Man one: So it’s pointing at you.
Philip Craig: So it’s pointing at me?
Man one: Yeah, yeah.
Man two: Exactly.
Craig: Oh, there we go.
Man two: Perfect, perfect.
Craig: There we go!
Man one: Okay, excellent.
Craig: Okay?
Robert Bauman: Okay. Let me know when you’re ready, all right? Then we’ll—all right?
Man one: We are rolling, so on your cue.
Bauman: So, let’s start, first of all, by just having you say your name and spell it for us, so we make sure we have that correct.
Craig: My name is Philip Craig. P-H-I-L-I-P. C-R-A-I-G.
Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this oral history interview on June 24th of 2015 on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So, Mr. Craig, why don’t we have you start, maybe, by just telling us a little bit about your background. Where you came from, how you came to Hanford, and that sort of thing.
Craig: Well my how I came to Hanford started back in high school. I had a high school chemistry class. I liked what I saw. And I knew that the Hanford Project was down the road—I was living in Selah, Washington, and the Hanford Project was very interesting to me. And I even wrote a term paper on Hanford, because I really wanted to work here. So, I went on to Whitman College, graduated from high school in ’56—or ’52, I’m sorry. Graduated from college in ’56, and then went on to Washington State College, then, now Washington State University in Pullman, and did a year of graduate work in chemistry. And at the end of that, I came to Hanford for my very first job. And lo and behold, that was exactly 58 years ago today: June 24, 1957. And it was quite an experience, let me tell you. The first thing that struck me, of course I had to have credentials to get in the building. And in those days, we didn’t have badges like you have today that are on a cord around your neck. We had a little plastic folder with our ID in it, and you’d pull that out of your pocket and flash it open to the guard sitting at the entrance desk. And then you could go on into the building and find your office and take it from there. The most interesting thing, I think, about it all was it was a very formal setting. For years we wore suits, ties, long sleeved white shirts only—couldn’t have colored shirts—and the ladies wore dresses. Far more formal than today’s environment. Security, of course, was very paramount. I mean, we were in the years where the Soviets and the United States was competing. And so the Hanford site, being one of the two principal sites manufacturing plutonium in the United States, the other one being Savannah River, most of the stuff in terms of total production and that sort of thing was top secret. A lot of it was not—it was secret, but security was paramount. I remember in my little office cubby hole—it was a room, it wasn’t just a cubby hole, in a big room—we had a three-drawer file cabinet with a combination lock. And I could take a piece of paper out of that file, put it on my desk and work on it. But if I had to go to the bathroom, it went back in the combination file, locked it, go down the hall and come back and you had to unlock the combination and start all over again. And the very first thing they had me do is they handed me about a three-inch black three-ring binder with a red coversheet, marked secret. This was the PUREX operating manual. Now, PUREX stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction, and it was the chemical process that is used to take irradiated uranium from the reactors, dissolve it in acid, treat it chemically, and come up with a plutonium nitrate solution. And I had to read this manual in about a week. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty daunting.
Bauman: Now where was your first office? Where on site?
Craig: It was on in the 703 Building, which is about where the Federal Building is today. The last part of the 703 structure—it was a herringbone structure. We had offices coming off a main corridor, and there was about six tiers of those. And the very last one is still standing, and the city offices are in there. But later on, the Federal Building took over.
Bauman: And what was your first job title?
Craig: Physical—let’s see. Physical Science Administrator, I think it was. The other thing about the environment is that you handwrote all your reports, and then gave them to a secretary who typed them. There was no computers. So, it was kind of a laborious process to do that. I needed to check out a government car, which I did in the motor pool, and drive out to the Area to PUREX, and see what was going on most every day, drive back, write the daily report, mark it all secret, send it up a line to my boss. But that government car, let me tell you—it was not air conditioned. So those days were pretty warm. But we got it done. About two months later, after getting into the PUREX part of it, the fellow who was a companion office mate had been handling the plutonium shipments. And he went off to Washington, D.C. for another job. So I got the job of accepting plutonium products on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission and the US government. So it was a very formal process. The products were in two forms. After the plutonium nitrate left PUREX, it was sent over to what is known as the Z Plant. And in that plant, by a series of chemical operations, it was converted to a metal button about this big and it fit in a tuna fish can. It weighed something close to two kilograms. So that was the first product. The second product were manufactured, machined weapon components. And I won’t talk about the exact details of their size and shape at this point. But nonetheless, Hanford was in the business of making weapon components. So my job was to accept this product and make the shipment, every couple of weeks or so, to Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats was about 15 miles northwest of Denver, and it was the receiving site for the plutonium as buttons. They would take that metal and cast it into weapon component shapes and machine those and so on. And of course the other part was the shapes themselves, they’d go up in pieces themselves, and they would go into an inspection process and eventually assemble parts of the warhead.
Bauman: So when you say—you’re accepting them from the contractor, or--?
Craig: I was accepting these materials from the contractor. I mean, General Electric Company was the contractor, and their job on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract basis was to run all these processes. And there’s hundreds of people involved in this. But at the end of the line, I had to make that transition from Hanford to the next step. So it was a couple of months into my first job, my buddy left for Washington, and here I am, learning how to actually accept these components. Now, you need to understand that plutonium was very radioactive. It emitted some gamma radiation, but not huge amounts. I mean, you could actually handle it. But it also emitted alpha radiation. And so it had to be contained in some kind of container, like a can. And then you could hold it in your hand. Interesting. It was warm. It was—the radioactive decay—was producing heat. So this can felt like hanging onto a 60 Watt lightbulb. Now, the other part of the business of plutonium is that if you got too much of it together in one spot, you had a criticality event. And of course, the bomb itself was designed to make a lot of it go critical at the same time, and that created an atomic explosion. But the point is that if you’re handling plutonium, it had to maintain a certain degree of separation at all times. In the chemical processing plants, they used different sized columns of chemical solutions and whatnot, depending on what was going on. And that was to maintain this critical geometry, so that you didn’t have any kind of criticality event. And after the plutonium was made into these buttons we called them, and canned in the tuna fish cans, they were stored in a vault. And the vault had pillars of metal rods, and little rings on that rod that you could put a can in. But it maintained the separation. So on shipping day, what we would do is we operators of the plant would go into the vault and take these cans and very carefully put—I don’t remember exactly how many—something about five or six cans in a little red wagon. Just a little kid’s wagon. But there was spacers in there so that these things didn’t get too close. And they’d bring it down the hallway to the room that exited to the building where it then could be handled further. And this assembly area, in this room were birdcages. Now a birdcage is a metal frame that’s about this big, this big, and this big. And in the middle was a metal pot with a lid. And the idea was that you took—one at a time—one of those cans from the red wagon, and you put it in the pot. And then I think the birdcage held like three buttons. Then there was a lid, and a bunch of bolts in places where you could put a wire with a lead seal on the end. And my job was to squeeze the seal closed with an imprint and record, of course, what the identity of those cans were, and the weight, and that sort of thing on paperwork. And at the end of that, I would sign this receipt for this material, and give it to the contractor. The weapon components varied a little bit differently, depending on the size and shape of the weapon component. Eventually, those were a much bigger birdcage, and it contained a couple of pieces of weapon material.
Bauman: So—
Craig: Hold up.
Bauman: Oh, sure.
Craig: I got to collect my thoughts here. Okay. You can go back on. The business of shipping, then—I owned that plutonium for maybe 15 minutes [LAUGHTER] before the government. Then I would transfer it to armed couriers, AEC couriers. They were not only armed with side arms; they were armed with machine guns. This was serious stuff. And they would load these birdcages into a truck, and eventually ship that off to Rocky Flats.
Bauman: How often did these shipments--?
Craig: Well, every couple of weeks or so.
Bauman: And so, they were shipped by truck then, to Rocky Flats?
Craig: That was a method used in later years. They didn’t really like shipping by truck that well. We actually had another system that involved—all I’m going to say is it involved rail. Because the exact details was highly classified.
Bauman: And did the amount that was shipped vary significantly, or--?
Craig: It varied, yes. Depends on how the production was going and what the requirements were on the other end.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Sure. And so how long did you do this, then? How long were you--?
Craig: From 1957 to 1972.
Bauman: Wow.
Craig: So I shipped a lot of plutonium.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Craig: The other thing that was kind of interesting—I was explaining to you about the criticality. I hadn’t been on the job more than, I don’t know, a couple of months, shipping. I knew what to do, I knew the whole process, and I knew the sensitivity of it. One day one of these chemical operators who worked for the contractor had gone to the vault, and he came down the hall carrying about five tuna fish cans in his hand, and holding it with his arm like this. Well, that was absolutely high risk criticality event waiting to happen. And he walked in the room, and I said, ooooh. Just stop right where you are. And I instructed one of the other operators, take one of the cans from him and put it in the birdcage very carefully. And we got that shipment loaded and we were on our way. And then I went to the manager’s office—the plant manager’s office. Now, this fellow was like 60 years old. Kind of a salty southerner with—I mean, he was definitely in charge. And I’m 23 years old. Fresh out of college, wet behind the ears. And I gave him a real lecture about safety. And he didn’t like that. He called my boss. And my boss said Mr. Craig was right: you really almost had an accident today. That’s the end of that story. There was more to the whole weapons system. Since I was in the whole process, one of the small cogs—there was uranium coming from Oak Ridge. There was plutonium—some plutonium—and tritium coming from Savannah River. There was high explosives coming from Pantex. And then Hanford plutonium. This all had to be scheduled into what was known as the US master nuclear delivery schedule. It was the weapons document for all the weapons made in the country. It was a top secret document, and representatives from each of these sites got together, usually in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or at the Rocky Flats Plant. And we handwrote this schedule. There was no computers. There was a spreadsheet format, yes. But we didn’t have computers to do all that. Everything had to be balanced. This whole process had to bring all these materials together for processing at Rocky Flats. And so, about once a year we got together to do the master nukes schedule. I found I was pretty fortunate to be a part of that. I was pretty young. But it was a challenge. I had a lot of help, of course. But I was very impressed. One of the things that kind of scared me though was—and let me check on the date. October 22 to 24, 1962. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were in Denver and Rocky Flats to work on these schedules. Now, that was ground zero for the Russians. If they were going to attack the United States, that probably would have been one of their targets. And it was kind of scary working there for those two days. I was very thankful that President Kennedy convinced Khrushchev to back off and no ill things happened.
Bauman: Were you here when President Kennedy came to Hanford in ’63?
Craig: Yes, yes.
Bauman: Do you remember that?
Craig: Oh, I remember that. We got to drive out and see him out at the reactor site. It was quite an experience. I think that was one of the only Presidents I’ve ever seen in person. And it wasn’t long after that, you know, a couple months or less, that he was assassinated in Texas.
Bauman: Do you remember much about that day?
Craig: It was hot! [LAUGHTER] It was still warm when he was here visiting. But it was a big event. There was thousands of people out there in the desert. But it was very thrilling experience to see the President come.
Bauman: Sure. So, you said you were working on the shipment from ’57 to ’72. So did that process change much over those years, other than shifting from—
Craig: Well, yes. In about ’66, we quit making weapon components at Hanford. And the process moved to Rocky Flats entirely.
Bauman: So that part changed.
Craig: Yeah. That part changed. But the plutonium buttons didn’t.
Bauman: And so then in ’72 then, how did your job change? What did you start doing at that point?
Craig: Well, take a break for a sec.
[VIDEO CUTS]
Bauman: Sure, that’d be great. Do you want to go ahead and do that now?
Craig: Hmm?
Bauman: Do you want to go ahead and start that now then? Start talking about that?
Craig: Yes.
Bauman: Okay. That’d be great.
Man one: All right, just a moment. Okay, we’re rolling again. Just start whenever you—
Craig: Okay. Well, let’s see, I need the face page of this. Okay, I’m ready.
Bauman: Go ahead.
Man two: We’re rolling.
Craig: The other significant activity that I was involved with was in 1968. The site was in a state where we had 149 single-shell waste tanks and 28 double-shell waste tanks. Actually, that’s not quite right. There were four short of that on the double-shell. And these were boiling waste tanks. The others were not boiling waste. But it was all liquid, and we were concerned about the integrity of the tanks and the lifetime of the tanks. And so at that time, the Atlantic-Richfield-Hanford Company, ARCO, was the contractor. And two of their engineers, Sam Beard and Bob McCullough and I co-authored a document that was called “The Hanford Waste Management Briefing.” And the purpose of this was to explain the Hanford situation to our headquarters—our AEC headquarters staff, and Congressional staffers who were then going to be funding what is now known as the Tank Farm projects. And this document was a briefing document, and the key—one of the key charts that we were particularly proud of is to try to show people how complex the business of the Hanford waste system was. And this chart shows what happens to a ton of uranium that’s been irradiated and then processed at PUREX, and the wastes that come out of that whole process. And some of it’s boiling waste, because of high levels of radioactivity that are in that particular section of waste, and some was non-boiling. For example, you’re dealing with—for that ton of waste—680 gallons of non-boiling waste and 220 gallons of boiling waste. And in the non-boiling tank, you have 900 pounds of salts, chemical nitrate—nitrates and so on, and about 350 curies of radioactivity. But in the boiling side, there’s 230 pounds of salt, but 300,000 curies of activity. That’s why they’re boiling. And then there was a low-level stream that had like 55,000 gallons of waste that went to a crib—a crib is like a septic tank—tile field—and the swamp, which is just an open pond. There was another 560,000 gallons went there, but their radioactivity was less than a tenth of a curie. I mean, it was just negligible. On the solid side, there was about ten cubic feet of solid waste. There was about 10 million cubic feet—I’m sorry—of gases that came out. And here’s the number that it was radio—a surprise to everyone that it was published. It was secret then, but it’s been declassified since. Out of that ton of fuel came 530 grams of plutonium and four grams of neptunium. So the chemical process that started with a ton of material and ended up with just a very small amount. So it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Because these wastes were boiling, we’d started building—had started building double-shell tanks. A double-shell tank is a steel tank within a steel tank within a concrete barrier. And this diagram in that briefing document showed what a double-shell tank was all about. These were million-gallon tanks. And in those days, it was about a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half a gallon to build those tanks. A million-million half dollars for one of these big tanks. Far, far, less than what they would cost today.
