work we did—and for me, as a veteran, the big night was the night the wall came down in Berlin. Because that didn’t only put my weekend job in perspective, but it also put the work we’d done out at Hanford. So I think we—the work they do at the national labs, and when we had a criticality safety lab onsite, the work that they did at those facilities—just incredible. I just wish we could have kept FFTF and done power production there. Beautiful reactor. I mean, it had an availability rate of almost 100%. Oh. So. But it’s all about people.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much.</p>
<p>Parr: Well, thank you for having me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Don’t forget your coffee there.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/-Tu2YqK6vfU">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:02:15
Bit Rate/Frequency
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317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
100 Area
1100 Area
300 Area
400 Area
Fast Flux Test Facility
K-West Area
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
PUREX
Vit Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1980-2010
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1980-2011
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Colonel Matthias
Babcock & Wilcox
Tom Foley
Hillary
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Robert Parr
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Robert Parr conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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11-17-2016
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2018-31-1: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
100 Area
1100 Area
300 Area
400 Area
Battelle
Cold War
Department of Energy
DuPont
Fast Flux Test Facility
Hanford
K-West Area
Kennewick
Manhattan Project
Mountain
N Reactor
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
PUREX
Safety
Theater
Transportation
VIT Plant
War
Washington Public Power Supply System
Westinghouse
-
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4edca9efa5b020755d209c72f854cb83
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F08e2a82e15be87724cc35f3cc14a3127.mp4
b8689a451a342a533ee6e816848384f1
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
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Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Jerome Martin
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p class="MsoNormal">Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1<sup>st</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe it was earlier.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not originally.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: The first name was John—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he’s not.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what about Lyon?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What’s that?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, give or take.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In the US, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Ah!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, mainly that room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: 155 millimeters.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Maybe I should come back.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I came back in 2001.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Very interesting project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yep, that was the one.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you helped design—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And tested.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Interesting story.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I moved here in ’76.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Really?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I can imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We were trying to help them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay, just curious.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I heard about it of course.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But I’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Well, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I believe we did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I hope so.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The most lasting impact.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: You do?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1<sup>st</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe it was earlier.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not originally.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: The first name was John—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he’s not.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what about Lyon?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What’s that?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, give or take.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In the US, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Ah!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, mainly that room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: 155 millimeters.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Maybe I should come back.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I came back in 2001.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Very interesting project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yep, that was the one.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you helped design—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And tested.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Interesting story.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I moved here in ’76.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Really?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I can imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We were trying to help them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay, just curious.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I heard about it of course.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But I’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Well, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I believe we did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I hope so.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The most lasting impact.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: You do?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:02:44
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
B Plant
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1976-2006
2001-2006
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Herbert M. Parker
Ken Hyde
John Jech
McCluskey
Mason and Hanger
Dade Moeller
Bill Bair
Ron Kathren
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
2001-today
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jerome Martin
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Jerome Martin conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
06-01-16
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
300 Area
B Plant
Battelle
Cold War
Department of Energy
General Electric
HAMMER
Hanford
Livermore
Los Alamo
Los Alamos
Manhattan Project
N Reactor
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Park
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
River
Ron Kathren
Safety
Sun
War
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3709e8204c8899a93c9c81308951a94c.JPG
84a45b395471c72ce61c06a25b1e3919
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Michael Lawrence
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Michael Lawrence on February 1<sup>st</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mike about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Michael Lawrence: Michael J. Lawrence. L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Thank you. So, how did you come to the Hanford Site?</p>
<p>Lawrence: I went—I grew up in Washington, DC. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and I went to the University of Maryland and lived at home when I did so. And I was a physics major. Between my junior and senior year of college, I was fortunate enough to get one of five internships at the Atomic Energy Commission. That internship had me working in a division of the AEC, or Atomic Energy Commission, called the production division, which was responsible for, among other sites, the Hanford Site, because of its production of plutonium. During that summer, I actually shared an office with an individual who was responsible for the operations and missions of the N Reactor which was located here. So I had an opportunity to learn a little bit about Hanford at that particular point in time. When I graduated from Maryland with my degree in physics the next year, I had already been offered and had accepted a full-time job with the Atomic Energy Commission when I went back to the production division again to work. I was working on isotopes programs and other things when I was called into the director’s office one day. It just so happened that several years previously, in 1969 I believe, President Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and one of the provisions in NEPA called for something which, at that point in time, was not known at all. Something called an environmental impact statement. You had to do environmental impact statements for any major federal projects, and our division was responsible for two projects that were going to occur in the early ‘70s here. One was the design and building of the quite a bit. And also had a sense of what it was going to be involved dealing with the public on important and issues that were of concern to the public, like the Z-9 crib and plutonium production. Because one of our hearings for those environmental impact statements was held down in Portland. And I can recall going down there, and there were demonstrators in radiation contamination clothing protesting and all the rest. And you got a chance to see just how the public felt about it. But that was my first instance of dealing with Hanford. Then later in the mid-‘70s—again, I’m still back in Washington, DC; AEC had become the Department of Energy—and I was responsible for a program to manage and store commercial spent nuclear fuel. And that program, the contractor and site that was helping us out was the Savannah River site in South Carolina. But because of the heavy burden they had, I decided it would be best if we changed the management of that program, or the contractor working on the program from Savannah River to the Hanford Site and to the Pacific Northwest National Lab—at that time was Pacific Northwest Lab; it wasn’t a national lab, but PNL. And so I started coming out again and working with the people here. So I had a pretty good understanding of the community and what was out here, and I liked it. But in the early 1980s, in 1982 to be exact, after several years of very, very intense negotiation back in the halls of Congress, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed by Congress which set up a process and legal requirements for identifying, selecting, licensing, building, operating, and funding a geologic repository for commercial nuclear waste from commercial reactors and defense waste from the production of plutonium, primarily either at Hanford or at the Savannah River plant. I was one of several people called down from where I was working in Germantown, Maryland, down to Washington, DC to work on the direct implementation of that act. Obviously, that was a very—it was controversial, it was huge, and the new Secretary of Energy at that time—his name was Donald Hodel, who had formerly been the administrator of Bonneville out here in the Pacific Northwest—he was very familiar with the issues involved. And I got an opportunity to meet and work with him rather closely. And after several years of doing that, he asked me to come out here to be the manager of the Richland Operations Office.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. Thank you. That’s really fascinating, with all of your lengths between DC and to here. Did you—I want to ask—you mentioned a hearing in Portland where there were demonstrators. And that—I think it fits pretty well into what we hear a lot about how the west side and the east side of the state think about Hanford. Did you find a pretty supportive public here in Tri-Cities when you would come and hold meetings here in the area about, like, for example the Z-9 crib or other projects? Did you find a pretty supportive public?</p>
<p>Lawrence: I wouldn’t use the term supportive, I would use the term very informed and knowledgeable. They understood, to a greater degree, what the risks, what the concerns were, what the precautions were. Not universally, obviously. There were—and I have a good example of what a protestor would be. But basically, they seemed to be more informed, and certainly they were more knowledgeable of the situation. So the further away you went, the less direct knowledge people had of the situation. And so consequently—and it’s understandable, you know, they really didn’t have the same—they didn’t know people who worked at the Site. They didn’t—couldn’t appreciate the values that they had, their sensitivities. So that would be more the way I would describe it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Lawrence: What was interesting, and I just had alluded to, was after coming out here—this was in 1984; I came—arrived in July of 1984. And at the beginning of that year was when the PUREX Plant, which processed the fuel coming out of N Reactor and reprocessed it to recover the plutonium, had just gone back into operation after a number of years of being mothballed. This was all part of President Reagan’s buildup of our military strength and weapons complex to more or less challenge the Russians or the Soviet Union in their ability to do so. And so we were gearing back up, really, the plutonium production mission at the Hanford Site. It was obviously very controversial here in the Northwest. And it was just starting up, and there had actually been a leak from the PUREX Plant right after it started up. And what I found when I arrived here in July was that even though the people on the Site—the contractor and the officials here—were saying, no, this is what it was and this is what the effects were. There was very little credibility. People would not believe them. And there was a strong opposition to what they were doing. That was a challenging situation to walk into where you really don’t have any credibility. But the first week I was in town, first week as manager, down in my office in the Federal Building, which is up in the northeast corner of the Federal Building, seventh floor, looking out over John Dam Plaza and the park, and I looked out on the street, and there’s a person with a big sign and billboard saying, Mike Lawrence, carpetbagger, go home. And he’s just sitting on the park bench in front of the building. And I—you know, I’ve just arrived in town, and I’m looking at him. His name was Larry Caldwell. He was known to everybody in town; he liked to protest. And I’m looking down at him and I—I sort of like to engage. I don’t like to ignore things. So I said, you know, I think I’ll go out and talk to him. Well, that caused quite a stir. But I walked down and walked across the street, walked up to the park bench, introduced myself, sat down and we started talking. I wanted to find out, well, since you don’t know me, why do you call me a carpetbagger, why do you want me to go home? Let’s talk. And it was funny because in the midst of discussing this with him, I happened to glance back over. And if you’re familiar with the Federal Building, it’s just full of windows. Every window was filled with faces looking out. [LAUGHTER] They said, this is our new manager and he’s out there. Security was very concerned. But you know? It worked out fine. Larry told me what his problems were. He didn’t like the mission. I told him, I said, I understood that. I had a job to do; Congress had appropriated the money, and I’d been given a job to do, and I was going to do it the best I could. But I was going to do it trying to do it in keeping the public informed of what we were doing and being as upfront and—now the term is transparent. We didn’t use that term back then—but as transparent I could be in handling it. So that was my first direct encounter with a protestor, if you will. But I thought it turned out pretty well. But that gets to a broader topic that I’d like to address, and that is, as I said, the Department and its contractors, I found they didn’t have credibility. And I’m not saying it was anyone’s fault, but it’s my opinion that it’s very easy for organizations—Department of Energy, Richland, Hanford—to lose credibility. And the only way you regain that credibility is through individuals, by really engaging with people so they get a sense of who you are or who the people are doing the work. And so we tried from the very beginning back in 1984 to go out and to meet with the public, to engage the public, to be as open as we could to explain our perspective and what we were doing. Obviously, we didn’t expect everyone to agree with us; some people were just diametrically opposed to it. But you’d like them to at least sense that the people doing the work shared some of their values, shared their concerns, in doing their work. The best example I have of that is—I believe it was in 1985. Again, Hanford, because of our role going back into the nuclear weapons complex had been quite controversial. I received a call from the pastor of the Catholic church down in Kennewick, St. Joseph’s. And he said, Mike, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the three bishops—Catholic bishops—in Washington State are having prepared a letter—very, very critical of Hanford, its operations, and the people who work there. And he said, I just think that it’s being, I guess—a focal point was being headed up by a person in Yakima where the bishop was a Bishop William Skylstad. And I happened to have met and knew Bishop Skylstad from my own personal dealings with the church. And so I thanked the priest in Kennewick, and I called up Bishop Skylstad, and I said, I’d really like to come—I understand you’re having some work done on behalf of yourself and the other two bishops, and I’d like to really come and talk to you about it. And so I actually took the president of Rockwell Hanford, who operated PUREX, his name was Paul Lorenzini—very, very intelligent, smart guy—with me. And we went to meet with Bishop Skylstad and he had the individual who was writing this who happened also to be a member of the Hanford Education Action League in Spokane. And, you know, I read what they had prepared. It was talking about the Department of Energy is lying about this, and they’re poisoning, and they’re making these intentional releases. And in discussing that, after a while, Bishop Skylstad said to me, he said, Mike, Mike, calm down. He says, you’re taking this personally. And I looked at him and I said, Bishop, of course I’m taking it personally. When you say the Department of Energy is lying, who is that? Who is it that you’re saying is lying? And it was amazing, because he just stopped; all of a sudden, it dawned on him. He said, oh my goodness, I never thought of it that way. But you had to put a face in front of the organization. And that helped a lot. Now, the letter still came out and it was still very critical. But it wasn’t as accusatory as perhaps it was. It says, we’re opposed to the mission. That’s fine; that I understand. But when you get into the motives and the ill will of the people, that’s where it goes a little too far.</p>
<p>Franklin: Mm. Right. The difference between unintentional or passive action and then direct action.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about what it was like in the early ‘70s to actually—to physically get to Hanford from Washington, DC. Was it still very—was travel still kind of tough to get to Hanford? Or was there easy air travel or car travel? Or did you find it to be a little still off the beaten path?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, it was a lengthy trip. Coming from Washington, DC, I would fly from Washington, DC to Chicago, Chicago to Seattle, then Seattle to Pasco. And usually that was like going United, and then I think there was—it was called Airwest—Hughes Airwest, owned by Howard Hughes. Then it did get significantly easier later on when Northwest Airlines had a direct flight from Dulles Airport in DC to Seattle, and then you’d fly back over here. I always used to enjoy those trips. I mean, air travel was a lot different then than it was now in that it wasn’t as—a chore and the like. It was a little bit more creature comforts in traveling as well.</p>
<p>Franklin: When you mentioned NEPA and the need for the EIS, Environmental Impact Statement, and digging at Z-9 and I’m sure probably a couple other facilities—did that also trigger any kind of cultural resources work, archaeological digs? Were there ever any—was there any cultural resources work or things found?</p>
<p>Lawrence: In the ‘70s, no. I mean, that work was right in the middle of the 200 Area. Which is—it still today is the most concentrated area. I believe, if I recall correctly, the EISs probably said—would address that. But not—I mean, EISs then were maybe 100 pages long. Now they’re—[LAUGHTER]—multiple volumes and many thousands of pages long. But I wasn’t aware of any. I think the first real instance of dealing with Native Americans and their concerns was with a project we had on the center of the Site called the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, or BWIP, which was on Gable--</p>
<p>Franklin: I was going to ask you about that next.</p>
<p>Lawrence: --which was on Gable Mountain. But I’ll let you ask about it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, no, I was going to ask if you—you talked about the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and finding a geological repository. And I was just going to ask, I assume that’s BWIP, then, that is the—</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yeah, and, actually there’s a slight difference there. But the whole idea of the geologic repository, especially since I had been responsible for that program before coming here, led people to suspect or conclude that it was a foregone conclusion that Hanford was going to be named the geologic repository for the United States. And actually, when I came here, that Nuclear Waste Policy Act had set out a process for narrowing down until you had three sites that you would thoroughly characterize. We had gone from nine sites to five, and when I came out here, there were five sites under consideration. Once I was here, it was narrowed down to the three finalists, if you will: Hanford for basalt, Nevada for tuffs—that’s the Yucca Mountain Site—and in Texas there was a salt formation called Deaf Smith County. And so that was being looked at. Now, BWIP itself was not the geologic repository site. It was a test facility built into Gable Mountain—and Gable Mountain, of course, rises up and the geologic repository was going to go down several thousand feet. But it allowed the scientists to put heaters into basalt rock to see how the rock responded to it—expansion, contraction, did it attract water, was it pushed away, and the like. It was actually a quite successful project. We learned quite a bit about how basalt rock would interact. However—getting back to the cultural resources—during that period, we also found out that the Native Americans—the Yakamas, I believe—used to use Gable Mountain for vision-quest-type activities and places to send people on a spiritual adventure. This didn’t happen right away, but we finally worked out—because I saw no reason why we couldn’t—with a day’s notice, we let the Yakamas—we said, we will let you come on and go up to the site, and do whatever ceremonies, to do whatever you want to do. We just need to know about it. Obviously there is physical security and there’s safety we had to provide for them. But I think we were able to work out and arrangement with the Yakamas where they would have access. Perhaps not as freely as they would like, but it did allow some compromise to be worked out so they could still perform some of their religious ceremonies there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. So you came—you arrived in July 1984, you said. And that was kind of—that was under this Reagan era mandate of basically restarting production.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: Because it had just been N Reactor through most of the ‘70s, correct, and into the early ‘80s. So I’m wondering if you can just elaborate more on that mission and some of the activities needed and the push back—if there was any push back—and the whole thing.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, there was opposition, particularly on the west side and in Portland to restarting plutonium production facilities. While N Reactor had continued to operate, the fuel had not been processed and plutonium had not been recovered in many instances until PUREX started back up. So that was the process of really then getting back into plutonium production. That’s what was leading to opposition to what we were doing. We did the best we could to try to go around and to explain at least what we were doing, how we were doing it, how we would interact. I can recall going with my wife to a meeting up in Spokane. I just went up on a weekday night and the Hanford Education Action League had asked me to come up and talk to them. It was clear. It was clear then, that there was very, very strong opposition to what we were doing. A person I remember asked me the question, did I realize that I was acting just like Hitler? [LAUGHTER] I said, you know, I don’t think of it that way. I think about what I do very seriously, and I’m doing something that’s approved by and funded by the government of the United States of America, from the President and the Congress. I have to do it safely, and I have to do it in accordance with the law, but that’s what needs to be done. But, again, it was another effort to try to get out and at least be present, answer the questions; you may not make them happy, but at least you know you’re there trying to interact.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so how many facilities ended up being restarted or brought online from when you got here to when things were shut down? Maybe you could kind of walk me through that process.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, as I indicated, N Reactor had continued to operate, because N Reactor, unlike the other production reactors that were at Savannah River, was a dual purpose reactor. It not only produced plutonium in the fuel elements, but the water which passed through the reactors for cooling it was then sent over to a facility operated by the Washington Public Power Supply System to turn turbines and to produce electricity, on the order of a gigawatt of electricity a year. And because of that, we needed to—the cycle of the N Reactor was different than other production reactors: it was on a shorter cycle. That was for production reasons, the type of plutonium we were producing. So N Reactor went from producing what was fuel grade—it was called fuel grade plutonium—for reactor development programs like the Fast Flux Test Facility and ultimately would have been a breeder reactor. It went to making weapons grade, which meant much shorter irradiation periods. Also, prior to their restarting of PUREX, the fuel was just stored. With the starting of PUREX, you would then let the fuel cool in the basin at N Reactor then ship it in casks on rail cars to the center of the site at PUREX where it would be dissolved in PUREX. The waste would be sent to waste tanks, the plutonium concentrate in a liquid form would be sent to the Plutonium Finishing Plant over in the 200-West area, where it would then be converted into a plutonium metal button about the size of a tuna fish can. And that would be then sent to Colorado—Rocky Flats Plant—where it would actually be fashioned into the material used in a nuclear weapon. So it was the facilities associated with reprocessing at PUREX, handling waste from PUREX, and the facilities associated with the Plutonium Finishing Plant for converting the plutonium to metal that were the primary set of facilities that had to restart.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so then N Reactor was the only reactor that was operated during that time?</p>
<p>Lawrence: It was the only production reactor on the Hanford Site at that time. And the only reactor that was producing water that was—steam—that was then used to produce electricity. There was another very important reactor at Hanford that was operating then. It was called the Fast Flux Test Facility, which had just started operation a year or so before I got here. And that was to be a precursor of a commercial breeder reactor. The developmental—the reactor, the full-scale reactor that was going to demonstrate the breeder process was going to be built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee at the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. But they built the FFTF prior to that in order to get a feeling for how the sodium cooling worked, the fuel worked, the interactions. It was a prototype, if you will, to see just how that system was going to work. And quite frankly, the FFTF was a tremendously successful test reactor and developmental reactor for liquid sodium. It operated flawlessly, really. Unfortunately, though, it shut down because the breeder program was canceled and there really wasn’t a need for it. People tried diligently to find a mission, to find a need for it. But it was a—it just wasn’t in the cards, and it eventually—it took until the late 1990s for it to be permanently shut down. But that was the other reactor that was operating when I came out here.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I’ve interviewed several other people that worked at FFTF, and they’ve all—</p>
<p>Lawrence: Oh, and they’re very enthusiastic about the FFTF. And I can understand it. It was a great reactor.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and a reactor with kind of a different mission than any of Hanford’s other reactors.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yes, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Save maybe the N Reactor which had a dual—</p>
<p>Lawrence: No, it was very different. It didn’t have that plutonium production role.</p>
<p>Franklin: How long did the production go at Hanford—that ‘80s Reagan era production?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, in 1986, the reactor in Chernobyl blew up—April of 1986. That was in Ukraine, at Chernobyl. Of course, there was very little information coming out after the news of that explosion occurred. You couldn’t get in; the Soviets weren’t saying anything about it. But they couldn’t deny it, because you could detect the radiation coming. But people knew, generally, what type of reactor the Russians were operating there. It was graphite-moderated, water-cooled, and very quickly they came upon the fact that, wait a minute, there’s a graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor operating in the US out of Hanford that’s called the N Reactor. So consequently, I believe it was in the first week of the Chernobyl accident, one afternoon—I guess it was a morning—in the lobby of the Federal Building, it was mayhem. There must have been 50 to 100 people, representatives from all of the television networks, the major newspapers and wire services—all there wanting to do a story on N Reactor, the Chernobyl of the United States. So I got on the phone to Washington, DC and I said, look, we’ve got a problem here. Because we had been told, do not talk to the press about this. This is one of the few times when I was manager here that we were ever given instructions from Washington about how to interact and how to manage the sites. The managers had much greater authority then than they do now. And there was only one manager here at that point in time, as opposed to three that they have now. So we had a lot of leeway, but we’d been told, don’t talk about it because it’s very sensitive; it’s international news and we’re concerned about it. So when I called and said we have this mob scene in the lobby all wanting to talk about and go see the N Reactor, they said, don’t talk to them. Don’t do anything. I got back on the phone and I said, look, there’s stories that are going to be coming out of here. They can either be based on fact or they can be based upon fiction. If they’re based upon fiction, it’s not going to be pretty. And it’s going to be inaccurate. And I said, look, I will not speculate at all on what happened at Chernobyl. I don’t know. I care, but I’m not going to say a thing about that. I just want to explain how N Reactor works and what its safety features are, so that they can see for themselves. So reluctantly but finally, they relented and said, okay, you can show them. Go take them out. So we got a big bus. We put everybody on the bus—it was multiple buses. And we went out to N Reactor. And as you know, that’s about an hour’s drive out. But they were chomping at the bit. And I can remember the look on their faces when they saw—I think they were expecting a little Quonset huts with steam rising out of vents and out of chimneys and all the rest. And when they see this massive building—and in fact we were able to open one of the doors, which was three feet thick of concrete and steel. They looked at that and they were kind of amazed. And I explained to them that although commercial reactors have a system called containment, which is a big steel dome, production reactors don’t. It’s called confinement. It’s different. So it leads to speculation. Well, you know, containment’s going to keep it in; confinement’s not going to do it. And I was pointing out how we had ways of safely venting steam and pressure so it wouldn’t build up, so it couldn’t explode. And we went through all the safety systems, showed them in the inside, the face of the reactor. And consequently, the next several days in <em>USA Today</em>—I mean, it was front page stuff. But at least it was based upon, well, you know, here are all these safety features. It still raised a lot of issues and concerns because nobody knew what caused Chernobyl, so how could we say it couldn’t happen here? We could only say, here are all the safety systems we have to prevent something like that from happening here. Now, ultimately, we found out over time, that what happened at Chernobyl was a physical characteristic called a positive void coefficient. But basically something that didn’t exist in the physics out at N Reactor. But the damage was done. We did need to do some safety upgrades at N Reactor, which we did. But ultimately, in 1988 I believe it was, the Secretary of Energy, John Harrington, in testifying before Congress announced that the US had now produced so much plutonium that we were in fact, quote, awash in plutonium and didn’t need to produce any more. And quite frankly, with that being the case, we no longer had a justification for operating N Reactor. And ultimately it was shut down. To this day, I applaud the hard work and dedication of all the people out at N Reactor. They worked on the safety upgrades and the operation of that reactor, they worked extremely hard and were very, very proud of the operation of that reactor. I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to those people. They did a great job.</p>
<p>Franklin: There’s several things that strike me as really interesting that I want to return to in what you just said about Chernobyl and N. One was one of the last things, that John Harrington, awash with plutonium; the US had produced enough. Did you agree with that statement then? That we were—because that would be, I mean, your boss or boss’s boss.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Quite frankly, I didn’t know what the total plutonium numbers were for the country. I didn’t know what the total demand was. I do know that plutonium has a very long half-life and sooner or later, you’ve got to have more than you need. We had thousands and thousands of nuclear warheads then. So, I mean, I didn’t know for sure, but I knew at some point we were going to reach it, and quite frankly felt we probably had overshot. So I did not disagree with Secretary Harrington on that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay, because I mean, we had passed mutually assured destruction quite a long—</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: And I guess, we know a lot more now about our stockpile then than we did then. But it’s a very interesting way to phrase that. We’re awash in—</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, it conjures up an image that you really don’t want to have.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to return to the Chernobyl thing. It strikes me as interesting that this reaction of don’t talk to the press, which is—you can understand in some way, because you don’t want misinformation. But isn’t that the same kind of criticism that we would level at the Soviets? That they were clamming up and not saying anything, and we wished that they were saying something? So this reaction to not say anything on our side is—could have been seen as—you know—being too controlling maybe perhaps?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, I mean, it went against my instincts, but it’s understandable. The Soviets were the one who had the accident. Now, if we had had an accident and they said, don’t talk to them, I would have been incensed. But basically, we were just going along and people want to come in and try to write a story and say, you’re just like Chernobyl. Well, in a sense, we didn’t know what Chernobyl was, how could we have definitely refuted that? So I can understand their perspective, because, quite frankly, some people at other sites had been quoted by the press as saying, well, we think this is what happened at Chernobyl, or that happened at Chernobyl. And it was just—it was getting out of hand. So I understood that. That was—my point was, I’m not going to talk at all about Chernobyl, because I don’t know. I do know N Reactor. I do know how it works, and I do know its safety features; that’s all I’m going to talk about. And I was awfully glad they let me do it.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s good, yeah. I’m wondering if you could talk about—being in charge of the Site here, I’m wondering if you could talk about the effect of Chernobyl on employee morale at Hanford. Did you notice a particular change—what changed as a result of—</p>
<p>Lawrence: I really don’t think I saw any change in the behavior of the people here. They were going about their work. They knew the systems and the procedures and the processes they worked by, the protections that they were given. I’ll tell you candidly one thing that always bothered me then and it bothers me today, is that sometimes people, they get off work and they act somewhat cavalier or bravado about the work they do. Whether it’s to impress somebody or what, I don’t know. But they say, oh yeah, we deal with this. You know, handling it not as seriously as it needs to be. I know on the job, they do and they have to. But then like a macho reaction at the Gaslight Tavern or something like that talking about what they’re doing. That bothers me because it leaves a wrong impression with the public. And it’s certainly not the way we act onsite.</p>
