Victor Vargas: Yeah, we should be good.
Robert Franklin: Ready?
Vargas: Yeah.
Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin and I am conducting an oral history interview with Ann Roseberry on January 25th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Ann about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record can you state and spell your name for us?
Ann Roseberry: Yes. Ann Roseberry. A-N-N R-O-S-E-B-E-R-R-Y.
Franklin: Great. Thank you so much. Tell me how you came to Richland.
Roseberry: Well, I was born here.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: I was conceived here. My folks met after the war. Dad had been active in the Air Force and came here to work for GE. Mom was recruited by General Electric, so she came out from Chicago. When she got here, he was a personnel manager for GE, and he gave her her first day orientation, and promptly asked her out to dinner. So that was 1948.
Franklin: 1948.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: I was going to say that probably wouldn’t fly with the human resources department nowadays.
Roseberry: I’m fairly certain not. So they married in 1950, and I was born in 1951. And just grew up here, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. And where did you live? Or where did your parents live in Richland?
Roseberry: Okay, they lived at 710 Stanton, which was a precut. Stanton is a little two-block street that runs perpendicular to Lee. So we had a two-block walk to Marcus Whitman Elementary.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Yeah, I live on that street, too, as you know.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: So what was it—so you, then, would have been about seven when Richland was privatized.
Roseberry: Yes, yeah.
Franklin: So what do you—what can you recall about those—your early childhood or those early years? Maybe from your own experiences or what your parents told you about that early Cold War era, government-owned era of Richland?
Roseberry: Yeah. Well, in regard to the 1958, I remember Mom and Dad talking about showing me a piece of paper that they were buying the house. As a seven-year-old, it wasn’t terrifically meaningful to me, but I understood that it was to them. That same year, my youngest sister was born and we added a room onto our house, the precut. So those actually have more primacy in my recollection than the thing that meant more to Mom and Dad.
Franklin: Sure.
Roseberry: But I do remember that. And I probably, at the time, said—because children do—oh, how much does the house cost? And Mom would have replied, we don’t ask those questions, dear. So just one little example of a culture of secrecy that I’ll—yeah. We—I guess my elementary school years, in some way were both peaceful—the idyllic, small town family life—but punctuated by the air raid drills, where we would get under our desks or go out into the hall and line up against the hall in a sort of a crouching position. Or now what we would call pose-of-a-child in yoga. But as flat on the ground and as taking up as least space as we could.
Franklin: Mm-hm. Did you ever do the kind of drills with the evacuation routes, where the families would drive out to a spot in the desert?
Roseberry: Yeah. We did once, but the school children were bussed. So as we were—I actually have a fairly strong recollection of that, because it was terrifying. That I was alone on the bus. And I remember counting on my fingers, where’s Mom, where’s Dad, where are my sisters? Trying to sort of get a mental picture of where they were. Because even though we knew it was a drill, we were in a bus by ourselves being driven somewhere. So, we never went out as a family in our car.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: What did your mother do for GE?
Roseberry: She came out—her training was as an x-ray technician. So, she came out and—I won’t get all the timing of this right, but at one point, she worked for early Kadlec. And then went out to the Project and she was x-raying samples. What they were samples of, I’m not clear. But samples. But inanimate samples. I remember her talking about her work environment and that the badges, they were also radiation detectors and would indicate when the human body had had enough. But she said that she also had frequent x-rays of her hands. And she said that—the term was hot—hot hands—when she had hot hands, it meant that she had had enough radiation and she had to not do that work for a while. So.
Franklin: Radiation from the handling the samples, or radiation from the x-rays?
Roseberry: I think from the samples. There are a lot of things where—we were raised in a culture of don’t ask questions. So often, if I would have asked a question, she would have said, well, they were samples. And that would have been the end of the discussion. So, rocks, pieces of equipment, I don’t know. But something that for some reason she was x-raying, but they would have been giving radioactivity, yeah.
Franklin: Hmm. Do you know where your mother worked on the Site? Did she talk about the Area? Do you know if she worked at 300, 200?
Roseberry: I don’t know. When Dad was out onsite, he was at 200-West.
Franklin: Oh, because he was still personnel manager at that time, or--?
Roseberry: Well, I don’t think so. When we would ask him what his job was, he would just say a manager. And that’s really all I know. In probably the last maybe 10 or 15 years of his working career, he was transferred into the Federal Building. And what he said then was that he was writing or editing technical reports. And he did have a master’s in English, so that’s credible. But I don’t actually know that that’s what he was doing. In the earlier years, it was just, I’m a manager. So questions like that, that a child would ask, we were given an answer and we just accepted the answer.
Franklin: Sure, sure. Did he have any other technical training, besides a master’s in English? Did he have any training that would fit to be more site-specific? Like, production-specific?