Bauman: Yeah.
Craig: At any rate, we made this presentation to the staffers and the ultimate activity was to remove as much as water as we could from the single-shell tanks so that we ended up with a salt cake that was not going anywhere. We isolated cesium-137 and strontium-90 by another chemical process, carried out in B Plant, to bring those short-lived emitters of radiation to a point where we could encapsulate those in steel cylinders. That was done and they’re stored. I think they’re still stored that way, but I’m not entirely sure. I kind of lost track of what’s happened since. We also built—were recommending that they build four more double-shelled tanks and that’s why the number finally grew to 28 double-shell tanks. And then, of course, it ultimately led to the pretreatment plant that’s in the process out here now, and the Waste Vitrification Plant.
Bauman: You mentioned one of the reasons for doing the report was there were concerns about the integrity of the single-shell tanks. Were some of them leaking at that point, or just concerns that they might leak?
Craig: I think at that point there were some that had displayed a little bit of leakage, yes. There’s other documents that showed some leakage, but, again it wasn’t into the concrete overpack, if you will. There was some, of course, got into the soil column, but it was not a series breach, and it wasn’t any radioactivity that got down into the groundwater. But we were afraid that it would. I mean, 1968, these tanks have been—the initial ones—had been built in 1944! ’45, ’46. So there was some that were approaching the end of life, and those tanks are still there today. And that’s why they’re so concerned about trying to remove some of the waste from these tanks and process it.
Bauman: So, who initiated—was this ARCO or AEC that sort of initiated the study that you helped write?
Craig: Oh, I think it was—collectively, the Hanford folks at engineering—folks on both sides of the contractor and the government were saying, we got to do something about this. Anyway, I think that’s about all I want to say about the creation of that document. I thought it would be interesting for you to look into if that ever showed up in the REACH literature as the kickoff document to get this thing going.
Bauman: Right, right. Yeah. And did you continue to be involved after this report in some of the tank—waste management end of things?
Craig: Yes. Actually, I had some side activities that I got into first. From 1968 to 1972, I was the plutonium leasing officer for the government. There was one in Oak Ridge for uranium, and I was the plutonium one for the US. And basically, what I was—what we did is we created a lease document, so the 125 commercial organizations, 40 government agencies, and about 450 colleges and universities could have plutonium material. And we would, in effect, rent it to them for a use charge. Wasn’t very expensive, but it was a charge. More importantly, if they lost any of it, they had to pay for it. The largest users of that lease program were the two reactor fuel contractors. One of them was Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation in Apollo, Pennsylvania. And the other one was Kerr-McGee in Oklahoma. They made reactor fuels for the breeder program at Oak Ridge, and the Fast Flux Test Facility here.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Interesting.
Craig: So that was a way for them to have this material. For the next nine years, I continued to be involved with the PUREX and Z Plant, and the management of both site materials—all of the different types of materials that we had: uranium, and plutonium, and so on. And those materials were about $500,000 to $750,000 in value. I’m sorry, $500 to $750 million in value. But it was a management process. Then later on, from 1981 to 1985, I was able to be involved in the last big development program that I had while I was working for the government. It was called the Spent Fuel Management Program. Now, during this time, the AEC had been in charge—prior to this time, the AEC had been in charge of both the Defense orientation of radioactive materials, and also the development of commercial power reactors. And there was a political hue and cry from about 19—let’s see—1974, I think it was—that the commercial reactor stuff should go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a new agency. And then, of course, a few years after that, about 1978 I think it was, the—oh, by the way, when the NRC was created, they changed the name of AEC. It became ERDA: Energy Research and Development Administration. And then about four years later, they changed it again to the Department of Energy. Well, now we had the government on our side—DoE had an obligation to kind of help the nuclear power industry deal with the long-term disposal of their spent fuel. I mean, as the fuel is burned up in their reactor and is no longer useful, eventually it was going to be encapsulated and sent off to Yucca Mountain. Well, until Yucca Mountain got authorized and built, then they needed an interim storage, and so we developed a concept called the at-reactor spent fuel storage. Several of us—myself and somebody from NRC, and somebody from Battelle, the contract who was working with me, and somebody from the Electric Power Research Institute, representing the power industry—I think that’s about it—we all went off to observe some dry storage in casks in Germany. We brought that technology back to the United States. We worked with the NRC to get it licensed. And now the power reactors of this country are using at-reactor storage in basically steel containers that contain the spent fuel and are just sitting on concrete pads, and the radioactive decay heat is dissipated into the surrounding environment. But all the radioactivity is very well contained in these casks. Hopefully, eventually Yucca Mountain will open. It was part of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that I was involved with in those days. The whole purpose of this act was to create a long-term disposal. And NRC was involved in licensing that long-term disposal, and the nuclear power industry was to pay a fee for all this fuel that they were generating to help pay for this. Well, then all this got stopped because of the politics of Nevada and the—it’s going to be restarted, because there was a lawsuit that was settled recently that said that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act should be followed.
Bauman: Right. So, you were involved with that in—
Craig: I was involved in—
Bauman: About ’85?
Craig: --all that kind of stuff.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Yes. And then I left the—at that point, this will be—okay, you can go back on. At that point in 1985, I left the government, went private, went to work for a packaging—an engineering and design company that designed high-level waste shipping containers for use on transportation. They started off—their first big project was the Three Mile Island cask, to move that waste. And then from that, I marketed to the government a high-level waste—any kind of high-level waste that could be put into a cask and removed. And then the TRUPACT-II cask for use in transferring transuranic waste, or primarily plutonium waste, from the government sites to the waste isolation pilot plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. And from there, I got involved on a couple of other organizations. Eventually, in 1991, I went to work for Lockheed. In 1996, Lockheed, along with—well, Fluor Daniel was the primary contractor, but we were on the Fluor Daniel team, and Lockheed was to manage the Tank Farms. So we came full circle, and I helped Lockheed win that contract.
Bauman: Right, you did come full circle.
Craig: So then, Lockheed moved me from—I was then living in Federal Way, and Lockheed rewarded me by moving me back to Hanford and letting me work on the Hanford site in ’96. And I did that until December of 2000. And there I was involved in the new contracting method. Instead of cost-plus-fixed-fee contracting, it was cost-plus-incentive-fee. And what we would do was we would create a document for a scope of work, a performance agreement. And the contractor would say, here, DoE, this is what we’re going to do for you, and here’s how long it’s going to take. And DoE said, okay, if you do that, we’ll pay you this fee, and if you don’t get it done on time, we’re going to cut your fee. And if you don’t do it well, we’re going to cut your fee. And my job was to, at the end of the work performance, was to write up the actual work done in a document to present to DoE that says, okay, pay us the fee. We were very successful in getting our award fee. And then I gave it all up in December of 2000, after 43 years.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Cut.
Bauman: That’s a long, fascinating career. Can I ask you questions, kind of go back?
Craig: Yeah, there’s a couple of transition spots I’m kind of worried about, that I kind of sound like an idiot.
Bauman: No.
Craig: I want to—is there any editing we can do?
Bauman: Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. If there’s any issue we can go back to it later. It’s not a problem. I wonder if I can go back—and this is really interesting stuff, fascinating career. I wanted to ask you just about the community, when you arrived here in 1957, what was Richland like at the time? Could you talk about that a little bit? And did you live in Richland, or--?
Craig: Oh, yes. Yes. We were allowed to rent from the government a B house—half of a B house on Haupt. This was June 1957. And by then—a couple of months—the government started selling off the town to private citizens. And we were in the first block to be sold. The senior owners in the other end of the B house bought the B house. And at that time, we moved to the other side of town, into a ranch house, because that had been sold to its owner. This is kind of an interesting—are you recording?
Bauman: Yeah.
Craig: Oh, okay. This was kind of interesting, because the ranch house that the owner—I mean the resident who was able to buy it bought for like $7,700. And then when we bought the ranch house, I think we paid like $9,500. And of course, those ranch houses today sell for over 100. The town was very—initially of course, it was very caste-oriented. I mean, if you were a contractor, management, you got to live on the river. If you were a lowly government GS-7, you got to live in a B house. And there was a certain level of, you know, if you weren’t in this class, you weren’t part of it, you know. And I think that’s changed dramatically over the years. It doesn’t make any difference who you work for and how much money you make and all that stuff. People have changed for the better.
Bauman: Anything else about the community that stood out to you at the time?
Craig: Well, the first thing that Richland did was they had to celebrate their founding as Richland. They set off a mock atomic bomb, and it was a bunch of fanfare out in the park, and made a poof of smoke that was to represent a mushroom cloud.
Bauman: So, was this at Howard Amon Park?
Craig: Yeah. It was.
Bauman: Anything else that—memories that stand out, either about in community of Richland, or your work—any stories or memories that really stand out to you that you’d like to share?
Craig: I think I’m kind of—
Bauman: Good? [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Completed.
Bauman: All right, well I want to thank you very much. This was really interesting. I appreciate you coming in and sharing stories about your work, and all that you did out there. I really appreciate it.
Craig: Well, you’re more than welcome. I feel confident that this waste document that shows particularly how much plutonium was made, that was a very revolutionary thing. I mean, the idea how much of material you got out of a ton of uranium was—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Very classified. And to see that declassified and whatnot. It’s—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Kind of mind-blowing. But there’s the document. And it’s legitimate to talk about.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Not sure I want it on the local news tonight, but—[LAUGHTER]
[VIDEO CUTS]
Craig: Details, but I know that he was—
Bauman: Yeah. So, just let me know when you’re ready, all right? We can—
Craig: So this was August, ’76. I don’t know the exact date.
Bauman: That’s all right. I mean, the exact date we have, so—
Man one: Okay, we are ready.
Bauman: Just whatever memories or knowledge you have about it.
Man one: We’re rolling. Whenever you’re ready.
Bauman: Okay. So I don’t know if you want to talk to us about the McCluskey incident and your involvement in that?
Craig: Well, at the time, I was responsible for the Z Plant operations. And so, one morning, early, about 4:30 in the morning, I get a call from the plant that there had been an accident out of the plant, and I needed to get out there. And so I threw some clothes on and got a government car and went out to the site. What had happened was the plant had been operating on the recovery of americium-241 as part of the reclamation activities. And it was a chemical process. Inside this chemical process were criticalities tanks, small tanks like this, long, inside of a glovebox. Earlier in that summer, there had been a labor dispute, and the plant was on strike. And so the process had been shut down. Well, what was going on was americium was loaded onto the ion exchange medium inside this long column. When the dispute was settled and we had several days of reviews, conducting interviews with the contractor people, are you ready to restart? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? And finally they were authorized to start. Well, what happened is that when they poured strong nitric acid on that ion exchange column to take, you lose off the americium. The americium had decayed the resin beads of the ion exchange medium ‘til it was kind of an organic gunk. And that acid reacted with it, and that violent chemical reaction blew open that column. It breached the glovebox, and it sprayed chemicals and americium all over Mr. McCluskey. And he was taken to an initial decontamination spot onsite, and then downtown. But my job, when I got there, was to fend off the media. What had happened—as soon as this became knowledge, and the media got hold of it, here they come in helicopters, landing inside the secure area of 200 West. The guards were going nuts. I mean, here’s these people that are not supposed to be there! Eventually, they didn’t do anything but try to manage it and bring them over towards the building, the end of the building, where behind the building walls was this processing cell where everything had taken place. And they were standing there, I was standing there outside talking to the media, trying to explain what happened. And I had an alpha copy machine. I was standing there, showing them that there was no contamination on my feet, there was no contamination around. They were panning everywhere with their cameras, and they found a sodium hydroxide feed tank that had just a little bit of salt cake around the valve on the outside. Non-radioactive, nothing—I mean it was a nothing tank. And they filmed that like it was the biggest thing since sliced bread. And I remember I went through all this and—to find out that it made the national news. But I didn’t get to see it, because I was out there. [LAUGHTER] But it became a non-event. It was not a disaster, there was containment, there was—all the safety things worked as well as they should. The public was never in any harm. But that was a—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So, what happened, then, with the room, or whatever, where the incident took place?
Craig: Oh, they sealed that room off right away. And then it remained sealed up until very recently, when they went in and took it apart. And processed it for disposal.
Bauman: Did you know Mr. McCluskey at all?
Craig: No.
Bauman: Okay.
Craig: No. He was a chemical operator. I didn’t know who he was, hadn’t met him. But it was one of those things that—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: --Happened.
Bauman: Well, thanks, again for sharing that story. Glad we remembered to do that.
Craig: What was funny about it—I was trying to stand up. I used to be able to do this. I could stand there and hold my foot up and balance. And then I realized I couldn’t do that.
Bauman: Oh, watch the microphone there on your—
Craig: Oh, yeah.
Northwest Public Television | Rhoades_Jack
Robert Bauman: Okay. We'll go ahead and start. And if we could start by having you say your name and then spell it for us.
Rhoades: Sure, my name is Jack L., middle initial for Lewis, Rhoades, R-H-O-A-D-E-S.