<p>Franklin: I guess I’d like to maybe rephrase that question. Did you see like maybe a level of—or rise of kind of the fatigue of workers, maybe thinking that anti-nuclear folks or that there was a new public perception that this was really unsafe or that there was really an imminent danger at Hanford? Do you think that weighed on—did that weigh on you, or did that weigh on anybody else?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, I think there was a sense on their part that there was an overreaction, that people were, in a way, paranoid and exaggerating the risk. They knew the risk. The people who work here know the risk. But they also know the precautions, so they can balance it out. And consequently, they felt like there was an overreaction. But even before Chernobyl occurred, there was an event that put the Site under somewhat of a microscope and an intense scrutiny, and that would have been, I believe it was September of 1985. Now, Chernobyl happened in April of ’86; this was September of 1985 on a Sunday, <em>The Spokesman Review</em> newspaper in Spokane came out with a multiday series on what they called the downwinders. Basically, they were interviewing and writing stories about an area across the Columbia River in Eltopia, Mesa, where farmers had experienced or felt they had experienced undue health effects—a number of health effects and cancers, and even some wildlife—some of their livestock being born with—there was reports of double heads and the like. And this was a major news piece done by a reporter called Karen Dorn Steele, and quite frankly she did an excellent job of researching this and writing it up. And I—you know, this is the first any of us had heard about this. That was on a Sunday-Monday. So, again, trying to engage on this topic, that Thursday, just several days after it had come out, we had a public meeting over at the Edwin Markham Middle School in Eltopia, across the river, with the public to say, we’re here. What are your concerns? This is—let us tell you what we’ve been able to measure and monitor, and you tell us what your concerns are. And I had some people from Battelle who—we put out an annual monitoring report saying, here are the releases, here are the quantities, here’s how they compare with standards and the like. It was somewhat emotional. You know, people are worried about their health and people dying of cancer and the like. But we also knew that we, in our numbers—we weren’t showing anything that should have resulted in something like that. During that meeting, one of the farmers who had been prominently noted in the article, his name was Tom Bailey, he actually got up and said, well, okay, we’re not saying that you’re doing that to us now, or that you’re intentionally doing anything now. But what happened in the past? What happened back in the ‘50s? When he said that, I realized that, although we had monitoring reports going back to the Manhattan Project—here’s what people were measuring and monitoring and releasing—most of those had been classified secret. And they had never been declassified. It wasn’t malicious; it’s just not a simple process to declassify a document. But I knew because of the extent of time involved, they could be. So, I then at that meeting said, you know, if you want to know, we can go back, we can review and declassify those documents and make them available so you can actually see what was being done. That seemed to both surprise but also satisfy. So we came back and started the process of declassifying monitoring reports going back to the mid-1940s. That is a time-consuming and expensive process. But we were doing it. And we were keeping the public—I used to have monthly press availabilities at the Federal Building and we’d talk about that. But we didn’t really have the first batch of documents, which was 19,000 pages deep, ready to release until February. Now, one thing I’d like to make very clear and to get on the record: we’re in the process of doing that—time-consuming and expensive—but in January, one month before we completed and released the documents, a Freedom of Information request was filed for those documents by an environmental group. I’m not certain of who it is, so I won’t say who it was. But it was an environmental group, filed a Freedom of Information request. And we said, wait a minute. We are releasing these; it’ll be ready next month—the first batch. The reason I raise that is because subsequently, to this day, I hear from time to time people say, you released those documents—they were forced out of you by the Freedom of Information request. And I say, that is just not true. We had—if you go and check the record, we had committed to doing that a long time before. Again, getting back to credibility—it was easy to make that charge. In fact, I had <em>National Geographic</em> call me about ten years ago checking a story and that specific point. Because they didn’t know if it was right or not and they were able to research it and confirm it. But anyway, we were able to release those documents. But when those documents came out—and this was a mistake on my part—there was a lot of information there, but where was the understanding? Where was the, if you want to call it, education of the public, so they could understand what they were reading? And very quickly, it was found that one of the monitoring reports from 1949 had talked about something called the Green Run, where fuel that had been cooled for shorter than normal, so there were radioactive elements in it, was dissolved and more radioactivity went up, intentionally, through the stack. Some of the background as to why that was done had to be deleted—because it was still classified. When this document—when that report was found and the Green Run was discussed, there was speculation that it was associated with human experimentation: let’s release it and see what happens to the public when it hits them. That was not the case at all. In fact, I knew from reading the documents, they had delayed the Green Run because unfavorable weather conditions that they thought might be harmful to the public. But nonetheless, since certain portions had to be deleted because of classification, we couldn’t really explain it to people. And that created quite an uproar. It’s normal and naturally you would expect people to think you’re trying to intentionally harm the public or experiment on the public. Ultimately, what we decided to do was that, even though we could not tell the public the intent of the Green Run, congressmen and senators from Washington and Oregon, by purpose of their position, have clearance and can be told. So I went back to Washington, DC with a person here from the lab and in a classified conference room in the rotunda of the US Capitol, we had the entire delegations from Washington and Oregon there, and we were able to explain to them the classified reason why the experiment was done and why it was still classified today. Tom Foley, who was later to become the Speaker of the House, from Spokane, more or less led the group. He appreciated it, but he pushed back. He says, I’ve got to have more to tell the public than that. I have to be able to tell them whether we know, but we can’t tell you. You’ve got to give me a little bit to tell them as to why it’s so classified. So I was able to get on the phone, again, back to the department, talk to them about it. And ultimately we were able to explain that the reason it was done was to allow the US government to improve their methods for determining and detecting what the Soviet Union was doing with their production program. Ultimately, it became known, if you measure the iodine and the cesium, you could cut back and see what they’re producing. And the reason it was still classified was that we were still, back in 1986, using that technique for nuclear non-proliferation detection around the world. So it’s since been declassified, but that was the reason. I felt that was a good use of our government and our representatives to represent the people and be able to explain to the people what was going on. But ultimately that whole—all those documents led us to create something called the Northwest Citizens Forum for Defense Waste, which was 25 individuals picked from a broad cross-section: academia, industry, church leaders—to be given the information and to be briefed on the information and ask and have answers provided for any questions they have. So they could act as the public’s representatives on what was being done. And that ultimately turned into all of the citizens’ groups that are formed at the DOE sites now. Where you have—here it’s called the HAB, the Hanford Advisory Board. But it was the first ever citizens’ group to oversee and look at what was going on at the DOE sites.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Thank you for that. That’s really illuminating. Wasn’t it still a calculated risk, though? Sorry, the Green Run, the actual action itself. Certainly there’s still, I think, in the mind of a lot of people—even though it may have been check the release to see how much the Soviets were releasing, there still is a real calculated risk, though. Or do you think that there’s still a calculated risk there—that there could have been some environmental or human population damage resulting from a higher-than-average—or kind of breaking protocol that was set to release that much contaminate?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, based on what I was able to look at and the rationale and how it was done, they were doing it at levels such that it would be a fraction of what the public was allowed to be exposed to. Even with that higher amount. It would just be a fraction. And that’s why when weather conditions weren’t right, and they felt it would rise above that, they didn’t do it. There are always risks. And were the standards that they were a fraction of, were they right, were they wrong, were they conservative, were they not strong enough? I mean, hindsight, you can go back and ask all those questions. But based upon the knowledge that they had at the time, they were being conservative. That also happened to be at the time when we were doing atmospheric testing at the Nevada Test Site. And you’re setting off nuclear bombs that people are going out and watching, you know, maybe 20 miles away. I’m not saying that’s right, and we know now it was wrong. But it was a fraction of the exposure that might have existed there.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right. I get—yes. That’s very true and that’s a good point. I guess it just—the only thing that still strikes, at least in my mind, as a difference is that they’re informing the public about the nuclear bombs so people can go and watch them. Whereas the Green Run was kind of this—I think that maybe—</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yeah, it was secret. No.</p>
<p>Franklin: It came out after the fact. And it was like, what else could these guys be hiding? Because, like you said, there was already that level of mistrust there.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: It just seems like that event can never really shake that level of mistrust in some ways with some people.</p>
<p>Lawrence: In hindsight, that’s true, but it was a very different time. A very different time.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of course. That’s just an interesting legacy. So, thank you for covering Chernobyl so much. I just have one more question. What role did Hanford play in assisting the Soviets—Hanford and Battelle play in assisting the Soviets with Chernobyl? Wasn’t there a team—</p>
<p>Lawrence: None at the time.</p>
<p>Franklin: --that went over?</p>
<p>Lawrence: None at the time. The Soviets didn’t ask for any. Ultimately, and actually when I came back to the Tri-Cities in 1999 and eventually started working for the Pacific Northwest National Lab, under my responsibility was the team we had at Chernobyl helping to build the new sarcophagus, the confinement structure, that now has been completed and rolled over the destroyed reactor. And I’ve been to Chernobyl a number of times and visited on that project. So we were involved in that. But I don’t recall us being asked to provide any assistance or having provided any assistance at that point in time.</p>
<p>Franklin: I was wondering—I’d like to—Chernobyl made me think of another incident, maybe hop back in time real quick and get your perceptions on that. You weren’t here, but I know you were still working in the nuclear industry, and I’m wondering maybe if you’re going to guess what I’m going to ask about, but I’m wondering, in the late ‘70s, the Three Mile Island scare. I’m wondering if you—because you were not here at the time of Three Mile Island, right, you would have been back east. But I’m wondering if you could talk about the legacy of that incident and how that affected people’s perceptions of nuclear—</p>
<p>Lawrence: Oh, it affected everybody’s perceptions of nuclear because—everyone in the nuclear industry had gotten a little sloppy, implying an accident cannot happen, it will not happen. You know, we’ve got all these precautions; the risk is so small, they’re non-existent. Well, nothing is non-existent. Everything is a risk, and if enough things go wrong, yes, you can have a problem. And they certainly had it there. Much more serious than they ever expected it to be. But in hindsight, the fact of the matter is, the systems all worked to contain it. There were never any releases harmful to the public. There was never a single fatality or anything associated with the Three Mile Island accident. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. I was getting ready to go take a run at lunchtime in the AEC—or it would have been a DOE at that time—building. And someone said, hey, did you hear they had some reactor incident going on up in Pennsylvania? You know, it started then and several days later I was getting calls from good friends who we were godparents of their child who lived in Hershey saying, should we evacuate? And I said, follow what the governor says. I really don’t have any firsthand knowledge, but it really did shake people’s fears, because it led people to say, you said it couldn’t happen and it did. And that’s always a problem.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s such a tough issue of framing, though, right? Because you can either say, well, it could happen but we have really good safeguards so it probably won’t, which leaves open the door in people’s minds to something happening. Or you can say, well, it won’t, we’ve got this under control and it won’t happen. How do you frame—framing disaster seems to be a very tricky subject. Or framing the possibility of disaster.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Yeah. In part, because you can say, just looking at risk and probability, you can say you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to die from this. And you’re willing to accept one but not the other. It’s what people are associated with. And if they think, I don’t have to deal with that, I don’t even want to deal with that minimal risk. I just don’t want to do it. That’s understandable; it’s part of human nature.</p>
<p>Franklin: It kind of comes to, we see this a lot in current day in dealing with—well, won’t go into that. But there seems to be a—there’s these fact-based arguments but they can’t always counter the emotion-based arguments. And a lot of the response to nuclear seems, in some cases to be emotionally-based and not fact—and immune, almost inoculated against the factual side of it. Which seems to bother many who have a lot of intimate knowledge, a lot of people who worked at Hanford who know the risks can’t ever seem to communicate that to the critics. I wonder if you could expand on that at all, being someone who would have been trying to communicate that to critics of Hanford. And how you’ve dealt with that fact-versus-emotion in your career.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well you see it—you still see it today. Fukushima is an excellent example of that. Assist you with the nuclear accident first. That tidal wave hits, completely washes over, and the plant loses all power. Now, most importantly that was an avoidable accident. Even as hugely severe as a tsunami was, if they just had have had the secondary generators higher and separated more from the plant, they wouldn’t have lost power, and the reactors would have been fine. In this country, we have that requirement. They didn’t have it there. So that reactor accident, which was catastrophic, it was devastating, could have been prevented if rules that we have here had have been used there. But the other thing—and this is more to the point you made—18,000 people were killed by the tsunami, by the flood, by all of the devastation caused by the tsunami. None were caused by the nuclear accident. And yet all of the attention is on the nuclear accident. And it’s not like, oh, but there’ll be 18,000 in the future—there won’t. You know, looking at the numbers, it’s hard to say if there’ll be any. And people are evacuated now, when perhaps they don’t even need to be, but it’s out of the fear of whatever’s left there. And consequently, because of that, it’s causing stress that have led to heart attacks and have led to fatalities. Are they caused by the nuke—they’re not caused by radiation, but they’re caused by fear of radiation or caused by fear of the displacement. So how do you put that in perspective, where as a nuclear accident has gotten all the attention, but a tsunami that killed 18,000 people, it’s sort of like, well, that’s an act of nature? And so, I really don’t know how to balance that. I do know that on <em>NOVA</em> last month, they had a very good show about that. Because nuclear is a carbon-free source of baseload electricity, and if we’re going to deal with climate change, I know I believe and many people believe nuclear has to be part of the solution.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, I would personally agree with you. I wondered—so, moving past Chernobyl then, you mentioned that as kind of a major—you know, it definitely is a major event in regards to people’s perceptions of Hanford. And you mentioned in ’88 this—awash in plutonium. How did it play out after that? What was the drawdown like? What happened in the community when that—when it was realized that Hanford was—the mission was going to change?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, you know, there was fear, because Hanford—the Tri-Cities over time, going back to the ‘50s and ‘60s had gone through booms and busts. And whenever Hanford production was up, the community was good; whenever it was down, homes were for sale, property values dropped and all the rest. So there was a feel, that was going to continue. And if N Reactor was shutting down, PUREX was down, it was going to happen to have a devastating effect on the economy again. Of course, what also happened at the same time was the commitment to the cleanup mission and the negotiation in signing the Tri-Party Agreement, which led to the cleanup mission here, which has continued and kept levels and funding levels right up to where they were and actually higher than in the production days. Maybe not employment necessarily, but it’s close. But also the Tri-Cities has significantly diversified from Hanford. Still very much—we get through $3 billion a year from the federal government between the Site and the national lab in this community, and that’s got huge benefits. But we’ve diversified quite a bit. But, getting to the Tri-Party Agreement, that was a direct result of a legal decision in Tennessee in 1985 that said that Department of Energy sites had to comply with national and state environmental rules. Up until that time, it had been assumed that the Atomic Energy Act, that the department operated under absolved us from that, or we did not have to do that. When that ruling came down, ultimately, it led to getting together with federal regulators in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and state regulators in the form of the Department of Ecology, to find out, okay, where are we in violation, what do we need to change, and how do we do that? You don’t do it instantaneously. Which, obviously, is clear. And that led to the negotiation and the ultimate signing in May of—May 15<sup>th</sup> of 1989 of the Tri-Party Agreement. But that has provided a rather steady employment, funding, and—you know, I realize it’s taking longer than people thought, it’s costing more than people thought. And fortunately, it’s not an urgent—it’s not the type of crisis where something has to be done immediately or here’s the catastrophic result. It’s a problem in slow motion that the main thing you want to do is get the solution right the first time. You don’t want to go hot with the Vit Plant and then find out it doesn’t work. Because you’ll never—you won’t get around to it again. So let’s make sure we’ve got it right. It’s been an enduring process, and I’m very pleased and proud of the enduring capabilities of the Tri-Party Agreement.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what was your role in the negotiation and signing of the Tri-Party Agreement?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, we—the Richland Operations Office had the responsibility and role of negotiating with EPA Region 10 and the Department of Ecology for what the cleanup agreement would look like and what it would entail. And we kept Washington, DC informed of what we were doing and we’d get feedback from them. But it was our main responsibility to do that. Initially a person by the name of Jerry White and then ultimately Ron Izatt who worked for me as division directors had that responsibility of negotiating. And they would brief me every other day and we would get involved. From time to time, I would have discussions with the head of ecology who was Chris Gregoire, who subsequently became governor of the state, on issues that they would rise to our level. Or with Robie Russell, who was the head of EPA regionally, on issues that would come up. But we eventually worked out, basically, the agreement: this would be done and this was the timeframe for doing it. Then it came time to saying, okay, this is what we’ve got. It was in December of 1978 when we had pretty much wrapped everything up.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry—’88?</p>
<p>Lawrence: I’m sorry. ’88, yes, I’m sorry. December of ’88. So I went over to Lacey near Olympia where Ecology is located, to meet with Chris Gregoire and her team, and I had Ron Izatt and a lawyer from our team, to talk about what we were going to do. And at that meeting—it was a Friday afternoon—they said, okay, what we want to do now is we want to take this to a court and have a judge bless it, make it law: this is what has to be done. And we couldn’t go along with that, and the reason was that the lawyer for the federal government is the Department of Justice. And anytime you go to court as a US government agency, the Department of Justice represents you. They do not believe in friendly settlements. They will fight everything. I don’t mean that to be critical; that’s just the approach they take. And I said to her, I said, Chris, if you insist on taking this to court, we, the Department of Energy and I, lose all ability to deal with this, and it goes into the hands of lawyers who get paid to fight it. And you’re going to win. You’ve got the law on your side. But it’s going to be two, three years from now at great expense. I said, why don’t we just sign it as an agreement, shake hands on it, and you wait for us to violate it, and then take us to court. And she—we went back and forth on that issue. EPA, by the way, had stepped back and said, if you two can reach agreement, we’ll go along with anything that you say. Because they knew we had the tough issues. And so finally, you know, she said, no, we need it in court. These were her instructions, or this is where the governor wanted to go. And I said, well, Chris, can we take this to the governor? And, fortunately, through my tenure here, I had wonderful relations, a great respect for Governor Booth Gardner, who was the governor at that time. And she said, sure, we can take it to him. Subsequently, the following Friday I went over by myself with her and we met with Governor Gardner in his office in Olympia in the state capitol. And I went through the message of, you know, I don’t have the authority to sign this in court. If it goes to court, Justice will fight it, you’ll win, but it will be two years from now or whatever. Didn’t sway the governor. You know, it was clear: no, we want this—we want the law behind it and make it in a court of law. I must have said the same thing three times. Always slightly different. Maybe I warmed him, I don’t know what. But finally the governor looked at Chris and said, well, Chris, could you live with it as an agreement until if and when they fail to live up to it and then go to court? And she said, you know, Governor, if you can, I can. And the governor says, okay, that’s what we’ll do. And so it was an act of faith and it worked for a long time before it ended up in court. But we would not have had the Tri-Party Agreement when we did in the manner in which we did without his willingness and her willingness to concede on that point and let us move on with it.</p>
<p>Franklin: And so when the Tri-Party Agreement was established, what did that lay out for the future of Hanford?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Basically, it took the entire Site and all the areas in which we were in non-compliance, whether it was currently operating sites—even though the plant wasn’t operating, there were still facilities that were operating that fell under the state, or old sites which fell under EPA. All of those things, and when they would be cleaned up, the schedule and process for doing it. And that’s what it laid out. It also laid out, like, the ability to modify the agreement as you went forward. Because the simple fact was, we were operating with nowhere near the degree of knowledge and specificity you would need to have hard-and-fast deadlines. And the other thing was, we didn’t know, and we still don’t know today, what the funding will be year to year. Okay, or problems that will come up. But there was a process in there to move with it and to let it happen. And that was, I think, one of the best features of the Tri-Party Agreement. And it required parties to act in good faith. And I’m pleased it did.</p>
<p>Franklin: Excellent. Was there anything in there about any of the history at Hanford or preserving any of the historic activity at Hanford, whether—keeping buildings there or documenting the history in some way, or saving equipment or anything used in the process?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Not really, no. I mean, this was all compliance. This was an enforcement order. But we did make sure that B Reactor was going to be one of the last things to be—actually, originally, they wanted all of the reactors out on the Site by the rivers to be decontaminated as best they could, and then they wanted to dig under the reactors, bring in the big crawlers they use at Cape Canaveral to move missiles, put it under there, lift up the block, and take it to the center of the Site. And I thought, oh, my good—and that was to be done early in the process. And we said, let’s move that ‘til about 25 years from now. Of course, subsequently they’ve learned how to cocoon and maybe that’ll be found to be good enough. But, I mean, that was—we didn’t have the level of specificity or knowledge or information that you need to do a good cleanup then as we do now.</p>
<p>Franklin: I know that the B Reactor Museum Association was founded in the early ‘90s, but were there whispers then when you were signing that agreement or afterwards about saving B Reactor or saving something onsite as kind of a testament to the production at Hanford?</p>
<p>Lawrence: There very well may have been. I just—I wasn’t cognizant of it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. So when did you leave working at the Richland office?</p>
<p>Lawrence: I left in July of 1990.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, okay, so you were—and why did you leave? Where did you go after?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, in part, I went to work for a company in Colorado that was doing cleanup work. But I was only there less than a year when the state department offered me a diplomatic post in Vienna, Austria. Because that was right after the first Gulf War, when they discovered that the Iraqis had a clandestine nuclear program, and they wanted the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was supposed to monitor things like that, to become stronger and more efficient and effective. And the State Department decided that they wanted a person with technical knowledge and ability but who also had had some international experience, which I had in the ‘70s under a Carter program doing international negotiations. So they called me up and I went to Vienna, then, to do that. I left here, one, because the managers’ authorities had been greatly, greatly reduced.</p>
<p>Franklin: Was that a result of the Tri-Party Agreement, or just from the shift or production to cleanup?</p>
<p>Lawrence: In part, it was due to the Tri-Party Agreement in that as we were negotiating the Tri-Party Agreement—we had the responsibility for doing that here, but kept Washington informed of our activities and getting their agreement as we went along. And right after those meetings that I told you about with Chris Gregoire and Governor Gardner, that was in December. In January of that year, a new Secretary of Energy was coming in. Admiral Watkins had been appointed to be the Secretary of Energy. So he was transitioning in, and there was an acting secretary. Her name was Donna Fitzpatrick, who was interacting with him as this transition occurred. Acting Secretary Fitzpatrick—they all knew what we were doing here. But as it happens, the agreement was formally signed in May 15<sup>th</sup>, 1989. But three months prior to that—what would that have been, February—is when—you have to give a three-month notice before you do something like that, for public comment and the like. As it turns out, everyone was so pleased with coming to agreement that the announcement of agreement was made in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, DC. Governor Gardner was there, I was there, representatives of DC and the Department were there, EPA were there, and it was announced we had reached agreement and it would be signed in three months in May. You know, after the formal comment period and any changes that had to occur. Well, in the normal question-and-answer period that went on, with that announcement, the State said, this is going to be commit the government to be spending $25 billion for the cleanup of Hanford. Now, it just so happened that the very next day was Admiral Watkins’ first day as Secretary of Energy. During that first day, he was to meet with all of the site managers, including myself. That morning, when it appeared in the paper that Washington State says it’s committed to paying $25 billion—whatever that means—the Office of Management and Budget, which, evidently had been left in the dark—I don’t know. I had no responsibility to inform them. They called him up and said, what in the world’s going on over there? What are you doing committing us to $25 billion? We go into the meeting with the new secretary. And he proceeded to just chew me up and chew me down as to, this is the worst thing we’ve ever done, how could we be so bad and stupid, and all this other stuff. And I just sat there, and—you know, you can’t push back, really. You just think—and unfortunately, the former acting secretary, Donna Fitzpatrick was sitting next to him. She knew all about it, but she couldn’t do anything. And it really just set a very bad tone with the secretary. Subsequently, however, as the kudos started coming in about what a good agreement this was and how it showed good cooperation and compliance by the Department, Admiral Watkins was very happy to take the credit for the Tri-Party Agreement. But life was a little uncomfortable out here. And I decided then I was going to be leaving. But I didn’t want to leave in the first year, because I wanted to make sure the Tri-Party Agreement got off to a good start. So, subsequently when I did leave, a lot of it was about the fact that it just wasn’t the same job. And quite frankly, a very important tenet of any management job is never accept responsibility that you don’t have the authority to fulfill. If you don’t have the authority, but have the responsibility, it just doesn’t work. And I didn’t, and I left.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. How did you come back to the area?</p>
<p>Lawrence: That’s an interesting story as well. After I left Vienna in 1985, I was hired by—</p>
<p>Franklin: Sorry, you mean 1995.</p>
<p>Lawrence: ’95, I’m sorry, yeah, I have my years mixed. 1995. I went to work for a company called BNFL, which stands for British Nuclear Fuels, Limited. And they had bought a company in Los Alamos, New Mexico and they asked me to be president of it. I was running the company, and then they subsequently asked me to move back to their Washington, DC headquarters for their US operations as the chief operating officer, which I did. But that was also the same time when BNFL had gotten the contract to design the Vitrification Plant for the Hanford Site. And they had brought in engineers and managers from the UK to head up that project here in the Tri-Cities. So, I’ve gone back to Washington, DC as the chief operating officer of BNFL, Inc., which is the US component. And shortly—not so long after it—I was there less than a year—the manager of the project in Richland came back. And they had signed an agreement of what they were going to do and the government was going along with it. It was basically, for $6.5 billion they would build and operate the plant and process the first so many million gallons of waste, for $6.5 billion. When that manager came back, he indicated—he said, you know—he’s British; I’m not going to do a British accent—but he said, you know, I really—I’m not fitting in well with the community. I just don’t understand those people out there. I don’t fit in well with the community. We need somebody out there who understands things. Well, I love this community. I know this community. They were very, very good to me and my family when we were here. So I raised my hand and said, I know those people. This was our biggest project by far for our company, I’d be willing to go out and head up the project. And so subsequently, I came out to head up the Vit Plant. Within a week of getting here, I had to go and report to the new Office of River Protection, which had responsibility for it, what the status was of our cost estimates. I had only been here a week, so they give me the numbers. And I asked the—are they aware of this? Yeah, they’re aware of this. So I went in and, oh, all hell broke loose. Because the number—it had risen. It was higher than 6.5. And Dick French, who was the head of the project, rightly so, says, I can’t—this is terrible. Your first report—and it’s over budget already. And I knew Dick, and I understood his position. And basically, I said, let me go back and find out what’s going on. I was told you were on board with this. You obviously are not. Let me find out. I subsequently found out that there had been an arbitrary 20% cut in their estimates, thinking they were just going to drive things harder and shave things off and make it cheaper. And I had a—obviously, I had a major problem with this. Because in the beginning, you don’t shave back. You have contingency that’s built in and you work off. It doesn’t work the other way. And so I’d moved back here, we bought a house, I’m running the—and this project is going downhill quick. What was worse was that I tried to tell BNFL, we need to go to the Department and say, this number, $6.5 billion, for the plant and operations of it is not going to work. We need to renegotiate. We need to do something different. And I got nothing but pushback. We would not do this. And I was even—I said, you know, if we don’t do something, we’re going to be fired. And they said, they can’t fire us. They’re not going to fire us. And I said, I’m sorry, I said, I can’t continue to operate like that. So I resigned. Resigned from the project. Didn’t have another job, but I figured, I’ll find something. But I can’t continue with this. And within two months, Secretary Richardson had fired BNFL. Fortunately, a couple months after that, Battelle and Pacific Northwest National Lab hired me to run their nuclear programs. That’s how I came back, and that’s how I spent my first two years back. As managing a dying project and then transitioning to a new job.</p>
<p>Franklin: And how long did you work at PNNL?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, I worked from 2000 up until 2008. And during that period, I had responsibility—I was the associate lab director for energy. But in the latter part of that timeframe, I was also deputy lab director for facilities and was responsible for the putting together and funding and getting approved the new—they called it a consolidated lab—facilities that are just north of Horn Rapids Road and two private facilities that are on the campus. And then Battelle asked if I’d be willing to lead a team to manage the national nuclear lab in the United Kingdom. They had put together a team with two other companies to do that. And I said I’d be willing to do that. I had spent time in Europe already. And I went over and subsequently we won the contract in the early 2009. So in 2009 and ’10, I was the director of the national nuclear lab in the UK. And then I retired and came back and retired here in West Richland.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow, great. Well, thank you so much, Mike. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?</p>
<p>Lawrence: Well, I’d like to get on record that I’ve been very, very fortunate in my life to hold some very interesting positions and to work for some phenomenal people. But the job that I enjoyed the most was as manager of the Richland Operations Office. There was a spirit, a camaraderie, a support, a community spirit that I felt there that I’ve just—as much as I’ve enjoyed my other jobs, nothing quite as good as that. It was really, really enjoyable, and aside from my wife and family, probably there was nothing better that had ever happened to us than to move to this area and be involved in these activities. I’ve really enjoyed it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for coming in today.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Okay, very good. Thank you.</p>
<p>Franklin: All right, yeah.</p>
<p>Lawrence: Thanks.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. That was a great--<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/SiYN7OCJOAs">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:23:14