Roseberry: I don’t think so. When he was talking about the later years and technical reports, he made the comment that scientists and engineers, their work often needed editing by someone who had a better understanding of the English language. So—and he was a published author; he was a skilled writer. So all of this is very credible to me, but I just don’t really know that he was doing that from the ‘50s through the ‘80s.
Franklin: What kinds of work did he publish or write?
Roseberry: Fiction, primarily. Fiction. He had a book that came out right before Pearl Harbor, Bobbs-Merrill, and he had just started on the author promotion tour when Pearl Harbor was bombed. So pretty much the next day he went and signed up and served stateside in—it was then the Army Air Corps, because he had had an injury. And almost literally to his dying day, that—he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t gone overseas. He felt that he hadn’t really quite done what he should, because he hadn’t been overseas. But then after retirement, he published a couple more fiction books and wrote some family histories, but mostly it was—he was a fiction writer, yeah.
Franklin: Okay. You mentioned that your mother talked about her work environment. Did she ever talk about the gender makeup of her environment, or her experience of a woman working out onsite?
Roseberry: She talked about a couple of men who she worked with right in her unit. And very warmly. Very—it clearly was a comfortable work environment for her. I’m interpreting from what she said that they were older than she was. She was in her mid-20s and very cute. But a very modest woman. Raised in the Midwest, small town in Iowa. So her comments came across as if they were avuncular or fatherly to her—warm, but not anything uncomfortable for her. Yeah. So that’s about all of her comments. I know she was back and forth between Kadlec and the Site during those years. She would have worked roughly from 1948 to 1951. I was born in March of ’51, and possibly she had to quit work before that because she was working with radiation.
Franklin: Are you the oldest?
Roseberry: I’m the oldest.
Franklin: Okay, so after you were born, she stopped working to be your full-time—
Roseberry: Yeah. There were three of us, so she stayed home until the year I turned 13, I believe. And then she went back to work part-time x-ray at the Richland Clinic, which is no longer a clinic. But—and then she worked through until retirement.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: Can you tell me about growing up in the prefab neighborhood? Because it’s slightly—from what I understand they’re slightly different than the Alphabet House neighborhoods in terms of not only the character of the houses but the income levels of the residents.
Roseberry: Yeah. We were—some of what I will tell you, to give a caveat, is my recollection. And I was a child at the time, so I had my own lens. But in our particular neighborhood, which is to say the one block, every person who lived in that neighborhood had a family member employed at the Project or at the Site. And in those years, it was all the men. The women were home. So across the street was an electrician, next door was Hanford Patrol, next door the other side, was—I don’t know what he did; I know he was a craftsworker. So in our block, all the other families were crafts families, except for ours. That was a very strong distinction, was—you were management or you were the crafts. And what I was told was that in our part of town, there was a conscious desire to mix within a neighborhood so that there would be some management people and some crafts people. In the block up, where you live, we didn’t know as many people. One of the high school teachers lived there at the time. It was close enough that we were allowed to trick-or-treat there. But we—within our own block, we were in and out of houses and borrowing a cup of sugar, and that kind of thing. But it was a very small one-block neighborhood for us.
Franklin: Interesting. How long did your parents live in that house?
Roseberry: Mm. From 1950 until 2013.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Roseberry: Yeah. My dad died at the end of 2004. And Mom stayed in the house until 2013. She had a series of falls. And after the last one, she said, I think it’s time for me to move. So we got that to happen, but—and she was—she had three other friends from the early days who at that time were still living in their homes. Only one with her husband; the other women had been widowed. But for her, this was not an unusual situation, that you would move into a house and you would live there your whole life. At some point, when I was in late elementary school, I know that Dad got a promotion at work. And this would have been before 1958. And so at that time, he was offered the chance to move to a different neighborhood to what would have been considered a nicer house. I remember our talking about that, and I just spoke right up and said, well, I don’t want to move. I like my school. I like my neighborhood. And so he didn’t accept the move. And I don’t remember now where it was. I just remember that to me it seemed really silly. Well, this was our house. Why would we move? This was home, yeah.
Franklin: Do you know if the—you had mentioned that separation between trades—crafts people and managerial. Do you know if that ever caused any tension with neighbors and things like that?
Roseberry: Yes. Not in our neighborhood, not among—this was a neighborhood where in the summer, Dad would cook hamburgers outside on the fireplace he built, and the neighbors would come over and have hamburgers. Or they’d come over and have watermelon, or they’d come over for the fireworks. So none of that happened there. But in the school environment, very much so. There were times where it would come up within the schoolroom. And fairly laterally, I want to say the early ‘60s—at any rate, there was a significant strike out at the Project and another one threatened. That was the time I remember most clearly that there were enough people out on strike that management were being placed in various locations. So Dad was driving a bus during that time. The buses came right into the neighborhoods, so he had a half-a-block walk to get the bus that took him to work. And I remember very distinctly getting into it a little bit with another girl. So—might have been fifth grade—I don’t remember the year, but there were lines drawn. Because her father was in the crafts and he was also—had some position of responsibility in one of the unions. And we didn’t fight, and we weren’t enemies, but we were just never close again. It wasn’t—this discussion happened and the lines were drawn, and we never quite managed to get back across again. But there were some neighborhoods—there were some neighborhoods in the ranch houses where the mix of people who lived there was such that, yeah, it was an issue in the neighborhood. In one case, a family—the same family where the father had quite position of responsibility, and the neighborhood lived across the street from a family where the father was a high-ranking PR person for the Project. And you felt it. You felt it; it wasn’t fighting, but it was tension, I mean—yeah.
