Interview with Mel Adams
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Richland (Wash.)
Nuclear reactors
Environmental engineering
Radioactive wastes
Radioactive waste disposal
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An interview conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by Mission Support Alliance on behalf of the United States Department of Energy.
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Transcription
Jillian Gardner-Andrews: All right, so I just start talking and you start filming?
Victor Vargas: Yeah.
Gardner-Andrews: Okay. My name is Jillian Gardner-Andrews. I am conducting an oral history interview with Mel Adams on February 10th, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mel about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name for us?
Mel Adams: Melvin Adams. M-E-L-V-I-N, A-D-A-M-S.
Gardner-Andrews: Okay. All right, Mel, can you tell me how and why you came to the area to work on the Hanford Site?
Adams: Well, I started out after I graduated from college being a science teacher in high school. Did that for about 12 years. And found that I really couldn’t make a very good living at that. So, my family and I just went back to school to get a degree in environmental engineering, which was a newly developing field at the time. Because I really wanted to work in the environmental area. And as I was about fit to finish my program, saw an ad in the paper. Rockwell Hanford, which is one of the contractors at that time, wanting environmental engineers. So I applied and they called me up here for an interview. It wasn’t long that we were moving up here. That was in 1979. So—do you want me to just keep going, or—
Gardner-Andrews: Mm-hmm!
Adams: At that time, the Site was still largely into plutonium production. So as far as I know, the group that I joined, under this crazy Irishman [LAUGHTER] named Hank McGuire, was the first group that dealt with environmental issues. So I may have been one of the first environmental engineers actually hired at Hanford. Because almost all the engineers were either chemical, and there were a few nuclear engineers. But that was the emphasis at that time. And then over the years, of course, the environmental work became more and more important. Finally, they stopped making plutonium. So there was rapid growth in the environmental cleanup area. At that time, I had enough experience under my belt to manage the environmental engineering group. That was really interesting.
Gardner-Andrews: Where, specifically, onsite did you spend the majority of your time?
Adams: Well, I was all over the place. My office was out at 200 East area. Which isn’t far from PUREX, if you know the Site. There’s an office building out there called 2750 East. All the buildings at Hanford have numbers and letters. Anyway, I was out there for many years. A few years, I was actually in town, and so I was kind of back and forth.
Gardner-Andrews: Okay. And could you describe a typical work day for yourself?
Adams: Well, when I was a junior engineer, it was mostly supporting the senior engineer and helping him write engineering studies and things of that sort. After I became a manager, it was quite different of course, because I had six different managers and their groups to look over, plus a large budget with a lot of subcontractors. So at that time, I spent a lot of time on training and a lot of time on budgets and didn’t get to do much of the engineering work myself. But I had to oversee it, make sure it was properly staffed and the work was being done safely and so forth.
Gardner-Andrews: Could you explain what exactly an environmental engineer would do onsite?
Adams: Yeah, the field of environmental engineering is—when I took the courses, it was largely involved with air pollution and treatment, and mostly water pollution—waste water treatment. And there were some courses in solid waste management. So, it was how to engineer things to keep the air clean, and clean up water, dispose of solid waste, that kind of thing. There was a heavy emphasis also on monitoring in the field to detect environmental problems. So we had a lot of biology and chemistry. And then there was a large legal aspect, because environmental law quickly became very complex. Particularly after the Nixon administration, when he created the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and so forth.
And there was large concern about cleaning up—have you heard the term RCRA sites? These are sites that were badly polluted and they had to be cleaned up and the sites restored. So that got us into soils—understanding soils. At Hanford, groundwater pollution was and still is a major issue. So there was an emphasis on also groundwater hydrology and how to clean up groundwater. So I’d say at Hanford, the part I worked in most was contaminated animals and plants, groundwater, solid waste, and contaminated soils.
Gardner-Andrews: So the animals that were contaminated and plants, these are the ones on Site itself?
Adams: Yeah, that’s less of a problem today, because my group made some progress and there’s been a lot more progress since. But what would happen is we had sites where there was a lot of water—just billions of gallons of waste water disposed in the soil—directly to the soil. That went on for years when the plants like PUREX were operating. So we had a lot of contaminated soils, and plants like the Russian thistle would go down 12 feet or so, and they were good at uptaking things like cesium and strontium, bringing them to the surface. And of course then when they became tumbleweeds, they would blow towards the river. This—the animals would—well, the plants would also be somewhat contaminated and the animals would then become contaminated, because they would eat—herbivores like rabbits and so forth. And then they would spread out and through their waste, they would spread contamination. So that was a real problem. It’s been largely solved now.