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
200 Area
B Reactor
Fast Flux Test Facility
N Reactor
Vitrification Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1972-1990
2000-2007
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1972-1990
2000-2007
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Donald Hodel
William Skylstad
Paul Lorenzini
Howard Hughes
John Harrington
Karen Dorn Steele
Jerry White
Ron Izatt
Chris Gregoire
Robie Russell
Carter
Governor Gardner
Donna Fitzpatrick
Admiral Watkins
Dick French
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Michael Lawrence
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Michael Lawrence conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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02-01-17
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
200 Area
Atomic Energy Commission
B Reactor
B Reactor Museum Association
Battelle
Cat
ceremonies
Dam
Department of Energy
Fast Flux Test Facility
Hanford
Kennewick
Los Alamo
Los Alamos
Manhattan Project
Mountain
N Reactor
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
PUREX
Quonset hut
Quonset huts
River
Road
Savannah River
School
Sun
VIT Plant
Vitrification Plant
War
Washington Public Power Supply System
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe4fc1a4c7495942bf447756ec5e85cfa.JPG
d98e592b247db687cb3749711ea3df5b
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
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Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Douglas O’Reagan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Mark Jensen
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Douglas O’Reagan: Okay. To start us off, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us?</p>
<p>Mark Jensen: My name is Mark Jensen, M-A-R-K, J-E-N-S-E-N.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great. Okay. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Jensen on March 25<sup>th</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be speaking with Mr. Jensen about his experiences working at the Hanford site and living in the Tri-Cities. To start us off, can you tell us a little bit about your life before you came to Hanford?</p>
<p>Jensen: Well, my mother moved to Richland to teach English at what was then Columbia High School, now Richland High School. She was a single mother with five children. So I started school at Jefferson Elementary in Richland in kindergarten. When I was in third grade, my mother remarried, and I was adopted by my new father. He was a long-time Hanford worker. Anyway, so I grew up in the Tri-Cities. We moved to Kennewick when I went into fourth grade, and I went through the Kennewick School District after that, and graduated from Kamiakin High School in 1974. Went to Washington State University, got a degree in forestry, thinking that would get me out of the Tri-Cities, because there aren’t any forests here. Unfortunately, there weren’t any jobs in forestry. So I came back home to live with my parents, and my dad mentioned that N Reactor was hiring reactor operators. So I applied, and got a job as a reactor operator.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What time frame would it have been that your mother moved here?</p>
<p>Jensen: I was five, so that would have been 1961.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, great. Can you tell us about the schooling, the education, the schools in the Tri-Cities as you experienced them?</p>
<p>Jensen: Well, I went to Jefferson Elementary, like kindergarten through third grade. It was in an old building left over from World War II. It was probably a grade school built as part of the Manhattan Project. That’s all long since been torn down. Then when we moved to Kennewick, I went to Hawthorne Elementary school there. Building’s still there as far as I know. And then to Vista Elementary, then to Highlands Middle School—Highlands Junior High in those days. Then the Kamiakin High School which was brand new.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was life like as a kid in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Jensen: It was pretty routine, I guess. Went outside and played in those days instead of staying inside for video games. It didn’t matter how hot it was outside, we’d go out and play baseball all day usually, and things like that. Then just going to school during the school year and doing whatever during the summer. When I was growing up, before my mother remarried, she would work in the summer and I was usually babysat by some of her students. After she remarried, then she stopped working during the summer. But I’m fairly certain that one of the reactor operators I worked with at N Reactor was one of my babysitters when I was second or third grade. But anyway.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you were sort of a teenager, what sort of stuff did you and your friends do for fun around the area?</p>
<p>Jensen: Usually, after doing our homework, we’d go outside and play basketball, every day, every night. We had a lighted basketball court. We’d play basketball all day Saturday and Sunday. When the weather was nicer, we’d play baseball or variants of baseball, since there were seldom enough people to make up a couple of teams. We used to go to baseball games—minor league baseball games—in the summer. A variety of different team names. There was a stadium in Kennewick called Sanders Jacobs Field that’s long since been demolished. That’s pretty much what we did, just mess around. Go bowling, things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Do you know what your step-father did at the Hanford site?</p>
<p>Jensen: He was a chemical engineer, and he worked at N Reactor and the older reactors designing systems for decontaminating the reactors. When I was in high school, he worked at the Tank Farms in the 200 Area. He was in charge of Tank Farm surveillance, and that was when the tanks started leaking—the older tanks first started leaking. So we got frequent telephone calls in the middle of the night that there was a leaking tank. Sometimes I’d hear my dad say something on the telephone, and the next day I would see that in the newspaper, as a Hanford spokesman said, kind of thing. That was kind of interesting.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So I guess you were aware of the future environmental issues pretty early on?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did that impact your life at all? Or was it sort of in the background?</p>
<p>Jensen: It’s just the way things were.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you came back and were looking for a job and you first heard about this job at N Reactor, did you—was that something you were sort of excited about? Was it something you were--?</p>
<p>Jensen: It sounded interesting. I knew nothing about it. Not too many people knew reactor operators, although there were certainly plenty of them around here over the years. So I had no idea, really, what that job entailed. But it was a job, and it paid pretty good. So when it was offered to me, I accepted it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of skill sets did it end up requiring you to gain?</p>
<p>Jensen: I had to learn a lot about how to operate complex systems, do valving in a precise, controlled manner so it was done correctly. Not so much working with pumps, other than checking to make sure they were running properly. I didn’t have to do maintenance kind of things. Then once I got my certification in the control room, I had to learn how to operate all of the systems, use the controls in the control room to do that, set everything up properly, and what to do in case of an emergency, or a reactor scram, or upset. Try and keep the reactor from scramming, things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of training was involved?</p>
<p>Jensen: We started out, once we got into the certification program, we went into what we called phase one training. That basically started off with fundamentals training. We got some math and chemistry. Didn’t hurt that I had chemistry in college. It’s kind of funny—the week or two weeks we had in chemistry, I think I learned more than the two semesters of chemistry in college, because the instructor was so much better for the fundamentals class than the professor I had at college. But it might have also been because I was older and a little more mature.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was that onsite at Hanford?</p>
<p>Jensen: It was onsite at Hanford, out at N Reactor. We had some chemistry, math, a little bit of electronics, things like that. Started learning some of the various systems at the plant. Then we went back on shift for several months. I can’t remember now how long, I mean this is almost 40 years ago, so it’s kind of hard to remember everything. So when we went back on shift, we were given a packet of stuff that we had to study on our own and learn while we were assigned to do other jobs throughout the plant. Then we went back into class, into phase two, and studied more systems, and started learning how things in the control room worked. I can’t remember if there were four phases or three phases, but each time after a phase ended, we had an exit exam. Then we went back to shift, with more stuff to do in between the regular job stuff. At the end of all of the phases, we took an eight-hour written exam. Theoretically, if you failed the written exam, they could fire you. Or they could just reassign you as a non-certified operator. Some people did that after they failed. They just said they didn’t want to continue. But generally they gave you a second chance. Well, I passed the first time, so didn’t have to worry about that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How long did that process take?</p>
<p>Jensen: Started probably in February or March of ’81. I was completely certified in June of ’82. So it was probably about a year and a half for the total process. But they were in a hurry to get people certified, because there were a lot of older operators who were getting ready to retire. So they needed to get people in there and get some experience before they lost too many of the older, experienced operators. So after the eight-hour written exam, we had to study for what we called the demonstration exam. That was in the control room, and an instructor would say, okay, Mark, how do you set this console up for operation? You are going to do this job, show me without actually doing it--because it was in the real reactor—how you would do it. Later on, we had a simulator that was pretty much an exact duplicate of the reactor, and then you could actually do the things in the simulator. But for my demonstration exam, it was just point out what you would do. When we passed that exam, we actually got a pay raise. We went from what we called a Grade 18 to a Grade 21, and got a nice little bump in pay. Then you studied for your oral exam. That one, you went before an oral board. There was a representative from operations, a representative from training, and a representative from nuclear safety. They all had a certain set of questions to ask, and any one of them could come in at any time with follow-up questions. So that—I think that took me six hours. And I passed that, so then I was a certified operator. Except that operations would not sign your certificate until you demonstrated that you could handle the jobs. So when I went back on shift, I was assigned to an experienced operator. So we rotated through various positions in the control room, and I followed him around. Initially, he would do things and tell me what he was doing. Then he would have me do it, but he would tell me what to do. And then when he was pretty satisfied I knew what I was doing, he would just sit back and let me figure out what I was doing. And then he must have told the control room supervisor I was ready, control room supervisor told the shift manager I was ready, and the shift manager recommended that my certificate be signed by the manager of operations. Then I could sit on consoles all by myself.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So was there an influx of younger operators at that point?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes, we had quite a few coming through. My certification class, we had three supervisor candidates, and I think we had seven operator candidates. One of them ended up not completing it. All of the rest passed. Some of them, it took them a couple attempts at the eight hour and maybe even the oral board to get certified. Then right after me, there was another class with a lot of other young people. So we got a lot of young people in there, and then that allowed some of the older operators to retire. I think some of them were hanging around a little longer than they might have wanted to otherwise, just because they knew they would have been shorthanded if they left.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was this all at N Reactor?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was it the same training program for all the reactors?</p>
<p>Jensen: Well, N Reactor was the only reactor left at the time. They had similar programs at the older reactors. But it evolved over time and got a little more detailed. We had a little more stuff on reactor physics. In the original days, it’s just, this is what you’re going to do, and nobody asked why, because it was all secret. It’s just, do this and keep this needle within this range, or whatever. Later on, you actually started to teach people what was happening. Some of the old operators complained about having some reactor physics stuff in there. Wah, we don’t need this stuff. And they were so good that it’s like, I don’t know that they really did need that. They just knew what to do when something went wrong. But the theory is it never hurts to have too much knowledge.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How many people were working at a given time in the actual reactor?</p>
<p>Jensen: In the control room, or—?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: That, and also—</p>
<p>Jensen: It’s easier for me to say in the control room, but I’ll estimate on the other.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Jensen: Minimal shift in the control room was three operators and a control room supervisor, but we generally had four. There were three positions that had to be manned 24 hours a day when the reactor was operating. One of them, the nuclear console, where you actually controlled the reactor power level, we rotated two people in and out on that: two hours on and two hours off. If you only had three, then, I think the control room supervisor could give you relief. But you weren’t allowed to be there for more than two hours at a time. The other two consoles, you could be there for the whole eight hours on a shift. After my class and the next one went through, they had enough operators that we could get six or more operators in there, which gave a lot more flexibility, both for giving breaks to people, because it can get hard to keep your focus all night long, particularly on graveyard shift, when the reactor ran itself, pretty much. You’re just looking at things to make sure everything’s normal. That gets hard to do. It doesn’t sound like it would be, but it is. It’s pretty—puts a strain on you. So we had more people to give breaks. And extra certified operators to go out throughout the plant and check things, because they could recognize problems that non-certified operators might not. So, let’s say six of us in the control room, a control room supervisor, a shift manager. They were both certified control room shift manager/operators also. So they could do anything in the control room we could. And on a typical shift, you usually had a couple of electricians, a couple of instrument technicians, three or four health physics technicians—radiological control technicians—we called them radiation monitors in those days. Plus supervisors for all of them. And maybe a handful of millwrights, pipefitters, whatever. Mostly, the maintenance people did their work when the reactor was shut down. There wasn’t very much for them to do when the reactor was operating. But there was always work for instrument technicians. They would come in, and if something wasn’t working right in the control room, we’d call them in and they would tinker with it and try to fix it. Things like that. Day shift, there were a lot more people on there. And then during a reactor outage, much more work going on, particularly or the maintenance people. Because that’s when they were tear pumps down and rebuild them and things like that. So there were probably, on days, a couple hundred people out there. On shift, maybe thirty.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So you’ve sort of been doing this, but could you walk us through a day in the life? What would sort of your average day involve?</p>
<p>Jensen: Okay. I’d come to work in the morning, a little bit before eight. And if I were assigned to the control room, I would go in and receive a turnover from the operator whose console I was taking over. We had a schedule that rotated us through. So if you’re one or two, you’re on the nuclear console. If you’re three, you’re on the double-A console. If you’re number four, you’re on the BN console, and I do not know what BN stands for. We used to joke that it was short for boring, because it was the most boring of the three consoles when we were at full power. So if I’m going to be on the nuclear console, I’d come in and there’s an operator who’s ready to leave. He gives me a turnover, tells me what the power level is, if we’re going to be raising power, if we’re at full power, we’re just going to hold power, if there’s any areas of the reactor that seem to want to lose power or gain power. So I get the turnover and then I take over. If I was on the nuclear console, I would work for two hours, and the other operator would come in, and I would give him a turnover and he would take over. And then I would usually give breaks to the other operators, unless we had enough other people to give them breaks. Anytime you take over, you’d get a turnover for what’s going on. Worked the nuclear console for two days, then you’d go to the double-A console. The double-A console controlled the reactor pressure and the primary coolant pump speed, and sending steam to the Washington Public Power Supply System. So you had this big console, went around like this and like this, and there were separate sections for each of the steam generator cells. We had six—five operating at any one time. Occasionally we ran with four operating. We never did all six. There was a reason why; I can’t remember what the reason why was. But always had one in reserve. That one was a pretty busy console during startups and shutdowns. I had full power. It was look around, look at all of the drive turbines for the primary coolant pumps and make sure they’re running at the proper RPM, look at the pressurizer level and make sure it’s at 23 feet. Got very busy on a reactor scram—lots of stuff to do there. And after the day on the double-A console, we went to the BN console. That monitored the secondary coolant system, so we had water coming back from the Washington Public Power Supply System. We sent them steam, they sent back condensate to us. Then we had a secondary system to maintain the pressure of the main steam header. So we had to watch that, plus we had to watch the rupture monitor system, which would check the radiation levels in the coolant water outlet from the reactor tubes. There were 1,003 tubes with fuel in them. The system would compare the radiation level between two adjacent tubes, and if one of them was higher than the other, a red light would come on on this panel. Then you’d go over and push the button to reset it. They’re coming on and off all the time. But if we had a rupture, that meant there was a leak in the cladding on the fuel. Usually, it was a little small pinhole; sometimes—and I never saw this—the welded-on endcap would blow off. Uranium, normally, is not very soluble in water, but when the water’s really hot, then it’s really soluble. And we’re running at 600 degrees or so for the coolant water. So if you had a rupture, you could start dissolving the uranium very rapidly. That’s got all of the fission products in it from the uranium atoms that have split, which are highly radioactive. So you could completely contaminate the primary coolant loop. So you needed to catch a rupture before it progressed too far. That was a frustrating job because those lights are coming on and off all the time. You got to look at those, and it was kind of a bad design, because that panel was here, the other panel was over there, and you had to keep looking back and forth. So that’s why we’d call it the boring console. It was pretty boring at full power. A lot of work there, again, on a reactor startup. We had to set things up to control the main steam header pressure, and that was a lot of work. So it was kind of fun, then. But full power, it was kind of boring. After we cycled through, if we had more than four operators, then we’d have two days where we’re—you could either study, because we always had to maintain our certification, and we had quarterly requalification classes and every two years we had to recertify. Or you could just be assigned to go out in the plant and do various jobs, help out—if it’s needed somewhere, help out some of the operators who were still studying to be certified operators, help train them, things like that. And then you just kept rotating through that. If we had an outage, we only had two places manned in the control room. One was the double-A console, and the other one was the communications console. So you kept contact with everybody throughout the plant, and made PA announcements if need be. Just let people know what’s going on. If we were in charge/discharge operations, you might be assigned to work on the charge or discharge elevator, to set it up for refueling the reactor. Or just—if it’s not a charge/discharge outage or we’re already done with that, you might be going in the rod rooms and doing some valving to assist the millwrights who might be repairing control rod issues and things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I saw you had some pictures there. Could you walk us through some of what those are?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yeah. Here is a picture. I found this online in the Hanford system a while back, and I was really surprised. That’s me, and I don’t remember posing for this picture. But I am on the charge elevator here. This is the wall, and it’s opposite the reactor and it’s a shield wall and each of these things here are plugs. You can open one up on the elevator side and on the other side, there was a really large elevator called the W work elevator. It actually came off a World War II aircraft carrier for lifting airplanes up to the flight deck. They could pull a plug out there, and they would run a tube through this penetration. Then you would mate it up with the process tube in the reactor. That’s how you refueled. They must have had a photographer up there taking pictures to show other people what goes on there. That was my assignment, and so I obviously posed for this picture, but like I say, I don’t remember doing this at all.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is that your usual outfit when you were working?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes. Those are called anti-C clothes, or—original Hanford terminology was SWP clothing, for Special Work Procedure. During World War II, you didn’t want to say that this was to protect against contamination, because this is all secret what we’re doing. So you’re doing a special work procedure, so you have to wear the special work procedure clothes.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So that’s a second pair of gloves there?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yeah. I would be wearing two pairs of coveralls, a hood, two pairs of gloves and some rubber shoes. And underneath the rubber shoes there’s some canvas booties. So this is not a real high contamination job. If we were actually refueling the reactor, I’d be wearing plastic raingear over that. We used to wear a face shield to keep water out of our face. Later on, we had a hood with a blower unit that provided air so we didn’t suffocate, and that kept water off our face. So that’s about as good as I could get on the elevator. This picture was taken of our crew in the control room. We had started a straight day shift crew. It was so we had more time for training. We worked Monday through Thursday in the control room, and every Friday we had training. And the rotating shifts, when they came in on days, they worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the control room, and then during the week they had training. We formed up this brand new shift. They let it out by seniority, and there weren’t that many people who wanted to do it. Some people, strangely enough, really liked shiftwork. So I managed to get on the first crew. And on our very first day working together as a crew, we had what we call a WPPSS turbine trip—the Washington Public Power Supply System bought our steam, and they had two turbines, and one of their turbines tripped. That had happened before, and the reactor had never managed to ride through that without scramming. Well, we kept the reactor from scramming. And I was on this console here—this is the nuclear console. I was controlling the reactor power level. When their turbine dropped off, the main steam header pressure goes up. This is getting a little technical, but—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: No, that’s great.</p>
<p>Jensen: The main steam pressure goes up high. That sits on top of the steam generators. When the pressure’s high, water doesn’t boil as easily. And when water boils, you get heat exchange. So we are sending hotter water back through the reactor. That is not as good a moderator as the cooler water. So the reactor power went down very fast. So I had to start pulling control rods to make up for that. In low-enriched reactors, like any of the Hanford reactors, when you lose power rapidly, you start building up a fission product called xenon which is a neutron poison. It absorbs neutrons better than anything else. At equilibrium power, we’re making xenon at a certain rate, and it’s destroyed as soon as it’s made by absorbing neutrons. So the net amount of it in the reactor is zero. But if we lose power, we’re still producing it for several hours at the old rate. But we don’t have as many neutrons in there, so the reactor power will go down and it will just make it worse. So you have to pull rods very fast. So that’s what I had to do. My part was to keep the reactor from going down so far that the xenon would take it all the way down. The other operators were working to keep the main steam header pressure from going up too high, because we had a scram trip on that, because you didn’t want to rupture the steam header. The people controlling the primary coolant loop pressure had to do work on that. It was very exciting. But we survived it, and so they took this picture as a commemoration. One of the people involved was on the nuclear console when they took the picture and he didn’t want to be in the picture. So he’s not in there. But I like this, because if you know what you’re looking at, you can actually see that the reactor’s operating. There’s some indications there that the reactor’s at its 4,000 megawatt power level. And it’s one of the few pictures I’ve ever seen where you can tell the reactor was operating. Then, almost a year later, the exact same thing happened again, and I was in the same place. It was really easy the second time, because I knew exactly what to do. So they took a picture again, for all of us. This is the double-A console. Kept these all these years. As long as I’ve got these up here, this is an aerial photo of the N Reactor complex. Let me see. This is the reactor building right here. Make sure I’m not looking at things backwards. This building over here is the Washington Public Power Supply System. You can kind of see over here there’s some lines that go over, and those are the steam lines going over to them. They bought the steam from us and then sent the condensate back after they ran it through their turbines.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much did you have to communicate with them?</p>
<p>Jensen: Frequently. We called them up--any time we were going to do something that might affect the power level, we would call them up, tell them we’re going to do that. If they were going to do something that might affect the condensate coming back, they would let us know. They would give us some numbers. From there, power generation, which we would compile into a daily report, I think that was the basis for how much money they paid us for the steam. Things like that. So we were in constant contact with them. Usually it was the operator on the double-A console who would communicate with the—we called them Whoops in those days. They didn’t like being called Whoops. Now it’s Energy Northwest. But that’s a habit that’s hard to break. I still want to call them Whoops. And we didn’t mean it anything derogatory in those days, but—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you said that the turbine tripped, would that seize it up? What does that involve?</p>
<p>Jensen: I’m not really sure why it tripped. They may have had some valves—steam admittance valves close or something. If they told us why it tripped at the time, I can’t remember. This was 1987 or so. So it was quite a while—almost 30 years ago. The second trip—not sure if it was the same cause or not. I know one time they had a turbine trip and we didn’t survive that one. [LAUGHTER] It was kind of funny. Somebody was sweeping in their control room, and the broom fell and hit a switch and caused the turbine to trip off. So on that reactor outage, they paid for everything we did to get the reactor back up. We had a special charge code. Because it was their fault, so they’re paying for it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: That would, I guess, give the reactor xenon poisoning and they couldn’t start up for a certain amount of time?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes. If we scrammed from full power, theoretically, you could pull control rods almost immediately and override the xenon building up. But we had a mandated one-hour hold if we scrammed from full power. And that’s so that you will make sure it wasn’t a spurious scram. If it’s something that’s actually not working correctly, so it would be unsafe to operate, you can figure that out. And by doing that—waiting that one hour, it gets impossible to start the reactor up. So our minimum downtime from full power was generally about 23 hours—23 to 24 hours. If we could figure out what the problem was and get it fixed, then we started up the next day. If I was something serious, it might take a few more days, or several days, to figure out what the problem is or correct the problem. And then when we started up, it was kind of interesting, because we had the control rods pulled almost completely out of the reactor before the reactor went critical. And then as the power goes up, you’re pushing control rods in, rather than pulling them out to raise power, until you get to a point—it’s called xenon turnaround—where you’ve burned up all of the xenon that was in the reactor, and now the reactor’s making more of the xenon and then they start coming back out. So those were actually really fun.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How often did the reactor scram?</p>
<p>Jensen: N Reactor was getting kind of old by the time I was there. Some of the equipment was really old, old technology, and getting a little hard to maintain. We usually had two or three scrams in a particular operating run. I’m not really sure how many, because, again, it’s been so long. We would typically operate for a month. And we were in plutonium weapons-grade production mode, and so we only operated for a month, and then we would shut down and about a third of the reactor. But it was unusual to go an entire cycle without at least one scram. And usually they were spurious ones. The ones that caused a lot of them were the flow monitor system, which was a pretty old system. If somebody slammed a door or something somewhere, the instruments would vibrate, and it would give a false indication of low flow, and the reactor would scram. It only took one of the 1,003 flow monitor devices to cause a reactor scram. So that was kind of touchy there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: And that was automated?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yeah, it was automated. You had this big panel with all these 1,003 dials. Normally, we never changed them. If we swapped steam generator cells out—like cell five was out for years until it got re-tubed, and then we put that one in and took another one out so they could re-tube that one. And we had to adjust all of those dials. Oh, that was a boring job—get them all set exactly right, and then somebody has to go through and check them all. If we ran in that mode with that same balance of steam generators, we didn’t have to do that every startup.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: In the pictures with the other operators, could you just tell us about one or two of the other folks you were working with?</p>
<p>Jensen: Okay. This is Dennis Real. Hopefully he won’t mind that I mentioned his name. He still works at Hanford. He started a little bit before me. This gentleman is Bill Terhark. He was a very, very experienced operator. He was one of the ones that you really wanted to have in the control room when things went bad, because he knew what to do all the time. He had so much experience. He went back to the 1950s, operating—probably operated at every one of the reactors. This is Fred Butcher, Jr. His dad had also been a reactor operator, Fred Butcher, Sr. And that’s me, and this is our control room supervisor, Glen Buckley.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Do you know anything about their backgrounds? Were they also—I guess the one who had most experience probably trained in reactors, but were they all engineers mostly?</p>
<p>Jensen: No, no. Dennis had been a paramedic or EMT before he started working at the reactor. I’m not sure about Fred, what he did. Bill had graduated from high school, joined the Air Force, came out of the Air Force, got a job at Hanford. Typically, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, they did not hire engineers to be—and I don’t know what Glen’s job was—or what his background was, before. Most of us, except the older operators had college of some sort or another. When I hired on, they were hiring people usually with a couple years or more of college.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So you were there through the end of N Reactor, is that right?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes. In 1987—well, 1986—I think it was in April, was the Chernobyl accident. Chernobyl, although really was not similar at all to N Reactor, everybody thought it was, because both reactors are moderated by graphite instead of light-water. So everybody looked at graphite—that must be the cause of why Chernobyl blew up. Well, it blew up because it was a really poor design, and it was poorly operated, and they had a really unusual transient situation and then they had a steam explosion that tore the reactor apart. Well, we decided we would make some safety upgrades. They decided we’re going to shut down on January 7<sup>th</sup>, 1987. Six months of safety upgrades, then we’d start back up. Well, we pretty much knew we were never going to start back up again. They did do all the safety upgrades, spent millions of dollars on them, but—anyway, so we came in on January 7<sup>th</sup> knowing that this is probably the last day of operation for the reactor, and it was our job to shut it down. I was on the double-A console that day. It would have been nice if I had been on the nuclear console, to be the guy actually putting the rods in, but that was Dennis. So we shut the reactor down. Took about an hour. We still had fuel in the reactor for a good almost two years before we defueled the reactor. Because we were going to start up again. And then finally they said, no, we’re going to defuel the reactor and we’ll go on wet layup. So we still had water pumping through the pipes, keep everything wet. Because if you let it drain of water and then it’s damp in there, then things will start to rust. But if you have water flowing through there, that wouldn’t happen. So we went for a few months where we kept all of the pumps running and stuff like that, but no fuel in the reactor. And then they said, well, now we’re going to go into dry layup. So we drained the primary coolant loop and all the other systems, and then we had big fans blowing hot air through there to keep moisture from condensing in there. The thought was, maybe we’ll get the order to start up again. And then they just said, nope. Pulling the plug. Reactor is abandoned, and it’ll go into decontamination and decommissioning. And it’s essentially been torn down now, and what’s left of it—the reactor block itself—is all cocooned. Just like most of the other old reactors.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What happened to your and the other reactor operators’ careers at that point?</p>
<p>Jensen: [SIGH] Well, that was kind of a scary time. People thought we’re going to get laid off. Some people quit and went back to school. I remember one guy went to school and got a doctor’s degree in optometry and became an optometrist. There was some programs to help people with that, some money to help people go to college and get something else. Some people just found other jobs and left. And then I ended up staying. I was getting bored with being an operator at a reactor that wasn’t operating, and there wasn’t even any fuel in the reactor. But we still had all the stored fuel, and they needed somebody to be what they called the criticality safety representative, to work with operations and with the criticality safety analyst to make sure we’re still storing that fuel safely, so we don’t have any inadvertent criticality accident. Not very likely, but it could conceivably still happen. So I got that job, and in addition to that I was doing other stuff that you would call nuclear safety work. So I ended up becoming, to all intents and purposes, a nuclear safety engineer, even though I don’t have an engineering degree. And I’ve been doing that ever since.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Who is that, technically, that you were working for at that point? Was it Battelle?</p>