Bauman: Great. Thank you very much. And my name is Bob Bauman and this is October 16th of 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So let's start with, if you could talk about your family's background. What brought them here? What brought you and your family here to the Tri-Cities, and when, and that sort of thing?
Rhoades: Sure, well my dad worked for DuPont in the early '40s--like '40, '41, '42--in a TNT plant for the war effort, and he had a college degree in chemistry. So when the Manhattan Project kicked off in late '43, he was one of the people selected out of DuPont's Joliette Plant to go down and train on the chemistry of plutonium at Clinton Works, which later became Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was located in Oak Ridge, probably an Army Depot at the time. And when he was transferred to the Clinton Works, why, my mom and my younger sister and I—I would have been about four then—went back to the ranch in Colorado and lived with her parents until my father got transferred up here to Hanford in like April of '44. And we finally got a house, or were on line to get a house, by August '44. And so what I can remember--I mean I was a young kid, but this was pretty traumatic, all the excitement of the war effort--but my mom got a telegram, which was hand-carried out to the farm by the postman. And it just simply said, go to Denver, get on train such and such. There'll be a one-way ticket for you waiting, get off at Hinkle, Oregon and the government will take care of you from there. So it was amazing because the train had some servicemen on it, but the preponderance of people on this train were women, just like my mother, headed to Hanford with two or three screaming kids. Everybody was trying to carry a couple suitcases, trying to carry a kid or drag a kid. We got off the train in Hinkle, Oregon—which is out like the armpit of America—and it was dark. It was probably midnight. And the Green Hornets, or the old Army buses, were there with a bunch of MPs. And the soldiers were really great. They helped all the women get their luggage off and loaded us all up into buses and drove over-- course we had to go the long way around Wallula Gap to Hanford. And the parking north of the Federal Building was all administrative and dormitories. So my dad had actually been in a dormitory there with a roommate for six months. And so he was out front waiting when the bus got there, along with tens of other guys. And so his roommate had gotten moved to another room, so there was like two cots in there. And my mom and dad had one cot, and my sister and I had another cot. And we lived there for several weeks until his name came up and we moved into an F house on—it's Jadwin now, but it used to be Goethals—down in the 300 block. There used to be Campbell's Grocery Store across the street. That's the way life started for us. I was five at the time, but my birthday was in late October, so I started the first grade in Lewis and Clark, which was one of the first schools that was occupied by students because they were still building the houses toward the north. I think maybe Marcus Whitman was in place, and later on Jefferson was built. But there were so many kids that when my mother took me to school, I was assigned to go to school from 6:00 AM to noon. And then other kids came in and went from 1:00 to like 5:00 or 6:00 at night. And so nobody had a car. You just were on foot. And then of course, the government had the Green Hornet buses for transporting people around town to a limited extent, but mostly for transporting workers out to the 200 Area. My dad was actually was the first plant manager of T Canyon, which was one of the two bismuth phosphate plants for producing uranium from the fuel from B Reactor. He later became the manager of 231-Z. When they first started processing plutonium, the end result at Hanford was plutonium nitrate, and they had to reduce it. It would come out of T and B Canyons as a fluid liquid. And so 231-Z then condensed it down to like a green Jell-O, and that's what they flew to Los Alamos. And then Los Alamos actually converted the green Jell-O to the metal which went into the first Trinity explosion. And even though everybody knows about Nagasaki because of the plutonium there, there was actually a third pit that was available. And after Hiroshima, Tibbets flew back to the United States to get the third pit in case it was needed. But, fortunately, the Japanese surrendered. So after the war was over, my dad got promoted up to what was called an area supervisor. He managed all of the plutonium activities because they'd started a new building that was called 234-5, or Z Plant. And Z Plant was the plant that produced the pits during the Cold War, and that's the nuclear core. So what they made down at Los Alamos for Trinity and Nagasaki, they transferred the production and the production line up to the building in 234-5 and he was a manager of that. I remember, in later years, my dad talking about the building was divided into two parts. There was the top secret half and the secret half, and the workers didn't know who was on the other side. They had entrances from different directions and they never communicated. And the whole building had—the doors were like a bank vaults, not three foot thick, but they were steel bank vault doors. And he said he had to memorize over 100 combination locks in the building. And to him, that was one of the more challenging tasks that he had to do.
Bauman: And how long did he work at Hanford?
Rhoades: We left in '50, and it ultimately caused his demise. But he had, according to the health physics people, he ended up dying of stomach cancer. And so there was a 50-50 chance that it was caused by working at Hanford. But he had developed really severe ulcers. And they eventually had to cut out half of his stomach because it just perforated and he kept almost bleeding to death. And so we moved to Texas and he went into business with one of his brothers in Odessa, Texas selling real estate and insurance. And later moved back in about 1960 and he then worked for United Nuclear, and he was a manager of extrusion press for N Reactor fuel. And then later on was hired by DOE and was a director of safety for DOE.
Bauman: And what was your father's name?
Rhoades: Paul Gordon Rhoades.
Bauman: And so during the war period when you were in first grade, did you have any idea of what your father was doing? What he was working on? What his job was?
Rhoades: No, absolutely nothing. And he was absolutely paranoid about the secrecy aspect. I can remember that vividly. And I can remember when news of the bomb was released on the radio, and my mother called him on the phone out at the plant. When she said, did you know that the bomb they dropped on Japan was made in Hanford? And he slammed the phone down, wouldn't even talk to her. He viewed working at Hanford as the same way a marine would view going ashore in Iwo Jima. It was his duty. In fact, he was not really for going after the compensation stuff that I think was voted in in 2000.
Bauman: Did he at some point then talk about what he was doing out there? What he--
Rhoades: Not much really. I mean, he did have anecdotes, like talking about the Green Run, when they released iodine-139. And one of the things I remember him talking about was arriving at work in a bus. And ruthenium is something that can't be filtered out in the sand filters on the plutonium processing plants, and so it would condense on the side of the towers because the chimney was so tall that it would cool off and then it'd condense on the inside of the--Well, every once in a while there'd be a change of conditions and this stuff would flake off, and go out the top of the stack, and be like snowflakes falling on the ground, and they have a short lived half-life. So the guys would get off the bus. They'd have to put on gauze mask and booties and everything, and walk into the building, and then get decontaminated before they entered the building. And then that was the start of their eight-hour shift. But there was no question that production was paramount. And there's no question in my mind that what DuPont did with the knowledge that was available in those days for designing the canyons and the reactors, was nothing short of brilliant. And even though people are upset with the environmental contamination--because we basically have got five square miles--or five by five, 25 square miles that's contaminated from the soil to the groundwater out there in the 200 Areas. But compared to what they did in Russia, which was dump it straight into the lake that fed out under the Arctic Circle, DuPont took advantage and was farsighted beyond belief in my professional estimation. I just marvel at how DuPont did on designing the reactor, and designing the canyons, and having them work safely.
Bauman: You say your father didn't really talk about it a whole lot--his work—did he ever express any concerns about safety at all or was he--
Rhoades: Never. In fact, DuPont was--as I grew up, and then as I worked later and they were down at Savannah River, and when I was working at Hanford--DuPont probably had the highest reputation for safety of any large organization in the nuclear industry. At Savannah River, if a guy climbed up a ladder, and did something stupid, and fell off and broke his arm at home, and he came to work and they found out that he had been unsafe at home, then he had time off. I mean, he was punished for what he did on the weekend because he was not thoughtful in his safety process. But DuPont, I held them in extremely high regard, high reputation. And they were, when you think about it, they did this for a dollar. They definitely were part of the war effort that sacrificed for the good of America. They weren't in it to make money or anything like that. They just were doing what they were paid to do. And they got out as soon as they could. And then they came back and did a second stint when they were asked. They were the only company that the government trusted. So they built Savannah River.
Bauman: I want to go back to talking about when you first arrived and you were five years old, do you remember any sort of first impressions that you had, or early memories of first arriving in Richland?
Rhoades: Oh, it was, of course, for a kid in the first grade, it was exciting because everybody was the same. They were all on foot, and they were all new. In fact, that kind of curiosity anecdote was on the first day as I was walking to school with my mother, and we got about half way to the school. And another woman who's coming in on a side street, and she had a little boy. And my mother just about passed out. It turned out it was her college roommate, who they hadn't seen since she graduated from college. And they both had gone their separate ways and it ended up that they are actually living in the house behind us. And they renewed their friendship from college and it went on until they both passed away.
Bauman: Wow.
Rhoades: Yeah.
Bauman: You mentioned that in first grade, you started at 6:00 AM. There was so many children that was a way they could serve the needs of all the families with children. How long did that last? Did that last through first grade or--
Rhoades: Yeah, it probably did last the first year. But by the time the year had gone by and as a year progressed, they were building hutments out alongside the school. So basically, the first grade was about the only time I went to school inside of a building. And maybe the sixth grade up in Jefferson, I went inside a building, but the rest of time I was always in a hutment. There were just more kids than there was space. But yeah, that was sparse. I mean, you didn't have a car. The only entertainment was playing bridge and softball. They had a very organized adult softball league, so that was the entertainment. There was no stores to buy Christmas gifts or anything. You ordered whatever you wanted out of Sears and Roebuck in July, and it got back-ordered, and you got it in the following July. But when Griggs opened over in Pasco that was a big thing because when I wanted a bike. And when my dad bought me a bike, basically, he had to borrow somebody's car. And we drove up to Yakima, and then he came home and assembled it, and turned us loose. For kids, the basic entertainment was skating. And they had concrete tennis courts up by Lewis and Clark--on the south end of Lewis and Clark--and so that was the only surface that you could roller skate on, because you had those old clamp on roller skates that you tightened with a key that just hooked on to your heel and the sole of your shoe. And so we were just constantly roller skating. There wasn't other entertainment. There was just recess at school.
Bauman: Were there any movie theaters, anything like that?
Rhoades: Yeah, there were. There were two movie theaters. And every weekend your dad gave you a dime. And you could get in for a nickel, I think, and get popcorn for a nickel or something like that. Probably everything you stood in line for—I mean everything—there was just a line beyond human belief. Like when it was haircut time, the only barbers in town at that time were down at the Allied Arts, down below Jackson's bar. And so, I don't know, they had two or three barbers in there. So Saturday morning, the boys and their fathers would show up to get their haircuts. And so there'd be a line of 100 kids. There wouldn't be no adults. They were all up at the bar playing pool and having a beer while the kids stood in line waiting to get a haircut. But when Ganzel’s came in was like night and day. Even shopping at the grocery store, you had to become friends with the butcher. If you didn't know somebody in the grocery store, and they befriended you and gave you a heads up that, hey, there's some marshmallows coming into town, why, you just did without. You ate a lot of canned fruit and vegetables and stuff like that. And people were always doing their own chickens and putting them up. But it was just pretty spartan. They gave you a house. I don't know if my dad even paid any rent. Basically, they gave him grass seed. They gave him coal. We just had a real nice house. And my parents had borrowed somebody's pickup, and they'd driven up Yakima and bought some furniture, and brought it home one piece at a time. But we lived down there on Goethals for, probably, from '44 to '49, or something like that. And then we moved up on McMurray, and then we left in '50 and went down to Odessa, Texas.
Bauman: What about institutions like churches? Were there churches for people to go to on Sundays in those early years?
Rhoades: We didn't. It wasn't because my parents didn't believe in God, it's just like we didn't go to church. I mean, we'd have had to walk. I'm not even sure where--I honestly do not remember where the closest church would have been. I'm sure there were churches, though, because the government set off areas for parks, they set off areas for schools, they set off areas for churches, very thorough.
Bauman: What about any community events that--
Rhoades: Not much. They had Richland Days. They had like the polio March of Dimes drives. Actually it was probably after—between, let's say, '45 and '50—when Camp Hanford really had gotten established and they had moved in missile people. This was just a sizable number of soldiers up there in North Richland, but they had much better facilities for entertainment--movies and all--it was just built newer. And so even though my dad didn't serve in the service, he had a lot of friends that had been in the service, and so we could go to movies up there. And they had outside entertainment that came in that you could go to. We never did live out at Hanford or anything like that. My ex-father-in-law actually came here and he lived out at Hanford for a while.
Bauman: So you said your family then moved away in 1950, and then came back in 1960? Your father came back?
Rhoades: Yeah, about ten years later he came back. I'm not too--
Bauman: Did you come back at that point also?
Rhoades: Well, I was in college, so I came up here after I graduated in '61 and went into the—they still had the draft at that time—so I volunteered for the Navy, and ended up flunking a hearing test and flight school. So I got washed out of flight training. And Vietnam hadn't started to build up yet so they weren't desperate for pilots. So after I got out of the Navy, I came back up here and stayed for a short while and got a job. I had a mining, engineering and geology degree, so I got a job in Colorado in a molybdenum mine, and worked there for a couple of years, and decided to go back to college and get a degree in metallurgy. And so I went to WSU and graduated from there in '65, went down to Kaiser Steel in California. By then, my dad had moved from working for the contractor into working for the AEC. Now, I'm not too sure—I'm sure he just probably just wanted me and my wife and their grandkids closer to them—but anyway, he told the people in personnel that I had a metallurgy degree. And one day I got a call from Wanda Cotner, that was the branch chief over the personnel hiring, and she asked me if I'd come up for an interview. And she said that she could give me a nice raise if I'd think about joining the AEC. So I ended up accepting the offer. And when I got my Q Clearance, I moved up here in July of '67, and worked for DOE as an individual contributor over PNLs. It was a Hanford lab. PNL, I guess, had taken over by then. They had a number of very important metallurgical programs on understanding how plutonium reacted, especially in the reactor with neutrons hitting it all the time. So I advanced very nicely. And by the early '80s, I was assistant manager for--it was then ERDA or AEC--for all the compliance programs at Hanford--that'd be safety, and QA, and environmental, and security--so all the compliance structure at Hanford. Then, probably, in about '84, I guess, I moved me over and I was assistant manager for all the nuclear operations at Hanford. So I had the 300 Area for the fuel fab for N Reactor. And we still had N Reactor running. And FFTF was starting up, we had PUREX running and T Canyon. I probably had a billion dollar budget back in the '80s just for all the nuclear operations here at the site. So we did the first comprehensive EIS that was ever done in the Department of Energy for the tank farms, built the last double shell tanks that were ever built.