Franklin: Sure. Do you remember what that series of labor movements was about?
Roseberry: I do not.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: I do not. And I wish that—because the memory is so clear, I’ve wished that I’d gone back to research it to find out what it was. I remember Dad saying that his concern or management’s concern was that this would be a disruptive enough situation that we would lose—we would no longer have federal funding. And so the other thing that’s unclear to me now is, the strike would have been against the contractor. But of course, all of the contractor money was federal money. So there was real concern that jobs would be lost. I do remember that.
Franklin: Did you ever—given that up until Richland was privatized, you had to work for Hanford to live in Richland—did you ever lose friends or notice people—had people that you knew that left during that time because they lost their jobs at Hanford?
Roseberry: No. And that is a really interesting question to me. I don’t remember ever losing any friends for that reason. And I don’t remember until high school that families were moving in from some of the other secret cities or Savannah River. I remember a family coming in from Savannah River. It isn’t that it didn’t happen. I don’t remember it, and there was no one in my close circle who left. And I really don’t remember much influx. My high school years would have been ’66 to ’69. And there were several families that I remember then.
Franklin: Did you go to Richland High School?
Roseberry: Mr. Franklin, that would be Col High.
Franklin: Col High. Sorry.
Roseberry: That would be Col High. This is essential for accuracy. Yeah. Marcus Whitman, Carmichael, and then Col High.
Franklin: Col High, right. You’ll have to forgive me.
Roseberry: I do forgive you, but I will correct you, of course, because this is so important.
Franklin: Point taken. Would that be the Col High Bombers?
Roseberry: Yes, that would be the Col High Bombers.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin: And how long—then did you leave Richland shortly after graduating?
Roseberry: Mm-hm. I left in the fall of ’69. I went to Cheney for my undergrad degree, and went through in three years because I had two sisters behind me. Then went to Michigan for my library master’s and then came back and my first job was in Yakima. So—
Franklin: I’m wondering if—you may have been too young for this next question, but I’d like to see what—if you remember. You know, Richland, up until the mid-60s or late-60s was primarily, almost exclusively white.
Roseberry: Yes.
Franklin: Due to housing restrictions on African Americans and other minorities, they had to live in East Pasco. And although African Americans were employed by the Hanford Project, they couldn’t live in Richland—
Roseberry: Houses—right, right.
Franklin: --at that time. So I’m wondering if you could speak to that, having observed—or if you observed discrimination or any civil rights attempts to address it.
Roseberry: Yeah. So in elementary school, at my elementary school at Marcus Whitman, there were two African American families who had children in the school. In second grade, I had a birthday party, and I’d invited people from school. And I remember this very clearly. We had added on the living room, so we’d set up card tables in the living room. And I had invited my friend Kathy Baker. And she didn’t come. And I remember going to the front door watching for her, and wondering why she wasn’t coming to the party. The Baker family is African American. Her mother is still here, Mrs. Baker. I remember—and I asked Mom, why didn’t Kathy come to the party? And in some way, Mom would have said, maybe she didn’t feel comfortable because she’s—in those days, we would have said Negro. And that wasn’t disrespectful. Sorry, I remember this really clearly. And it just made me so sad. She was almost my best friend, and she didn’t feel she could come to my birthday party. My folks were very—whatever opinions they might have had to the contrary, we were raised that race was not an issue. It was not a matter of discussion; it wasn’t—it was an irrelevant thing. I look back now—hold on, I’ll get hold of myself. I look back now and I think of family names that we would have heard. But in our family, nobody ever said, this name tells you that their family came from Russia or Ireland or Germany or—that was not a—we didn’t know to make those connections. It just wasn’t discussed. So, the issue of race was, it just, it wasn’t present in the way we were raised. I didn’t really question in grade school that there were only two families. When I got to junior high, as it was then, I remember two Hispanic families being added. That was at Carmichael. And I may be forgetting somebody. By high school, another African American family and a Chinese family. But at one time—and I’m not sure I could do it right now—but I counted that in my growing up years, we had nine families of color in Richland. So we had some African American families, one Chinese family, and I think maybe by high school three Hispanic families. But I didn’t know that was unusual. I just didn’t know that was unusual.
Franklin: Sure. The children—the African American children that you went to elementary school with, they were allowed to live—the family was allowed to live in Richland?