But we also had a lot of other problems with animals, like we would get calls from people and offices with rattlesnakes under their desk, and spiders and all kinds of things like that.
One of the most humorous stories was, my group were called the Bugs and Bunny Boys—or the Weeds. [LAUGHTER] And they were a pretty interesting group. But they got a call from Battelle one day and said, we’ve got some lab mice that have gotten loose, and it’s upsetting our experimental protocols. We need to get these guys back in their cages. So the Bugs and Bunny Boys were called on to solve that problem. So they said, well, we’re going to need a lot of peanut butter and rolled oats. So I gave them an emergency order so they could go to the store and buy lots of it. One day, my manager came in—what are you trying to do, feed your family on the federal budget? So I had to explain to him that this was bait for the traps, live traps, so we could get these mice back under control. And he finally went away, a little bit embarrassed. [LAUGHTER] But those are some of the kind of jobs we got.
Their workplace was really like a bizarre morgue. They had all these freezers full of animals that had been collected and were due to be analyzed for radioactivity. So there’s lots of animals in this freezer, and there was plant specimens everywhere. Plant presses and microscopes. You go out in their garage, they had—it looked like a farm shed: all these machinery to spray plants. What they would do is each year go out and spray all the Russian thistles and then come in and plow it up and replant with native bunchgrass. Because the bunchgrass can’t go down nearly as far to bring up radionuclides. So that’s kind of some of the—that was one of the six groups I had, and I would say they were kind of the most interesting. [LAUGHTER]
Gardner-Andrews: So would the environmental engineers themselves do the research on the animals?
Adams: Yes. And we—well, sometimes they would have to get help from Battelle or specialists. But they would collect and do most of the analysis themselves and write reports and all of that. The soil cleanup was a different matter. That involved a lot of soil sampling and my group would actually go in and do some of the pilot scale cleanup where they’d go into the trenches and survey it. Then bring in backhoes or whatever tools were needed to clean it up. So we contracted out a lot of the work, but not all of it.
Another aspect was groundwater. Hanford has thousands of wells that are used to sample groundwater. There’s still about a thousand-and-some that are used even to this day to take samples, probably about once a month. That way the groundwater hydrologist can tell which way the plumes are moving and whether they’re growing or shrinking. Then we would go in and use pump and treat—pump the water out, run it through a treatment plant, and put it back. And that worked. So the plumes at Hanford, for the most part, are shrinking, have been for quite a few years now. But there was over 100 square miles of polluted groundwater. So it was a major, major effort.
But anyway, when we were drilling lots of wells, we had like 14 drill rigs in the field at a time, with all the mobile labs and mobile equipment that was needed to go with them. We had to use a certain kind of drilling rig, which we got from the Texas oilfields. [LAUGHTER] So that was interesting, because we had a lot of contractors we had to watch over, the drilling contractors.
Another little-known thing that most people don’t understand is Hanford is obsessed with safety. Not just radiological safety, but physical safety. We had safety engineers and industrial hygienists working with us to make sure all the work was conducted safely. There was a lot of training, a lot of procedures, a lot of trial runs before you even went into the field. So that was an aspect of Hanford. People think it’s just a nightmare, but it’s not. It’s highly controlled, highly proceduralized, and everyone has a lot of training. So it’s done—the work was—I felt safer there than when I was a teacher. [LAUGHTER] So—
Gardner-Andrews: Okay. So what would you say that the most challenging aspects of your work at Hanford were?
Adams: Well, depending on the time when I was there—I mean, towards the end the challenges were mostly managerial. But there were some interesting engineering challenges, which I got to do and be involved in, or directly involved in, in some cases. One of them was that there was a requirement, a code of federal regulation, that said that if you’re going to leave waste in place—and there will be some left at Hanford when it’s all done; it’s unavoidable—that you need to mark the sites so that if someone comes along 10,000 years from now, that you can communicate the danger to them. Well, so, we had to develop some markers. Well, the problem is, are people still going to be speaking English that live here? Are we still going to have, you know, technology like DVDs or at that time floppy disks, or whatever? So how do you design a marker?
Well, to do that—and that project, I was working on my own, because it was a small project, money-wise. So I contracted an archaeologist who had been at all these sites, like the Great Wall of China, the Acropolis, Stonehenge, and all of these places which have been around a long time. So we started analyzing them and trying to get some clues as to how to make these markers.
And I remember that one of the things you don’t do is make them of metal, because, like on the Acropolis, there’s holes where there used to be large metal shields, and the shields have been lost because people would scavenge them. So we didn’t want to use metals.