Bauman: And how long did you work at--?
Rhoades: I worked for about 20 years for DOE, and the AEC, and then I took an early retirement in, must've been like 1988. So it must have been about 21 years I worked here. So I left Hanford and went over to Idaho Falls and was as a manager over their capital construction projects. And then I got transferred to Rocky Flats. After the FBI and EPA had shut down Rocky Flats, the Department of Energy terminated the contract with the contractor. And actually they didn't even compete the contract. They just, literally, gave it to EG&G, which is almost unheard of, to not compete a major contract. So I was in charge of—they had shut down Rocky Flats operations. And so when EG&G came in, our charter was to restart the plant. And so I was the project manager over restarting the plutonium operations at Rocky Flats. I got promoted up to being assistant general manager over environmental remediation. And then I got a call from Lockheed down in Houston and they were trying to break into the DOE business. And so they hired about 20 experienced people that had worked in and outside of DOE to put together proposals to run these big contracts, whether it be Oak Ridge, or Rocky Flats, or Idaho, or Nevada Test Site. And so then I worked for Lockheed and it then became Lockheed Martin. But I worked for Lockheed from like '93 to '96, and I was a general manager of one of their environmental remediation divisions. And I transferred back up here, which was probably about the sixth or seventh time I've been through this town. But when Lockheed Martin and Fluor won the Westinghouse contract in '96, I got transferred back to Richland. So I'd made a circuitous loop that had gone from Richland to Idaho Falls to Rocky Flats outside of Denver, down to Houston, the Nevada Test Site, and the back up to Hanford. But I ended up, after I retired from Lockheed Martin, I went to work for a small business here at ATL International. They currently run the 222-S Laboratory. I was a vice president for them over all their Hanford work. Eventually, I just decided to go out on my own. So I consulted from about 2004 to the end of 2011. And by then, I looked around and all my contacts had either died or moved to Arizona or Florida. Even today, I probably don't know two human beings that are still working for a living. But this place has been--and DOE has been—absolutely a blessing to me.
Bauman: I want to go back. So your family left in 1950. Then you came back in '67, roughly?
Rhoades: No, I came back in '61.
Bauman: Right.
Rhoades: Just for a short period of time. Just long enough to enlist in the Navy. And then when I got ready to start flight school, I took a hearing test. And believe it or not, the physical requirements for all branches of service are the same. It's just that they check people that are going to be in the Air Force or in the Navy, they just check certain things closer than they do if you want to be a marine. And so I was just borderline acceptable in the hearing. And since they had an abundance of pilots and the Vietnam War hadn't escalated or not, they ended up giving me an honorable discharge and reclassifying me as 1-Y, which is, it has to be a national emergency to call you back up. I came home and then went to Colorado and went to work in the mine.
Bauman: When you came back here for the job working at Hanford, I was wondering, what ways had the community changed since you were here as a child going to school?
Rhoades: You know what, to me, at a macroscopic view of the Tri-Cities, the biggest thing that's changed is the number of people. Richland is still uptown and downtown. Kennewick is striving to open up that area between the two bridges along the river. But the biggest thing is now there are probably three times as many people. There was probably 90,000 people between the three towns early in the '50s. And now there's probably a quarter of a million people. And so the biggest changes is that the roads and streets haven't been modernized--or the stoplights--to handle triple the traffic. But the wine industry obviously is a major thing, because when I was a kid growing up here—When they talk about termination dust storms, they were not kidding, because I lived in eastern Colorado and my parents had lived through the Dust Bowl, and I knew what dust storms looked like. And when they hit Richland, your house—I remember my mother, she—when they vacuum--you've just got sweep broom and a wood floor, and your sweeping it up, and throwing it in the yard with a dust pan. But the irrigation changed all that. There's just so much more moisture going up in the air that the dust storms are few and far between. And the humidity has gone from like 10% or 15% probably to 35%. And the summers have gotten less extreme. When I was a kid, it was not unusual at all for July--from the first of July to the end of July--to be 110 to 115 degrees. I've seen it 117 degrees here. And now, just look at this last summer, we had a few days of 101 or 103. But the climate has mellowed out with the extremes. Like in '48, the Columbia River froze clear across from side to side. You could drive a truck across it. The same year as the big flood. So the extremes have gone away. And instead of the real dips and curves a sinusoidal curve, it's more shallow extremes. But the fact that they now have Meadow Springs, and they have Clipper Ridge, and West Richland, of course, has expanded from a nothing. When I was a kid there was just basically a few people that liked to have farmland lived out there. There was probably as many people living in Yakima as there was in Richland, because they couldn't build houses fast enough. And those that worked in the 100 Areas or the 200 Areas, it was just as close to come in from Yakima as it was to drive from Richland.
Bauman: You talk about a number memories from your childhood, are there any other things, events, or particular memories that really stand out from those early years in Richland?
Rhoades: You had to make your entertainment. And you had to wait in line for everything, including getting a car. Jeez, it must have been '48 before we got a car. And in the Sunday paper there was an ad that said, call a number in Seattle, and get on a list for a Buick. And so my mother did that. And about six months later we got a call and said come pick up your car. We got on a train over in Pasco that just had wood benches in it, and we went over Snoqualmie to Seattle, and got this new '48 Buick, and drove it home over Snoqualmie Pass. People from all over the neighborhood were kind of ogling this car because anybody else that had a car basically were driving some pre-1940 model, because during the '40s they didn't make cars. But that was a vast improvement for us to have our own wheels. But self-made entertainment. When we lived up on McMurray—of course, all these guys that came here from the '30s and '40s, all the entertainment they had as they grew up as kids was self-made also. So playing pool was a big activity. And so my dad bought a pool table over in Pasco, and we had it in the basement. And on the weekend, he and all of his buddies iced down beer and played kelly pool all afternoon, that was the entertainment. And probably that night those same guys, with their wives, had a little potluck at somebody's house and played Bridge. My parents played bridge all the time.
Bauman: I wanted to ask you, then, also about your working at Hanford. Hanford for so long focused on production. You mentioned that production, production. At some point, of course, it shifted to cleanup. I wondered if that shift impacted your work at all?
Rhoades: Well, by the time I left Hanford it was still in a reduced production mode. The writing was on the wall that environmental restoration was the future of Hanford, not production. We fought to keep N Reactor going because it was dual purpose. But especially when they passed the RCRA, or Resource Conservation Recovery Act, that was the first major commitment by the US Government for an environmental cleanup. And they sent that law, or bill, out to all the field offices and asked for the field offices to comment on what effect it would have on their operations. And Dixy Lee Ray was the commissioner at the time. And I must've been a director of safety at the time. So we got together with the contractors and we labored over this. And fortunately, I have a knack of being able to synthesize complicated things into a very concise statement. And when we got through reviewing this, I wrote a letter for the manager of the field office. And it was about this long, and it simply said, this will shut down nuclear pit production for the United States of America. And from that point on it was one lawsuit after another as Congress tried to extend its will on the defense industry. But at the time, like when I was a Rocky Flats, the reason they were so anxious to restart that plant that was the only plant in all of DOE complex that didn't have two--like there was Hanford and Savannah River, there was Los Alamos and Livermore Design Lab. So there was a duality in everything. But when they removed the pit production from Hanford, instead having pit production at Savannah River and Hanford both, they built a new plant at Rocky Flats. And it was the only plant that made pits. And so it was a choke point. And when the FBI and EPA shut that plant down, basically, we had nuclear subs that were out in the ocean with 20 missiles and there was no spear point on the end of the spear. They were not loaded because we were not making pits. So that was why the defense industry was fighting with Congress on the environmental cleanup was because we were not in a good defensible position nuclear-wise during that Cold War years if we had the boomers out in the ocean that didn't have a number of warheads on top of them. And that's why EG&G got the contract because DOE believed that they could restart the plant and start making these pits. So even though the environmental law was saying you should be shifting quickly to environmental restoration at Rocky Flats, the headquarters people over defense programs were telling you under the table, get this plant running. We need these pits for the defense of America. So it was real catch-22 for the management of the Rocky Flats plant. But eventually, it became obvious that they were never going to restart the plant and so everybody shifted into a full environmental restoration mode.
Bauman: During your years working here at Hanford, what would you consider some of the more challenging aspects of your job, the work you were doing here, and maybe some of the most rewarding aspects of your work?
Rhoades: Well, you know--[SIGH] I mean, rewarding is a hard thing to define because that was one of the primary reasons I took early retirement. Let me just use Yucca Mountain as an example. When I hired into the AEC in '67, the United States Government was looking for a repository for nuclear fuel in Lyons, Kansas. So that was '67, and here we are, 2013, and we're no closer to solving that national problem today than we were 40 years ago. So the satisfaction that comes with mission accomplished was always very difficult to achieve. It was more of a case of frustration on my part that the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence. If I was going to go any higher in DOE, I would have to go to Washington, DC. Because I was already an SES and that's as high as you could go without a congressional appointment. But the most challenging thing was that when Alex Fremling came in to be the manager of DOE, he brought a complete new, fresh environmental sensitive outlook to the plant. And so trying to deal with the public interface over leaking tanks—106-T was a big bump in my career. I went from a nobody to a branch chief just with one tank leak. [LAUGHTER] But he was very environmental conscious and he was very safety conscious. And so he ratcheted the whole system up, not just one notch, but numerous notches. Because when they built the nuclear industry, they did not have safety standards for the nuclear industry, because it was a brand new industry. So if you looked at the operation of the uranium side, then they used the safety standards of a steel mill and a blast furnace to do the safety standards for Fernald and these other uranium enrichment places. And if you look at the chemical processing in the canyons, they looked to the petroleum cracking industry for safety standards. And if you look to the waste disposal, which was the operation of the tank farms and the burial grounds, it had the same basic safety standards and the interest as a commercial landfill. And so it wasn't until the nuclear Navy was born and Rickover installed a completely different safety philosophy because he was going to have 200, or 300, or 400 sailor—lives were dependent on everything functioning perfectly. And Alex Fremling was bright enough and young enough to recognize that. And he brought that standard into Hanford. So there was just a real crash program on upgrading the operational procedures for tank farms and other waste disposals. Skin contaminations were accepted as—like a guy working on your car, he accepts the fact that his hands are going to get greasy. But Alex didn't accept that. He said, you know, we're going to have zero accidents. And we're going to have zero skin contaminations. We're going to be open with the public on any of these tank leaks. And the problem was we didn't have, really, the skill to measure how these tanks were doing—whether we're losing material or not losing material. And even though you could measure the depth, the interest of whether it was unacceptable to leak was not there. And the reason for that was that when the first tanks were built, they were built in 12. So there's four rows of three, and the separation process was simply a settling process. So the waste would come into the first tank and fill up, and the solids would drift to the bottom. And then it'd overflow into the second tank, another lighter batch of solids. And then it would flow into the third tank, and more solids would fall out. Then it would flow into the ground. And so if you're putting stuff in the ground for ten or 15 years, and using nine exchange properties of the soil to capture the radionuclides, then what's the big deal about a tank leaking a little extra waste? You've already put a billion gallons of stuff into the soil, what's another 100,000 gallons? So that was the mentality that Alex faced with the contractors when he came to Hanford. I give him credit. He single-handedly changed that. And he took on the challenge to do the very first environmental impact statement on tank waste for the whole agency. He was the guinea pig. He was the front runner, or the blazer, for the DOE on environmental issues. And so I honestly think that Hanford, even though, because of the design of the plants, there was no way to retrofit these plants to not discharge stuff to the soil, but there was a way to monitor it better and be more acutely aware of occurrences that you didn't want to occur. Whether it was stuff leaking on the ground on top of the tank, or whether it was stuff leaking into the ground through the bottom of the tank.
Bauman: So what time period are you talking about here?
Rhoades: This would have been in late '70s up to, probably, '87. And Mike Lawrence came in '87.
Bauman: And it's Alex Fremling?
Rhoades: Yes, Fremling.
Bauman: How do you spell the last name?
Rhoades: F-R-E-M-L-I-N-G.
Bauman: So that's when you noticed a shift definitely taking place?
Rhoades: No question. I was a student of, that instead of resisting these changes, I embraced these changes and I was rewarded for that. But the mentality of the DOE—or it was ERDA at that time, but the mentality of the workers in ERDA were no different than the mentality in the contractors. I mean, we'd been doing it this way for 30 years, why are we changing? He conducted the first operational readiness review probably in the nation for startup nuclear facilities.
Bauman: How were you able to change that mentality I guess into the--
Rhoades: You know what, I'd say, probably, through the award-fee process. It's through the money. When I first got here, contractors had contracts, but there was never any real evaluation of whether they deserved their fee or didn't deserve their fee. So once we instituted an award-fee process in which we itemized the areas for improvement, then quantified A, B, C or D or F, you could then quantify. If they had $10 million fee that's up for grabs for this quarter or this six month period, you could quantify how well they did to meet those goals. So it was very intense and it was a steep learning curve, but it produced results. And we changed contractors, too.
Bauman: Mm-hmm, right. So this was when you would have been in charge of compliance programs?