Roseberry: Mm-hmm, yeah. The Bakers lived over—it’s an area of town just on the other side of Duportail. I’m so bad with directions. There was a little market there, Dietrich’s Market, that’s now Minute Mart or something. But they lived in that neighborhood. And I think Mrs. Baker is still in the family house from those days, too.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Roseberry: Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah.
Franklin: Great. Thank you. Do you remember any later civil—like, any of the later civil rights actions in Kennewick and Pasco, or did you not—have you not connected much with—
Roseberry: I was not—no, I was not connected. We didn’t really have any family friends in Pasco or Kennewick. One exception, a friend of my dad’s in Kennewick on Canal Drive. But the world was very small. You knew people from school, where parents of other children—more strongly in elementary school of course, and then you knew people from your church. And in the people I knew, everybody went to church. Everybody belonged to a church and they went to church. And so we belonged to Central, to CUP. So, that’s how I met children from other parts of town, because I would meet at church. But we didn’t—in the early days, very actively encouraged to stay in Richland. Shop in Richland, go to a doctor in Richland. Not go out to dinner in Richland because there really weren’t many options. But you lived in Richland, you did your business in Richland, and you socialized in Richland. After 1958, I suspect the message wasn’t quite so strong. But still strong.
Franklin: Probably because it had been ingrained.
Roseberry: It had been ingrained, uh-huh. And there was still—even after Richland re-formed as a First Class City, all of that secrecy and deliberate attempt at isolation was still very present. Because we were in a very strong part of the Cold War. So the secrecy did not—and the fear—did not go away once Richland re-formed as a city. But no, I was unaware of those. In high school, a man named Duke Mitchell, who has come back—homecoming king? Anyway, one of those dances where someone is king and queen and there’s an election, and he was. So in some ways, you could say that this community was not—
Franklin: And I’m sorry, who was this?
Roseberry: Duke Mitchell.
Franklin: Is that CJ’s son?
Roseberry: CJ’s oldest, yeah.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: So he had a very strong position of leadership in the high school. Liked and respected. I couldn’t really answer adequately about how it felt or how it was. I can report that, yeah, he was held in acclaim. He was class president, too. I—once I left, I left. I just remember strongly that he was very well-liked and respected. And certainly one of the first things I did when I came back to Richland to be the library manager here was to look him up and say, I need you on the library board. But he could speak to that better than I can.
Franklin: Okay. Did you ever feel—you talked a bit about the duck-and-cover drills that made you kind of feel the fear of being separated. What about later, as you grew up and entered adolescence or early adulthood and knew more about what was being produced at Hanford. Did your feelings toward—what were your feelings toward Hanford? Did they change at all from when you first found out about what was being made there and--?
Roseberry: I never went negative. Partly that is because my dad was—even postwar, he felt that the work that was being done there was patriotic. He still felt that it was protecting the United States. A personal characteristic of his was loyalty. So, he would have valued, in a patriotic way, and defended the Project until the day he died. So that did not occur for me. And I was never afraid in a way that you would be about something that you could do something about it. When we were very young, and maybe into pre-adolescence, I remember that he would try to teach us from the ground what planes were overhead so that we could identify them. Because it was, plane: Russia is going to bomb us. That was our default response. I got as far as being able to distinguish between a small plane, like a Piper Cub, or a B-52, or a jet. I never got—but even those distinctions, if you were—I’m the eldest. I was, I mean, day one, take care of your sisters. So I’m out on the street with my sisters, maybe walking over to the school grounds to play, and a plane goes overhead. And first I look up, try to decide if they’re in danger or not, and then look down, okay, there they are; they’re safe. And it’s not something that woke me up in the middle of the night, or I had emotional problems with. It was just part of where we were. And, again, how did we know that that wasn’t everywhere? So, learn to distinguish. But it was actually pre-adolescent. It was third grade, and we were being taught about the half-life of plutonium. I would say that my strengths have always been on the verbal, not the quantitative side. But even in third grade, I could do the numbers on that and realize that no amount of duck-and-cover was going to save any of us if we were—nuclear bomb fell. But that was, for me, a little bit like, huh. Okay, well, maybe we’ll get bombed, and maybe we won’t. So it wasn’t a fear moment; it was like, hmm, do you guys think we can’t do these numbers and figure it out? But it was really more a moment of clarity than fear. And we just never—living in Richland and reading only the local paper—although Mom and Dad always subscribed to the Spokesman Review, so we did have a paper that wasn’t local. Lots of magazines. But having very limited even television access, news like that just didn’t show up here. And it just—if we weren’t hearing it at home, and we weren’t hearing it at school, we just wouldn’t have heard anything anti. Really, the first time I kind of went, oh, people are upset about this was at Cheney, so that’s late ‘60s, early ‘70s. I took a class called environmental geography. Anyway, one of the field trips was here to Hanford; another was to some of the bunker silver mines in north Idaho where there was, in fact, damage from something that was manmade. And so then I started getting it. But not here. Not here.