<p>Jensen: No. Initially I worked for UNC Nuclear Industries. That was UNC parts stands for United Nuclear Corporation. They had the contract to run the reactors. In those days, Rockwell ran the 200 Areas for the Tank Farms and stuff like that, and the processing plants. So they ran the PUREX Plant that was extracting plutonium from our fuel. Battelle operates the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and that does research and design. Right after we shut down, DoE announced that they were going to consolidate all of the contracts. Westinghouse got that contract, so I worked for Westinghouse at the time I got into nuclear safety. Westinghouse went through a contract period and then a renewal period, and DoE typically does not renew anybody’s contract—nowadays anyway—more than once. So Westinghouse left, and then they announced a bid for a new contract. The Fluor Corporation won that one, and so I worked for Fluor for several years. They went through—I think they went through two and a half. DoE gave them an extension on the second done until they could get everything in place. And then the contract was won by the CH2M Hill Company, and that’s who I work for now.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Does it make much difference when one becomes—</p>
<p>Jensen: WE used to joke the only difference it makes is in the color of the paycheck. It makes a little bit of difference, because you get some upper management coming in, and they have different ideas on how things should be done. We all joke that we have to educate them on how things actually are done. That’s only half-joking because it’s different than anything else. Fluor had some subcontractors who had never done work for Department of Energy before. So they wanted to do things the way you do it in the commercial nuclear industry. And it’s like, you don’t get to do it that way—you do it the way DoE tells you to do it. So we kind of had to educate them. But it’s a little bit different. There’s a little bit of different philosophy every time.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was there ever any kind of either interest or communication with the commercial sector, in terms of learning or teaching any particular things?</p>
<p>Jensen: We did a little bit. I cannot remember the name of the organization, but it’s an organization that compiles knowledge from commercial nuclear reactors all over the country, and the disseminates that to help everybody. We had some people who would go to meetings there, so I guess we became a member of this group. I never was involved in that, but—So we would hear things that happened at other plants and then see if there were some lessons learned that we could apply. But N Reactor was so different than a commercial reactor that sometimes things that happened at N Reactor, they wouldn’t be able to use at a commercial reactor and vice versa.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How secretive was your work?</p>
<p>Jensen: Not much. There were a few things—security stuff was classified. But what we were doing was no longer secret, hadn’t been secret since 1945. I had to have a clearance—it was a secret level clearance. Mostly that was just to make sure I was trustworthy and wouldn’t sabotage the plant or something. Very rarely did I actually see any information that was classified secret.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I would assume, though, that the plutonium itself—I guess you didn’t see the plutonium until it got through the PUREX Plant?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yeah, well I never saw it. I’ve never seen plutonium. All of that stuff—how it was handled, how it was stored—that’s all part of the security thing, and that was all classified. And would still be, to this day, except we don’t have any plutonium at Hanford—not in any discrete form that you can do anything with, anyway.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So what is it you’re doing again? Could you give us more detail on what you’re doing or what you did subsequent to being a reactor operator?</p>
<p>Jensen: I worked in nuclear and criticality safety for N Reactor until we shipped all of the fuel over to the fuel storage basins at the K East and K West Reactors and I moved over there. I worked in criticality safety for that. When they were storing the fuel, that was fairly easy, because they weren’t doing anything. Then they decided they needed to get the fuel out of the basins because they’re close to the river, and the K East Basin had leaked at least once and maybe twice in the past. So the contaminated water gets into the groundwater and eventually gets out to the river. So we needed to get the fuel off the river, so they built a storage facility in the 200 East Area. We had to build a whole system to take the fuel out of the basin and put it in shielded casks and ship it over thee. So there was a lot of work on that, and all of that had to be set up to prevent criticalities. And also nuclear safety, which is more concerned with releases of radiological stuff to the atmosphere. So you need to keep those releases down below certain guidelines that DoE provides to protect the public.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So was this at all part of this amelioration cleanup efforts at that point?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yeah, that’s the whole goal that we’re working towards: get all of the fuel out of the reactor basins. So we got it all out of the K East Basin first, and then that’s actually been destroyed—the basin has been completely dug up and destroyed, and the area backfilled. The reactor’s prepared for cocooning, but hasn’t been, because they ran out of funding. So it’s in a safe, stable condition right now. K West Basin is empty of fuel, but it has sludge. I still do some work for 100 K, although mostly I work at the Plutonium Finishing Plant now. They’re going to move all the sludge out, and then they’ll do the same thing to the K West Basin that they did at K East. And basically, all over Hanford, that’s what they’re doing is cleaning things out, and getting them ready for demolition. So I work at PFP now in nuclear criticality safety there, and they’ve got miles and miles of ductwork. Some big pipes and some little pipes that are all contaminated with plutonium, and they have to carefully take all that stuff out. Get enough of that out so they can actually start tearing the building down.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Are there any general ways, whether it’s the type of people working there, or morale, or whatever, that the work at the Hanford site has changed over the time you’ve been there?</p>
<p>Jensen: [SIGH] During the operating days, it was fun. Actually fun to go to work and do something that you thought was productive. I mean, you can argue whether you thought we should have been making plutonium for nuclear weapons or not, but the job was very interesting. When the reactor shut down, the morale went down quite a bit, because, for one, people thought they were going to lose their jobs, and two, it’s like, well, even if we stay here for decommissioning, that’s not going to be anywhere near as interesting. And it isn’t. It has its own interesting aspects to it. But mostly, people are pretty professional and here’s a job, we’re going to get all of the fuel out of K East. So people went and worked on that, and we’re going to get all the fuel out of K West, so you work on that. While you’re doing that, it’s satisfying, because you’ve got a goal to work for. PFP—it’s a very difficult job. I think the morale kind of goes up and down. We have successes and then there’s problems you run into. But in a way that’s what makes a job interesting, if there’s problems that you can resolve and get through it, and then you succeed on this task and go onto the next one. But it was a lot more fun to operate than to do what we’re doing now.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much longer would you guess we’re going to be doing this--?</p>
<p>Jensen: I, personally, or Hanford?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Both, why not?</p>
<p>Jensen: Well, PFP is supposed to be torn down. It was supposed to be torn down by the end of September this year, but it’s probably going to be about a year off from that. The K Basin—K West Basin has sludge in it. They’re probably going to start removing the sludge in about two years. That’ll probably take about a year to do that and then they’ll start tearing that basin down. There’s still a huge project called Groundwater, where they’re pumping contaminated water, and it’s not just radioactive contamination, there’s a lot of heavy metal contamination in Groundwater. They pump that out, and they run it through processes to take the, like, chromium out of the water and replace it with a type of chromium that’s not as environmentally damaging. That’ll go on for years and years. And then there’s still—all of the old processing canyons are still there in place, and all of those are going to have to be torn down at some point. So, it’s probably decades more work here. And then there’s all the tanks. They’re going to take all the waste out of the tanks and run it through the Vit Plant which isn’t done yet. So years of work left at Hanford.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. Were you ever interested in the sort of politics of Hanford?</p>
<p>Jensen: Not too much. The politics were different. In the ‘80s, it was whether we should be making weapons-grade plutonium or not. Nowadays the politics is more like, which project do we rob from to give to somebody else? And political battles in Congress as to how much funding Hanford gets, and things like that. So I try and stay out of all of that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. So how about life outside of the work plant? Where were you living—still in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes, I’ve been living in Kennewick since I moved there as a kid in 1965.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Where in Kennewick?</p>
<p>Jensen: It’s over near Highway 395 as it kind of cuts through the middle of Kennewick.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How has life in the Tri-Cities changed in the time you’ve—</p>
<p>Jensen: The Tri-Cities is a lot bigger. It was pretty small when I first moved here. For several years, it was just slowly growing, and it’s been growing like crazy since. It’s like, they’re always building new schools, and there’s always housing developments under construction. There used to be a lot of orchards in Kennewick, all around. There’s hardly anything now, because they’ve all been cut down and there’s houses there now. Traffic’s a lot worse.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What do you do in your spare time? Any hobbies or--?</p>
<p>Jensen: I like photography, I like to take pictures with film, which is old-fashioned nowadays. And I like to develop the film myself. So far that’s all been black and white film; I haven’t tried developing color film yet. And I like to collect old film cameras that I can still find film for and use those. Up until recently, I was playing hockey—adult hockey, which I started when I was 49, started playing hockey. I’m 60 now, so I’ve been doing that for about 11 years. However, I had quit, hopefully only temporarily because I’ve got some medical issues. My doctor said no hockey until this is resolved. And then I hurt my knee the other day, so I don’t know. That might—even if the other one gets resolved, that might be the end of hockey. I like to go to Tri-City Americans hockey games during the season. I got to Tri-City Dust Devil games during the baseball season. Like to go to plays and movies. I decided this year I was going to audition for a play, see if I could get in. I did not make it, but I’m going to try again, coming up later. Probably this summer. So we’ll see. Never done that before, either. But it always sounded like fun.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Any sort of major events or incidents, whether at work or just sort of around the Tri-Cities that comes to mind that are sort of worth commemorating, or worth just sort of mentioning?</p>
<p>Jensen: Kind of the interesting thing—back in 1986, reactor was still operating, and do you remember Connie Chung, the news—she came to the Tri-Cities to do a show on Hanford. Everybody at work was wondering who she’s going to interview. And we’re thinking they’re going to interview, like company president, company vice president, or something. And I remember joking that she should interview a reactor operator like me. And everybody laughed. And about an hour later, the phone rang, and it was the producer wanting to talk to me, and they wanted to interview me that night. And I got permission from the company. Turned out, my dad, who, like I said, had worked at the Tank Farms—he had gone to a public hearing on what to do with tank wastes. The Connie Chung crew had gone to the same meeting, because they were getting background information. My dad spoke at the meeting, and they said, oh, we have to interview that guy. When they talked to him, he mentioned that his son worked as a reactor operator. Oh, god, that’d be great, interview them both. So that’s how I got called up. The company gave me permission, and they did it in my house. I told them, it was my son’s third birthday, and I said we’re going to have a birthday party, but you can do the interview after the birthday party. So they said okay. After I got home, my wife sent me out to buy ice cream, I think. And I’m coming back. When she came back, she was all excited. Connie Chung called personally and asked if they could film the birthday party. So they filmed my son’s third birthday party, and then they interviewed my dad and I in my living room, and then—I don’t know, two, three hours of interview stuff, and they boil it all down to about five minutes. But that’s the way that goes. So that was kind of exciting. I was a minor celebrity for a while.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Any other stories leap to mind?</p>
<p>Jensen: We had some interesting scrams in the control room. I talked about the two turbine trip ones that were very interesting. The first one, like I said, I had to pull control rods rapidly to compensate for the xenon building up faster than it’s being burned out. I got that all settled out, and the power level wasn’t dropping, and I had forgotten that--when the main steam header pressure goes up, the power level goes down—well, eventually, they’re going to control the main steam header, and it’s going to go back where it’s supposed to be. And the power all of the sudden starts shooting up. So now I’m shoving control rods in like crazy to keep the power level from going up too fast, because we could scram on a high rate of rise. So I got that all settled out. The second time it happened—since I was the most experienced person on the plant on this upset, I got it settled out from the xenon, and I just got my ear open over here, and as soon as I hear somebody say, main steam header pressure’s coming down, I look over and the power level starts to go up, and I tap some rods in, and it was just like routine. Nothing to it. But another time, we had another accident—well, accident’s probably not the right word. We had another upset. We had a new control system—computerized system for controlling valve positioning. The old system we had was very ancient. It was obsolete when they put it in at the reactor, but they got a good price on it, so that’s why they did that. So we had this new computerized system, and there were two cards in the computer that controlled the valve positioning. The primary card, and a backup card. If the primary card failed, you would transfer to the backup card, and it was supposedly a bump-less transfer. The system wouldn’t even know. The primary card had failed, and so it transferred to the backup card, and everything went perfect. Well, the instrument technicians took the primary card out to repair it, and they came to put it back in. Now, this card controlled the steam valves going over to WPPSS. I was on the console controlling all of that, and I remember, jokingly, I said to the guy—the instrument tech and the engineer, when they came in, they were going to go to the rom below the control room where all of that stuff was. They were going to replace it, and I said, you aren’t going to scram us, are you? And the engineer said, trust me. And they went down—and I was just joking, because I figured, no big deal—and they went down and they put the primary card in and they told it to take over. It took over and sent its signal to the valves, but the secondary card did not relinquish control. So all of the steam valves opened up twice as far as they were supposed to. So our steam pressure goes down, and when that goes down, the reactor power goes up. And the primary coolant pressure also goes down, because you’re boiling water really well in the secondary system, that cools the water really well in the primary system, and cold water contracts. So that pressure goes down, and if the pressure goes down to far, the reactor scrams. So I’m fighting like mad with—somebody else came over to help me—to keep from scramming on low pressure. Other people are working over here, trying to keep from scramming on something over here. And other people over here, and the guy on the nuclear console is trying to keep the power level from going up too fast. We’re running around—it was very exciting. Seemed like it took hours. Probably just took a few minutes. We got it all stabilized out, and I’m looking at the primary loop pressure, and it’s kind of fluctuating and bouncing. And right when it’s going—trying to think if it was going up or down. See, if we cool—it had to have been going up. The secondary card cut out, all the valves slammed shut, and we had the exact opposite thing happen. Now, the primary loop gets hot, everything expands, and we scrammed on high pressure. And then about five minutes later, the instrument tech and the engineer come upstairs. They could tell something bad was happening, and they just looked like—it wasn’t their fault, but—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When it actually does scram, is it actually just rods, or—I’ve heard some designs where there’s actually just balls that are—</p>
<p>Jensen: Okay. The main system was control rods. And you were going like this, like dropping down from the top. The old reactors had safety rods that dropped in from the top. N Reactor’s rods all came from both sides, and they overlapped. All the rods would slam in with hydraulic pressure. We had some hydraulic pumps that would turn on and pump very high pressure hydraulic fluid into the system, and the rods would shoot in. It would take about a second-and-a-half to go in. And you’d get all these enunciators in the control room, and if you were—mmm, it’s pretty boring here at two in the morning, and then all of the sudden the reactor scrams, you were wide awake. Got adrenaline pumping through and then you’ve got all these things you have to do to make sure everything works correctly on a scram, because it causes all kinds of things. The balls were the backup to the control rods. They had to be 75% in in one-and-a-half seconds. If they went in too slow, there was a problem. If they went in too fast, there was a problem, just because they could be damaged. But if they went in too slow, that’s what the ball system was for. There were hoppers on top of the reactor—I think there were a hundred-and-some reactors. And they were full of boron carbide balls. Boron absorbs neutrons. That’s what’s in the control rods to absorb neutrons. If you had one slow rod, it’s no big deal. If you had two slow rods in one column, you would drop balls on both sides of that rod column. If you had three slow rods anywhere in the reactor, you would drop balls on both sides of each of those three rod columns. Then there was also a thing where you could have a complete ball drop—drop all of the balls. If the reactor power level did not decay below five megawatts in three minutes, I think it was, then you would have a complete ball drop. That happened twice. Once, for real, because we had a scram and the rods didn’t go in at all—this is before I started working there. So there’s a scram trip, the rods did not go in, the balls dropped. And the other one was we were starting the reactor up—getting ready to start the reactor up and going through all of these checks on various instrumentation. The instrumentation that would monitor if the reactor power was below five megawatts in three minutes, they were doing the work on that, and they had a procedure that they would run. There were three channels and they would run it on each channel. That included having a switch to put in a couple of different calibrate positions. Basically, it put a false signal into the system so you could see if it’s responding correctly. So an operator and an instrument tech were doing that. They did channel one and it didn’t look right when they put it in the calibrate position. So they went on to channel two to see if it would do the same thing, and they did that. Well, they put two trips into the system. The reactor—what we called the safety circuit—was not made up, and so the system started timing for five minutes. These two instruments said the power level was greater than five megawatts with the safety circuit broken. When the give minutes went up, all the balls dropped. It was kind of innocuous. There was an enunciator that said, any ball hopper open. So the enunciator goes off, and the operator looks up at that. Any ball hopper open. And then he realized what happened. He told the control room supervisor, and the control room supervisor told me that. He says, I looked up at it. And I looked down. And I looked up again to make sure it was actually on. And then he said a few bad words and then he went and told the shift manager that we had dropped all of the balls.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I heard on the old reactor designs, that had to be actually sort of vacuumed out.</p>
<p>Jensen: Yes. They used vacuum—they were steel balls, too. And they used vacuums to suck them up. At N Reactor, we had a valve at the bottom of the channel that you would open up, and the balls would drain into a hoist, and then you would lift them all the way up to the top, and put them in a hopper at the top—a big hopper—and then you would load the individual hoppers. That was a horrible, horrible job, being up there loading those hoppers. It was always hot, you had to wear plastic raingear and an assault mask, which—rubber hugging your face, and it’s hard, physical labor, and wearing the raingear and it’s already 100 degrees up there anyway. It was just miserable work. So nobody liked to do that. When we had that big ball drop, my job was to go down underneath the reactor. You could open up those drain valves remotely. So we had Bill here who smoked a lot and was not allowed to wear respirators, he was operating the control panel. But a lot of times, the valves wouldn’t work remotely. So, me, wearing all of this fresh air stuff, would stand by, but would say, 43 didn’t work. So I would have to go back there, trailing this hose with my fresh air, and go back to 43, and open it manually. It was extremely hot, radioactively, down there. I picked up my entire one week’s worth of radiation. We were allowed 300 millirem of radiation, either in a single exposure or in a seven-day period, and I picked up that entire 300 in less than an hour, going back and forth. And most of the time, I was just standing there, waiting. And I’d go back in there, and I’d pick up quite a bit, and I’d open up a valve and come back, and then I was done and left. Couldn’t work in a radiation zone for seven days after that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How often did you have the radiation testing? Or was it the hand-and-foot test—</p>
<p>Jensen: Oh, any time we came out of a contaminated zone, contaminated area, when we were wearing those SWPs, you have to undress in a proper sequence. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this. We had step-off pads. A red pad and a green pad. And when you get to the red pad, before you get to that, you have to remove all of your outer clothing before you step on the red pad. And then when you get to the green pad, you have to remove all of your SWP clothing before you step on the green pads. So you end up coming out there—well, in the old days when there were very few women working in the Area, you’d be coming out in your underwear. Later on they made us wear a t-shirt and shorts. But I kind of lost track of what we were saying there. Oh, the hand-and-foot counters. And then when you came out, we would step into a hand-and-foot counter or a whole-body portal monitor that would monitor our sides and front and back, to make sure we weren’t contaminated. Then usually we would also be surveyed by a health physics technician who’s got a Geiger counter, and he just slowly goes over, checks your hands, checks the bottom of your shoes, makes sure you’re not—don’t have any skin or clothing contamination. If you do, then you’ve got to get decontaminated. And that happens once in a while.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was that ever a concern of yours?</p>
<p>Jensen: No. I did get a few skin contaminations. I had to hold over once. I got some primary coolant water in my hair, and there was a lot of radon in the water. Radon is electrostatically attracted to polyester and hair. So it latches on, and it’s hard to get off. I just had to wait until it decayed off. After about--</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you shave?</p>
<p>Jensen: No, no. I washed my hair several times, and then they just said—come back every hour and we’ll check, and after about three hours they let me go home. Usually, skin contaminations wash off pretty easy. If it’s your clothing, you have to wash the clothing. You don’t get to take that home until it’s passed as clean. Sometimes, rarely, stuff would have to get thrown away. But I never had any serious contamination issues. If you’re careful, if you dress correctly, and then when you come out, you undress correctly, then it’s very rare to be contaminated.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Any other sort of stories leap to mind from your--?</p>
<p>Jensen: There’s a few things that happened before I was there that were interesting. I don’t know. We had an accident. It was about three—and this one is an accident—it was about three years before I started work. They flushed a tube of hot, radioactive fuel onto the charge elevator, which is not where it’s supposed to go. It’s supposed to go out the back, and fall into the discharge shoots and then go into the basin. There were workers on the elevator when it happened. They got very high radiation exposures. Fortunately, not high enough to kill anybody. But that was just lucky, I think. So, I don’t know. That was the most serious thing I know that happened there. We did have one—before I was certified, we had one really bad accident where we lost all the instrument air to the plant. Almost every valve functions with air—they’re air-operated: air to open, air to close. A lot of pumps are—the pump speeds are maintained by air pressure, things like that. So we had a scram, and it was a very abnormal scram. But we survived it.</p>
<p>[VIDEO CUTS]</p>
<p>Camera man: Okay, hold it out so we see.</p>
<p>Jensen: --piece of fuel out of the reactor, and they pushed all the hot, irradiated fuel out, but we’d done a normal refueling after that shutdown. And, well, now, we’ve got to—we pushed out all the hot fuel, and now we’re going to push out all the un-irradiated fuel and keep it, just in case we start up again. I happened to be walking by when they got the last one out, and they were taking a picture and they said, get over here!</p>
<p>Camera man: Oh, so where are you? Are you down in front there?</p>
<p>Jensen: I am right there.</p>
<p>Camera man: Yep, that’s right.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You’ve got the [INAUDIBLE] gear guy in back.</p>
<p>Jensen: So these guys are all dressed up in the gear and they’ve got the fuel with them. I think they’ve got the fuel with them in there. There’s another picture that I don’t have that actually shows them holding the last piece. [VIDEO CUTS] There were two certified operators when I was hired on. I think there had been some more who had left. There was another lady who was in the certification program and then she certified shortly after that. In my class, there was one woman and she did not go all the way through, and then in the class after, there was at least one woman in there. So we had a handful of women certified operators. The very first one hired, I’m pretty sure that would have been Martha Coop. I’m wondering who the guy you talked to was who hired her. Because I’m sure I would know him. I just can’t think of who that might have been. The other one was Leslie Jensen, no relation to me, and I think she was the one who babysat me when I was probably a kindergartener or a first grader. She was one of my mom’s students.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right. Anything else I should be asking here, any other memories that are worth preserving?</p>
<p>Jensen: I’ll probably think things when I get home.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Jensen: But right now I think I’m—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great. All right, well that’s been great. Thank you so much for being here.</p>
<p>Jensen: You’re welcome.</p>
<p><br /><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/vzYLT2Ds3-Q">View interview on Youtube.</a></p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:16:35
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
N Reactor
200 Area
Tank Farms
WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems)
UNC (United Nuclear Corporations)
Rockwell
PUREX
PNNL (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
K East Reactor
K West Reactor
K East/West Basins
100-K
PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant)
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1961-
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Mark Jensen
Description
An account of the resource
Mark Jensen moved to Richland, Washington in 1961 as a child and grew up in Kennewick, Washington. Mark began working on the Hanford Site in 1981.
An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
03-25-2016
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Nuclear reactors
Nuclear reactor accidents
Chernobyl Nuclear Accident, Chornobylʹ, Ukraine, 1986
Nuclear energy
Nuclear power plants
Nuclear fuel rods
Relation
A related resource
<a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/26">Mark Jensen, Oral History Metadata</a>
2-East Area
200 Area
200 East
200 East Area
Battelle
Department of Energy
Energy Northwest
Hanford
K Basin
K West Reactor
K-Basin
K-West Reactor
Kennewick
Manhattan Project
N Reactor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
PUREX
School
Sun
Tank Farm
Tank Farms
United Nuclear Corporation
VIT Plant
War
Washington Public Power Supply System
Westinghouse
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b6e2050edfa97bbc612db21101040b22
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc9d1a57f8d88a0e009add28a9e2ba8f1.mp4
3286c8becf054ce14ec7b2b3b78954f5
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Douglas O’Reagan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Maureen Hamilton
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Douglas O’Reagan: My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an interview with Maureen Hamilton on January 20<sup>th</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ms. Hamilton about her experiences working on the Hanford site and her experiences in this community. Thanks for being here.</p>
<p>Maureen Hamilton: You’re welcome.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: If we could start, maybe—it’d be great if you could just tell us a bit about your birthplace, where you grew up, just a little bit of biography before you got to Hanford, if you would.</p>
<p>Hamilton: Sure. I was raised on a farm in south central Illinois, not too far from St. Louis. So I was a farm girl. I went to college at Monmouth College in northern Illinois, which is where I got my chemistry degree—I got a bachelor’s degree there. I worked briefly for Dow Chemical in Michigan, and then I was working at the University of Missouri in their agricultural chemistry lab while my husband was in graduate school. So there I was doing analysis of various environmental and animal products, looking for heavy metal contamination. Then we were in Germany for a couple of years while my husband was in service, and we ended up out here starting in 1972, where we both worked onsite.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sorry to interrupt. Okay, so you came directly from Germany to here?</p>
<p>Hamilton: No, there were a few months finding the job, once we got back. Well, at the time there weren’t a lot of chemist jobs around, I don’t think. So my husband sent out applications to several hundred companies, and Hanford was one of the places that responded. I think possibly because he was a special weapons technician in the Army, they knew—and his master’s degree dealt with some radioactive materials, so that may have been part of why he was hired here.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Were you familiar at all with the community before you moved here?</p>
<p>Hamilton: No. No, it was something totally—totally foreign to us, but interesting.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Do you remember your first impressions?</p>
<p>Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Well, coming out of Idaho and the green into the barrenness of eastern Washington was a bit of a shock, yes. Because I hadn’t seen it, he didn’t really see that much of it when he came for the interview. But we very quickly learned to love the place. I wouldn’t live any place else right now.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was the area like in the ‘70s?</p>
<p>Hamilton: It was still a small farming community, pretty much. There was obviously—Hanford was the main employer, as far as Richland and much of the Tri-Cities was concerned.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Where did you live?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, for a couple—we had an apartment off of Van Giesen for a short period of time. Then we moved into a condo apartment out on the Meadow Springs golf course. Then in ’75 we built our own house on Peachtree Lane in Orchard Hills.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you were working on the site, you were industrial hygiene chemist, is that right?</p>
<p>Hamilton: That was my position, yes.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Would you explain exactly what that is? What’s involved in that?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Sure. The employer initially was the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which was the medical contractor onsite. In addition to providing the doctors and nurses, they had the industrial hygiene for the whole site. Industrial hygiene is monitoring of worker health and checking the workplace to make sure that it is safe, that people aren’t being overexposed to things. We had a chemistry lab, and that’s where I was involved. So we would analyze air samples that were collected onsite for things like asbestos or lead or heavy metals or whatever types of materials—non-radioactive. The lab was located here in town at 805 Goethals, so we weren’t onsite. We also did drinking water analysis onsite, and we were doing a little bit of hazardous waste characterization.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So what would a typical working day look like?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Oh, it varied, depending on what was going on. Initially, when I started, we were pretty much—I mean, the industrial hygienists were the people who went out in the field and collected the samples and evaluated the data. The lab—we were very small—I started actually as a technician for a year before I actually became the chemist. We had one chemist, one technician. And then we eventually grew to have a total staff in the lab department of about 20. We would run gas chromatographs, atomic absorption, different types of equipment, analyzing those air and water samples that were being brought into the laboratory. I also eventually—well, initially at least—was functioning as partly a quality person as well. In 1974, the lab became one of the first in the country to be accredited by the American Industrial Hygiene Association. So, while I wasn’t listed as the technical manager or the director at that point, I was kind of the technical expertise for that portion of the company. Eventually, expanded that I did manage the lab component as well as function as their QA coordinator.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is that similar to the work you were doing before you came here?</p>
<p>Hamilton: No, my experience before was strictly laboratory. Had no management responsibilities. And while I was using spectroscopy equipment at the University of Missouri, it was more on things like goose livers and grain and things like that. It had nothing, really, to do with human health.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. So you said you went out to collect samples at some point, especially in the early career?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Just for a few months, I actually—Hanford had some offsite monitoring systems across the river for nitrogen oxides and I think sulfur oxides. It was things that would have come out of the production facilities. It wasn’t radioactive, again, it was chemicals. So once a week, we’d drive out there and change—they were liquid impinger type samples. So we’d change them out and bring them back and analyze them.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I’ve read some accounts of local farmers who grew up remembering people coming from Hanford—scientists, to come gather samples from their farm to test for various things. Is that the type of--?</p>
<p>Hamilton: That might have been part of it, because at least one of them, I know, was set up near a barn on the top of the bluffs there, across the river. We weren’t doing any—there were a lot of other people doing radiological monitoring, that was nothing to do with what we were doing. But it’s possible that some of the people where the sites were located would remember. Because they were on private property.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you ever find any safety hazards?</p>
<p>Hamilton: None of what we were—no, we never found anything that was exceeding any kind of limits in those.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Could you describe the ways in which the security or secrecy of the Area impacted your work?</p>
<p>Hamilton: I mean, since I wasn’t doing radiological, it wasn’t as much so as like what my husband was doing. But if we wanted to give a paper or anything at a technical conference, it had to go through DoE for approval for release. So we worked with very little classified material where I was.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Can you tell us about what your husband did?</p>
<p>Hamilton: He worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, PFP. He was a non-destructive assay chemist, where he was monitoring the plutonium that was being either produced or stored there at PFP.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: That was—did his role change over the course of time he was working there?</p>
<p>Hamilton: He had a few months, initially, where they rotated him through different sites to pick a spot where they wanted to end up. But, no, he spent most of his career there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Let’s see. So the first few decades you lived here were during the Cold War. Did you feel that impacted your time here, or was that just something in the background?</p>