Rhoades: First, yeah. After I was a branch chief, I was an assistant division director. Basically all of my career was in nuclear operations, especially with the tank farms. And even though I moved over to be the director of safety, and then on to be the system manager for compliance, you were just viewing operations from an independent standpoint. You didn't direct nuclear operations, but you did appraisals, and you did audits, and you did oversight, and you graded a contractor on his performance independent from operations.
Bauman: Was it during your time there, I mean, at some point of course there were a lot of questions raised about the tanks. And in terms of the public, questions about tanks leaking and that sort of thing. Did you have to deal with any of that sort of thing?
Rhoades: Listen, I spent—if I wasn't making presentations to the public or defending our actions to the public, I was doing so in front of Congress. There was constant barrage and it was difficult to communicate because by this time the environmental support groups were springing up to put pressure on DOE to perform and to clean up and to accelerate. And, of course, you control certain things, but you don't control your budget. Congress controls your budget. And so it was difficult at best, and it was contentious. It's constantly contentious because it was like I was speaking in English and they were listening in Greek. We couldn't communicate, because they were just totally upset with what the government had done to end the war. They forgot that what was the end result was stop the war and save millions of lives in the invasion of Japan. And they had forgotten that. And it was just on the bad things that have been done to the environment. And I'd be the first to agree to that--I don't think that in hindsight, if you went back and re-ran it ten times in hindsight, I don't think anything would have changed. Because the same pressure to beat the Germans to the nuclear bomb and the same pressure to end the war in the Pacific would not change. And so you'd only have the capability to do what your technology was advanced enough to do at that time and place.
Bauman: I wonder if there's anything that you haven't talked about, or I haven't asked about yet, either in terms of your years growing up here as a young child, or your father's work, or your work at Hanford, that you'd like to talk about, or think it would be important to talk about.
Rhoades: I would just simply say that I think that the people and the contractors in the government, as well as contractors, have always given 100% to do the right thing. And they don't get much praise. And they are constantly vilified because they're missing milestones and stuff like that. But there is just some extremely technically challenging work to be done out there. It's been a flywheel for this site since 1943, and it's going to continue out probably to 2075. But they'll never clean the site up, and they'll never walk away from it. They'll have some 25-square-mile pad out there that has all kinds of markings on it, don't drill here. But they're making tremendous strides in cleaning up the groundwater and removing the stuff along the river. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that they could clean up all the burial grounds and trenches along the river and the buildings. Each one of those reactors had the facilities enough to run a small city, and now all that's left is a cube. You could paint dots on it or something like rolling dice across the prairie. But I just think it's been remarkable how much they've cleaned up and how safely they've done it. You don't ever read of anybody getting killed out there, or maimed out there, and they're still using a lot of heavy equipment. The safety standards are extremely high and it’s part of the reward, the carrot in front of the donkey. If you're safe and have a good safety record and you make progress, you get your fee.
Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much—
Rhoades: Sure.
Bauman: --for coming and talking to us today and sharing your memories and experiences. I appreciate it.
Rhoades: Great, thank you very much.
Northwest Public Television | Peters_Leonard
Leonard Peters: Leonard Peters. L-E-O-N-A-R-D P-E-T-E-R-S.
Arata: Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. It's November 19th--already--2013, and we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start, if you could tell us a little bit about how your family came to Hanford and where you were from.
Peters: I was born in Denver in August of '43. My father came out in June or July of '43 from Denver. And so my mom, myself, and my brother were there in Denver, and when I was two months old we came out with another family, the Carl Eckert family. And it was my mom, Mrs. Eckert, their daughter--who was about my age--and my brothers. So five of us came out in a car in October of '43. And my dad was working out here. And so that's how we came out, was in an old car.
Arata: And what was your father doing at Hanford?
Peters: He was a truck driver. He drove for Remington Arms in Denver, who was DuPont, and he also worked for Bechtel up in Alaska. And he came down and went back to Denver and was driving, heard about this place. And if you'd like a very interesting story--
Arata: Always.
Peters: He was driving for an Army officer. A colonel or something, I'm not sure. Kind of a--I'll say chauffeur, but it wasn't really a chauffeur. But my dad had heard about this place. And he asked his--I'll say colonel--about it. And very few people knew about it. But this colonel says, well, I can't tell you anything about it, but if you've heard of heavy water, it has something to do with heavy water. Of course my dad, heavy water didn't mean anything to him. But you know, hindsight. It's kind of interesting to me this colonel knew a little bit about what was going on here. As big a secret as it was, not that many people knew. But he had some idea of what was going on. I found that very interesting.
Arata: Yeah. And how long did your father work at the Hanford site?
Peters: From '43 until he retired in '73.
Arata: Okay, well, we'll come back to that. I want to ask you just a few questions about the area. Obviously you were very, very young—
Peters: I'm sorry. He passed away in '73. He retired in '67.
Arata: Okay. I'll have more questions for you. [LAUGHTER] Do you remember, growing up, what sort of housing you lived in, what the situation was like?
Peters: My first memory was an A house, 1520 Thayer. We moved in there about 1945. So that's my first memory, though we lived many places before that, as my dad's Q clearance bears out. But my memory goes back to the A house in 1945.
Arata: Did you live there for quite a while?
Peters: Lived there until around '56, '57.
Arata: And could you describe that house a little bit, for anyone who doesn't know what an A house is?
Peters: An A house is a duplex, two-story. You have neighbors literally right next door to you. It was a three-bedroom, all upstairs. And of course back then there was no air conditioning, and it would get hot in the summertime. I can literally remember summers, 109 to 110, 112 degrees. And the only air conditioning was a swamp cooler. So it was pretty miserable, but yet you didn't think about it because that's just the way it was. The government literally furnished everything, from throw rugs to table, chairs. I mean literally everything. Coal. We had a coal-burning furnace, and like once a month or so on, they would deliver coal. And you had to make sure there was a coal bin that had slats in it, and you had to make sure that the slats were in, because if you forgot to put the slats in you'd have coal all over the basement floor. And so that was kind of interesting. My dad, every morning, would have to get up and stoke the fire and get it going in wintertime, because we used to have some pretty bad winters compared to today. And so that was, again, just part of living in this area. Dust storms. You've heard of the termination winds. The wind would blow and the curtains would go back and forth and just wave in the breeze, with all the windows closed. And you'd have a quarter of an inch of dust on the windowsills and everything. But there again, that's just the way it was. I can remember one story--my wife tells that when her mother came out with her and her brother, met at the train station, and the father was there to pick them up. There was a windstorm right then. And her first words were "Sherman, get me a ticket back home." And they ended up dying here, and buried here. And I know my dad, he swore he would never—he wanted to go back to Colorado, but again, he was buried here and lived here all the rest of his life. But what else can I say on the government? Everything—you know, I've heard of people—we never did do it, but people get tired of a chair or something, they'd break it, call housing. They would need another chair, and they'd come out and replace the chair. And if you had—back then they had fuses, as opposed to breakers. Blow a fuse, call housing, they'd send an electrician out to change the fuse for you. I mean, it was pretty amazing, really. And it was good quality furniture.
Arata: Cool. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about growing up in Richland in the '40s and '50s, sort of what the community was like at that time?
Peters: It was a fairly small town, of course. I think--and this is just my memory--it was about probably maybe 23,000 people, was all. Something like that. And it was truly a Leave It to Beaver era. People laugh at that, but that's exactly what it was, because if you stop and think about it--in order to live in Richland, you had to work out in the area. In order to work out in the area, you needed clearance. And it was not unusual to have someone knock at the door and be an FBI agent investigating someone or something. I mean, it was very controlled. And so there was no crime to speak of. Nickel and dime stuff. But there was one murder, in all those years. They never did find the killer. But no, we'd play out all night and folks wouldn't think a thing about it. That’s just the way it was. And in the summertime, like I said, as hot as it was, all the windows and doors would be wide open and wouldn't think a thing about it. And people kind of knew one another. Not that you knew everybody, but that small a town and everyone working out there. Everyone rode the bus, so there was a camaraderie with not only where you worked but also on the buses. And people I think really did try and watch out for one another. But no, growing up, it was great. One kind of fun story. We used to hooky-bob. You know what that is?
Arata: I don't.
Peters: Okay, what we'd do in the wintertime when the roads were snowy and icy. You'd hide behind a bush, and as a car went by, you ran out and grabbed the bumper and had them drag you around. And that was a lot of fun. That was one of the winter sports. But it was kind of interesting. I can remember, newspaper front page showed a bus with a glove on it. The story was, it was a hooky-bobber and his hand was wet and it froze to the bumper, and--make a long story short, it was on the dangers of hooky-bobbing. But it just happens that the guy that that glove belonged to graduated a couple years ahead of me. Name was Jim Crum, who is now an attorney for the US government. But no, it was a fun time. I mean, Friday night shows was wall-to-wall kids. Very seldom was there a fight or anything. We'd hang out at the Spudnut Shop, or there was another place called Tim's. Someone that had a car would drive around the Uptown area about 30 times, just looking for gals or whatever. I mean, it was an American Graffiti time. Have you seen American Graffiti?
Arata: Yes, sir.
Peters: You see that, and every person in there--Hey, that was so-and-so; that was so-and-so. I mean, it was so accurate to our high school days. It was a good time to grow up. Wintertime, of course, we had Christmas tree forts, and if there was snow on the ground we'd have snow forts and choose up sides and have snowball fights hiding behind our snow forts. We would, if there was no snow--or even if there was snow after Christmas--build Christmas tree forts. Stack them up and have a roof on it, even sleep out in it. But if a neighbor down the street--you know, if they had a Christmas tree fort, about one or two in the morning we'd sneak down and steal all their trees. And we'd have a bigger fort then. We would sleep out a lot in the summertime, because it was hot. I can remember we would sleep out maybe 10 o'clock at night or so. There were still orchards, cherry orchards in town. Up on Van Giesen. We lived just around the corner on Thayer. We'd get up, go down there and steal cherries. We'd steal quite a few cherries. Then the next day we'd sell them house to house. What else was there? The buses were a big part. The buses were fun, because there was two groups. They were both run by the government, but there was what they called the city local, which took people from point A to point B as far as downtown and uptown, different places. Then there was the outer area buses that took workers to work and brought them home. But there was two different--not bus companies, but groups of drivers that drove for each group. But not only hooky-bobbing, but it was always fun to--as buses passed--snowball them, and throw snowballs at them. Just fun things.
Arata: Some good winter sports.
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: Could you talk a little bit more about these--you mentioned Friday night shows, and also the Spudnut Shop. Could you describe those a little bit?
Peters: I mean, everyone went to them. All the kids went to them. And you know, you're talking the '50s, where rock and roll was just coming in. I wrote a piece one time on--I really think that we were born at a nice time, because we can remember big bands, we can remember that type of music and how rock and roll came in. And of course parents didn't like rock and roll at all. It was evil, and all this. But a lot of the movies, some of the movies, had rock and roll stars. I can remember people dancing in the aisles while the movie was on. Things like that. I can remember one gal was dancing what they used to call a dirty bop. They ended up kicking her out. [LAUGHTER] But no, there was dancing and hooting and hollering. Before the Uptown Theater opened was the Village Theater. And that was when we were younger, but that's when they showed the serials, whether it be Superman or Whip Wilson or whomever. But every Saturday we'd go to the show. There'd be a cartoon as well as one or two double feature. That's back--we were young, but a fun thing then, I guess, was to have your popcorn boxes. They were boxes at the time. You'd flatten them and throw them and make a shadow on the screen. That was the big deal. But the Village Theater was so strange because it was all kids, basically. Because the Richland Theater, which is now The Players, was more the adults. The Village Theater was for little kids. But you would walk down the aisles, and was a kind of carpeting, and you'd stick, stick, stick, stick. I don't think they ever cleaned it. Pop spilled on it, candy bars, and everything else. That was fun. Then they did build the Uptown Theater, and that was more adult movies. But on Friday night, it was lot of science fiction. That's where you saw Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, and all that. Then the midnight shows had really neat--they'd have a midnight show, and we wouldn't get home until three in the morning, but no big deal. You'd walk home. No big deal. I don't know if you can do it today, but there'd be half a dozen of your friends walking home with you, just having a good time. But the Friday night shows--I started smoking quite early. I don't smoke now. But I can remember, for mowing the lawn and peeling the taters and things that, I’d get $1 a week allowance. And with that dollar I could buy a pack of cigarettes, which would last me a week, get into the show, and have like a dime left over. So I mean, a dollar, I was in fat city.
Arata: Do you remember how much a movie cost, about that time?
Peters: First ones I can remember was $0.11 or $0.12, and then it went to $0.20. And I think during my high school days, if I remember right, it was probably $0.35, something like that. I'm not sure.
Arata: All right. I'm fascinated by the Spudnut Shop and Tim's. Can you describe those a little?