Franklin: Thank you. Did the neighborhood or Richland change perceptibly after it became a First Class City to you? Did you notice any changes?
Roseberry: Mm-mm. Not to me.
Franklin: Did the fabric of—or I guess, did the fabric of the neighborhood change while you lived there after it incorporated?
Roseberry: Very little. I think that from 1951 to 1969, on our side of the street, the house at the corner of whatever that is and the house at the corner of Stanton and Lee, those houses had changed out once in 18 years. I don’t think any of the others had by the time I left to go to Cheney. In the mid- to late-‘70s, there were some deaths on the street and some houses changed out. But I think just those two. And those were precuts, the much smaller house. So the one up by Lee, that changed out pretty quickly. They needed a larger house. And the one on the other end, it was retirement or something. But only those two, yeah.
Franklin: When did you come back to Richland?
Roseberry: I came back on May 15th of 2006. That was my—I got here on May 14th. I threw stuff in my car, drove to Mom’s, unloaded the car and started that Monday. And May 16th—I remember it very clearly because May 16th was the day of the bond election for the new library building. And it passed. So those dates are just really clear for me. Yeah.
Franklin: Right. And since that time you’ve been working at the Richland Public Library.
Roseberry: Mm-hm, yeah.
Franklin: Tell me about your involvement in promoting Hanford history and that kind of thing.
Roseberry: Oh! Okay. Well, I really started with meeting Ron Kathren—Dr. Ron Kathren. He has been, for a long time, a library supporter. And I met him on May 16th—the evening of May 16th. The polls had just closed; it had been declared that the bond had passed, and we were walking out to the parking lot together. And I offered him a carrot, my go-to snack, and he accepted. So pretty much it was friendship at first sight. And he started coming into the library and just chatting with me. He’s an excellent teacher among other things. And there was something about his love of Richland and the value he places on the scientific work that had been done here that just—it created or it caught a spark in me. And then I just started thinking about it more and thinking about my parents’ generation having been pioneers of a sort. And this is no disrespect to the people who were here farming at all. But they left the Midwest, the East Coast, and they came out probably on trains and got off to a desert that had no trees. They moved into tents, or if they were lucky, trailers, and then barracks, essentially—dorms. They did work that they had no idea what they were doing. And in the early days, they couldn’t tell their families where they were, what was going on. They just seem extraordinarily brave to me. So the environmental situation that they had to deal with—against—and the work they were doing created this bonding among them that is really phenomenal. They feel that at some level they all care about each other, still. Because they were on this great adventure and venture. Then the more I learned about the science and technology and creativity and innovation that went into that, I just got fascinated. Just got fascinated. And the people who made that choice and stayed, they have a strength that I think is uncommon. And they were—we now look at that and we talk about the effects of an atomic bomb and nuclear waste, which—I’m not stepping away from that. But for them, to have been doing something that they thought was not only very important but maybe vital to the survival of the country. If you can just understand that mindset. I just admire them very much. And they’re a generation that did not complain. Did not complain. You still—no matter how much you probe with my 92- almost 93-year-old mother, she will not complain. She will not say anything bad or—she just won’t. And that’s very, very common among her friends. So I just—I think the combination of the science, but also the creativity that fueled that science, I think that’s what it was. Just started fascinating me. And I also, as a librarian, I understand that the kind of history we have here is singular. We’ll find similarities with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, but there are three secret cities in this country. Arguably three secret cities in the world. We’re not regular. And I kind of started embracing being weird and finding the ties that we do have with those other secret cities at every possible level: the level of education, the fact that we still expect our garbage to be picked up in certain ways, that we are used to a very sturdy, robust infrastructure—we just have a lot in common. It seemed to me from a history point of view that there was some pretty important history stuff. As the public librarian part of my job—not just my interest, my job—was to collect the stuff, to protect it, to wait for WSU to be ready to have the Hanford History Project, so we could have a real, live, professional archives. And I don’t know, it just—somehow out of respect and admiration, it started being important to me.
Franklin: Great.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: What would you like—I think you’ve already covered this somewhat, but I’d like to ask it again. What would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War and what was done here during the Cold War?
Roseberry: Wow. Respect the science. Respect the creativity. Respect the strength of the people who were here. I might say plan ahead. One of the stories Dad told was—so, context. We were in Portland. My husband and I were living in Portland, and each year in Portland, Nagasaki Day is not celebrated, but noted.
Franklin: And why is that?
Roseberry: The people draw chalk outlines of bodies on the ground in memory of what was left after that bomb, that there would be sort of a—just a charred outline on the ground, because the body had been so thoroughly incinerated, that’s all that was left.
Franklin: Sure, sure. I—sorry, but why Portland? Or why does that happen? Is there a special reason? Is it like a sister city relationship?
Roseberry: I don’t know. I just—from having lived in Portland for 30 years, I would say, that’s just Portland. I don’t have a good—I don’t have a good answer for that.