<p>Hamilton: I was not nearly as aware of it as some people seem to have been. No, that just really didn’t—was some place off, had nothing to do, really. I didn’t feel like we were in danger because we were close to Hanford or anything like that, no.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Do you have any impression of whether the community around you also felt that way? Do you know if there were—I don’t know quite what I’m asking here. Was there more of an impression of that, or did people just sort of go about their lives?</p>
<p>Hamilton: I think people here were just used to Hanford as a secret place. You don’t talk about what you’re doing out there, that’s just the way it is. We did our thing and didn’t worry about the rest of the world much.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Tying back into—tell us a little bit about life in the ‘70s here. Do you feel—I don’t know—the social scene or the feel, the life in the area has changed much over the ‘70s to ‘80s to ‘90s?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Yeah, I would say that’s for sure. For instance, when we built our house out there in what’s now called South Richland, which is across the river, near<a>[EM1]</a> Meadow Springs—the road from there to Columbia Center was still gravel. Gage didn’t exist as a paved road. We were like the second house in the subdivision where we were built. It was mostly still orchards around us, so it was a lot more rural there. There was probably one, maybe, movie theater, the Uptown. And I guess Columbia Center maybe always had one. But there’s a lot more for people to do now, and there’s certainly way more people to do it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it you liked about living here?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, being a country girl from the start, I guess we liked the feel of a small, close-knit community. The job was good. It was very comfortable living. We had good friends. So it was pleasant. We didn’t have a lot of traffic to deal with.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What sort of things would you do in your spare time, or with the friends in the area?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Oh, one of the things that became a big interest for us was the growing wine industry. We came just about the time it was getting started, and we stumbled into making friends with the Rauners at Yakima River shortly after we got here. So we got to actually help them at times with crushing things, to get to know all about the wine-making process. And we quickly joined the Tri-Cities Enological Society, it was called then. Now it’s just the Wine Society. So we were very much involved with that. We also enjoyed the variety of types of scenery here. Whether you wanted to do something, you were close to the mountains, you were close to the ocean, you had this nice dry, arid climate here, where you could go hiking or do things. So it was an easy, comfortable place to be. Have lots of things—options to do.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You ever get to use your chemistry knowledge in the wine--?</p>
<p>Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Learned enough about the wine making process to know I didn’t want to do it. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You’re—since 1999—a consultant, a public safety consultant. Is that right?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Yeah. When I retired from Hanford, officially, then, basically, I continued for five years going back, doing the same thing for them onsite that I had done as an employee on a part-time basis. But it was in ’95 that I started doing these laboratory assessments for the American Industrial Hygiene Association, which is one of the organizations that had accredited our lab here. So I still do that through—this year’s probably about the last year I’ll do that, but I’ve been doing that for 20 years.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What’s involved in that?</p>
<p>Hamilton: It’s going to these various lab sites and making sure that they have all the documentation, the properly trained people, that they’re following the procedures and doing it in accordance with the now international quality requirement.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So you’ve been involved in some of the historical organizations around here. When did you first start getting involved in those?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Pretty much after I retired from Hanford. I knew I wanted to do something locally, too. And I had visited the CREHST Museum from way back when it was still in the Federal Building. So that was the first thing I did. I started out reviewing some of their oral histories and then gradually, as I had more time during the day, I would serve as kind of a fill-in docent for them, and did various projects for them. Then when they were transitioned out and replaced by the REACH, I moved over there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What is it about that work that you find rewarding? What is it that draws you to work with them?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, I think it’s extremely important to maintain the history of what was going on here at Hanford. This is certainly a unique and important part of our country’s history. I’m very pleased that the National Park has been designated. That will be an important part of preserving all of this. I like—people need to know their history. So I think the Hanford history is—as well as the exotic geology we have here, the effect of the Ice Age floods and everything. This is unique area, both geologically, and historically, I think.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hm. I guess it’s more common today, but do you ever feel you are treated differently as a woman scientist over your career?</p>
<p>Hamilton: [LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, yes. I had to do a little fighting to get some equal pay when I first came out here. But it was easy enough to do. And in the field of industrial hygiene, women have been moving in quite a bit, actually, there. Probably almost equal number of women as men in this field now.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. Anything else about your time working on or around Hanford that leaps to mind that you’d like to talk about? Anything that was particularly unusual, or just sort of curious, or otherwise noteworthy?</p>
<p>Hamilton: No, I can’t really think of too much that at least I wouldn’t want to talk about. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in this area over the course of time you’ve been here?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, I feel it has been a very rewarding experience, a very good place to live. I think it’s environmentally very pleasant. The work at Hanford is certainly important. The fact that the first commercial scale nuclear reactor in the world was developed here. The speed at which things were done back then. The government regulation has become extremely burdensome since then and it’s much harder, but when Hanford was a production facility, it was something you felt like you were contributing to the society and to the world.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What haven’t I thought to ask, or should I be asking?</p>
<p>Hamilton: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Anything? Anything come to mind? I try to go for the open-ended questions.</p>
<p>Hamilton: Yeah. I think the culture at Hanford really changed when they shut down. And now that it’s just a cleanup site, the loyalty, the sense of responsibility to the site, I think, has gone away. There’s a lot more disputes, unhappy employees, some of which may or may not be based on fact. There’s just not the continuity there was when people could work there for 30 years and know that’s where they were going to be for their lifetime. There was a lot more dedication to it. You felt like you were accomplishing something.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Of course, the cleanup may be still going in 30 years!</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, I don’t—do not print this part—but as far as I’m concerned, it’ll never get done. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So were those documents you brought—</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, I brought some articles out of some of the Hanford newspapers and things. I didn’t know if you have access to some of those types—I assume you do. But I just thought I’d show you some of those, if you were interested.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, we’d love to go through them. Any of them in particular that would be worth talking about now?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, it’s mostly things like the history of what was happening there with the environmental health. You can take a look at—one of the things that I think was important when I was there yet, and the industrial hygiene function—the health and safety function was focused in one company, it was better controlled, there were records that were kept, and everybody knew where they were, and they were being maintained. The first thing they did was they took the hygienist away from—well, first they took the respirators away from HEHF. Then they took the hygienists, separated them, and moved them, spread them out all over the contractors onsite. Then they moved our industrial hygiene lab out with the environmental lab, and we became a very small thing, compared to a bigger thing. Now, if you go out—we repeatedly would do things that had already been done, because the contractors changed, they lost the records, they have no history. That just added to the jumble. I feel sorry for the workers who have to try and recreate their health histories. Because I don’t think the records since the early to mid ‘80s are anything like they used to be.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Do you feel safety was a priority on the Hanford site during your time there?</p>
<p>Hamilton: I think it was. They did what they could to the best of their ability with what they knew at the time. So I think it really was a very safe place to work. Yes, there are things that have happened. Yes, there were exposures. But then that was happening in any industry, no matter where you go. People learn because they see what’s happening. They don’t test animals on everything before they put it into practice. No, I think it was a very—you would hear of very few accidents, per se. There were asbestos exposures, there’s beryllium, there’s radiation, but it’s just part of industry. So I don’t think it was any different.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Anything else we should look through that you have?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, you can keep that. That’s my resume. I’d like that other—if you want a copy of that other, I can send it to you. This one had some information just about the industrial hygiene lab being recognized. I don’t know if you want any—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is that a picture of you?</p>
<p>Hamilton: That’s me, way back when these were—and these are all Hanford-taken pictures. So they’re ones you could get, but I could make copies of those for you, too, if you wanted them. These are just—there’s Dr. Meader, these are some of the people at HEHF. That’s about all that’s in there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great. Yeah, we have—we’re just setting up our scanning stations, so we might see if we could get copies of some of the pictures.</p>
<p>Hamilton: Okay. I know these I have on the computer. I can send you. There are three of these early ones of me in the lab. I could send you those.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, I know there have been a number of oral history interviews and interest in some of the women who were assigned to this, around the site, or to work on the site.</p>
<p>Hamilton: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So I think it’d be very interesting for that as well as the safety aspects are very interesting. And then also just everyone’s experiences in the area--</p>
<p>Hamilton: Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: --are worth knowing.</p>
<p>Hamilton: One of the unique things I got to do were I got to go on one of the first People to People occupational health trip to China back in the early ‘80s.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was that like?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Fascinating! [LAUGHTER] There were 23 of us, I think. We stayed in places like the Royal Palace in Beijing. We definitely had Chinese people who told us where we could and couldn’t go. [LAUGHTER] We were not allowed on the street by ourselves. When we were there with the group, people were just awed by us, because we looked so different. They were all still in their blue suits and not much else. One of our people had a Polaroid camera and having an instant picture was just amazing to them. We got to go to hospitals and factories and things that normal tourists wouldn’t see.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: That was all sponsored through Hanford, or part of your job?</p>
<p>Hamilton: No. HEHF paid my way, but I’m not sure—I mean, I belonged to the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the professional organization, and somehow, they put my name on a list, and HEHF said, yes, they’d pay for it. So I went. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: That’s very interesting.</p>
<p>Hamilton: Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you get to do other travel over the course of your time?</p>
<p>Hamilton: Well, I went to conferences and things, but nothing as exotic. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. I think that’s most of the sort of set questions that I had down, but anything else you think is worth the time to chat about?</p>
<p>Hamilton: I can’t think of too much else. I think you’ve got the overall picture. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right, well, thank you for speaking with us. It’s been very interesting.</p>
<p>Hamilton: Sure. Okay.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:27:17
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
317 kbps
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1972-today
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1972-2005
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Maureen Hamilton
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Maureen Hamilton conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
01-20-2016
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
Relation
A related resource
<a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/21">Maureen Hamilton Oral History Interview</a>
Cold War
drinking
Event
Hanford
Park
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
River
War
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbab9aaad909435686a751bcbe39d438b.JPG
66ab21e45337864e82e518e34179747c
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1397d9eb82d20248c32d7079d03d7288.mp4
f4cbd8641a1b1edcb6e4447010862c8d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Douglas O’Reagan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Maxwell Freshley
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?</p>
<p>Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11<sup>th</sup>, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?</p>
<p>Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?</p>
<p>Freshley: ’45?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I think so.</p>
<p>Freshley: That—oh, okay.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.</p>
<p>Freshley: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.</p>
<p>Freshley: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: But what is annealing?</p>
<p>Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon me?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?</p>
<p>Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?</p>
<p>Freshley: Overall?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?</p>
<p>Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.</p>
<p>Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!</p>
<p>Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?</p>
<p>Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?</p>
<p>Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: You don’t do that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.</p>
<p>Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great.</p>
<p>Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?</p>
<p>Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.</p>
<p>Freshley: No.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.</p>
Duration
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01:06:39
Bit Rate/Frequency
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317 kbps
Hanford Sites
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300 Area
324 Area
3706 Building
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-today
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1951-1993
Names Mentioned
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John Fox
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Max Freshley
Description
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An interview with Max Freshley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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02-10-2016
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
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The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
300 Area
324 Building
3706 Building
Battelle
Cold War
Engineering Test Reactor
General Electric
Hanford
Livermore
Los Alamo
Los Alamos
Mountain
Mountains
N Reactor
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
River
Savannah River
School
Street
Theater
War
Westinghouse
-
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8976c055d68251fc4d46ba983b6f47fb
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F89da53c58c34229c68c8890bd2ee16b8.mp4
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Oral History
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Interviewer
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O'Reagan, Douglas
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Freshley, Max
Location
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Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
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<p>Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?</p>
<p>Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11<sup>th</sup>, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?</p>
<p>Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?</p>
<p>Freshley: ’45?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I think so.</p>
<p>Freshley: That—oh, okay.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.</p>
<p>Freshley: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.</p>
<p>Freshley: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: But what is annealing?</p>
<p>Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon me?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?</p>
<p>Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?</p>
<p>Freshley: Overall?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?</p>
<p>Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.</p>
<p>Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!</p>
<p>Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?</p>
<p>Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?</p>
<p>Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: You don’t do that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.</p>
<p>Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great.</p>
<p>Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?</p>
<p>Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.</p>
<p>Freshley: No.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:06:12
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
248 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
3706 Building
234-5 Building
231-Z building
324 Building
N Reactor
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-2016
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1951-1993
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Fox, John
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Max Freshley
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Max Freshley conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford (Wash.)
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-1-11
231-Z building
234-5 building
300 Area
324 Building
3706 Building
Battelle
General Electric
Housing
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor (PRTR)
Richland (Wash.)
Secrecy
Westinghouse
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd3a31e8f531859f8cf4173f7e777e4cc.jpg
2a38262e6623571282c597a9daca931b
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7c6061bb308050f0219a8db9b6ffcf03.mp4
98f9b422199605caf34957b60917b70d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Bauman, Robert
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Petersen, Gary
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Northwest Public Television | Petersen_Gary</p>
<p>Gary Petersen: Sure. This is easy.</p>
<p>Robert Bauman: All right, let’s see.</p>
<p>Petersen: Hair's combed, eyebrows are trimmed.</p>
<p>Man One: Yeah, you sure do look pretty.</p>
<p>Petersen: Actually I'd rather watch her than—</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Petersen: Is that--</p>
<p>Bauman: Unfortunately, you're supposed to look at me, actually.</p>
<p>Petersen: Oh. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: Yeah, I’m sure. All right. Does that work there, on the mic?</p>
<p>Woman One: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Bauman: It’s okay?</p>
<p>Man Two: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay.</p>
<p>Man One: We can start whenever you’re ready.</p>
<p>Bauman: All right. All set to go?</p>
<p>Woman one: All set.</p>
<p>Bauman: Excellent. All right. Well, Gary, I think we're ready to go.</p>
<p>Petersen: Fire away.</p>
<p>Bauman: All right. Well, let's start first by having you say your name and then spell it.</p>
<p>Petersen: Okay. It's Gary Peterson G-A-R-Y P-E-T-E-R-S-E-N. That's important, the E.</p>
<p>Bauman: Yes. You're right. My name's Robert Bauman and today's date is June 5<sup>th</sup> of 2014. And we are conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So, Gary, let's start with the beginning of your time here. Can you tell us about when you came to Hanford and Tri-Cities, what brought you here?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, that's a good question. [LAUGHTER] Okay. Actually, I came first in 1960, January, 1960, with the Nike Ajax Missile site at the top of Rattlesnake Mountain. And I was temporarily assigned up there--well I was assigned up there, but three times a day we'd get on the back of a two and a half ton truck and go down to the mess hall down below. And I knew I was going to die, so I asked be transferred to any place and I got sent to Korea. I said never come back to the Tri-Cities, but as you can see, I did. The second time, though, is probably the one you're after. I decided after the military that I needed to get an education, so I went to Washington State University and got a Communications degree with a minor in Electrical Engineering. I had a job with Ford Motor Company all lined up, but I wasn't too enthused about going to Detroit. That was January of 1965. And so my college professor, Chuck Cole said, gee, there's a new company opening up in Tri-Cities. Why don't you stop by? So I stopped by on a Friday, went to work on Monday with Battelle, which became Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So there's how I got here.</p>
<p>Bauman: So, that first time, in 1960, why did you want to transfer? Was it the ride down the mountain?</p>
<p>Petersen: Three times a day with an 18-year-old driving, and you drop 2,000 feet, and at the bottom there's a 90 degree corner, 16 degree grade, and it was January. I knew that one of these was going to go off the road. So I said I've got to get out of here. So I put in request for transfer, and I transferred. Just like that. To Korea.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. During the first time here in 1960, did you spend any time in town?</p>
<p>Petersen: We did, much different than--actually most of the servicemen, and there were quite a few of us at the four batteries, would go to--there was a bowling alley and a dance hall over in Kennewick, just off of Clearwater that was surrounded by fruit trees. Now all of that's gone and it's all businesses and so on. Clearwater's full, but at that time, it was all orchards. It was pretty nice.</p>
<p>Bauman: What were your impressions of the place, other than not liking that ride down the mountain?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, you have to remember it was about like probably what the first military people saw when they came by here in December, January of 1943. I mean it was cold, it was brown. No trees. It was a barren place, even in 1959. So I can imagine what Colonel Mathias thought when first flew over this place. From the top of Rattlesnake, as you can imagine, you saw the entire Hanford site, so it was pretty barren and bleak.</p>
<p>Bauman: Going back a little farther, where had you lived before this? Where did you grow up?</p>
<p>Petersen: I graduated from Womack High School, which is up the Okanagan. I lived on an apple orchard. Again I was used to being around trees, and you come to the desert--I can imagine, any time between 1943 and 1959, ‘60, ‘61, ‘62, this was a pretty barren place.</p>
<p>Bauman: And so in 1965, you took the job up at Battelle.</p>
<p>Petersen: Yep.</p>
<p>Bauman: What was the job?</p>
<p>Petersen: The job to start with was a communications person. I became the manager of the news of service. The advantage I had was I got everywhere on the Hanford site, except the tank farms. I've stayed away from the tank farms successfully for a lot of years. But I spent a lot of time out on the hundred F reactor, which was the biology and aquatic biology site at the time. I got all over the site, including back up to the top of Rattlesnake Mountain a couple of times. So it was really pretty nice.</p>
<p>Bauman: When you came back then, in '65, where did you live?</p>
<p>Petersen: Lived originally in what were called the stilt apartments. They're on Jadwin. They've been fixed up since, so you would never know that they were stilt. Stilt, meaning that they actually had posts that held up the second floor. The posts were the garage for the people who lived there. But they're not far from the Chevron station, kind of in North Richland. Lived there for quite a while. And then the last of the homes that were built prior to 1958 went for sale. Those were called the Richland Village Homes. And there were two-bedroom and three-bedroom, either one-car garage attached or unattached. And they went up for sale for—I bought one—three-bedroom with a single car garage attached—for $6,200. Pretty good buy at the time, and I ended up paying less than I was for rent in the stilt apartments. I thought was pretty good deal.</p>
<p>Bauman: What was the community of Richland like at the time in the mid-1960s?</p>
<p>Petersen: The community was still just finding its way out of what I call the federal government ownership. In 1958, the city became an incorporated city again. And it was 1958 that the federal government to city back over to itself. And so between '58 and '65, it was a city that was still trying to find its way as a city, other than as a federal funded city. It was unique in that aspect. Battelle was well the first companies, too, to come in here—although it had a government contract, it was one of the few to come in here and be from the outside. Man, up until that point it was DuPont and then General Electric and then in 1965 is when the AEC decided to diversify the Hanford contract. They split it up into eight pieces, and so Battelle was one of those pieces. The others were HEHF and the operations and so on. There's been 35 contractors in here since 1965, and Battelle was one of the early ones.</p>
<p>Bauman: Now, before your first arrival here in the 1960, the Ajax site, were you familiar with Hanford? Did you know what sort of work that was going on in Hanford?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, I did only because I spent some time up at Fairchild Air Force Base. They also had a Nike Ajax missile site. They were trying to transfer some people from Fairchild to Hanford. And so I learned a little bit about what Hanford was. The nice thing at the time is everybody--all the military guys said, oh, you're going to love the Tri-Cities because it's way warmer than Spokane. So I thought, sure, and then you come down in January and it was cold, at the top Rattlesnake you get winds up to a hundred miles an hour. It was not one of your pleasure spots at the time, but the view was great. View was great.</p>
<p>Bauman: So, you knew something about Hanford at that point.</p>
<p>Petersen: Knew that it was a military installation, federal installation. Knew that they made the material for the atomic bomb. Knew that there was a reason for the Nike Ajax missile site to be there, to protect the site. So, yes, that much we were pretty clear on, and the military took their job very seriously. There was a no fly zone over Hanford. No commercial flights, no flights of any kind other than military itself. It was pretty well protected. And on top of Rattlesnake, I might just add, that was the radar installation. It was at the highest point, so the radar reached a long way. You could see planes coming well, well in advance of them ever getting through to Hanford. What was interesting is sometimes we would notify Fairchild or McChord, and you'd actually have fighter jets intercept planes that wouldn't veer off. That was a unique feature of what you did on top of the mountain. The other sites, they had radar installations, but that one was pretty unique. That was pretty good.</p>
<p>Bauman: Yeah. So in 1965 when you came and were working in communications, what sort of responsibilities did you have there?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, one of the assignments that was unique was to take tours to indoctrinate all new staff members, and that was for everywhere on the site. Over the years, I've taken literally thousands of people on tours over the site. At the time, it didn't seem like it was that great of a job to be able to take people around the site, explain what the reactors were, what the 100 Area, 200 Area, 300 Area, those kind of things. But as it turned out, the longer I did it the more I realized that the work that was going on here was critical. The Cold War, was still fairly active, so it became important to me to make sure that people understood what kinds of things went on here. It wasn't until later that I became interested in what happened pre-1943. As you keep tromping across the land, you start saying, oh, there were other things here too. But it was pretty good.</p>
<p>Bauman: Those site tours for new employees, were they able to go pretty much everywhere on site?</p>
<p>Petersen: We could go everywhere except into the area that had the plutonium, which is now known as the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Where there was restricted classified, the real concern was both tritium and plutonium. You couldn’t say the word tritium back in those days. You could plutonium, because they knew it was the material for the plutonium bomb, Fat Man, came from here. But tritium was something nobody talked about. And so those areas were restricted and that was mostly in the tank farm area. That was were chemical separations took place, so we stay away from those. It was okay by me.</p>
<p>Bauman: Well, that does raise—obviously, security, safety were very important at Hanford. In what ways did security at Hanford impact your job? That's obviously one way. There's certain areas you couldn't go, right?</p>
<p>Petersen: There were replaces you couldn't go. The badges--all of the badges at that time were designated to which areas you could or couldn't go. It was readily identifiable on your badge whether you were allowed into say, the 300 Area or the 100 Areas with reactors, or the 200 Area. And within them there were other exclusion zones, too. There were restrictions placed in each of those locations. Typically somebody that worked in 100 Area wouldn't ever be allowed into the 300 Area, or into the 200 Areas. The reactor areas were the 100 Area, the 300 Area was the research area, and the 200 Area was chemical separation. They were pretty segregated as to where you could go.</p>
<p>Bauman: In communications you mentioned that you couldn't say the word tritium. Were there other things you couldn't talk about or write about?</p>
<p>Petersen: You couldn't talk about quantities. As a matter of fact, there was a real restriction early on. One of the things that I found in the process of working in communication, there were nine production reactors around the Columbia River on the horn. In the summertime in particular there were periods where all nine reactors would be working. Sounds unique when you think about it today, but in the summertime June, July, August they actually measured the temperature of the Columbia River before the first reactor and after the last reactor. As I recall, if the Columbia River temperature was raised by close to ten degrees, then they would have to start shutting down the reactors, because the flow back into the Columbia River was that warm coming from reactor. In order to protect the fish and things in the river, then they really monitored the river very carefully. The reason I point that out is you also never talked about how much water went through those reactors because there was a fear that the Soviet Union could figure out the quantities of production simply by measuring the amount of water that went through those reactors, or the temperature increase from one point to another. It sounds odd today, but that was one of the strictures of what you could and couldn't talk about. It was a pretty quick--they were very careful about quantities.</p>
<p>Bauman: And I assume that you had to, when you were hired, had to go through security clearance process--?</p>
<p>Petersen: Q clearances were standard. There was one level above that that was called CRYPTO for a while. I don't know what happened on those, but that was for individuals who got around most of the site. They were a unique feature at that time.</p>
<p>Bauman: Where was your office located? Where did you work out of?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well my office moved all over. Originally it was in the old army headquarters—and this is in 1965. Battelle, when they first came in here, moved into a building that was called 3201. Later they changed it to the old office building—OSB was what it was called, old office building. But that was before the Battelle buildings were built, which became known as the Sand Castle. We lived and worked from January of 1965 until probably the spring of '66 before we moved into the new Battelle-owned buildings, the Sand Castle, which are on Battelle Boulevard now. And then later I moved out into the 300 area. I was in and out of 100F area. Those kind of places. So, yeah. How we doing?</p>
<p>Bauman: You knew the site well.</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, except for the 200 Area. That was a real restricted area, and maintained that for quite a number of years.</p>
<p>Bauman: You talked about giving tours to new employees, sort of the indoctrination to the site. How about for dignitaries, government officials, did you do that? How about the general public?</p>
<p>Petersen: The general public rarely, if never, I don't think we ever did that, but government official Catherine May was the first congresswoman I took through. She was a congresswoman from 8th District. I took Senator Magnuson through. Later Tom Foley, so quite a number of those over the years. In later years we started getting some foreign visitors, as well. But early years congressional officers, congressional staff, the governor. Dan—Governor—the name just few out of my head. The governor of the State of Washington, Dan--?</p>
<p>Bauman: Evans.</p>
<p>Petersen: Evans. Thank you. He later became also a senator from the state. He was a first governor that I helped escort across the site. Most of those, it was unique to be able to take visitors like that around the area.</p>
<p>Bauman: Do any of those tours especially stand out? Were any officials particularly interested or excited about it? Are there any sort of strange stories from that?</p>
<p>Petersen: [LAUGHTER] Well, Senator Magnuson was a unique individual. He actually came out quite a number of times. And one of those times we were in the 300 Area, and I was working at the time for Westinghouse, Westinghouse Hanford Company. He came out to actually, quote, break the ground on FFTF. We were in a building at the time, a four story office building in the 300 Area, and I'll never forget, I was assigned to make sure he got up to the podium. His vehicle came in front the building, and then drove around to the back of the building, so I ran back and met Magnuson back there. I'd known him before. Frankly, honestly, he was drunk as a skunk. I didn't think he was going to be able to make it. He says, just get me to the podium and I'll be fine. I didn't think it was possible. But he got up, he gave an excellent speech. A little wobbly, but I don't think most people knew that he had been drinking. This was 4:00 in the afternoon or so, and then he left. I might point out, it was about a year later, 1971, that President Nixon came out. There was quite a scramble, because at that time there were no buildings for Westinghouse. Westinghouse was kind of spread all over, so when the advance team for Nixon came out, they decided that the proper place would be the Battelle buildings. This sounds odd, but there was a real infighting between, at that time, Atomic Energy Commission, Westinghouse Hanford Company, and Battelle over what signs would be displayed where. Because Westinghouse was interested in making sure—this was for FFTF, and that was a Westinghouse project. On the front of the podium, of course, was the President's seal. He spoke out in front of the buildings, but behind that—or around that, Westinghouse came in the night before and put up Westinghouse circle W signs around the site. Just an example of my boss at the time, who was one of the vice presidents, said I don't care how you do it, but I want to sign that says Battelle that they can't take down and will be located visibly for all the cameras. So we stole a door off of one of the rooms in the Battelle building. I don't know if you've been the buildings or not, but they're very tall doors. They're nine-foot-tall doors. So we actually, that night, took one of the doors off, put Battelle on it, and put it up on the front of the building up high so it was right behind the podium. Westinghouse--we had to do that after midnight. That door actually was at the entrance to Battelle for—I don’t know—the next 20 years. They finally took it down not long ago. But that was relative to President Nixon showing up. That was pretty good.</p>