Peters: Well, Tim's was where Dr. Chavla placed his--it's kind of caddy-cornered from the graveyard, the old graveyard. And it was a nice place. A fireplace in it and everything. That's where the kids hung out. And it wasn't really a pizza parlor, but it was kind of a pizza parlor sandwich place. It was our high school days, and it closed, I'm not sure exactly when, but became Einan's Funeral Home. It went from the restaurant to Einan's Funeral Home. And then Einan's, of course, moved out on the bypass. But the Spudnut shop, it's bigger now than it was. It used to just be just a few booths. But I can remember Spudnuts were, let's say, $0.10. And for a Spudnut ala mode--that was a Spudnut with soft ice cream on it--that was $0.15. And if you had $0.15 for that, you was in pretty good shape, because we didn't have money like that. And there was another place just two doors down from that that was the Fission Chips. But it was interesting the way they spelled fission. It was fission, like nuclear. It was Fission Chips. You can see some old pictures of the Spudnut shop, and just a couple doors down, you'll see the Fission Chips. But we'd hang out in the Spudnut Shop before the movie, and then maybe go there after the movie. And that's just where everyone hung out. When we had a car later, more in our high school years, we hung out at a place called Skip's. It was where Les Schwab is now. That was kind of the hangout there. I don't know if you want this on there. It's not very nice. But Skip's, there was a young girl worked there with a cleft palate. One the guys that we kind of ran with, he had a cleft palate also. He was about three years older than me. But he pulled in there, him and friends, and she said in her cleft palate way, ,ay I help you? He said yeah, give me a such and such. And she got mad, you don't have to make fun of me! Because she though he was just making fun of her. Kind of a sad story, but kind of humorous also. The movies was a big part of life. Of course, swimming. We used to swim in the Yakima a lot. And the old pool, what we used to call the big pool, down in what's now Howard Amon Park—it used to be Riverside Park--there was a swimming pool there. And the flood of '48, '47-'48, it flooded the park. And so they done away with that pool and built the present one. That flood was quite a deal. I can remember going--the bridge was out--going out of Richland, and they had a pontoon bridge. And that causeway wasn't there then. It was just flat. But I thought that was so neat. We was going across the bridge, and you see pontoons all the way across it with lumber to drive on. And that always impressed me. Down around Gowen and things, I can remember the basements flooded from that flood. And it was quite a flood. That's when they built the dam or dike around Richland and Kennewick and so on. The—I was thinking of something else, and lost it. But no, the flood was quite an event. I worked with a guy named Ralph Schafer, who had a private pilot's license, and they hired him as a bus driver. But they let him go from bus driving long enough, because the only way to the airport at the time was to fly from Richland to Pasco. So they hired him to ferry people to the Pasco airport in his private plane, because basically there was no way out of Richland, until they put that pontoon bridge in.
Arata: I wonder if you could talk about--obviously you went through school here. Do you have any memories--there were also some residents that were here prior to 1943, that were still in school here, that were moved off of their family lands. Did you go to school with anybody who had memories of that, that you recall?
Peters: Not to my knowledge. You hear all kinds of stories and things that I don't know. I know I've heard that one family--or some people, I'll say--when they were, quote, kicked out of White Bluffs Hanford area, they moved to Prosser, Sunnyside, somewhere up there, and swore they'd never set foot in Richland. And whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I know there's hard feelings over it, rightfully so. But no, I don't know of anyone. I know we had a lot of construction workers in trailer parks in north Richland. There was a big trailer park, and they had an elementary school out there, John Ball. And once they got all the houses built that they were going to build, I guess, they closed the trailer park and closed John Ball and had them all into town. But I can remember living on Thayer, going to school at Old Sacky—Sacajawea, the Old Sacky--that for some reason, for two-three days they sent me to Spalding. I had to walk to school, which was maybe three, four blocks, five blocks. I can remember big piles of dirt, having to climb over them to get to school. And the reason for that was they were building the ranch houses at that time. So I was probably first grade, I'm guessing. So they were still building in the late '40s, early '50s. In fact, Bauer Days and the Richland Village came later, after the letter houses. But school--no, I honestly can't remember any kids there.
Arata: No problem. We're here to get your memories, so. A bunch of other things I want to ask you. One thing, you said your father worked in Hanford until '67.
Peters: He retired.
Arata: He retired in '67. So he was working in the area when President Kennedy came, in 1963. Do you have any memories of that event?
Peters: No. I was in the Navy then, so no. I know my wife said that she went out to see him. And there were so many people you could hardly see him, but she went out to it. But no, I got out of the Navy in October, '63. I was on a train back to Denver to visit relatives. It's kind of sad. I was sitting in the club car playing cards with strangers, and the porter came in--a black fella--says, [EMOTIONAL] the President's been shot. And we all--aww, go on, he's pulling our leg, he's joking. Then I says, you don't joke about something like that. We were somewhere around Wyoming on the train, and then they was able to get a radio station over the PA or whatever it was. Sure enough, a little bit later--that he had died. And that's how I learned of it. I'll never forget that train ride. Got to Denver, and it was just strange.
Arata: Of course. And we're right on the anniversary of it now.
Peters: Yeah. Yeah. But my dad, I don't know if he went to see him or not. I mean, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. He came out of the Depression. He was born in '03, so he'd been through a lot. I can remember him saying that he'd vote for a yellow dog before he'd vote for a Republican. He was the old Democrat. But he did vote for one Republican. That was John Dam, who was running for county commissioner. They were personal friends. He said that's the only Republican he'd ever voted for.
Arata: One exception.
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: So did you work at Hanford at all?
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: You did. So could you start filling us in on that a little?
Peters: I worked 40 years out there. Hired on '65. And luckily my dad was still working, so we overlapped. We were both drivers. And I started out as a laborer, though they called them servicemen--basically a laborer. And I got set up to bus driver. And in '61, had a layoff. And I could have stayed, but I thought, man, let's see what else is out there. And I went and worked for Battelle. I was with Battelle for about 13 years in inhalation toxicology. Long-term study. Plutonium, curium, americium studies on dogs. And in about '84 I quit Battelle and went back to transportation, because money. You know that all your college folks know that biology is not real high-paying, unless you're a PhD or something. But a BS in biology's not much. But no, I really enjoyed that. In fact, when McCluskey's glove box blew up, about 200 Areas were exposed to--I forget if it was curium or americium, but there hadn't been a lot of studies on those. And like I said, I was working in inhalation toxicology, and we got two or three big contracts right after that to study the health effects of curium and americium through inhalation. He was an amazing man, because I worked with PhDs. Immunologists, veterinaries, hematologists. You name it, we had the discipline there. Pathologists. And they didn't give him six months to live, with what he got. And he ended up living probably 20 years or better. It is quite an amazing story. You can go on the internet and look up Atomic Man, and his story's in there.
Arata: We actually interviewed the gentleman who was in charge of the cleanup, cleaning up his hospital room.
Peters: Yeah. I don't know if it was this guy I worked with, what we called a radiation monitor. Now they're HPTs or something. But he was with him, scrubbing him and things. His name was Larry Belt. He'd be a good interview for you. I worked with Larry for a number of years. He was our radiation monitor when we exposed dogs and so on. But he said, you can't believe the pain this man was in. He said, we had to literally scrub him with brushes, because he had stuff embedded in his face and so on. Terrible. He says, submerge him and scrub him. No, Larry Belt could tell some stories about it. But back to my job. I quit Battelle for financial reasons and went back to driving. Drove a bus for a lot of years. They shut the bus system down, and I went and worked driving a truck, and drove ERDF trucks hauling the solid waste from out around the river and so on. Did that for a number of years and retired. I taught HAZMAT classes for the last about ten years. But buses were the fun job. A lot of stories there. One of our drivers named Carl Adcock was driving down Delafield, taking the day shift home--so it was about four or five in the afternoon—and a little girl was standing out in the middle of the street playing. About five, six years old. Stopped his bus, pulled the brake, got out and spanked her butt, get out of here! Got back in the bus, and the passengers were just--what are you doing? You could get in trouble for that. And it was his daughter. But no, we've had people have epileptic seizures on the bus. And there's all sorts of things like that. A lot of stories.
Arata: You must see a little bit of everything.
Peters: Oh, yeah. We had poker games, bridge games, on the buses. They had cardboard tables. Four people would sit down, put their table between the aisles and play cards. They had a bridge game going from 100F, which was where the animals were before they built 300—the animal life sciences 300 Area--but they had a bridge game that was going steady for at least 30, 35 years. I mean, it was different people. You know, someone would retire, someone else would take their place. But it started out at 100F at lunch break and then on the bus, and it continued. When we were at 300 they were still playing. Again, it was different players, but it was the same game.
Arata: Wow. There's something I wanted to ask you about. Returning back to when you worked in inhalation toxicology at Battelle, did you work with the smoking beagles?
Peters: Yes. That was my first job, was smoking.
Arata: We just interviewed Vanis Daniels--
Peters: Oh, yeah. I know Vanis.
Arata: --last week, who worked with the smoking beagles. Can you describe for us the process of getting the beagles to smoke two packs a day?
Peters: Well, the hard part's lighting 'em. No, the reason for the study, as I understood it, was uranium miners were dying early, and they wanted to know why. Because it could be cigarette smoke--because most of them were smokers--uranium ore dust or it could be radon daughters. And so we had a group of--I forget now. 70 dogs, 60. Something like that. And 10 of would receive smoke only, cigarette smoke only. They had a table, kind of a horseshoe. The mask fit over their muzzle with a cigarette in there, and like every seventh or tenth breath, a little gadget would open and their breath would suck in the smoke. But then ten of them would receive uranium ore dust and radon daughters. There was a large chamber that held ten dogs around it, and up in the top there was a grinder thing that would grind the ore dust and sprinkle it down in. I mean, it wasn't noticeable, it wasn't thick, but it was in there. And then we had radon. I think it was water bubbled through it that would give the radon gas, and it would get into the chamber. And then we had another ten that would receive cigarette and the radon. And then a control group that didn't receive anything. They were called sham. You'd bring them in, go through all the same routine, but they wouldn't receive anything. And just see what the effects were. And it was a lifespan study, so you'd look at the dosage and how long they lived and what affected them the most. So that's basically what it was. One story I heard--probably true--was that the Russians said that our limits were too high, should be lower. So that maybe prompted it, I don't know. Then after that when we got to 300 Area, 100-F moved into 300 Area, and they closed 100-F down. And then they had a group of just smoking dogs. And it was more difficult in the sense that we had a mask that fit over their muzzle, and they could trick it. They could breathe out of the side of their mouth. When they did it at one area they trached them, and there was no cheating that. It was direct. There was no getting around that. I learned a lot. I mean, that was one of the most exciting jobs. And the learning curve was just like that. I really learned a lot about physiology and biology and chemistry. You work there that long, and you learn a lot. Because part of my job was necropsy--or what they call autopsy, but necropsing the dogs. And we always said we took everything but the bark. I mean we literally disarticulated them and took every piece that they had. Every organ, every bone, separated it. The reason for that—we wanted to know where the plutonium or curium or whatever went to in the body. Where was the body burden? Was it in the lungs, was it in the bones? And interestingly enough, we exposed Pu-238 and 239, and the 238 would be a bone-seeker. The bones would have high doses. But in 239, the bones hardly got anything. It was all soft tissue. So they learned a lot from that, as far as where these elements--what they seek. The target organs, if you will. I don't know if all that should go in this.
Arata: Fascinating. I really love hearing about it. Could you talk a little bit about--obviously, during those times, security and secrecy was still very much a part of working at Hanford. Did that impact your work at all?
Peters: Oh, a lot. You know, being raised--from my oldest memories, it was secure. And I can remember when I was probably about 10, 11, 12 years old I went in for a library card here in Richland. They asked who my dad worked for, and I was scared to tell them. Because the security--my dad never told me what was going on out there. And I knew security was a big deal. And I says, I don't know. I kind of knew, but I--And she says, well, what does he do? And I says, well, he drives. So then she wrote down General Electric. But no, I mean, it was paramount even as a kid. I can remember—and this is kind of funny hindsight--but kind of put yourself in that timeframe--I can remember calling my brother who was seven, eight, nine years old--would have been in the early '50s, McCarthy era--I can remember calling my brother a dirty communist. And my dad just came unglued. He would rather have me call him S.O.B. than that, because that wasn't something you messed with in the early '50s, with the FBI and everything else. But I mean, security was bred into you, I guess. And when I hired on, it was still, but not like it was. But many of us still had that same mentality. I can remember when they started releasing things to the public. That always bothered me, because this is secure, and people don't have the need to know a lot of this stuff. Security was a big deal. I mean, you didn't go anyplace without a security badge. They could stop you, search your car, and everything else. So it was a high priority. There was seclusion areas within the area. You might get out in the area, but you might not be able to get into a certain area. When you got in that area, you couldn't get into another area, like dash-5 or Z-Plant or REDOX or PUREX. You needed extra security on your badge to get in these places. So security was very tough.
Arata: Could you talk a little bit about how Hanford was overall as a place to work? Anything you found particularly challenging or very rewarding about your time in the area?
Peters: I think it was great. You know, let's face it, it was great for a lot of people that worked here. I mean, good pay—relatively good pay, and a lot of people raised their families and sent them to school on this pay out here. And as far as working out there, we really had fun in the early days. And by the early days, I mean when I hired on. Because I felt very lucky that when I hired on, most of the old-timers were still working. And by old-timers I mean them that hired in the '40s. So a lot of the stories, a lot of things that they knew and interesting things that they talked about, I was privy to. And that was great. And it was, to me, really a fun place to work. I really enjoyed it. Later I can remember saying more than once in the '80s or '90s, this isn't fun like it used to be. And it wasn't. But you know, I was younger then, and that made a difference. I was about 21, 22 when I hired on. And so times changed. I think in the early days--by that, my early days--there was what we call maybe some dead wood. And they might have five people to do a job for two people. But I mean, it was good, it was job security. Well, then came the cuts and so on. I think that made it a little different, because one thing that's bothered me over the years, there's been layoffs. But you can check the records. Many times after these layoffs, within six months they're calling them back, because work has to be done. We might cut 500 people, but that job is still there, so they called a portion of them back. Which, to me, doesn't make sense. But I don't think there's the fat out there that there was at one time.
Arata: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about? Any other stories that stand out?