Franklin: Sure, sure. I was just wondering if there was a deeper connection.
Roseberry: Not that I know of.
Franklin: Okay, sorry.
Roseberry: But at any rate, Mom and Dad were in town, and we were walking, downtown Portland in the city hall area. Dad asked what they were, and unthinkingly, I told him the truth. Never seen him so angry. Never saw him as angry as that. He was saying, we were saving lives, we were saving American lives. Very, very, very angry. When he calmed down a little, I said, you know, people are concerned about the waste, Dad. This aside, there’s a legitimate concern about the nuclear waste. And the reason I laugh, you’ll understand, is he said, well, for Pete’s sakes. They only built those tanks to last 20 years and look how long they’ve lasted! So for future generations, I would say, maybe a 20-year tank for nuclear waste when we already understood the aforementioned half-life—maybe add that element into your future planning, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, 20 years, the life of radioactive material: not a really good match there.
Franklin: Some disconnect, perhaps, between science and then the administrative side of--
Roseberry: Exactly, exactly.
Franklin: --of legacy waste commitment.
Roseberry: And the difference between getting federal funding to, in their hope, finish a war, end a war, and in their hopes, defend the United States, and—oh, huh, yeah, well, now we want to fund something else. We don’t want to fund this. So it’s pretty big picture, but, yeah.
Franklin: Oh, hey, we’re going to need a lot more money for many hundreds of years to come to manage the—
Roseberry: Right, yeah.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s a tough sell.
Roseberry: it’s a tough sell. It’s a tough sell. Garbage cleanup. It’s a tough sell.
Franklin: Yeah, it is. Everybody wants it, but nobody wants to do it.
Roseberry: But nobody wants to do it. So, yeah, I guess, not a question I’ve thought about, but probably that’s what I’d say.
Franklin: Great. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to talk about?
Roseberry: I don’t know. I have said—maybe a little bit about the hierarchy in Richland, because from a point of view, it has the worst of a military reservation, an academic community, and a company town, where in those environments, at some level hierarchy is all. So even in the later years—I think this is changing—but the division, if you will, between management and crafts or the trades. I think, I hope, that Richland has grown so much, benefitting from people who weren’t born here, that some of that is being mitigated, but—and feel free to eliminate this if it’s in somebody else’s story. But GESA Federal Credit Union was GE Supervisors’ Association. And my dad was one of the founders of that. I have his passbook; it’s number four. But it was only for supervisors, period. Period. So about a year later, I think—I think GESA was founded in 1954, I think. At any rate, approximately a year later, HAPO was founded. So if you were not a GE manager, you could still join a credit union. And now both of them are very, very strong, very community-minded. But lines like that were drawn. And there were some sort of informal, unspoken rules about what kind of car you could drive, according to your status at the Project. And so my dad, not being a scientist or an engineer, was maybe sort of middle. So we had—growing up we had Dodges, kind of a medium. And then, at one point, I was gone, but he got another promotion and he and Mom bought an Oldsmobile, because that was okay. Whereas when I was in grade school and junior high, that—there were people above him in the hierarchy who drove Oldsmobiles. And so that—there’s some big car stuff in this community that sometimes is at the base of—people who weren’t born here or grew up here, they observe things, but they can’t decode them. And there’s no way in the world they would ever be able to decode them. The other thing where there was a hierarchy—and I don’t know that I really have an opinion about it—but certainly, in second grade, I remember actively and clearly, we were given standardized tests. So starting in second grade, we were tracked, according to what they called ability. So in second grade, we took the Stanford-Binet, which was considered a measurement of IQ. And so the result of that, partly, was that even though when I graduated high school—that would be Col High, yeah—I graduated high school, 676 people in the graduating class, but I only really knew a fraction of them. Because even in grade school, we were ability-tracked. That continued through junior high and certainly at high school, there was advanced this and honors this. The focus on academic ability—very, very strong here. So I think for children who were perceived to fall into that, you could not have had better college prep. You could not have. We—my first formal researched-with-citations research project was in fourth grade. We were writing from very early on. We were being taught research skills from very early on. And when I left and went to Cheney, I found that that was not the norm. So the school system here is very, very focused on that. And I benefited from it; my sisters benefited from it. So, I just—I have this niggling sense that that could have been improved or fine-tuned, but because I benefited from it, I wouldn’t be a very credible voice on that. But the whole concept of hierarchy: just so strong here, yeah.
Franklin: And you think still to this day?
Roseberry: To a certain extent. I think more so in the people who are still here who were here in the very early days. Which now would be the ‘50s, because I think most of the people who would have gotten here early ‘40s to build the Project, they’re gone. And the people who arrived just post-war, like my folks, they’re dwindling, you know. They’re dwindling. But the people who came early-ish, I mean strongly in the Cold War era, like in the ‘50s, a little bit. Because that was the Project environment.