<p>Bauman: Stealing and moving doors.</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, everybody wanted their name and with the President of the United States, and so that's what we did.</p>
<p>Bauman: Did you get the chance to meet him when he came?</p>
<p>Petersen: I did. One of the things I still—my family still values—is Pat Nixon was along with him. My oldest daughter was one year old, and because of what I was doing, we managed to get my wife and daughter into what was called the VIP area of the presentation and so on. She didn't get to shake hands with President Nixon, but Pat Nixon came by and actually held my daughter for a brief minute. We got a picture of it and it is still on the family someplace.</p>
<p>Bauman: How about foreign dignitaries were there any--</p>
<p>Petersen: Foreign dignitaries, those came later, too, after the SALT agreements. On the signing of the SALT agreements, there was real concern both on the part of Russia, Soviet Union, and the United States for how much materials were still being made or not made. There were a number of Russian visitors who came over to verify which reactors were still operating, which ones weren't, how much material was still going through the canyon facilities, those kind of things. We started for the first time, seeing some of the senior Russian officials come through. The one that still strikes me and my memory is Admiral Sarkisov. He was head of the Russian Navy, and he came out both to see at that point the start of the reactor vessels from the submarines. Today, we have about 124 submarine and cruiser missile reactor cores out on site, but at that point I want to say we probably only had eight or ten, maybe 11, 12, something like that. But he also wanted to see those and verify that the submarines had actually been decommissioned, cut up, and so on. We toured both the reactor areas and the submarine vessel area. Of course, that's where my story about FMEF comes from, too. There was a building out there that was built for FFTF called FMEF, Fuel Material Examination Facility. On the way out to the site, Admiral Sarkisov asked, what is in that building. I told him it was a shut down building. We went out and toured the site. We toured the top of Rattlesnake Mountain with him, too, which was pretty unique. But we toured the site and coming back in, he asked if he could see that building, inside the building. So I called security. It was a closed building—it was locked up. And so they met in they let us in. As we came out, Admiral Sarkisov says, well now I can move the satellite. I asked what he was talking about. And he said, well, we've been watching that building since it was completed, and we couldn't believe the United States would build a building of that size, that massive size, and then not use it. So we knew that was connected underground some other place, because we never saw any cars come. So the Russians actually thought that that building was so secret that they had an underground entrance that came from someplace else. But he saw it was simply not used. And it is unique building. It's a billion dollar building.</p>
<p>Bauman: That's a great story. When you were giving the tour with him, was there an interpreter present when he was--</p>
<p>Petersen: There was always an interpreter. As a matter of fact, one from both State Department for us, for the people who were the escorts, and then he had his interpreters, too, so there was both. The group was probably ten people or so: site manager, and then others of that--there was people from state--you didn't let them wander around by themselves. Pretty unique.</p>
<p>Bauman: Well, you said you've been connected to Hanford since 1965--</p>
<p>Petersen: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>Bauman: I'm sure you’ve--</p>
<p>Petersen: Almost 50 years.</p>
<p>Bauman: --been privy to a lot of interesting events and stories. So I’m going to ask you to tell me some of those, but there's one in particular I know, and that's the alligator story.</p>
<p>Petersen: Yeah, the alligator story is good.</p>
<p>Bauman: All right, you can talk about that.</p>
<p>Petersen: The alligator’s pretty unique. The aquatic biology was located in 100-F Area. That's the last reactor in the downstream flow of the Columbia. So they studied the impacts of the reactors on fish, miniature swine, beagle dogs, they had African pygmy goats, but one of them—Merc Gillis was a doctor of veterinary medicine—graduate of WSU, I might add. He said that he wanted to study the uptake of strontium-90 in a thick skinned animal, because strontium is bone seeker or thick skin. So he convinced the manager of the site, of biology site, that we ought to buy some alligators. The story varies depending on who you're talking to. Bill Bair will give you one side of the story, because he was one of the managers out there. I'll give you another one. But I know for a fact at least six alligators were purchased for the studio strontium-90 uptake. Bill Bair says there were more, but I still wonder about that because I was in and out of there a lot. But these alligators were about two and a half feet long and they put them in a retention pen in the Columbia River, but it was also where the effluent from the F Reactor came back. The water would pass through the reactor, put into retention basin for a short period, and then put back in the river, so it was warmer than the river. That's part of the point. It also was the first place where the water returned to the river, so that was where the strontium would be taken up by the alligators. That's the theory. Well, two months, three months after they put the alligators into this retention pond, there was a big storm. The pen came down and all six alligators got out. This was under the AEC at the time, too—they managed to catch five, but they missed one. It was months later that a fisherman over in Ringgold, downstream, fishing caught this last alligator. Of course, he was trying to tell friends about it, and on and on. But, he had to protect the proof, so he took to a taxidermist office in Pasco and had the thing stuffed. Well, one of the technicians from aquatic biology was walking by the taxidermist shop, saw this stuffed alligator. So he ran in, grabbed the alligator, and ran out, which now makes it more or less of a public story. This was in 1963, before I got here. But the story comes around. Anyway, AEC tried to bury that story. No, we've never had an alligator out there. We don't know anything about alligators. They actually, I think, had it classified for quite some time. But when I got here in '65, my boss was a guy named George Dalen and I had been here for about a year. He says, it's time to give the alligator back. I had no idea what he was talking about, but this is where I entered the story. So he pulls out this stuffed alligator about like this, and he said it was, I think the guy's name was Aaron, he said track him down, because he was the fisherman. He paid to have it stuffed, and we're going to give the alligator back. We'll just let the story go away. So I did. I found the man. Unfortunately, the <em>Tri-City Herald</em> ran a story about this big about the alligator, and once every eight or ten years, they use one of these clips when they do the previous in history. DOE came in and they claimed to know nothing about any alligators, ever, ever, ever. It was in the technical library that they finally found the documents that showed not only did they have alligators, but the other five, they moved from 100-F when they had a fire out there, down to the 300 Area where life sciences built a new building. So I know that there were six alligators, five, one stuffed, and Bill Bair says that there were a few more than that, but I don't know that. That's the alligator story. Better told over beer, I might add, but not bad.</p>
<p>Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Are there any other stories during your time at Hanford--incidents, events, things that you were involved in in your job [INAUDIBLE]?</p>
<p>Petersen: The biggest one is one that I think this community has forgotten completely, and that's Apollo 11. Apollo 11 was the first lunar landing. When Apollo 11 came back to the moon and splashed down in the Pacific, it turned out that in 329 Building, there was a room that was used for very low level radiation detection. It was a room made of pre-World War II battleship steel. It was used for a lot of reasons for measuring very small quantities of radiation. Battelle actually put in a bid with NASA to study some of the first lunar materials that came back. So they had splash down in the Pacific, and we had a man named Dr. Lou Rancitelli, who actually waited in Houston for those materials to be flown from the Pacific, off of the aircraft carrier, back to Houston. He had a briefcase—big briefcase—chained to his wrist, where he brought those back through Seattle and then to the Hanford site. He arrived here about one in the morning, I might add. There were only a few people--Doctor Perkins, myself, a couple of others, who were waiting. We kept this all secret, because we weren't supposed to tell news media or anybody else that this was going on. But Lou got the materials back, and the next day we started petitioning NASA to allow us to display those moon rocks here in this community. The second place in the whole world that moon rocks were displayed was the Federal Building here in Richland. We managed to display them for three days, and there were lines four abreast around the federal building to look at those rocks. They'd go by and ooh and aah because it came from the moon. But almost to a person, everybody says, looks just about exactly like what we see out here in the desert. You couldn't tell them apart. But the fact that we had those lunar materials, I mean that was--wherever you were, you watched TV of the landing on the moon in 1969. That was a huge event. It was after that that Nixon came to town, but hardly anybody recalls that at all. It's just a forgotten piece of history, but at the time, it was pretty big. It was almost--and I missed it—it was almost like when President Kennedy came out to dedicate the Hanford Generating Project attached to N reactor, and that happened in 1963, just before I got here. Big events.</p>
<p>Bauman: Yeah. Yeah. Any other happenings or stories that stand out in your mind?</p>
<p>Petersen: I wasn't a part of what was called the Green Run. Others will have to tell you about the Green Run. But one of the stories I covered, and that's one of the only ones that I was out near the tank farms. Atmospheric sciences is out between the 200 East and 200 West. It has a 300-foot-tall atmospheric tower at that site. They've all been removed today, but going downwind from that 300-foot-tall tower were, number one, four or five 200-foot-tall towers and then five or six or seven 100-foot-tall towers. They would regularly release very small quantities of radioactive iodine, most usually put into colored smoke so they could track both the visual as well as radiation and see how long it took to go downwind and disperse. Just to show you how we were at the time, the photographer and I who were covering that piece as a story thought, well not only did we want to shoot it so you can see it go, but get underneath it so you could watch it as it--It's not a very smart thing to do today, but at the time it seemed like a pretty good idea to be able to watch that stuff as it drifted and deposited. So, we did the story. AEC never let us release it, but we kept the story internally for quite a number of years. I don't know what happened to it now, but those kind of things went on fairly often. You need to know where radiation goes, and that was a piece of it.</p>
<p>Bauman: Do you know roughly the time period that would have been?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well, it would have been probably '68 or '69, someplace in there. There has been more study on the Hanford site--atmospheric studies, geologic studies, temperature swings, those kind of things, than almost anywhere in the United States. They really tracked how the weather changed, how the wind moved, what the ground flow is from rain, those kind of things. It was--going to atmospheric physics lab in the 200 Area was an experience. At one point I managed to take a TV crew up, because if you climb a 300-foot-tall tower in the middle of Hanford, you could see just about everything. It turned out that we got the film crew up, they took the pictures, and then security looked at the pictures and said you have pictures of classified areas within those pictures, so they took a whole video. All of the climbing up and down was for naught. So, a pretty good place.</p>
<p>Bauman: You mentioned earlier that when you first came and started giving tours, you really didn't know much about pre-'43 events.</p>
<p>Petersen: True.</p>
<p>Bauman: When did you become more aware the communities that were out there and start learning more about that?</p>
<p>Petersen: I had the real fortunate opportunity to meet Bill Rickard, and I hope you've interviewed him. Bill is a gentleman of the first order, but Bill has probably walked that site more than any single person. One of the early things—I got acquainted with Bill. Bill ended up taking me on walks across parts of Hanford. The first time that he took me out was to Rattlesnake Springs, which is up a gully on the face of Rattlesnake Mountain. It's just an experience to go with Bill, and that was mostly on—we call a bugs and bunnies--but it was mostly what was all of nature that's out there: deer, elk, coyotes, even fish and so on. But Bill knows that site probably better than any other single person. So every chance I ever got to go out with Bill, anywhere, that's where you first got the sense that there was something here pre-1943. That's when I first saw the irrigation piping. That's where you first saw the home site--we've had two major fires across that site, and both of them ended up and taking out things and were still left. There was a home up by a Rattlesnake Springs that actually still had furniture in it. It was burned down in the first fire. So Bill knew all that stuff, and so the experience of going out with Bill was really unique. I wouldn't trade it for anything. That's where I started thinking, well—actually, Bill led me to a person named Annette--I can't think of it.</p>
<p>Bauman: Heriford?</p>
<p>Petersen: Heriford. Annette is the one who—she was in the class that would have graduated from Hanford High School out there on site. She worked for Battelle, PNL at the time. I got real acquainted with Annette, and then I helped Annette have the first reunion of her class out at that old Hanford School and that would have been, my gosh, maybe '78 or so. 1977, '78. And Annette could tell stories about what the old Hanford town was like and White Bluffs, and how rich and agricultural area it was. She was an amazing lady. It's too bad that she passed away quite some time ago. She was a real historian. You talk to those, and all of a sudden it becomes real. She's the first one that I talked to, not Bill Rickard, but Annette Heriford that that explained that some of the people had less than two weeks' notice to move off that site. You think about it and you say, that's just not possible. But it happened. Then you start feeling for the people who—there were roughly 2,000—the numbers change, depending again on who you talk to. The one on one side, the federal side, says there's only 1,500 people out there. But if you look at the historical records, you know that there were probably about 2,100—kids and the whole works. Some of the early census didn't include some of the children, or the sheep herders that moved back and forth across the site. In talking with Annette, you finally got the feeling that was something else here that happened before 1943. That's what got my attention. Good that you know her name, too.</p>
<p>Bauman: Yeah. Why did you think that was important, then, for people to know about?</p>
<p>Petersen: It was probably a little later than that that I also became acquainted with some of the Native Americans. I've got to know some of those over time, too. The relationship of the people who lived out there, both with Native Americans and the site—I’ll change directions for a minute, too. My family at that point lived in Wenatchee, so when I first came in 1965, in order to get to Wenatchee from here, you had two choices. You'd either go around through Pasco and up through Moses Lake and back, or you could go out to Vernita where there was a ferry, part time, and it didn't work at night. You'd ride the ferry and go across. That was prior to the bridge being built and so on. As you go out there, and see the ferry, you'd also see the structure that now I know is Bruggemann Warehouse, and you'd meet some of the people who were either former residents or Native Americans. Then you stopped and you waited for the ferry. You got a chance to talk to some of the people as you went back and forth. There was a lot of discussion about what was this site prior to. But growing from Vernita to Vantage that was pre-Mattawa days. Now I can visualize what Hanford must have been, because Hanford was an agricultural area, prior to—it looked like Mattawa today does. When I first started driving up there, there were no orchards between Vernita and Vantage. Now you look, there's orchards and vineyards and all kinds of stuff at Mattawa. Hanford was that, but it was that before 1943. You have to visualize what it was like, and it was amazing. Hanford really has a perfect weather pattern for early produce, and it was one of the first in the state to produce and all kinds of things--peaches and pears and cherries and walnuts, all kinds of stuff. How we doing? These guys need a break. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: You started in '65. You're now at TRIDEC. At what point did you move to TRIDEC? I know you worked also at Westinghouse and [INAUDIBLE].</p>
<p>Petersen: My wife kids around and says I can't hold a job. That's the point. I typically work for a company for about seven years and then move companies. So I worked for Battelle for a while, then Westinghouse for a while, then what was called WPPSS, Washington Public Power Supply System for a while. But I retired from Battelle in 2002, and the Hanford manager for the site was Sam Volpentest. Sam was 99 years old at the time, and his doctor, who's also my doctor ended up saying, Sam you can't fly to Washington, DC anymore and go after money. I'd known Sam since '65, I met him in '65, and Sam called and said, Gary, I know you retired, but would you come back to work part time, ten hours a week, easy job go to Washington, DC for me and that's it. He had the nerve to die at 101. He lived for about a year after he hired me to do those trips. And when he passed on, as a result TRIDEC at the time said, well, we need somebody full time to do this. I wasn't real interested, so they said we'll make it part time job. You only have to work 25, 30 hours a week. It hasn't been that since. Away we go. It's nice because if they want to fire me, I'd love it. I'll go and play golf. It's a good deal.</p>
<p>Bauman: Can you talk about Sam Volpentest a little bit? Obviously, a very important figure through most of the Tri-Cities. Can you talk about his significance a little bit?</p>
<p>Petersen: Would be happy to. Sam was an incredible politician. He never ran for office that I know of, but he knew politics from the top to the bottom. He was friends with everybody from Governor Rosellini to Senator Magnuson, Senator Jackson, Speaker of the House, Tom Foley. He knew politics. If you read the book so that was just written about Sam, it has a lot of facts, but until you knew Sam--and I was fortunate. Another part of my assignment, when I first got here in '65, TRIDEC was called TRICNIC. So it had a different name. It was Tri-City Nuclear Industrial Council. And Sam was not a writer. As a matter of fact, everything he did was longhand, very pretty penmanship, but he couldn't put things down on a typewriter for taking to Washington, DC and so on. Battelle, one of their offers to the community was to provide somebody who could write to Sam to write their newsletters, to write their congressional letters, to write things. I got to know Sam when he was in a little office on the Parkway. Later he moved into the Hanford house. Sam was a mover. Most of the ideas that Sam accomplished didn't start with Sam, but he would hear an idea and he'd say, that sounds good. We're going to do that. For example, he started TRICNIC/TRIDEC in 1963. In 1963—you've got to go back in time—every road in and out of the community was two lanes. There was one airline only at the time, and Sam knew that in 1963 the government, AEC, was starting to shut down the reactors. Sam and Glen Lee and Bob Philip formed TRICNIC and they did that to try and offset, with federal dollars, the coming shut down of the production mission at Hanford. In the process, they also determined that in order to develop a community long range, you had to have transportation. Even though most people think that Sam concentrated on Hanford, he actually--and Glen Lee and Bob Philip—all really focused on how do we make the Tri-Cities bigger and better than it is? Four-lane highway was first, but airlines were second, and the third one that really was not well-known at all was education. And they went after a Center for Graduate Study for this community, which became WSU Tri-Cities. They decided that you had all of this intellectual property at the laboratory at Hanford, but you needed something for their families. I don't think it was a sit down and let's do a vision and do all these things. I think it came in pieces, where they actually decided they wanted certain things. Sometimes the fallout was better than what they expected. As an example, the breeder reactor program, which started in 1968, '69, was going to be a major, major new AEC mission. Sam went after the breeder reactor program, and he didn't get it. Savannah River did, what was called Clinch River Breeder Reactor. But he got the secondary issue, which was FFTF, which is a small test reactor that led to. As it turns out, over time the administration killed the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, but they kept FFTF going. Or, another example is we lost out on a mission that Sam really wanted that I think was called SMEVs—and maybe I'll explain it, but maybe not. And we lost that one, too, and so Sam went to Magnuson and said, we need something. Give us something. A couple days later, the story goes, Magnuson called up and said well we had a federal building planned for Montana or Wyoming or something, but they really don't want it. How about we put a federal building in the Tri-Cities. That's how this Federal Building came about. That was Sam. Sam was tenacious. He either liked you, or he didn't like you. There were people he wouldn't let in his office, period, but others-- Phenomenal memory. He could pick up a phone and call congressmen or senators from other states without ever looking the number up. He would pick up the phone--he never believed in talking to staff. He would talk to Senator Magnuson. He would talk to Chet Holifield. He would call them up personally and say I need this or I need that. He was incredible.</p>
<p>Bauman: That's a great story. How was he able to have such persuasive powers with Magnuson, Scoop Jackson, a senator also, Tom Foley, right, these US Senators? Tri-Cities is still fairly small, population-wise. Was it his tenacity?</p>
<p>Petersen: Well. It was his tenacity, but it all started with Governor Rosellini. And the fact that Sam, for a period before he came here, was in the Italian something club in Seattle, which was Rosellini, Magnuson was an honorary member. He, Sam, belonged to the Seattle club, which is still there, downtown Seattle. He made politically--he recognized that you needed political connections no matter what. When he came here and then he had the backing of Glen Lee<em>, Tri-City Herald</em>, the combination of those two—Sam took every advantage he could find. His advantage with the <em>Tri-City Herald</em> was, if he thought we needed something, then Glen Lee would support it editorially, and they would go after the politicians collectively and get it. Sam liked to take credit and he did many, many things, but it was really the combination that he put together that was pretty unique—partnerships. It took him a long time to play what I call both sides of the aisle. Typically he was a Democrat. He was a solid, solid Democrat. But he started realizing that there were Republicans that you had to deal with as well, and he needed to work with them over time, and he did. He built friendships across the whole gamut. And active, I mean, he was amazing. If you ever got a chance to go—Sam was small, but if you ever got a chance to go to Washington, DC with Sam, it was an experience. It was unbelievable. He knew where he was going. He didn't have to look at a map. He walked everywhere. I'll say he was a cheapskate, but he was a penny pincher. If a hotel cost $110 a night, he'd find one where you’d get it for $109. Sam was that kind of an individual. But he knew The Hill like nobody else I've ever seen. He knew the underground parts of The Hill, too. He didn't like to get out in the weather, so there's a whole both subway system and hallways between the House side the Capitol and the Senate side. Sam knew all of those underground links, and he'd just take off through those tunnels and go from one side of The Hill to the other side of The Hill. Amazing.</p>
<p>Bauman: And he lived a long life, so he had--</p>
<p>Petersen: 101.</p>
<p>Bauman: --connections with those politicians--</p>
<p>Petersen: Long period of time. He recognized, too, that he was outliving his supporters. He outlived Magnuson, he outlived Jackson. The one that was constant was Rosellini and Rosellini and he were the same age. And so Rosellini lived to 100, as well. Pretty good.</p>
<p>Bauman: What about Glen Lee? What sort of role--what was he like?</p>
<p>Petersen: Glen Lee was a bulldog. He's a big, imposing man. The thing that I think the <em>Tri-City Herald</em> should have done was kept his office as a mausoleum. His office was a piece of history by itself. He had pictures with Presidents, he had pictures with governors, he had memorabilia from all over the place. If you asked Sam and Glen the same question, you'd get two similar, but different answers. Who caused something to happen? I'll give you one story that is really unique. How did Battelle get here? Sam had a vision of how Battelle came; Glen Lee had a vision of how Battelle came. Fred Albaugh, one of the lab directors had a story about how Battelle came to be here. And Sherwood Fawcett, who became the first director of the lab, had a different story. I believe they're all correct, but they're different. Each one takes credit in a different way, and so Sam claims full credit for bringing Battelle here. He was at a meeting in New York and he knew that the lab was going to be bid out. He ran into Burke Thomas, who was the president of Battelle, and Sherwood Fawcett, and sold them on the idea coming. That's Sam's story. If you listened to Sherwood Fawcett, Sherwood Fawcett said that the president of the company actually was a graduate of the University of Washington. He wanted to open the lab somewhere in the state of Washington. Burke Thomas found out that this lab was going to be bids, so Burke told Sherwood go and bid on that and win it. Two different sides of the same story. I don't know which one is right.</p>
<p>Bauman: You've been connected in Hanford for quite a few years now, and seen a lot changes take place. Obviously, one of the key changes was the mission of the place itself, from production to clean up. I'm wondering if you can talk about that a little bit in terms of how you saw that and the impact that had on the area of Hanford itself?</p>
<p>Petersen: I'm happy to. I'm going to connect it back to Sam a little bit. One of the changes that was major was going from AEC, Atomic Energy Commission, to an organization for a short period called ERDA, which I forget now what that stands for. They were only and operation for a year and a half or so, and now to DOE. Most of the new missions for the Hanford site didn't come from within the federal government, they came from the community. As the production reactors were being shut down, Sam and Glen in particular saw that we needed to find new missions for Hanford. One of the first ones was a Hanford Generating Plant, which was operated by Washington Public Power Supply System, but attached to N Reactor. N Reactor was the first dual purpose reactor in the United States, and the vision was it was going to last a long time because it was the newest one and it produced 800 megawatts of power. Sam and Glen said, let's get the HGP here, because the United States wouldn't dare shut down a reactor that's producing 800 megawatts of power, so that was one the early ones. But as you started to see the reactors come down, they looked for other missions. One of the first ones was a thing called BWIP, which is--everything has an acronym, but a Basalt Waste Isolation Project, which was actually in competition with both Nevada and Texas to become the nation's repository. BWIP, that's a misnomer, what I just said. BWIP was actually the study of the geology of basalt for a repository, but it wasn't going to be the repository. It was a study site. If it worked, if it showed that it could work, then there would have been some other place on the Hanford site they would have dug deep down into the basalt and made a repository. Deaf Smith, Nevada, Yucca Mountain, and here were one of the visions of Sam and Glen and wanted to become the repository for the nation. All of a sudden there was a move in Congress that said we're going to select one and it's going to be Yucca Mountain. And so shut the other two down. And actually BWIP, the Basalt Waste Isolation Project, was shut down within a period of two to four weeks. There were hundreds of people who worked out there. When that shut down, Sam then went after that Clinch River Breeder Reactor program. The breeder reactor program ended up getting FFTF so there was certain things that happened in a sequence that he was always looking for that new mission, whatever it was. One example, the one that Sam loved to do, and I stumble on every time, is Sam also heard that MIT and some others were going after this deep space exploration project. There were two sides to that, at the time. One was SNAP, which is the Space Nuclear Application Program and the second side was what became LIGO, the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory. I can only do that once. But Sam loved that one because he could spit it out. He had that one memorized and he loved to go into a congressional office and say—rather than LIGO. So Sam is the one that really pushed for that project as well. Always, they had a vision of trying to capture new missions for Hanford, and it was never really—the push never came from DOE or ERDA or AEC after the original mission. They all came from the community. And we’re in competition with Oak Ridge, Idaho Falls, Savannah River, for those kind of things.</p>
<p>Bauman: Another one of the changes that's taken place at Hanford since I've been here is there are a lot fewer buildings on site now than there were. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit, and what that means, you think, in terms of the history.</p>
<p>Petersen: I'll start lightly and say it's a conspiracy. The conspiracy is every building that I've ever worked in out there, with the exception of FFTF, has been torn down. [LAUGHTER] So I think they're out to get me. At the top of Rattlesnake Mountain were the Nike Ajax building, they've been torn down, and buildings and then the 300 Areas that I had offices in. What we're seeing today, though, is the success of cleanup, particularly along the river corridor. I will say that the Department of Energy and the contractors have done an amazing job of cleaning up this site. When you look at the changes, particularly in the 300 Area or the reactors themselves, the change is phenomenal. I forget, I think there's something like 280 buildings have been taken off the site, and the landscape has changed. The big, tall smokestacks are gone. The water tanks that were out there are gone. The skyline has changed drastically. And they've done it, too, with an intent to try and return it to original habitat. Most of it is what's called brownfields, but they have done a tremendous job of actually recovering a lot of the vegetation the original look of the land, with the exception that this was agricultural area, so it's different. But that's a huge, huge change. And most of that's been in the last five years. It's a different thing today than it was, 1965. You just see it all over the place.</p>
<p>Bauman: You've been giving tours for years. I can't imagine how many tours you've led.</p>
<p>Petersen: I don't know. A lot.</p>
<p>Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Do you have a favorite place on the site of the different places you stopped for tours or maybe when you went out with Bill Rickard? Is there a place that you really--?</p>
<p>Petersen: The B Reactor is unique, unique, unique. There is no place like B Reactor. When you go in to B Reactor and you realize that 50,000 people were brought from all over the United States, and some foreign countries, they didn't know what they were building. They didn't have computers. They didn't have portable radios. They didn't have portable phones. And they, start to finish, built B Reactor in 11 months. That's just plain incredible. When you look at the craftsmanship of doing that, the best analogy is still from Jim Albaugh, who was the head of the Boeing program for 787s. We took him on a tour of B Reactor and he came out and he said, this would be like trying to bring in 50,000 people, have them build their own community first, because they had to have a place to live and eat and so on, and then tell them build a 787, but you've got no computers to do it with. And you've got to buy all the materials and manufacture them. So B Reactor is unique, unique. I can't say enough about B Reactor. But there's a flip side, too, and that is I've also become enamored with pre-1943. When what I think about that, it's really the city of White Bluffs, and the fact that there's still a ferry landing out there, there's a bank building out there, there's sidewalks out there. You go out and when you're alone, you go out by yourself, you can just visualize this community that used to exist. Then all of a sudden, they're moved away and 50,000 people come in in a period of weeks, just a very short period of time. They have to build a town, and then they start building things like B Reactor. And to know is all done, really, under the direction of a 36-year-old individual and a Corps of Engineers, it's unbelievable. I know a lot of cocky 36-year-olds, but I don't know anybody like Franklin Matthias to do the things he did with 50,000 people. Unbelievable. My favorite place is B Reactor. It's got to be right there.</p>
<p>Bauman: Well, I think you and I could just go on talking for hours, probably.</p>
<p>Petersen: [LAUGHTER] I think we're close.</p>
<p>Bauman: But I do wonder, is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you want to talk about, maybe that I haven't asked you about. Any stories, or anything that's really important that you want to mention?</p>
<p>Petersen: There's a piece that has yet to be done, Bob, and that piece I've talked to several people about. That piece is trying to capture either the individuals or the families of the people who were here prior to 1943. I think it is extremely important for us as a community to find those people, identify them, bring them together, allow them back out on the site for the first time. I took the Bruggemann family back out. That was the first time--did this about three years ago. That was the first time they had been back since 1943, and to go--it's like anybody's heritage. If you have a chance to go back and see where your parents or your grandparents--or you, as a child, grew up--the vision is different. Things are smaller, but—the feel of the place. We need to find those people and give them credibility and standing so that they have the opportunity to see their heritage. It turns out that exactly the same time as people were being moved off Hanford, the Japanese were being moved off of Bainbridge Island. Exactly the same time. And they all had to be off by August of 1943. In the case of the Japanese, the federal government has actually done some very nice things. They helped some of the families regain their land. They put up displays of all kinds to say this is what happened. But here at Hanford, of those families still are scattered around the United States, and they have very little to remember the site that they knew by. When you think about--and I'll use the Bruggemanns because I know them the best--you think about Bruggemanns who had 1,400--they had 640 acres, but they leased more—and they had sheep, they had cattle, they had a working staff of something like ten to 20 people on and off, up and down. They were given two weeks to get rid of all that stuff and move. We've got to get that. We've got to capture that. We've got to help them. That's the piece. How’d we do? Did you guys go to sleep back there?</p>
<p>Man two: Huh?</p>
<p>[LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: Well thanks very much, Gary, for sharing your stories. Like I said, I'm sure you and I could go on talking for quite a while.</p>
<p>Petersen: I recognize, too, you're really after the people who were here from pre-'63, but '63 to '65 or so. But I'm a Johnny-come-lately, so I look at it different.</p>
<p>Bauman: You know a lot of the history of the place, the stories.</p>
<p>Petersen: There's pieces that are really pretty fun. There's some of the stories, honestly, that you probably will never hear, because they have different twists to them. Some point, not with an audience, I will tell you there's another side to the Apollo 11 moon rocks that got here. It's a very unique story that only a couple people know, how they actually came to the site. And it was tough.</p>
<p>Bauman: Thanks so much, Gary.</p>
<p>Petersen: Yeah.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:08:37
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
260 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
B Reactor
100 Area
200 Area
300 Area
N Reactor
200 East Area
200 West Area
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1960-2014
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
ca1965-2014
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
May, Catherine
Foley, Tom
Nixon, Pat
Bair, William (Bill)
Rickard, Bill
Volpentest, Sam
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Gary Petersen
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Gary Petersen conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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2014-6-5
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Date Modified
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2016-07-22: Metadata v1 created – [RG]
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford (Wash.)