Peters: I think the racial thing was a big story in the early days because there wasn't that many black people working out there. And I can remember us--I mentioned earlier that Richland didn't have hardly any blacks. We had one black I'm aware of. He was a shoeshine guy at the Ganzel's barbershop. His picture is still in there. But I can remember--I must have been six, seven years old--I saw my first black person. I was in a car downtown with my mom. And I saw him, and I just saw his hands and face. And I can remember wondering, I wonder if his whole body is that way—we just didn't see them. We had two black guys in high school. C.W. and Norris Brown, who was terrific basketball players. And the main reason their family moved was because of those two boys. It was a different time then. I don't know it should go on record, because I don't know if it's true or not, but talking about the early people that worked there, one of the stories that I heard--and like I say, whether it's true, I have no idea. But they were out working, and they had a burn barrel. It was very cold. A barrel full of wood and so on, a burn barrel. The construction workers were huddled around it, and this one colored individual this kind of bulled his way in. He wanted to get up to the front. And the story goes--whether, again, true or not, I don't know--a carpenter took his hammer and ended it. And that wouldn't surprise me, though I don't know if it's true or not. Because there was prejudice. A lot of the people that came here were from the South, and it was a different lifestyle. I know that they had separate camps for the blacks and the whites. And it was segregated. So I can remember when I was driving the bus here, we only had--to my recollection—one black in all of transportation. There may have been more, but I think only one. And it wasn't until probably '63 or '64 that they really started recruiting blacks.
Arata: I understand there were labor organizers and people who came in with the NAACP and that sort of thing to sort of assess conditions, which would have been about the time you were working in the 100 and 300 Areas. Do you have any recollections of that?
Peters: Well, the one black that I told you about was a serviceman—labor. Same group I was in. And he was the head of the local NAACP. His name was McGee. And the way you became a driver was seniority. In other words, if this driver retired and you were next in seniority, you'd get that job. Well, he was the next one up, as a laborer, for a driving job. They wouldn't give it to him, for obvious reasons. Well, he fought it through the NAACP and he ended up becoming a driver. But they was not going to give him that job because of his race. Battelle, to their credit, was the first ones to make an overt effort to hire black people. And that's where--gentleman you mentioned earlier. And Battelle had--not overwhelming, but a number of blacks working for them. And in inhalation toxicology we had a number in animal care as well as in the crafts. So I would say from '63 on, it started changing.
Arata: So this is kind of my last question--we'll have students accessing these interviews. Most of my students now are too young to have remembered the Cold War. It's sort of an older--
Peters: Yeah.
Arata: So maybe if you could just talk a little bit about what it was like being part of this Cold War effort, and what you'd like students or future generations to know about contributions to that process.
Peters: Yeah. I know there's different views on this, but I feel very strongly about--because I knew a lot of GIs from that time frame—had two uncles that were in the war. And you know, the atomic bombs, and we made the plutonium here for the bomb, literally ended the war. I am a firm believer--had we had to invade, there'd been hundreds of thousands on both sides killed. And they talk about the badness, rightfully so, of the atomic bomb. But you look at the conventional bombing of Germany, and it was as bad or worse as the atomic bombs. The firebombing of Tokyo. Things like that. So as bad as the atomic bomb was, it did end the war. You'd had to live through it. Now, as far as the Cold War goes, you know, the place wasn't supposed to last much more than ten years. And that's what everyone thought. Well, then the Russians got the bomb. That changed things a little bit. And it was scary. I mean, like I said earlier, me calling my brother communist. I wasn't old enough to really realize what was going on, but I can remember--would've been during the Korean War--my dad came to my brother and I and said, I want to know where you guys are all the time, because we might have to leave town in a hurry. That was the mentality of that time. We had air-raid sirens throughout the town. I can remember every--I believe it was Monday at ten o'clock, they would go off to test. But there was one right behind Jason Lee, where I was going at the time, and it was loud. Every--I think it was Monday or Tuesday, at ten o'clock they'd go off. Because we literally were on standby. We didn't know what was going to happen. And the Korean War and then the McCarthy era, it was a scary time for adults. You know, as a kid, you didn't notice it, other than watching others. But I think Hanford had a lot to do with ending the war. Which ushered in the Cold War, because of the proliferation of the weapons. And you have to give credit to whomever for tearing down the wall, for bringing somewhat of a peace in the world—I say somewhat. I think it was our spending billions of dollars building up our—you know the old saying, peace through strength. That's what Reagan did. He was a big spender, but he got the job done. But Hanford was unique, because I can still remember there was anti-aircraft placements out there. When I hired on, all the old track houses were still there. I worked on a fuel truck, and we would fuel here and there and then we'd go out into the desert area, if you will, and look at these old houses that were still standing. And the old icehouse was still there. And a lot of these buildings were still there in the '60s. And why they had the need to tear them all down, I don't know. I think it was a shame. But they tore them all down other than the bank and the school. I believe about all that's left. No, it was a different time. Like I say, I can still remember my dad telling us both, I want to know where you are in case we have to leave town. I mentioned earlier, the FBI--it was not unusual to have an FBI agent knock at the door and talk to my folks about so-and-so. We had neighbors that lived in the same house—in our A house, our neighbors there was there one day and gone the next. It wasn't unusual to--you're out of here.
Arata: Certainly a different time. I want to thank you so much for coming in and sharing your memories with us. I really appreciate it. We'll film all these goodies you brought us, if that's okay--
Peters: Yep.
Arata: --before we have to go.
Northwest Public Television | Craig_Philip
Philip Craig: My name is Philip Craig. P-H-I-L-I-P. C-R-A-I-G.
Robert Bauman: Great. Thank you. And my name is Robert Bauman, and we are conducting this oral history interview on June 24th of 2015 on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. So, Mr. Craig, why don’t we have you start, maybe, by just telling us a little bit about your background. Where you came from, how you came to Hanford, and that sort of thing.
Craig: Well my how I came to Hanford started back in high school. I had a high school chemistry class. I liked what I saw. And I knew that the Hanford Project was down the road—I was living in Selah, Washington, and the Hanford Project was very interesting to me. And I even wrote a term paper on Hanford, because I really wanted to work here. So, I went on to Whitman College, graduated from high school in ’56—or ’52, I’m sorry. Graduated from college in ’56, and then went on to Washington State College, then, now Washington State University in Pullman, and did a year of graduate work in chemistry. And at the end of that, I came to Hanford for my very first job. And lo and behold, that was exactly 58 years ago today: June 24, 1957. And it was quite an experience, let me tell you. The first thing that struck me, of course I had to have credentials to get in the building. And in those days, we didn’t have badges like you have today that are on a cord around your neck. We had a little plastic folder with our ID in it, and you’d pull that out of your pocket and flash it open to the guard sitting at the entrance desk. And then you could go on into the building and find your office and take it from there. The most interesting thing, I think, about it all was it was a very formal setting. For years we wore suits, ties, long sleeved white shirts only—couldn’t have colored shirts—and the ladies wore dresses. Far more formal than today’s environment. Security, of course, was very paramount. I mean, we were in the years where the Soviets and the United States was competing. And so the Hanford site, being one of the two principal sites manufacturing plutonium in the United States, the other one being Savannah River, most of the stuff in terms of total production and that sort of thing was top secret. A lot of it was not—it was secret, but security was paramount. I remember in my little office cubby hole—it was a room, it wasn’t just a cubby hole, in abig room—we had a three-drawer file cabinet with a combination lock. And I could take a piece of paper out of that file, put it on my desk and work on it. But if I had to go to the bathroom, it went back in the combination file, locked it, go down the hall and come back and you had to unlock the combination and start all over again. And the very first thing they had me do is they handed me about a three-inch black three-ring binder with a red coversheet, marked secret. This was the PUREX operating manual. Now, PUREX stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction, and it was the chemical process that is used to take irradiated uranium from the reactors, dissolve it in acid, treat it chemically, and come up with a plutonium nitrate solution. And I had to read this manual in about a week. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty daunting.
Bauman: Now where was your first office? Where on site?
Craig: It was on in the 703 Building, which is about where the Federal Building is today. The last part of the 703 structure—it was a herringbone structure. We had offices coming off a main corridor, and there was about six tiers of those. And the very last one is still standing, and the city offices are in there. But later on, the Federal Building took over.
Bauman: And what was your first job title?
Craig: Physical—let’s see. Physical Science Administrator, I think it was. The other thing about the environment is that you handwrote all your reports, and then gave them to a secretary who typed them. There was no computers. So, it was kind of a laborious process to do that. I needed to check out a government car, which I did in the motor pool, and drive out to the Area to PUREX, and see what was going on most every day, drive back, write the daily report, mark it all secret, send it up a line to my boss. But that government car, let me tell you—it was not air conditioned. So those days were pretty warm. But we got it done. About two months later, after getting into the PUREX part of it, the fellow who was a companion office mate had been handling the plutonium shipments. And he went off to Washington, D.C. for another job. So I got the job of accepting plutonium products on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission and the US government. So it was a very formal process. The products were in two forms. After the plutonium nitrate left PUREX, it was sent over to what is known as the Z Plant. And in that plant, by a series of chemical operations, it was converted to a metal button about this big and it fit in a tuna fish can. It weighed something close to two kilograms. So that was the first product. The second product were manufactured, machined weapon components. And I won’t talk about the exact details of their size and shape at this point. But nonetheless, Hanford was in the business of making weapon components. So my job was to accept this product and make the shipment, every couple of weeks or so, to Rocky Flats. Rocky Flats was about 15 miles northwest of Denver, and it was the receiving site for the plutonium as buttons. They would take that metal and cast it into weapon component shapes and machine those and so on. And of course the other part was the shapes themselves, they’d go up in pieces themselves, and they would go into an inspection process and eventually assemble parts of the warhead.
Bauman: So when you say—you’re accepting them from the contractor, or--?
Craig: I was accepting these materials from the contractor. I mean, General Electric Company was the contractor, and their job on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract basis was to run all these processes. And there’s hundreds of people involved in this. But at the end of the line, I had to make that transition from Hanford to the next step. So it was a couple of months into my first job, my buddy left for Washington, and here I am, learning how to actually accept these components. Now, you need to understand that plutonium was very radioactive. It emitted some gamma radiation, but not huge amounts. I mean, you could actually handle it. But it also emitted alpha radiation. And so it had to be contained in some kind of container, like a can. And then you could hold it in your hand. Interesting. It was warm. It was—the radioactive decay—was producing heat. So this can felt like hanging onto a 60 Watt lightbulb. Now, the other part of the business of plutonium is that if you got too much of it together in one spot, you had a criticality event. And of course, the bomb itself was designed to make a lot of it go critical at the same time, and that created an atomic explosion. But the point is that if you’re handling plutonium, it had to maintain a certain degree of separation at all times. In the chemical processing plants, they used different sized columns of chemical solutions and whatnot, depending on what was going on. And that was to maintain this critical geometry, so that you didn’t have any kind of criticality event. And after the plutonium was made into these buttons we called them, and canned in the tuna fish cans, they were stored in a vault. And the vault had pillars of metal rods, and little rings on that rod that you could put a can in. But it maintained the separation. So on shipping day, what we would do is we operators of the plant would go into the vault and take these cans and very carefully put—I don’t remember exactly how many—something about five or six cans in a little red wagon. Just a little kid’s wagon. But there was spacers in there so that these things didn’t get too close. And they’d bring it down the hallway to the room that exited to the building where it then could be handled further. And this assembly area, in this room were birdcages. Now a birdcage is a metal frame that’s about this big, this big, and this big. And in the middle was a metal pot with a lid. And the idea was that you took—one at a time—one of those cans from the red wagon, and you put it in the pot. And then I think the birdcage held like three buttons. Then there was a lid, and a bunch of bolts in places where you could put a wire with a lead seal on the end. And my job was to squeeze the seal closed with an imprint and record, of course, what the identity of those cans were, and the weight, and that sort of thing on paperwork. And at the end of that, I would sign this receipt for this material, and give it to the contractor. The weapon components varied a little bit differently, depending on the size and shape of the weapon component. Eventually, those were a much bigger birdcage, and it contained a couple of pieces of weapon material. The business of shipping, then—I owned that plutonium for maybe 15 minutes [LAUGHTER] before the government. Then I would transfer it to armed couriers, AEC couriers. They were not only armed with side arms; they were armed with machine guns. This was serious stuff. And they would load these birdcages into a truck, and eventually ship that off to Rocky Flats.
Bauman: How often did these shipments--?
Craig: Well, every couple of weeks or so.
Bauman: And so, they were shipped by truck then, to Rocky Flats?
Craig: That was a method used in later years. They didn’t really like shipping by truck that well. We actually had another system that involved—all I’m going to say is it involved rail. Because the exact details was highly classified.
Bauman: And did the amount that was shipped vary significantly, or--?
Craig: It varied, yes. Depends on how the production was going and what the requirements were on the other end.
Bauman: Oh, okay. Sure. And so how long did you do this, then? How long were you--?
Bauman: Wow.
Craig: So I shipped a lot of plutonium.