Franklin: Right, and there’s a real difference to authority, too, among those. And kind of a—one thing I’ve noticed is a belief in corporate benevolence, and that you’ll be taken care of with—the hard work and things will be rewarded in a corporate environment. That struck me as more present here, I think, due to the nature of the contractor relationship.
Roseberry: I think so, I think so. That—so for that generation, they had world-shaking events, okay? My folks lived through the Depression. My folks both were of an age to understand what Pearl Harbor meant. But I might suggest that my generation, the Boomer generation, had the first conviction that there was not only not corporate benevolence, there was not government benevolence. The World War II generation, they were patriotic. They were responding to those calls from President Roosevelt. My generation, particularly here, learned very early that, um, duck-and-cover wasn’t going to work. That there remains a question, many questions, about the assassination of President Kennedy. That the Vietnam War was not exactly about protecting democracy. So I agree. There’s more acceptance, respect for an authority figure, yeah.
Franklin: Yeah.
Roseberry: Yeah, I think so.
Franklin: Even—you mentioned some big events and kind of betraying of trust. I’d like to ask you about how you think maybe people’s reactions to the Green Run fall into that. Because that happened pretty early on in ’49. But a purposeful release of dangerous material that seems to be accepted by the community as something that happened and maybe shouldn’t have, but did nonetheless. But to outsiders is shocking.
Roseberry: It’s shocking.
Franklin: And a betrayal of trust, because it’s not a corporate—it’s the government. It’s supposed to be—
Roseberry: Right, yeah. And I did not know about that until after I came back in 2006.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Roseberry: None—information about the Project, any of the science, any of the politics—not in the Richland school system. Not there. And in our family, not discussed. Ever. Ever, ever. So I did not know that.
Franklin: Sure. I forgot to ask: did you go to see President Kennedy?
Roseberry: Yes.
Franklin: Or did your family go to see President Kennedy? What was your—what do you remember about that day?
Roseberry: Okay. So, it was very hot and windy and dusty. And we were out in the middle of the desert, okay? However, we were just thrilled beyond any belief. He was—and just my family—but he was a beloved president. People did trust him. They followed him. People—I don’t think during his presidency, you would ever have heard him referred to as Kennedy. It always would have been President Kennedy or the President. Always, always. And partly that was then. But he, as a person and a president, people liked him, they cared about him. Here, we were so—we so completely understood that we were isolated, that that was on purpose, that for someone that important to come here was just—it was amazing. It was just amazing. And we were just thrilled. We all had to submit a security clearance paperwork. Mom just handed to me the papers for my youngest sister who was about seven, yeah. So I remember filling this out—no, she wasn’t even seven. She was more like five, she was more like five. So I filled it out, and there was a space called Membership in Subversive Organizations. And, you know, I thought about—I took this really seriously, and—
Franklin: And that was a voluntary thing that you would fill out, or that’s--?
Roseberry: No, we would not be allowed onsite.
Franklin: No, I mean, that was a form given to someone to fill out, so they would trust that you were being honest about your membership in a subversive organization?
Roseberry: Right, right.
Franklin: Okay.
Roseberry: And I put in that, yes, the only organization she was part of was the CUP Sunday school. But she was a member of that organization. But, I mean, what, to express rye amusement at the vagaries of life, but filling out a security clearance form for a little tiny girl, but we did, and we took it seriously. So we went as a family—I think I got off track, but we went as a family, and it was a big deal. But it was windy, and the wind was blowing up the sand. And it was hot. And the helicopter came in and blew up more sand. But, no, we were just thrilled. Just thrilled. The most important, the most famous person we had ever seen. And, oh, it was big. It was big, yeah.
Franklin: Cool. Well, did you have anything else you wanted to add?
Roseberry: I can’t think—you know, Robert, I could go on for a long time, but that’s—you’ll talk to other people and they’ll either confirm or deny, and—
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Roseberry: But you know, so much was family-centered. And then your school and then your church. Those were the circles. Oh, I guess just one other note and then you should probably just turn the equipment off, but—I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not, but Richland did not appear on any maps or on any road signs. So that piece of understanding that we were secret and that the government didn’t want people to be able to get here, they didn’t want people to know where we were or what was going on. That was—there was just sort of this combination of you just sort of accepted it, and then you’d say, hmm, I wonder why that isn’t true of Pasco and Kennewick. But even a question like that, the answer would be, well, Richland is different.
Franklin: Yeah.
Roseberry: Yeah.
Franklin: Well, thank you Ann. I really appreciated your talking today.
Roseberry: You’re welcome. Oh, I’m really happy to. I’m sorry the Kathy Baker story got me.
Franklin: No, it’s okay. I appreciate it.
Roseberry: But you know, it’s funny, we were so young, but I just remember I just kept going to the front door, watching, where’s Kathy? Where’s Kathy?
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 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?
Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—
Martin: Okay.
Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.
Martin: I believe it was earlier.
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?
Martin: Not originally.
Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?
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.
Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?
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.
Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?
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.
Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?
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.
Franklin: The first name was John—
Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.
Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?
Martin: No, he’s not.
Franklin: And what about Lyon?
Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.
Franklin: What’s that?
Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Yeah, give or take.
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?
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.
Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?
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.
Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?
Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?
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.
Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?
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.
Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?
Martin: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Oh.
Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.
Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.
Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.
Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—
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.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?
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.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.
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?
Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.
Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?
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.
Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?
Martin: In the US, yeah.
Franklin: Wow.
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.
Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?
Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.
Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?
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.
Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.
Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—
Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.
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?
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.
Franklin: Ah!
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.
Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?
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.
Franklin: Wow!
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.
Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?
Martin: Well, mainly that room.
Franklin: That room.
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.
Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?
Martin: 155 millimeters.
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—
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.
Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—
Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.
Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—
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.
Franklin: Sure.
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.
Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.
Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Martin: Maybe I should come back.
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.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.
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.
Franklin: Great.
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.
Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?
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.
Franklin: Wow.
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.
Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?
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.
Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?
Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.
Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—
Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.
Franklin: Oh!
Martin: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?
Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—
Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—
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.
Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?
Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.
Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.
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.
Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?
Martin: I came back in 2001.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.
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.
Franklin: Wow.
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.
Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.
Martin: Very interesting project.
Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?
Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
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.
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?
Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?
Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.
Martin: Yep, that was the one.
Franklin: So you helped design—
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.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: And tested.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.
Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.
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?
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.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Interesting story.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?
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.
Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?
Martin: I moved here in ’76.
Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?
Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.
Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?
Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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—
Martin: It did.
Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.
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.
Franklin: Really?
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.
Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?
Martin: Yes.
Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?
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.
Franklin: I can imagine.
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: We were trying to help them.
Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.
Franklin: Okay, just curious.
Martin: I heard about it of course.
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?
Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.
Franklin: Sure.
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.
Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.
Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, okay, good.
Martin: But I’ll do that.
Franklin: Well, good.
Martin: We’ll do that.
Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—
Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?
Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.
Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?
Franklin: I believe we did.
Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s okay.
Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.
Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.
Martin: I hope so.
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.
Martin: Oh, okay.
Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.
Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—
Martin: Sure.
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?
Martin: The most lasting impact.
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—
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.
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—
Martin: I do.
Franklin: You do?
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.
Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.
Hungate: Okay.
Franklin: Great.
Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1st, 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?
Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—
Martin: Okay.
Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.
Martin: I believe it was earlier.
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?
Martin: Not originally.
Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?
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.
Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?
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.
Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?
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.
Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?
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.
Franklin: The first name was John—
Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.
Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?
Martin: No, he’s not.
Franklin: And what about Lyon?
Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.
Franklin: What’s that?
Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Yeah, give or take.
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?
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.
Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?
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.
Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?
Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?
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.
Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?
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.
Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?
Martin: Oh, yes.
Franklin: Oh.
Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.
Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.
Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.
Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—
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.
Franklin: Wow!
Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?
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.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.
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?
Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.
Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?
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.
Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?
Martin: In the US, yeah.
Franklin: Wow.
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.
Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?
Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.
Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?
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.
Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.
Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—
Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.
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?
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.
Franklin: Ah!
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.
Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?
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.
Franklin: Wow!
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.
Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?
Martin: Well, mainly that room.
Franklin: That room.
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.
Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?
Martin: 155 millimeters.
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—
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.
Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—
Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--
Franklin: [LAUGHTER]
Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.
Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—
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.
Franklin: Sure.
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.
Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.
Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.
Franklin: It’s okay.
Martin: Maybe I should come back.
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.
Martin: Right.
Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.
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.
Franklin: Great.
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.
Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?
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.
Franklin: Wow.
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.
Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?
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.
Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?
Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.
Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—
Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.
Franklin: Oh!
Martin: [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?
Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—
Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—
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.
Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?
Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.
Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.
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.
Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?
Martin: I came back in 2001.
Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.
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.
Franklin: Wow.
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.
Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.
Martin: Very interesting project.
Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?
Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
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.
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?
Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?
Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.
Martin: Yep, that was the one.
Franklin: So you helped design—
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.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Martin: And tested.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.
Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.
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?
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.
Franklin: Wow.
Martin: Interesting story.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?
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.
Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?
Martin: I moved here in ’76.
Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?
Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.
Franklin: Okay.
Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.
Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?
Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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—
Martin: It did.
Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.
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.
Franklin: Really?
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.
Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?
Martin: Yes.
Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?
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.
Franklin: I can imagine.
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.
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?
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.
Franklin: Sure.
Martin: We were trying to help them.
Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?
Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.
Franklin: Okay, just curious.
Martin: I heard about it of course.
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?
Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.
Franklin: Sure.
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.
Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.
Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Oh, okay, good.
Martin: But I’ll do that.
Franklin: Well, good.
Martin: We’ll do that.
Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—
Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?
Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.
Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.
Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?
Franklin: I believe we did.
Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: That’s okay.
Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.
Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.
Martin: I hope so.
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.
Martin: Oh, okay.
Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.
Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—
Martin: Sure.
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?
Martin: The most lasting impact.
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—
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.
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—
Martin: I do.
Franklin: You do?
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.
Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.
Hungate: Okay.
Franklin: Great.