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
100 Area
200 Area
200 East Area
200 West Area
300 Area
B Reactor
DuPont
General Electric
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Volpentest, Sam, 1904-2005
Washington Public Power Supply System (WOOPS)
-
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06e1f10cf2e38fb3e3dfb0b8752d48eb
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe2e54b58cdd2f5fab7a12a0708dc2830.mp4
79bd6450065d4f81f08c69238dc284b8
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
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Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Bauman, Robert
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Snyder, Wayne
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Northwest Public Television | Snyder_Wayne_1</p>
<p>Wayne Snyder: That was always the worst thing when I worked was public speaking. I don't know how they do it. All three of my children are--they all speak about their professions. My son sings publicly and everything, but they came from a dad who isn't that much around—</p>
<p>Robert Bauman: Not much for public speaking?</p>
<p>Snyder: Oh Amos, if you stay down, it's okay.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay, we good? All right, let's go ahead and get started.</p>
<p>Snyder: Okay.</p>
<p>Bauman: Let's start by just having you say your name and spell it for us.</p>
<p>Snyder: Okay. Wayne Snyder, W-A-Y-N-E, S-N-Y-D-E-R.</p>
<p>Bauman: All right, and today's date is September 4<sup>th</sup>, 2013.</p>
<p>Snyder: Correct.</p>
<p>Bauman: And we're conducting this interview in Mr. Snyder's home—</p>
<p>Snyder: Right.</p>
<p>Bauman: --in Richland. So let's start by maybe having you tell me about how you came to Hanford, how you heard about the place, when you came.</p>
<p>Snyder: Okay. Well, I was at University of Colorado. I graduated there in 1950 in chemistry, and GE was one of two outfits that interviewed me. They were offering a salary of $54 a week, and that beat out the government job in Rifle, Colorado doing oil shale by about $5 a week. So I accepted this, thinking I was going to the General Electric research laboratory back in Schenectady, New York, but wound up--oh, no, you're going to Hanford. We need to people out there. So I got on the—well, my parents came to my graduation; they put me on the train to Richland. And I got here in the middle of night in Kennewick, and I had only a bus ticket from Pendleton to Kennewick. GE was supposed to pick me up, but they didn't. So I was fumbling around with all my luggage, all of my worldly belongings, and looking for a motel. A lady came by and said, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm trying to get to Hanford or to Richland, if you know where that is. She said, oh yeah. She said, I'm picking up my son who is just off shift down here. Can I give you a lift up to town? So we pulled into Richland, and it was about midnight by this time. And the city lights were pretty much on, and I thought, wow. You know, it looked to me at that time kind of like Las Vegas, all lights lit up, very contemporary. Bell Furniture had its lights on on its sign. And the building I went to was the Hanford House, which was called then the Desert Inn, a structure that preceded the existing building. And it was an old army facility, and everything looked like army around here. And I went in, and I said, I would like to get a room for tonight if I could. And they said, sure. I said, first I got to tell you. I have a check for $35, if you could cash that it would help me to pay for the place. And they said, oh sure. So I spent the night, on the second floor, woke up and looked out my window. And it was the most bare—just place without any life or anything except for the big river that I could see flowing by. And I thought, oh God, if I can just earn enough money to get a car, I'll get out of here. But I'm here later, all this time. Excuse me, my voice is cracking on me. And so I was taken over to the 703 Building, which was at that time where the Federal Building is today. And it was the headquarters for all of the Hanford site General Electric company top dogs, and the AEC, as DOE was in those days. And it was a white—just white, wooden building like everything in town, looking like an army camp, and a big building though. It had a main hallway that extended, I think, five wings, and so you would go in the building, and here's the big lobby. And I was taken to a place where they would interview me again, I think. And they said, oh you're a tech grad aren't you? And that was because I was wearing a blue sport coat and a tie. And he said, oh, yeah, you're not coming to dig ditches. you're coming to be a professional. I said, well, that's good. And so they oriented me and told me where I would be working, and asked if everything was going well. I was living in a dormitory in North Richland at that time, and that was about—what it is, six miles out of town from the Federal Building. So they made sure I could get the bus and get to work and stuff like that, but told me I'd be working out at the bismuth phosphate process, the 200 East 271 Canyon. It's the building that today they are just calling the Queen Mary. Its sister building is, the 271-T. But 271 was the B Plant, and it did the batch processing of all of the irradiated fuels in the 100 Areas, dissolved them up, separated them out by this bismuth phosphate precipitation process. Refined them through pretty much a high concentration plutonium nitrate solution. And that went on off to the 330--233 B, which was over in Two West Area. And you are not interested in the rest of the process, because it just gets boring. But anyway, I got out to work. I took the bus out, which became a very, very common thing every day. Run out and catch the bus, and go 30 miles through the desert to the north and get to the 300 Area. Excuse me, the 200 East Area. And go into my little building, which was the analytical laboratories associated with the big processing canyon building. And there I did various analytical tests, you know, determining how much plutonium in the solution, what were the concentrations of the fission products, and what was left? And we started out with the initial dissolution of the batch process, and they would dissolve up in nitric acid. I don't know how many--fuel slugs, we called them in those days--they are now the fuel element. But they were about eight inches long, and about that big in diameter. And a whole batch of them would get dissolved up—you know, half a ton or something like that. And then we would measure all of the concentration of the various elements as it went through the precipitation process. And we took it through the lithium--the wait a second--hafnium fluoride. I'm getting confused here. This has been quite a few years ago--through a concentration and there the f-10 p sample went on to the Two West Area where the oxalate precipitation took place. And at that time, that was the end of the processing at Hanford. It went through a plutonium solution, plutonium nitrate, was bottled up in very safe containers and shipped to either Los Alamos, or to, I believe, Oak Ridge. And Los Alamos was able to go ahead and make metal out of it from which they fashioned to the various bomb pits. And we sort of ended there, but a few years later, as a matter of fact I worked at it, they built what's now called the Plutonium Finishing Plant. But it was at that time the 234-5 Building, and I worked there again as an analytical chemist in the analytical laboratories. And we were measuring the purity of the plutonium, the amount of extraneous materials. And unlike the bismuth phosphate process where we were worried about the radiation—the very high level gamma irradiation—over at 234-5, we were worried more about contamination from the plutonium. Plutonium gives off no radiation that penetrates anything, but if you ingest it, you've had it. And so we'd be in gloveboxes and protective clothing, and I don't think we had anything over our faces. But I remember reaching through the glovebox and refining all of the plutonium. And then I was a spectrometer. We did a spectrometric analysis of the old fashioned kind, where we burned it off, caught the rays that came off of it, and then we could read all of the barium, the cesium, the plutonium, everything in it. And that would go back to the processing, and if it was determined clean enough and everything, it would then be sent on—the metal from which it came--would be sent on to Los Alamos for processing. But very quickly after that, they built the lines, the ABC and whatever line, which went ahead and processed the metal—the plutonium metal into a shape, which was then shaped into the bomb pit that was being built at the time. And it's not thought of that Hanford ever really handled the metal or produced weapons—weapon parts, but we did for quite a few years. And that seems like a long part of my life, those three years from 1950 up until 1953, when I was kind of tired of that. And I think they were tired of me, perhaps, out at that area too. I interviewed for and got a job in radiation monitoring. And the nice thing about it, it was the first time I lived closer to town. It was--that facility was officed in the 300 Area. And it was day shift. That other time I worked shift work the whole time. This was ABCD shift. It was 24/7. The plants were operating constantly. And so I would be working day shift, then swing shift, then graveyard shift, and it's rotated, so that you were cut out of your night life for every two out of three--let me get it straight--weekends. And all my buddies that I was with in the dormitories had all--they were day shift. And they worked Monday through Friday, they would take off weekends for the mountains or for the rivers or for the fun times. And I would get to go every third long weekend. I was off from Friday morning graveyard until Wednesday afternoon swing shift, so I had what's called a long weekend which is four full days of fun and playing except, there was nobody around that I liked, that I enjoyed. There were a lot of people worked those shifts. But most of them were operators in the production plants, or were at least a part of the continuing plutonium production and not into research or other more fun things like they did in 300 Area. Well, I was able to do that for about two more years or so, and in 1955, I was interviewed and joined a group called the Graphite Group. This group was involved in studying graphite, which is the main moderator. It's that big black block in the center of the reactors which slows the neutrons down to absorption velocity, so that they get struck in the 235 and cause it to fission, or are absorbed in the 236, and ultimately through neptunium become plutonium. And the graphite was swelling badly in the reactors. It was a fairly low temperature thing in the reactor, and the power level was around 250 megawatts. I think that was the design level. They ultimately got to operating up over 1,000 megawatts, so that was a lot. But anyway back to the graphite. I would get samples made and little cylinders and get them shaped up by the machinists, and then we would irradiate them in the test holes in the reactors. I would work out at the reactors quite often. We would be putting samples in the test holes. Getting them out, putting them in, taking them out. And then I could measure the graphite samples, as to how much dimensional change they had made. And at that time, all of them grew slightly, very slightly. But in the full size reactor, it was enough growth that the reactor was beginning to really buckle. It sunk in the middle and grew on the edges, so that the process tubes which used to go straight through the reactor began to be a shape that started higher, sunk down in the center, and went out. And they got so bowed that eight inch slugs or fuel elements would not go through them. And they would charge them in for re-irradiation—or for their first cycle, they would almost not go through those process tubes. The process tubes were aluminum. They were surrounded with water which cooled them, and the fuel elements then did its thing, fission, and made all this heat and fission products and stuff that we're still trying to get rid of here at Hanford. But that was really fun because it was day shift, it was not doing analytical chemistry. And I was working with more people who—well, all of the tech grads who did analytical work were really fun, but it got me in with the crowd, like John Fox as a matter of fact. And it just seemed more like what it was supposed to do with my life—a highbrow chemist in a research setting. But with my bachelor's degree, that wasn't the best preparation for highbrow scientific work. And I did some artwork back in those days. It was always a phase of mine. And when I got my chemistry degree, I really wished that I had gotten a bachelor's in fine arts, but I knew that would pay for nothing. [LAUGHTER] So I decided, well, to make it in fine arts, I better do something. So my wife and I got married, and we went off to Mexico where I produced a portfolio of artwork. It was a good enough to get me into one of the best commercial art centers in the country. It was called The Art Center in Los Angeles, California. And there again, I loved it. But I lasted about, oh, four months, I’ll say, into the first quarter. I was doing very well, but the people who were assigning the work would hang over you. And they would evaluate what you did, and they would find it lacking, because it wasn't as professional as they were. And so I enjoyed it though, but I thought, if I'm going to have a wife and maybe a family, I’d better earn a living. So I called my old boss at Hanford. Said, you know this art stuff isn't really working for me. Is there anything back there that I could do? He said, well, come on back, Wayne. So I joined the Graphite Group again briefly, but they let me interview around until I found something that would be a more likely career, something that would actually let me promote in career and stuff. And I joined a job—joined a group called the Programming Group, and it was the first of an outfit being put together that looked at the whole plant's operation. And they were responsible for resolving all of the programs that were going on. So we did the report writing and the final merging of all of the Plutonium Recycle Program, was the primary source of this stuff. And the plutonium recycle program went on from about--I'm going to say '58. I was married '58, so this would be '59. And as a matter of fact, again, joining with John Fox, who was one of the designers of the PRTR. And we were, at that time, probably rooming together in old Bauer Day house which were the first nongovernment owned houses in Richland. Spokane built of an outfit called the Spokane Village, which are the—oh, what would you call them, honey? The houses along George Washington Way, between it and Stevens north of the old Uptown area, those white, two-bedroom, three-bedroom buildings with white, I suppose, asbestos shingles and stuff. Anyway, where am I going from here? You can cut for a second.</p>
<p>Bauman: You were talking about rooming.</p>
<p>Snyder: Yes, thank you. Yes. And so Gerry McCormick and Fox and I got together, and we decided we'd rent one of the Bauer Day—we would rent a Richland Village house. But they would not rent to single people, so we tried the Bauer Day place. And they said, yeah, we'll rent you a house. So we got together. And I worked for Graphite Group, and Gerry was in chemistry on the separations process. And Fox was designing the PRTR. And we just hit it off well, and we were--not to brag, but we were one of the classy bachelor quarters in town. So now I'm preceding my art career, but before going there I was working in this stuff, having all this fun. We'd have--I was day shift of course—weekends off. John and Gerry were, and we'd have parties with 30 some people or so attending. And lots of people came, because we would have lots of hard liquor. And just had a good time generally. So that lasted for a while, but then when I got married, I came back, joined this programing group that I talked about earlier, got involved in the whole site more or less, and reported to a pretty high up guy, Larry McEwen. And he thought that I would be able to help publicize Hanford to the public. I would put together a small exhibition center, a room that showed the process in its entirety, and add some examples of fuel elements and various solvent extraction columns and things like that. And that was really fun, and I enjoyed it. And reported to Larry, and this was right reporting to Herb Parker who of course became the head of all the laboratories. But, another kid, Art Scott, and I were asked to help him write his annual talk, and so we met with Herb which was quite high level thing for us. And we scraped and bowed and did the appropriate things and came together with a script that he could use for the big annual meeting.</p>
<p>And he would go through it, and he would laugh. And he would say, we don't say things like, further on in the evening we will get into. He said, that would kill the talk right there. People are bored and no way would they like to hear, longer on at some time, while they still sat there. But any way, Art and I did okay. And he then joined an outfit called measurements, which was all new in those times. It was a group assigned to measure the progress of the company. How well were they doing? Were they meeting program requirements? And he did that. And I joined--left the Programming Group. And my boss there Kelly Wood said, Wayne, you're going nowhere. He said, you're going to have to do something else if you expect to have a career. And at that time, an offer came up from the technical information crowd. Chris Stevens was manager of a technical library, and they did this work called reviewing reports for declassification. And so it sounded pretty good, and it was more permanent. And so I joined that group, which was much more of a service job again. So I discovered my real career was in service work; it was not in science and engineering and research and that kind of stuff. And so I got over, and I joined Chris Stevenson, and this is a group of about 35 people in the Technical Information Group, most of which processed all of the technical reports that were created at Hanford. We had the technical library, which provided all of the technical information from worldwide scientists and engineers would need. And I reviewed these new technical reports for the appropriate classification: could they go out unclassified, or should they be confidential, or should they be secret? And everything at Hanford was born secret. Unlike the Department of Defense, which wrote stuff and then decided whether it was sensitive, here stuff was sensitive, period, before it was reviewed and allowed to be unclassified. So I would review all of these reports, as boring as they were, and identify things would have to be deleted in order for them to be unclassified. And most of them were high technical reports. They were not about the production programs. They were not about how much plutonium was produced and things like that. It was about the Plutonium Recycle Program; it was about advanced research in materials; it was about lots of interesting things. And so I sort of acquired a knowledge of things that were going on around the whole site, mainly research.</p>
<p>Bauman: About what time frame was this that you were doing this?</p>
<p>Snyder: Time frame? This would be 19--this was about 1980, I think, when I interviewed with Chris Stevenson and was hired into this Technical Information Group. And that was my career then. I had worked at Hanford for seven years before going to Art Center, and I worked for them for a couple more years, from 1950 and joined the group in 1960, the Programming Group. And so this would have been '63, I think, was when I joined Technical Information Group. Am I off on dates here badly? I hope not. Anyway. It was kind of boring, but I was the classification officer, did all this reviewing, and gained some awareness of how important the information was that supported a technical outfit like Hanford was, partly research and a lot of production stuff. And progressed in that far enough to where when Chris Stevenson resigned, other than just being a reviewer of reports or classification, I became a candidate for running the whole thing. So I became manager of Technical Information section in 1963. And then Battelle Memorial Institute came in and got the contract to run the research parts of Hanford, and the work I was in joined Battelle. And that was, I think, 1965. Things changed a little bit with Battelle. It was a more behavioral kind of a company. GE had been very strict, very much old style corporation, very line management, very much more like normal business. And Battelle came in, and they were used to doing contract research. They would have people come in and say, we have this problem in our material studies for zirconium or something, could you help us solve this problem? So Battelle was used to doing the same kind of research as the Hanford laboratories, but on a much broader scale; more kinds of technology were looked at. And it was a good outfit to work for, and as a matter of fact, I retired from them in 1990. And I had progressed in the technical information work enough that I was really enjoying my job as manager of that outfit. There were about 40 staff members, I'd say, who reported to me, primarily women, but a few professional guys in the technical information work. That I—well, I enjoyed the women too, but the guys, at that time--I shouldn't say this--but were more important than the women, so you tended to associate with guys instead of women in the technical side. And very soon after that, probably ten years, women really came to the front of course in science, and they became bosses around here. But my work had primarily been in a more traditional work through my early career, and through a whole different kind of work as a manager of technical information, being responsible to provide all of the current ongoing world information in science and technology to the Hanford scientists and engineers for their needs in conducting their programs. So that was a very satisfying thing to do, and it acquainted me even further with all of the kinds of things that were going on at Hanford, but without being responsible for making the reactors operate or making the research programs work and things like that. So that a good career. And like I said, I was married in '58, went off to Los Angeles--Mexico and Los Angeles--and then came back and spent the rest of my life, pretty much, in a technical information career. And it's been good.</p>
<p>Bauman: I would go back a little bit. You say when you said you first arrived, you lived in the dorm?</p>
<p>Snyder: Yes. At that time--</p>
<p>Bauman: Could you talk about that a little bit? Where was the dorm? What was the dorm like?</p>
<p>Snyder: Sure. Initially, the City of Richland of course was all government owned. DuPont had had set up, and followed by General Electric company, setting up dorms for single women who were working onsite, and dormitories for single men. And the dorms for men were called M1, M2, M3, M4, whatever. And the women's dorms were called W. What W to do with it? And I was in M9 for a short time. And the company decided set up this dormitory for the single tech grads, and they didn't have an empty men's dorm so they set aside one of the women's dorms, W21. It was built on what would be the parking lot of Albertson's grocery store right now, down on Lee and Jadwin. And that was where I met Fox and McCormick and all these other guys that I still see occasionally today. But it was a whole different style. It was amazing. How could guys be shunted off into a supervised dormitory, practically a continuation of your freshman year in college? We had a house mother even, who made sure we were behaving, not having women into our rooms, and things like that. [LAUGHTER] And today kids would just have a—they would up-rise against this kind of thing. But all of us were pretty pliable. And we were still earning a living. I did get above $52 a week, finally. But still not earning great bucks at that time. So the dormitories, they were $11.50 a month, and the beds were made daily by maids that came in and helped clean up our rooms a little bit. So it was--</p>
<p>Bauman: How long did you live in the dorms?</p>
<p>Snyder: I lived in the dorm for two years. And then that's when I joined the group in Bauer Day house, and became friends with—you know. It's amazing how many people who started then are still alive and still at Richland. And even today we'll get together with maybe 15 guys who were part of dorm W21, and three of which, we're really still close friends. And so--</p>
<p>Bauman: I wanted to ask you about, what was it like living in Richland during the 1950s? What was Richland like as a community?</p>
<p>Snyder: Okay. It was--the government township made people feel very irresponsible about—they would rent a house, but the government owned it. So you have--you just paid your rent, $30 a month or whatever and got the comfort of having all of your fuel delivered weekly. And I think you did pay for groceries and things, but the town had a little bit of a government town—a company town situation. And people were good—the higher level--it was supposed to be a community that was totally non-status. Workers, and top dog managers, and presidents would all live in mixed up neighborhoods. You might live next door to a plumber, and there might be an electrical engineer in the next one. But that never worked, and the highbrow executives of the site did get all the houses along the river, which was called pill and skill drill hill, which was the doctors, the dentists, and the executives. And the rest of the population got nice houses, and no problem with it. But again, they're all government owned, and everybody rented them. But came 1958, this government town was sold to the occupants. The government got out of being responsible for any landlord responsibilities or any government--any town operation. And it—my dog is barking, you hear [LAUGHTER]--anyway, it changed. People really owned their own homes. And property was opened up where you could buy property and build your own house. So instead of all this very much alike, six or seven different kinds of houses were built, a large number of them, you now owned them, so you took care of them. But new property was available so that you could build your own house. And that all happened in 1958. The town got a mayor. Fox's first predecessor was a lady named—I can't remember. It was more of a—there was a city council. The city council worked with the General Electric Company and the AEC people to start running our own city. And then in '58 when it was all sold, they literally became the honest government for the town. And they had to set up company-owned, company-operated—I mean privately owned, city-owned fire departments, police stations, and all that kind of thing. By that time, private industry had come in and built the large chain grocery stores like Safeway, and Albertson's, and all those. And the health business had been all company owned, but the Kadlec Medical Center was set up, and it was private again. You went to doctors who were your own. The initial facilities were very primitive. They were just like government military operations. The hospital where all my children were born was just an old clapboard building that could have been any army fort in the country. But it turned private, and it started building on an enterprise basis more so. I bought one of the lots a little bit north of town, and by that time, I had three children in the Bauer Day house. But we built a larger home up on--a block off from the river but--up on Enterprise, which still exists. And the home we built, we had an architect, and we contracted it out. So it was very much a private-type operation. It was not a development house or something. And we lived in that house until two years ago, until 2000—was that it? No, 2011. We had built our house, and we had lived in it then until, like I said, 2011. So it just became a regular community, a regular life. The whole country's looking at Hanford. It was very accepted when it was an important part of defense. We were building weapons as fast as we could to keep up with Russia. The whole Cold War lasted that long period of time, so it was very solid employment. But it was not looked at negatively like today. Today, Hanford being the biggest waste dump in the world is not thought of really highly by a lot of environmentalists and other people like that. [LAUGHTER] It's slowly being realized, but up until that time, it was very patriotic. People thought, yay, we've won the war. We'll continue to be safe; we'll have the biggest arsenal in the world, be able to maintain our security and safety. And then when that was no longer that important, and they shut down the Hanford plutonium operation, the taking care of all the waste products that had been created, stored in the big tanks, stored in crypts and things like that, became a negative to the environmentalists. And so then Hanford site is still accepted and known to be important, but didn't enjoy that win-the-war patriotism, everyone thought highly of you, type situation.</p>
<p>Bauman: I wonder about, especially during those early years in the 1950s, any community events that stand out, that you remember?</p>
<p>Snyder: Oh, yeah. There was no real social facility in the town. There was the VFW, the Veteran Foreign's where they had a bar and a dance place. The city itself provided a lot of recreation in the way of athletic courts, tennis courts, swimming pool, and that. But pretty much, you made up your own entertainment. And things were formed like the Dormitory Club, and they would go on hikes at least two to three times a month during the summer. And the Alpine Club would go on climbs. And the athletic events, the local softball teams and things like that went on. But pretty much you made--you used those facilities, but you were responsible yourself to. If you wanted to have a party, you had it in your home. You didn't have a party in some commercial facility. There were no real bars or things like that. There's one place I remember though. When the government sold off the town, and the facilities were no longer needed, people may remember what was called the Mart. And it was like the dining halls out in the Areas. It was a big facility that serve meals to the people who worked in town or people who were off shift and need to go eat. And so it was a huge cafeteria where food was served in great quantities at low price, but when the place sold off, that became pretty passé. You know, people were no longer interested in living like a company town. You're more interested in having clubs built and things like that. And so early on, this Mart building, which was an eating hall mostly, had in the back end of it a little bar with a guy whose name I forget, played a Lowrey organ. And those were the most popular thing in the world with Carmen Miranda and other such names who played that. So we would go down there and dance, or we would go there and have drinks and stuff. And the VFW was popular. And there were other places that got built ultimately. The—what was the Red Robin for a while was earlier on a V-named guy. Anyway, it was a regular commercial eating place. There were places to dance, and there were—something like that. So the early town was pretty much, do it on your—do-it-yourself with your own friends. You didn't get to do anything. A big thing though was the Richland Players, a community acting group, was initiated. And the Richland Light Opera Company, who put on pretty much Broadway musicals, came about. And they did really good work. And Richland Players—I can't recall the names of the plays—but some of the musicals that went on with Richland Light Opera were like <em>Annie Get Your Gun</em>, and <em>Show Boat</em>, the ongoing things. They still produce good plays and good musicals. So that was kind of a way to entertain yourself, and would we spent a lot of time supporting groups like that.</p>
<p>Bauman: I wanted to ask you also about things like Atomic Frontier Days or any things like--</p>
<p>Snyder: Oh, okay. When I first came here the Atomic Frontier Days was an annual celebration of the town, very much like any small Western town. And there was a parade, and there is a Miss Frontiers Day elected. And there was the beard growing thing, who could grow the biggest beard. And a little later on, it turned into the Water Follies, which was the whole Tri-Cities, and that was the beginning of the very big scale hydroplane racing, the Unlimiteds. And they raced on the Columbia right out of Kennewick. And so the Frontier Days folded totally, and Tri-City Days, or whatever it's called now, came into being, which is a much more lavish production, much more important.</p>
<p>Bauman: I know President Kennedy visited the Hanford site in 1963.</p>
<p>Snyder: Right.</p>
<p>Bauman: I wondered if you were onsite at the time, if you have any memories of his visit?</p>
<p>Snyder: Yeah, he came out to inaugurate the N Reactor. It was the first reactor that was not like the old original reactors that didn't produce any power or anything. The N Reactor both produced plutonium, but it also took the heat off the reactor operations with a big turbine and made electricity. And Kennedy came out—that was a pretty important thing nationwide, at least in the nuclear industry—and told people how great they had done and how important it was. And I didn't go out to it, but many of my friends did. And Kennedy was--everybody really liked President Kennedy—anyway, Democrats did. And I was a Democrat, so that made it one for one. And it was just a big deal. Earlier than that, other Presidents had done things out here, like—oh, the McNary Dam when it was built. I think it was President Eisenhower, may not--might have been a little later that--came out and dedicated that facility. And then even after that, we had President Nixon come and visit. And he landed in his helicopter in the new Battelle buildings, the Battelle research area, which was quite glamorous and very beautiful compared to the old facilities, and gave us a good spiel. And this was while he was still somewhat in vogue, you know, before the Cooks bit and Watergate and things like that. [LAUGHTER] And we all loved him, and we waved him off. And we were glad that he dipped his wings to show that he approved of the place. But so the site later on--and even early on with like the McNary Dam and things--had some national popularity, or some popular awareness at least. A lot of people really never did know of Hanford, and may still not, but at least it's a well--a better-known facility. And its purpose is, I hope, better understood by the public, creating an atomic bomb. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Bauman: Are there any--were there any incidents, events, things that happened that--during the years working a Hanford that really sort of stand out in your memory?</p>
<p>Snyder: It doesn't pop into mind. That's not a good statement is it? [LAUGHTER] But it was pretty much an even-keel life for me. It just flowed nicely. You worked hard, you earned money. But you were not--you didn't become a national figure, and that was okay. It's just—it gave a whole bunch of us--I think the '50s were considered to be the best generation’s support that ever happened. It was a good time, and excuse me, a good time to live. I'm getting cracked up.</p>
<p>Bauman: I wonder what you consider, like, the most challenging aspects of working Hanford, and maybe the most rewarding aspects of working there.</p>
<p>Snyder: Of course rewarding was earning a living. A satisfaction in what you did, your coworkers, the local community—that was a big plus. No single event that stands out, like I won a Nobel prize or anything like that. [LAUGHTER] But very good, and so that was a very plus thing that stands out. Negative, other than some of the change of the environment, the Cold War ended, thank goodness, and our--the need for Hanford became less, so there was just some less feeling of being critical to the well-being of United States. We still feel it's very important, but not as critical as it was in early days.</p>
<p>Bauman: You talked a little bit earlier about the Cold War and the importance of being part of that, sense of patriotism.</p>
<p>Snyder: And earlier than the Cold War even. The Korean War, and there were still some wars going on, but no atomic as it was called in those days. No nuclear weapons were required.</p>
<p>Bauman: Right. Most of the students I teach now were born after the Cold War.</p>
<p>Snyder: Yeah.</p>
<p>Bauman: After the Cold War ended. And they have no memories of it, and know very little about it, so I guess my question would be, what would you like today's younger generation or future generations to know about working at Hanford, Richland during that period?</p>
<p>Snyder: I think to some degree Hanford has a negative connotation. And I guess I would like for it to be known--excuse me--Can we just cut it off for a second?</p>
<p>Bauman: That’s fine.</p>
<p>Snyder: Whoa!</p>
<p>Bauman: It's okay.</p>
<p>Snyder: I told Peg I might do this.</p>
<p>Bauman: Mm-hmm, it’s all right.</p>
<p>Snyder: I guess we can go on. I'll compose myself.</p>
<p>Bauman: Sure.</p>
<p>Snyder: Oh I was--I would like for it to be known that—I can't say it.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay, it’s all right. We can skip to something else if you want. That's fine.</p>
<p>Snyder: I don't know. Excuse me. I have no idea why this is becoming so real.</p>
<p>Bauman: It's all right.</p>
<p>Snyder: Are you leaving, hon? Oh, aren't you going to go to the store?</p>
<p>Peg Snyder: Well, I can't get the car out, so we're just going to go a couple of blocks.</p>
<p>Bauman: Oh, my car’s in the way.</p>
<p>Peg: That's okay. We're going to go in a couple of hours.</p>
<p>Snyder: What's wrong with the car? What's wrong with the car?</p>
<p>Peg: They’re parked in front of the garage.</p>
<p>Bauman: We're parked on your driveway.</p>
<p>Snyder: Oh, okay.</p>
<p>Man one: But we can--I can move stuff if you want.</p>
<p>Peg: No big deal.</p>
<p>Snyder: Maybe—are we about wound up, do you think?</p>
<p>Bauman: Yes, I just had one or two items—one or two questions.</p>
<p>Snyder: I see. Well, I was trying to say, the acceptance of Hanford--the need for it--I would like to be known.</p>
<p>Bauman: One of thing I want to ask you about is, I understand you were very involved with the Richland Library.</p>
<p>Snyder: Not the Richland Library, no. The Technical Library at Hanford.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay. That's what you were talking about in terms of the declassification.</p>
<p>Snyder: Yes. And the provision of technical information—books, reports, anything that provided that.</p>
<p>Bauman: Okay, great. All right. Anything that I haven't asked you about that you would like to talk about, that you think be important to talk about?</p>
<p>Snyder: No, I think I pretty well covered my relationship at Hanford. It's been a good one. And you've done a good job.</p>
<p>Bauman: Well, I want to thank you for talking to me today and letting us come to your house--</p>
<p>Snyder: Oh, sure.</p>
<p>Bauman: --and interview you. We really appreciate it.</p>
<p>Snyder: You're more than welcome.</p>
<p>Bauman: Thanks for--</p>
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:46:49
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
230 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
703 building
200 East
271-T Area
B Plant
100 area
330-233B Area
300 Area
271 Canyon
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
ca1950-2013
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
ca1950-1955; ca1960-1990;
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Fox, John
McCormick, Gerry
McEwen, Larry
Parker, Herb
Scott, Art
Stevens, Chris
Miranda, Carmen
Kennedy, John F.
Eisenhower, Dwight D.
Nixon, Richard
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Wayne Snyder
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Wayne Snyder conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Subject
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Hanford (Wash.)
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant (Wash.)
Hanford Nuclear Site (Wash.)
Date
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2013-9-4
Rights
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Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2016-07-21: Metadata v1 created – [RG]
100 Area
271 Canyon
300 Area
330-233B Area
B Plant
Building 200 East
Building 703
DuPont
General Electric
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-1963
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Richland (Wash.)
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fef770d057cbd7fcd5e879acb0e88b207.jpg
4163a90a24db7d167a6eaea91a7561ee
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F607e136b0c77f3d9db0c55df91e50740.mp4
9f34d5ceebf274acb1217462d6100458
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Description
An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items.