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
Craig: The other thing that was kind of interesting—I was explaining to you about the criticality. I hadn’t been on the job more than, I don’t know, a couple of months, shipping. I knew what to do, I knew the whole process, and I knew the sensitivity of it. One day one of these chemical operators who worked for the contractor had gone to the vault, and he came down the hall carrying about five tuna fish cans in his hand, and holding it with his arm like this. Well, that was absolutely high risk criticality event waiting to happen. And he walked in the room, and I said, ooooh. Just stop right where you are. And I instructed one of the other operators, take one of the cans from him and put it in the birdcage very carefully. And we got that shipment loaded and we were on our way. And then I went to the manager’s office—the plant manager’s office. Now, this fellow was like 60 years old. Kind of a salty southerner with—I mean, he was definitely in charge. And I’m 23 years old. Fresh out of college, wet behind the ears. And I gave him a real lecture about safety. And he didn’t like that. He called my boss. And my boss said Mr. Craig was right: you really almost had an accident today. That’s the end of that story. There was more to the whole weapons system. Since I was in the whole process, one of the small cogs—there was uranium coming from Oak Ridge. There was plutonium—some plutonium—and tritium coming from Savannah River. There was high explosives coming from Pantex. And then Hanford plutonium. This all had to be scheduled into what was known as the US master nuclear delivery schedule. It was the weapons document for all the weapons made in the country. It was a top secret document, and representatives from each of these sites got together, usually in Albuquerque, New Mexico, or at the Rocky Flats Plant. And we handwrote this schedule. There was no computers. There was a spreadsheet format, yes. But we didn’t have computers to do all that. Everything had to be balanced. This whole process had to bring all these materials together for processing at Rocky Flats. And so, about once a year we got together to do the master nukes schedule. I found I was pretty fortunate to be a part of that. I was pretty young. But it was a challenge. I had a lot of help, of course. But I was very impressed. One of the things that kind of scared me though was—and let me check on the date. October 22 to 24, 1962. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were in Denver and Rocky Flats to work on these schedules. Now, that was ground zero for the Russians. If they were going to attack the United States, that probably would have been one of their targets. And it was kind of scary working there for those two days. I was very thankful that President Kennedy convinced Khrushchev to back off and no ill things happened.
Bauman: Were you here when President Kennedy came to Hanford in ’63?
Craig: Yes, yes.
Bauman: Do you remember that?
Craig: Oh, I remember that. We got to drive out and see him out at the reactor site. It was quite an experience. I think that was one of the only Presidents I’ve ever seen in person. And it wasn’t long after that, you know, a couple months or less, that he was assassinated in Texas.
Bauman: Do you remember much about that day?
Craig: It was hot! [LAUGHTER] It was still warm when he was here visiting. But it was a big event. There was thousands of people out there in the desert. But it was very thrilling experience to see the President come.
Bauman: Sure. So, you said you were working on the shipment from ’57 to ’72. So did that process change much over those years, other than shifting from—
Craig: Well, yes. In about ’66, we quit making weapon components at Hanford. And the process moved to Rocky Flats entirely.
Bauman: So that part changed.
Craig: Yeah. That part changed. But the plutonium buttons didn’t.
Bauman: And so then in ’72 then, how did your job change? What did you start doing at that point?
Craig: Well, the other significant activity that I was involved with was in 1968. The site was in a state where we had 149 single-shell waste tanks and 28 double-shell waste tanks. Actually, that’s not quite right. There were four short of that on the double-shell. And these were boiling waste tanks. The others were not boiling waste. But it was all liquid, and we were concerned about the integrity of the tanks and the lifetime of the tanks. And so at that time, the Atlantic-Richfield-Hanford Company, ARCO, was the contractor. And two of their engineers, Sam Beard and Bob McCullough and I co-authored a document that was called “The Hanford Waste Management Briefing.” And the purpose of this was to explain the Hanford situation to our headquarters—our AEC headquarters staff, and Congressional staffers who were then going to be funding what is now known as the Tank Farm projects. And this document was a briefing document, and the key—one of the key charts that we were particularly proud of is to try to show people how complex the business of the Hanford waste system was. And this chart shows what happens to a ton of uranium that’s been irradiated and then processed at PUREX, and the wastes that come out of that whole process. And some of it’s boiling waste, because of high levels of radioactivity that are in that particular section of waste, and some was non-boiling. For example, you’re dealing with—for that ton of waste—680 gallons of non-boiling waste and 220 gallons of boiling waste. And in the non-boiling tank, you have 900 pounds of salts, chemical nitrate—nitrates and so on, and about 350 curies of radioactivity. But in the boiling side, there’s 230 pounds of salt, but 300,000 curies of activity. That’s why they’re boiling. And then there was a low-level stream that had like 55,000 gallons of waste that went to a crib—a crib is like a septic tank—tile field—and the swamp, which is just an open pond. There was another 560,000 gallons went there, but their radioactivity was less than a tenth of a curie. I mean, it was just negligible. On the solid side, there was about ten cubic feet of solid waste. There was about 10 million cubic feet—I’m sorry—of gases that came out. And here’s the number that it was radio—a surprise to everyone that it was published. It was secret then, but it’s been declassified since. Out of that ton of fuel came 530 grams of plutonium and four grams of neptunium. So the chemical process that started with a ton of material and ended up with just a very small amount. So it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Because these wastes were boiling, we’d started building—had started building double-shell tanks. A double-shell tank is a steel tank within a steel tank within a concrete barrier. And this diagram in that briefing document showed what a double-shell tank was all about. These were million-gallon tanks. And in those days, it was about a dollar, maybe a dollar and a half a gallon to build those tanks. A million-million half dollars for one of these big tanks. Far, far, less than what they would cost today.
Bauman: Yeah.
Craig: At any rate, we made this presentation to the staffers and the ultimate activity was to remove as much as water as we could from the single-shell tanks so that we ended up with a salt cake that was not going anywhere. We isolated cesium-137 and strontium-90 by another chemical process, carried out in B Plant, to bring those short-lived emitters of radiation to a point where we could encapsulate those in steel cylinders. That was done and they’re stored. I think they’re still stored that way, but I’m not entirely sure. I kind of lost track of what’s happened since. We also built—were recommending that they build four more double-shelled tanks and that’s why the number finally grew to 28 double-shell tanks. And then, of course, it ultimately led to the pretreatment plant that’s in the process out here now, and the Waste Vitrification Plant.
Bauman: You mentioned one of the reasons for doing the report was there were concerns about the integrity of the single-shell tanks. Were some of them leaking at that point, or just concerns that they might leak?
Craig: I think at that point there were some that had displayed a little bit of leakage, yes. There’s other documents that showed some leakage, but, again it wasn’t into the concrete overpack, if you will. There was some, of course, got into the soil column, but it was not a series breach, and it wasn’t any radioactivity that got down into the groundwater. But we were afraid that it would. I mean, 1968, these tanks have been—the initial ones—had been built in 1944! ’45, ’46. So there was some that were approaching the end of life, and those tanks are still there today. And that’s why they’re so concerned about trying to remove some of the waste from these tanks and process it.
Bauman: So, who initiated—was this ARCO or AEC that sort of initiated the study that you helped write?
Craig: Oh, I think it was—collectively, the Hanford folks at engineering—folks on both sides of the contractor and the government were saying, we got to do something about this. Anyway, I think that’s about all I want to say about the creation of that document. I thought it would be interesting for you to look into if that ever showed up in the REACH literature as the kickoff document to get this thing going.
Bauman: Right, right. Yeah. And did you continue to be involved after this report in some of the tank—waste management end of things?
Bauman: Right. So, you were involved with that in—
Craig: I was involved in—
Bauman: About ’85?
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Yes. And then I left the—at that point, this will be—okay, you can go back on. At that point in 1985, I left the government, went private, went to work for a packaging—an engineering and design company that designed high-level waste shipping containers for use on transportation. They started off—their first big project was the Three Mile Island cask, to move that waste. And then from that, I marketed to the government a high-level waste—any kind of high-level waste that could be put into a cask and removed. And then the TRUPACT-II cask for use in transferring transuranic waste, or primarily plutonium waste, from the government sites to the waste isolation pilot plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. And from there, I got involved on a couple of other organizations. Eventually, in 1991, I went to work for Lockheed. In 1996, Lockheed, along with—well, Fluor Daniel was the primary contractor, but we were on the Fluor Daniel team, and Lockheed was to manage the Tank Farms. So we came full circle, and I helped Lockheed win that contract.
Bauman: Right, you did come full circle.
Craig: So then, Lockheed moved me from—I was then living in Federal Way, and Lockheed rewarded me by moving me back to Hanford and letting me work on the Hanford site in ’96. And I did that until December of 2000. And there I was involved in the new contracting method. Instead of cost-plus-fixed-fee contracting, it was cost-plus-incentive-fee. And what we would do was we would create a document for a scope of work, a performance agreement. And the contractor would say, here, DoE, this is what we’re going to do for you, and here’s how long it’s going to take. And DoE said, okay, if you do that, we’ll pay you this fee, and if you don’t get it done on time, we’re going to cut your fee. And if you don’t do it well, we’re going to cut your fee. And my job was to, at the end of the work performance, was to write up the actual work done in a document to present to DoE that says, okay, pay us the fee. We were very successful in getting our award fee. And then I gave it all up in December of 2000, after 43 years.
Bauman: I wonder if I can go back—and this is really interesting stuff, fascinating career. I wanted to ask you just about the community, when you arrived here in 1957, what was Richland like at the time? Could you talk about that a little bit? And did you live in Richland, or--?
Craig: Oh, yes. Yes. We were allowed to rent from the government a B house—half of a B house on Haupt. This was June 1957. And by then—a couple of months—the government started selling off the town to private citizens. And we were in the first block to be sold. The senior owners in the other end of the B house bought the B house. And at that time, we moved to the other side of town, into a ranch house, because that had been sold to its owner. This is kind of an interesting, because the ranch house that the owner—I mean the resident who was able to buy it bought for like $7,700. And then when we bought the ranch house, I think we paid like $9,500. And of course, those ranch houses today sell for over 100. The town was very—initially of course, it was very caste-oriented. I mean, if you were a contractor, management, you got to live on the river. If you were a lowly government GS-7, you got to live in a B house. And there was a certain level of, you know, if you weren’t in this class, you weren’t part of it, you know. And I think that’s changed dramatically over the years. It doesn’t make any difference who you work for and how much money you make and all that stuff. People have changed for the better.
Bauman: Anything else about the community that stood out to you at the time?
Craig: Well, the first thing that Richland did was they had to celebrate their founding as Richland. They set off a mock atomic bomb, and it was a bunch of fanfare out in the park, and made a poof of smoke that was to represent a mushroom cloud.
Bauman: So, was this at Howard Amon Park?
Craig: Yeah. It was.
Bauman: Anything else that—memories that stand out, either about in community of Richland, or your work—any stories or memories that really stand out to you that you’d like to share?
Craig: I feel confident that this waste document that shows particularly how much plutonium was made, that was a very revolutionary thing. I mean, the idea how much of material you got out of a ton of uranium was—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Very classified. And to see that declassified and whatnot. It’s—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER]
Craig: Kind of mind-blowing. But there’s the document. And it’s legitimate to talk about.
Bauman: Right.
Craig: Not sure I want it on the local news tonight, but—[LAUGHTER]
Bauman: So I don’t know if you want to talk to us about the McCluskey incident and your involvement in that?
Craig: Well, at the time, I was responsible for the Z Plant operations. And so, one morning, early, about 4:30 in the morning, I get a call from the plant that there had been an accident out of the plant, and I needed to get out there. And so I threw some clothes on and got a government car and went out to the site. What had happened was the plant had been operating on the recovery of americium-241 as part of the reclamation activities. And it was a chemical process. Inside this chemical process were criticalities tanks, small tanks like this, long, inside of a glovebox. Earlier in that summer, there had been a labor dispute, and the plant was on strike. And so the process had been shut down. Well, what was going on was americium was loaded onto the ion exchange medium inside this long column. When the dispute was settled and we had several days of reviews, conducting interviews with the contractor people, are you ready to restart? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? Have you checked this? And finally they were authorized to start. Well, what happened is that when they poured strong nitric acid on that ion exchange column to take, you lose off the americium. The americium had decayed the resin beads of the ion exchange medium ‘til it was kind of an organic gunk. And that acid reacted with it, and that violent chemical reaction blew open that column. It breached the glovebox, and it sprayed chemicals and americium all over Mr. McCluskey. And he was taken to an initial decontamination spot onsite, and then downtown. But my job, when I got there, was to fend off the media. What had happened—as soon as this became knowledge, and the media got hold of it, here they come in helicopters, landing inside the secure area of 200 West. The guards were going nuts. I mean, here’s these people that are not supposed to be there! Eventually, they didn’t do anything but try to manage it and bring them over towards the building, the end of the building, where behind the building walls was this processing cell where everything had taken place. And they were standing there, I was standing there outside talking to the media, trying to explain what happened. And I had an alpha copy machine. I was standing there, showing them that there was no contamination on my feet, there was no contamination around. They were panning everywhere with their cameras, and they found a sodium hydroxide feed tank that had just a little bit of salt cake around the valve on the outside. Non-radioactive, nothing—I mean it was a nothing tank. And they filmed that like it was the biggest thing since sliced bread. And I remember I went through all this and—to find out that it made the national news. But I didn’t get to see it, because I was out there. [LAUGHTER] But it became a non-event. It was not a disaster, there was containment, there was—all the safety things worked as well as they should. The public was never in any harm. But that was a—
Bauman: [LAUGHTER] So, what happened, then, with the room, or whatever, where the incident took place?
Craig: Oh, they sealed that room off right away. And then it remained sealed up until very recently, when they went in and took it apart. And processed it for disposal.
Bauman: Did you know Mr. McCluskey at all?
Craig: No.
Craig: No. He was a chemical operator. I didn’t know who he was, hadn’t met him. But it was one of those things that—
Bauman: Right.
Craig: --Happened.
Bauman: Well, thanks, again for sharing that story. Glad we remembered to do that.
Craig: What was funny about it—I was trying to stand up. I used to be able to do this. I could stand there and hold my foot up and balance. And then I realized I couldn’t do that.
Bauman: Oh, watch the microphone there on your—
Craig: Oh, yeah.