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Bauman, Robert.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Copeland, Harold.
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri Cities
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:49:48
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
602 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
200 Area
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Reduction-Oxidation Plant (REDOX)
Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant (PUREX)
3000 Area
T Plant
184 steam power plants
1100 Building
100 Area
184 Building
Dash-5 Building
221-T
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1947-2013
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1947-1987
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Windchimer, WW
Hall, Lee
Hill, Verne
Lettingham, Jay
Copeland, RW
Galloway, Elijah
Chein, Yao
Madison, Web
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><strong><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Northwest Public Television | </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Copeland_Harold</span></span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></strong></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Robert Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, we can go ahead and get started with the interview.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Harold Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Sure.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So first I'm going to have you say your name and then spell it also.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Yes. I am Harold Copeland, Harold Curtis Copeland, </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">H</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">-A-R-O-L-D C-U-R-T-I-S C-O-P-E-L-A-N-D.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">All </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">right. And my name’s Robert Bau</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">man and today is August 6, of 2013. And we're conducting oral history</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And so we're going to be talking about your</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">experiences working in the Hanford site. So I wonder if we could start by having you tell me first, how you came to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Hanford, when you got here, any first impressions of the place, any of that.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">My wife and I came here from Denver, Colorado in October 1947. I was working for the Bureau of Reclamation.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">They were decentralizing their main office, sending people to all the field offices. General Electric came in</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">recruiting and they had received word of this decentralization, looking for engineers.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So there were a number of us that thought that's a good opportunity, so we came out here, 1947. We're driving</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">our little three-window Ford Coupe and towing my Harley motorcycle on back. And the first impression of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Richland was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> pretty grim. We came into town and all we saw were these flat-topped, prefab houses. They didn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">have their peak roofs yet. And there was dust in the road and not hardly any trees.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But we came here. General Electric said there's a job for five years. Well, for the first four or five years, we kept</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">thinking</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">, when do we go back to Colorado?</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> I grew up in Colorado. See, it's a neat place in Fort Collins and I</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">graduated from CSU there, so naturally, it was like home.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But after five years, we began to like this place. We had the Colu</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">mbia River, the Yakima River, ha</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">d the Blue</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Mountains, the Cascades, and the ocean, and fishing in the ocean not too far away. So we made it our home for</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">all these years.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And when you</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> and your wife</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> first came, what sort of housing did you live in first?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">They were </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">building houses rapidly. The A and B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> houses, a lot of those were up and people living in them and prefabs,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">as I mentioned. Our first few months, we were living with Lee Hall and his son, 700 Sanford, in a two-bedroom</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">prefab. And a wife and I got the small bedroom.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">She was pregnant when we got here. December 7, the Pearl Harbor Day, but in 1947, our first daughter was born</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">and there was pretty cramped conditions with the baby beside the bed and then a two-bedroom prefab, well, the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">crying at night. She had not gotten used to sleeping at night.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But Lee Hall said he had one bad ear. He says, put her out in the living room and let her cry out there. I'll just turn</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">my good ear down and I won't hear her. So we did and the crying session and nothing happened from it. Finally</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> got the message </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">to Dian</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">e that she was supposed to sleep at night, so that was nice.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And Lee Hall was so glad to have a woman in the house to do cooking and do furniture. She did curtains and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">changing paint and putting a woman's touch on</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the house like women can do that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> men don't have any idea about.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, she did that and he was very pleased to have us with us, but they were building the pre-cut houses. And we</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">get in along about in the '48, it was probably in March or April, the pre-cut houses were ready to be occupied. We</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">move</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">d to a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> two-bedroom pre-cut. Lee</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Hall was most depressed and dej</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ected because we were leaving and taking all</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">his good drapes away.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So we lived at 700 Sanford for several years until about, I think it was </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">1973, our second child was born. S</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">o on the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">housing list, we were eligible for a bigger house, a three bedroom. We were in a two bedroom.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">It so happened I was working with the engineer, Verne Hill was his</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> name. And he lived out on Atkins. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd he said,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">they had a housing list. Big </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">board behind the glass, a housing </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">list was posted. You'd go down and apply for housing</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that became available. Verne told me his next door neighbor was moving, so I applied for that house before it was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">posted, see? So I was first on the list of eligibility for the house and we got the house at 209 Atkins because of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Verne.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> And it—they were well-built houses, number one </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">grade lumber, and it's been a very durable and good place to live over the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">years.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Where was this housing list that you mentioned? Where was that?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">They had sort of a housing department located in the vicinit</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">y, very close to where the Rich</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">land Police</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Department is, acro</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ss the street from the Federal B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">uilding would be. But they would post this housing list and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">people that were eligible to move would go in and apply.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And how would you describe the town of </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Richland</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> at the time in the late '40s and early '50s? What kind of place</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was it to live?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Very safe place. Good schools. Good housing. No crime. Everybody that worked at Hanford had had their</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">background checks. They wouldn't hire any criminals or</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> background violators. So we could</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> leave our cars unlocked,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">we could leave our doors unlocked, and it was a very safe place. The main thing was security for the plant.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">The plant operation security was very, very strict then, but living conditions were very good. They had 700</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">420</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Wright Street. We rented the house. $38 a month. It's a two-bedroom pre-cut called a U house. And the electricity</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was furnished, the water, the sewer. They even give you grass seed to plant your lawn, and if you had some</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">maintenance to be done in the house, call them up and they'd come and fix it.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">The wind blew a lot. There were no ranch houses at</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> that time. And the wind came—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">they started building the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ranch houses. The soil was all very fluffy and stirred up and we would get one of those terminator winds as they</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">were called, the way they would blow dirt into our yard. And there was a terminator wind and there was probably</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">three to four inches of sand blew into our front yard.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">The way they took care of it was the fire department came out with their tanker trucks and hoses and hosed this</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">off of our lawns. They also learned, they gave you the plant seed, but they only gave you enough seed for just</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">about one quarter of your lawn at a time. When you get it going, then they give you seed for the next section.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Trying to water it and keep it growing, the whole thing they learned, was too much for the residents. So it was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">very safe, good place to live.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Do you remember any community events, any special events sort of things in the community during that time?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Community events, the one that comes to mind, there were probably some but I can't think </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> was the boat races</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd it was called the Atomic Cup, which nowadays is not politically correct. The</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">y</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">call it the Columbia River, then it</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was the Atomic Cup for several years. And it used to be a nice place to go and watch the boats, but recent years,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">they're so crowded and unruly people that I don't have any reason to go down there.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Let's talk about your work in Hanford then. What was the first job that you had when you first came to Hanford in</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">1947?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, my degree is in mechanical engineering and that's what I was doing in Denver with the Bureau of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Reclamation. They came out here and I had an engineering job in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I think they call it the 1100 Building</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> It was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">a single story Army barracks type of building. It </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was in the </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">location of, I would say where the parking lot is now</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">on</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the lower side of the Federal B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">uilding. That was its location.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And so I</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> worked there until I got my Q</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> clearance and then I was sent to 200</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea after I got the clearance. After</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I got to the 200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea, they were in search of instrument engineers. No college courses taught instrumentation.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> The one up in Yaki</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ma was teaching good technicians and the one</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> up</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> at Milwaukee had good technicians, but no</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">engineering.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, I'd been in the Navy and my training in the </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Navy was with electronics gear:</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> radio, transmitter, receiver,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">sonar, LORAN, and there might have been something else. So I had a lot of this electronic training and I had one</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">semester of electrical engineering at Colorado State.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So I transferred over to instrument engineering and </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">shortly after I got to the 200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea and followed that through all</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">my time there as an instrument engineer.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So what sorts of duties did you have </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">then? What sorts of things might</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> you do on a typical work day?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, I would work with the instrument technicians, help them with their work. If they needed new parts, I would go</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">write purchase orders. If some of the instruments were getting old and wearing out and needed total replacement,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> I would write orders</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> for those and oversee the installation and help the craftsmen, the instrument techs with calibration.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">There's one funny story that </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">just can't forget. Most of my work, some, not all, but most of my works in the 184</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">steam power plants, which provided the steam for emergency use during outages</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd this took place at the N</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Reactor,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> at</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the 184. And he was an instrument specialist. And he was the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">what do you call them? The steward. He</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was the instrument steward for their craft, Jay </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Lettingham</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And we'd gotten all these new </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Foxborough</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> D</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">P cells in</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> that we were installing to replace some other instruments</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that were obsolete. There's a much, much better system and we were in this little instrument shop in the 184</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">uilding and I was reading the manual and he was trying to turn the screws and nuts to get it calibrated. And he</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">tried and it didn't work and he tried and it didn't work.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And then what he did,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> well,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> he said, here, you take these tools. And so I did it and showed him how to do it. He being a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">steward, see, I wasn't supposed to pick up a tool or touch one, but he had me do it.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> I thought that was a real</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">amusing situation, but we got along. We worked as a team.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Mm-hm. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And how long did you work at the N Reactor then?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, N reactor from about 19</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">probably '66 to '87. I retired in 1987. But my first work was assigned in the 200</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">reas. And I was fortunate. One day, I got in on the startup of the </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">234-5, which they now call the P</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">lutonium</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Finishing P</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">lant, but in those days you're probably aware that they named the plants and the facilities in a name that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">did not relate at all to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> what they did. See? Plutonium Finishing P</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">lant would have been giving away a secret, so it</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was 234-5.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Everybody referred to it as the Dash-</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">5 B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">uilding.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I was there on the construction and startup of 234-5, mainly working on heating and </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ventilation. Had three big air</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> supply</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> filters and washers and fans for the building and it was a real tough ventilation because there were three</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">separate pressure </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">zones. The office zones were the higher pressure and the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">n there was an intermediate zone.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd the zone where the hoods and the work was done was the lowest pressure so that all contamination wouldn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">flow from the work area to the shops and clean areas. And it was very difficult to get those pressures to be stable</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">and maintained.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I got in on the </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">construction and startup of REDOX</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> plant. And then I also got in on the construction and startup of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">P</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">UREX. Now, part of the PUREX</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> work, I had an of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">fice under Webster in the 3000 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea, North </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Richland</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">, where we</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">were working on design work and approving drawings and specifying the type of instruments to be procured. Then</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I got to go out to the field and saw them being installed.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And I worked for Copeland, R</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">W</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Copeland. That was a coincidence. No relation that I know of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> but he was a good</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">guy to work for. He was, I think, </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Blaw</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">-</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Knox Construction, if I remember right, that he was in charge of all</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">the construction there. So I got well acquainted with a lot of welders and pipe fitters and electricians</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">everybody worked together. It was a very cooperative effort in those days.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Your first job was with GE, right?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">General Electric, yes.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And then what other contractors did you work with?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, it was, I think about 1964. GE's contract was running out. They chose not to want to extend it and so United</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Nuclear came in and took</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> over the contract for the 100 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">reas and I think Westinghouse had a contract. There</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">were s</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">everal contractors for the 200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea, so Uniroyal and couple others. I don't remember the name, but</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">anyway, Un</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ited Nuclear took over the 100 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea, so I worked for them and retired for them.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And the plant was down in 19</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I got my neat belt buckle. 20 years, 1964 to 1984. So the plant went down in 1984,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">but I retired in 1987. The neat thing I remember doing there, our maintenance work could only be done when the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">reactor was down. The reactor running was producing plutonium and steam for the steam plant. That was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">money earner, so the downtime was kept at a minimum.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">When it went down for good and we thought that it was always going to restart, we went in and replaced a lot of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">tubing and instruments, valves with upgraded material, upgraded design. And</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> we thought—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I believe that that plant was in</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">better condition, had better equipment than when it first started up a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd we always had that hope that—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">we didn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">have any doubt at </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that time--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that it was going to start up again and that all this good stuff in it was really going to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">run good.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But then because of the Chernobyl incident, the politicians shut it down. It didn't make a scientific and engineering</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">gradual shut down, which would have saved a lot of money in handling n</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">uclear fuel and processing it. But t</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">hey shut</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">her down because of Chernobyl.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> And I'm not a real good </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nuclear ph</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ysicist, but they think it's a two</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> factor or an n factor. You'd have to talk to a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nuc</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">lear person. But it was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> designed in this N Reactor so that it would not run away and meld itself like the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Chernobyl plant did. It was impossible, but the politicians didn't know that.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Obviously, security, secrecy were a big part of the Hanford site. Can you talk at all about how that part of it</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">impacted your work at all in any way or any interesting stories about security?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: Yeah. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Some of the security men would hang out in restaurants or bars. I never experienced this or saw it happen, but</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I've heard about it. And if the customers in there talked anything between themselves or anyone else about</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">anything, the work they were doing or what was going on out there, they were out the door. And most people</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">knew that and obeyed it very, very strictly.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">For a long time, my </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">wife and my daughter, see, they didn't know what I did out there. I couldn't tell them. I'd go to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">work in the morning and come back in the evening and ride the bus. So it was that tight</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd another fun</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ny</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> story, the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">kids in school were talking about what </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">does your daddy do out there? </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Of course, they didn't know. And they'd say, my daddy is making toilet paper. He brings it home and his lunchbox.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">It was one of the answers that the kid tha</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">t didn't know what's going on w</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">as doing because, I guess toilet paper at</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the times</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> was not readily available</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> but there </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was still always lots of it out</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> at the plant.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">JFK, President Kennedy came to visit.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">What's that?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: President Kennedy came in 1963--</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Yes.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> dedicate</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the N Reactor [INAUDIBLE]</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> came</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. What are your memories of that day?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">He dedicated the reactor. Well, I was working that day and didn't see it, but my wife and daughter went out and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">got to watch Kennedy designate. He moved the radioactive wand over the receiver and the motorized shovel, big,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">earth-moving shovel, scooped the first scoop of dirt out there, so the way I heard about it, he started it up.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Okay. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Were there any events that sort of stand out in mind from the years working? Any unusual happenings or strange</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">occurrences, sort of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> when you were working out at Hanford at that time</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> or funny stories?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: Yeah, I think </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> one</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> that was very amusing. The instrument techs who I worked with, all of them were a bunch of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">good guys. They would play jokes. They had subtle humor and played jokes on people, harmless type of things,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nothing to harm. This occurred in the 221-T, the s</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">eparations building in the 200 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">rea, 200 West.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And I'd often go over there early in the day, see the instrument foreman, what he was going to assign to the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">technicians and what was going on, what was to be done that day so that if it involved something that I needed to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">know, I would be there to hear about it. And one time, we had these ring balanc</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">e instruments, we called them pe</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">n</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> draggers. They had little pe</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ns. They would make a mark on a round chart, a moving chart and they were a very</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">small pen with ink in them and made a very small line.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And we were having this, I guess, a safety meeting was finished a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> we were talking to this</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">they had a secretary.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">The instrument foreman had a secretary. I think she was Eleanor, but I'm not sure. Well, one of the guys rigged</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> up one of these ink pens, held it about waist height</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> and he had a squeeze bulb with water in it and he squeezed it</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">right at Eleanor.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So she became all wet on her front side there and everyone was smiling and giggling and she didn't know what</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was going on until she looked.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> You couldn't see the stream it was so fine, see? It was a fine stream. I thought that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> was funny! </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Another one in the same building, at quitting time, the guys </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that have their lunch buckets se</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">t on the workbench and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">when the bell rang, it was time to go rush out and get on the bus and go home. So this one guy, he was especially</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">quick at grabbing his bucket and getting out so he could get a seat on the bus that he wanted.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, we had a lot of lead bricks. They're the sam</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">e size as red bricks that we have</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. This was a lead brick. They put</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">it in his lunch bucket and he came along and grabbed this lunch bucket and all he got was the handle on the top</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">part.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> That was a funny one.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I wonder what you see as were some of the more challenging aspects of working at Hanford were and what were</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">some of the most rewarding</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> parts about working at Hanford?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Challenging and rewarding. Well, the challenging</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> and to a certain respect of keeping the secrecy of the plant, one</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">of the challenging things was the dust storms called the terminators. And the rewarding thing, I think, was the men</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that I got to work with. They were all good guys, cooperative, pulling together. There was no territorial protection.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">If somebody knew something that the other guy didn't know, he would share it. That was very rewarding to me.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">There were different technical problems that I was faced with during the time, which we were able to take care of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">and never had any bad accidents.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And you were there for </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">40 years--</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Copeland: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Yes.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I imagine you must have seen some changes take place.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Many.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Either technological changes, </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">or </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">instruments. I wonder if there were any changes t</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">hat you saw that you thought were </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">important?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Yeah, there were a lot of changes. The older instruments in the power houses were</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">can't remember them. But</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> they ran on a five</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> to 25 psi signal. Then we got these newer </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Foxborough</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> i</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nstruments and then they were three </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">to 15</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">psi. And before I left, they were going to forward a 20 milliamp electrical instruments and controls.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And the computer age was just getting started when I retired. And they would allow computer measurements</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">was in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> 100 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">reas by then, of course—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nstruments, they would measure pressure temperature and position,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">could be done with computers, but the control the people had, the men, the operators had to maintain control.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">They allowed no computer control of the reactor. That was a lim</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">it at that time, but that's gotten</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> past that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> present</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> day. B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ut we had computer programs on the old IBM cards, punch cards, that punched the little square holes, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">there was a giant c</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">omputer in the basement of the Federal B</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">uilding. There was a Boeing computer facility and all</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">the cards went down there to be processed and problems and answers, solutions work out from that. That was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">just the beginning of that age that I just got in </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">on the start of it, but not any</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">more.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: The site, of course, at some</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> point, shifted from focus on production to focus on cleanup. I wonder if that shift</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">impacted your work at all, the sorts of things you </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">did?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Yeah. Well, to back up a little bit more, at one time, we had nine reactors up and down the river operating. And N</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Reactor was a first one in the country and maybe in the world that produced power. It was one of the first power</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">reactors</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> of which there are quite a few of them now. So that was a neat thing, but</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">give me your question again.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Oh, I was asking about the shift from production to cleanup.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">To cleanup. I got in on a little of that before I started working at N reactor, the other BDF and DN</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">DR we</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">re all being</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">shut down and I worked for Wind Chimer, WW Wind Chimer. We were on</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I was probably for about a year--helping with some of the cleanup on that and our motto, our mission was, </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">drain and dry the piping and store the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">mercury. That was our mission that we were doing.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">The other groups were doing other things, but I know that we were tending to that for the shutdown. And at that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">time, it was shut down, not that we were not involved in the cleanup yet.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But the shutting down of some of the reactors.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">M</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">m</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">-hm.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: I wonder if you could—so</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> in a sense, overall your experience workin</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">g at Hanford for those 40 years--</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">What about the overall?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Yeah, w</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">hat's your overall assessment of your 40 years working at Hanford? What are your thoughts about</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Oh, very proud. Very positive. I'm proud that I was able to work out there and support the Cold War effort. My first</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">job out of college was with Fairbanks Morse, Beloit, Wisconsin where they made the diesel engines for the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">submarines, the OP, opposed piston engi</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ne. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So I got to help with the war effort. Then I got the letter from my draft board that said, greetings, you are a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">selected volunteer, so that's when I got into the Navy. So I got into the Navy parts and then</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">, as</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> I told you I didn't have</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">to get shot at, but I was working during the war time, then out here for the Cold War. So I had those three parts of</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">my life, I think, contributing to the growth and the safety of our nation.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I want to ask you about your running.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Oh, yes.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">At some point, you got involved in running. When was that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> and how did that get started?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Elijah</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Galloway. Dear, dear friend who’s</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> gone now. He was the Brown Shoe Air Force, that's </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">the </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Army Air Corps.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Before</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the Air Force—the present day </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Air Force was formed, the Air Corps was a part of the Army. He said I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">part of the </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Brown Shoe Air Corps. So he flew</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> missions and did things, but one of the jobs where he got started</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">running was CIA, Russia.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Both he and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> his wife got trained. They had</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> probably most of a year of training in Russian and how to conduct</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">themselves as observers, but really getting spy information, but they were just </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">called observers over in Russia</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And then he participated in all the Russian parties. They had lots of caviar and vodka and pretty soon he was</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">overweight. And his doctor, when he went to Germany for a checkup or leave, he said, you need to lose weight.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So he encouraged him to start a running program, which he did</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd he lost weight and he lost weight and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">whenever he would go out on one of these surveillance programs, he'd just go out walking, then he got to running.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">He'd count the number of insulators on the power pool, just simple stuff that he could observe while he was out,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">then there was always a Russian counterpart that was with him and following him. He was a runner. And pretty</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">soon, Elijah got so good he could run out and leave this guy.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And so one time, the story he told me, he went out for his run with his counterpart, Russian guy, and he finished</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">his run and then he told the Russian guy, well, let's go out and run your course. Now, I want to run your course.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">He was too tired to do it.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">He was a specialist on antennas, jamming and communication, that was his specialty in his work. He had an</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">electrical engineering degree and antennas was his thing. And so he was involved in a lot of that communication</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">and jamming for the US over ther</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">e. The one amusing thing that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> was taught to his wife. The Russians would</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">have a big parade. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">They would have these big wheel movers with the missiles on them and they'd have a big</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">parade celebrating how great we are.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And Elijah and his wife,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Beryl, would have their trench </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">coats on and </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">have their Leica cameras down at waist</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> high,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">just barely pointing out between the buttons. And they would take pictures and just the time they'd click, they'd go,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [COUGH].</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> And there were always Russians around spying on them. If they heard a camera click, well, then bad news for</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">them. But they</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> could cover this up with [COUGH].</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Just cover it up the click of the camera. That was one of the neat</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">stories</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> that</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> he told me.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But from his experience with losing weight, he retired and his home was in San Antonio, Texas. And he couldn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">stand being retired</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">nd he'd gone to school with Paul Venter, a name that I mentioned. I think it was probably a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">t Whi</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">tworth. I'm not positive, but he knew Paul and he kept in touch over the years and Elijah didn't like being retired</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">and he had this electrical degree and Paul says, w</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">hy don't you come up to Hanford?</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> There's some jobs here.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Elijah came up here, got a job. He was my office partner and I think I already told you part of it, that he and Jerry</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">and I, in my office one day, Elijah said, let's go out on our noon break and go for a little run. Because it had meant</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">so much to him and he felt so much better getting down to a trim weight that he wanted to influence other people</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">to enjoy that sam</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">e feeling and the euphoria—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">the endorphins get into your body when you're running to where</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">you just feel like you're just going and can go forever. Of course, you can't, but you have that wonderful, elevated</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">feeling.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">He wanted to share that with everybody and I wanted to share it with other people too that I have run across in my</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">running years. So that was Elijah. It was about 1972 that this happened and I started running and within a year</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">later, I ran my first marathon.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">He coached me on how to train for a marathon. It feels good, but don't keep going further than</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> you know,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">increasing not more than 10% or a few miles each day. Hold a very strict schedule of gradual training and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">conditioning. Because if you do try and get too much, you get injured, disappointed, then you quit running. That</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">has happened, so one thing that he taught me and another people. And so we ran</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> the old</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> Cheney Marathon up at</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Cheney, Washington.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And that Cheney Marathon only lasted, I think, about three years and they discontinued it. But the neat thing</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> I still</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">hold the first place for 50 age division at the Cheney Marathon. No one came along later and beat my record</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">because the marathon was stopped.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> A lot of oth</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">er marathons, why, </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">someone e</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">lse comes along when they turn </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">60 and they beat my record.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">That's how I got start</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ed running and I'm </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> advocate of—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">f not running, I swim or bike or kayak, whatever suit</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">s</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> your</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">fancy, whatever you feel good doing, do it, but keep doing something.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: Sounds like you were</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> running pretty regularly at your last time period working at Hanford.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Pretty regular. My routine for many years</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> was up at 4:30. Do my toilet</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ing, strap on my shorts and shoes, out</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">the door at 5:00. I'd run 7 miles in an hour and I was back to the house and Evelyn would have breakfast. I'd quick</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">shower and get breakfast and then I'd catch the bus at 6:30, about a two-block walk from my house, catching the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">bus.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> That was my routine, seven</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> miles </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">every weekday morning and then six</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> miles at noon with the guys at N Reactor. So I</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">got 13 miles a day, weekdays. Saturday was the long run day. Do 20 or 22 miles. You have to have some long</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">distance training to train your body to learn to burn fat when you run out of glycogen.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And the person I did that most with was my dear Chin</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ese running friend, Yao Ming </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Chein</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">“</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Chee-</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">in.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">”</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> We would meet</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Saturday and run our 20 to 22 miles. Sunday was a rest day, so I'd ride my bike about 15 miles. That's a different</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> exercise. It rested your</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> running muscles.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Bu</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">t </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Che</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">in</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">, I remember, he would, at one of our wedding anniversary parties, Yao Ming and is wife were there and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">I was introducing him and he says, </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Chein</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">, E before I. He says I before E and everything except </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Chein</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">, C-H-E-I-N.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">It wasn't C-H-I-N as Chin, but he was </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span class="SpellingError SCX243576330">Chein</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. That made a difference to him.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So he's still around. He lives over in Bellevue. I talk to him every once in a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> while. We formed a—a </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">lot of marathoners, you form a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">bonding, a marathon bonding with these people that you run 26 miles with and you look for them and wonder how</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">they are and if they're not at the next marathon, you wonder if they're ill or accident or anything happened. It's a</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">bond that, it's hard to describe, but it's there.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Is there any things that I haven't asked you about in terms of your working at Hanford that you think is important to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">talk about and would like to talk about that you haven't talked about so far?</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">There's one </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">more funny</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> that I didn't incl</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">ude. We were working at the PUREX </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">plant, 200 </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">East</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. And this instrument</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">specialist, Web Madison was his name, he</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">to back up a bit, they needed instrument technicians that could find</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">work and work on instruments.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So they were looking for watchmakers, all search the country. Watchmakers would qualify. They knew how to do</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">fine, delicate work. Well, there were a lot of watchmakers out there because there was no training for them early</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">on except, later they had the Yakima, forget the name of it, instrument school and the one in Milwaukee.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">But Web had tooth problem, teeth all decayed. So he had upper and lo</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">wer plates, all new plates. Had </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">them</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> built</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">by the dentist, you know, nice. And then the one thing that I'm leading up to, if an instrument needed a part and</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">you couldn't buy it, they could make it and they could build parts that were broken and replace th</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">em,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> they</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">were so good.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">So Web got his new teeth and he looked at them real close. He built himself a set of stainless steel teeth, a whole</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">set of stainless steel teeth. And one night when he come off shift and through the badge house, the guard always</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">looked at you and looked at your badge and he'd know who you are and he knew who he was. They checked him</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">out. But he flashed those stainless steel teeth at the guard and the guard just about fell over. It was a riot.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Another thing they did, they were practical jokers. Another thing they did there to the going off shift, I didn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">observe this, but I heard about it. An instrument tech, they were getting ready to go off shift and they called up at</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">the badge house and said, we're going to flush the phone lines. And we want you to unhook your phone, take</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">your phone off and just hold it while we flush the lines.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">And so he did that and they took some air nozzle and made some noises. It sounded like flushing noise</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">s</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">. And then</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">he went up to check out to catch the bus and they really ribbed that guard. What in the world are you doing on the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">phone.</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Oh, they had him put it in the basket. They had him put it in the wastebasket. What are you doing in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">wastebasket? Practical jokes like that. There are so many of them </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">that—</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">so</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> good to think about.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for coming in today and sharing your stories and experiences. I appreciate it.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">It was my pleasure. I am hopeful and I'm sure that what you're doing will be very educational and important to</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">your students over the coming years. So I want to thank you for doing this work.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Bauman</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">Well, I'm glad to be a part of it. Thanks again.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX243576330"><span class="TextRun SCX243576330"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Copeland</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">M</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">m</span><span class="TextRun SCX243576330">-hm.</span><span class="EOP SCX243576330"> </span></p>
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Harold Copeland
Description
An account of the resource
Harold Copeland was an instrument engineer on the Hanford Site from 1947-1987. <br /><br />An interview with Harold Copeland conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Richland (Wash.)
Nuclear instruments & methods
Nuclear weapons--History.
Nuclear weapons industry
Nuclear weapons industry--United States--Employees.
Nuclear weapons plants
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2016-04-22: Metadata v1 created - DMO
2016-07-08: Metadata v1 created -[J.G.]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
8/6/2013
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item.
Format
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video/mp4
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection.
100 Area
1100 Building
184 Building
184 steam power plants
200 Area
221-T
3000 Area
Cheney (Wash.)
Chernobyl Nuclear Accident
Dash-5 Building
General Electric
Hanford Site (Wash.)
N Reactor
Nuclear waste disposal
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant (PUREX)
Reduction-Oxidation Plant (REDOX)
Richland (Wash.)
Running
Secrecy
T Plant
United Nuclear Corporation
United States. Bureau of Reclamation