How large do you make the marker? Well, at Stonehenge, a lot of the stones less than twice human size were taken. So, it’s got to be at least twice human size. So we’re talking about a pretty big marker.
And then we had to figure out what languages to put the warnings on. We ended up with the six languages of the United Nations. Then the Yakama Tribe came along and said, well, our language has been around a lot longer than yours. Use ours. Well, that’s a good idea, except they didn’t have a written language. They’ve been working on it, but we couldn’t really use it, because it wasn’t written—at least at that time.
So once we decided on the languages, then we had to decide on what to put on the marker, how to incise the message so it doesn’t get eroded. And we put on maps, we put on warning pictograms like showing people digging and then collapsing, things like that, so people would get the idea. You don’t want to dig here.
These ended up being like an obelisk made of granite that were about—what—16 feet high or so. We never actually built one of those, because they’re not needed yet. But basically the 200-East and West area would be surrounded by these markers, such that, if one was taken away, you could still reconstruct the perimeter.
And then we decided to make some subsurface markers—small markers that could be put by the hundreds into a waste site, into a barrier. So if they started digging, they would pull up these brightly-colored with the radiation danger sign on them, magenta and yellow, with the symbol that showed what happens to you if you keep digging. You know, a little cartoon. So we made hundreds of those. Those were made out of—well, we did a lot of testing with this pottery works. All kinds of testing to make sure those would hold up in the ground. And of course, pottery has survived for thousands of years from burial sites. So we knew that they would last a long time. But they had to be tested with ASTM tests—American Society of Testing. And to make sure that the colors would be retained and that the colors wouldn’t fade, that they wouldn’t break up in the soil due to temperature or water fluctuation, things like that.
So that was really an interesting project. We made a lot of those, and there’s actually a sample at the display case at Atomic Brew. If you look, when you go in Atomic Brew, they’ve got a lot of memorabilia from Hanford. Somehow they got ahold of a sample subsurface marker. They’re about this big. So that’s kind of interesting.
Gardner-Andrews: Are any of the subsurface markers in place already?
Adams: Yeah, there was a lab. I don’t remember the number of it—building number—that was entombed some years ago, and there were hundreds of those markers that were put into that entombment.
Gardner-Andrews: And were the markers themselves made onsite?
Adams: No. Actually, we had put those out to bid and they were ceramic, of course. There was a potter back in Vermont that won the bid and they made them. Then we sent them out to testing. So that was kind of a little interesting project, making markers. Both the large and the small ones.
Gardner-Andrews: Do you know if they’ll still be using the small ones in the future?
Adams: I hope so. It’s a good idea. Of course, they aren’t to the point yet where they’re going to start building large disposal barriers. And we planned to put those in when the barriers were built. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up ordering thousands of those, and they end up going into these barriers. Because it’s still a requirement. Like, there’s a very large landfill out at Hanford that my team did the first work on. There’s been thousands of truckloads and they’ve got these huge trucks of soils and solid waste that have been dug up and put into that landfill. Well, someday that’s going to have to have a barrier put over it to keep the water, plants and animals out. That was another fascinating project, to develop that barrier. So, probably they will distribute some of the subsurface markers in that barrier.
Gardner-Andrews: Can you describe the project of building—creating the barriers for the landfills?
Adams: Yeah. That was a development project, undertaken by my group and with quite a bit of support from Battelle. The idea was that we wanted a barrier that would be made primarily of natural materials and that would function according to natural ecological processes and would last hundreds, if not thousands, of years without a lot of maintenance—or any maintenance.
So for that, we got this idea of using what’s called the outflow law, which says that if you’ve got a fine soil over coarser materials, that soil has to be completely saturated before it’ll break through. So we felt that since we only had six inches of rain a year—not this year. [LAUGHTER] That we could make a fine-layered barrier over a graded coarse layer barrier. And then plant that with native bunchgrass, which would, as the water accumulated, evapotranspirate the water out before it could break through. And then we also had like a gravel mulch which has been used since ancient times to help store the water in the soil layer, and also to prevent wind erosion. So that had to be carefully designed.
And then—so we had the design and then—oh, we used archaeological analogs—or actually geologic analogs. As you know, this area was hit by huge floods of biblical proportions at the end of the last ice age. And when the icebergs grounded at Hanford—what’s now Hanford—they melted and left these mounds called bergmounds. And these mounds had been there for 10,000 years. And some of them, they were layered almost like our barrier. So we studied the bejeebers out of those, because they gave us clues of what could last. And then we had out there also caliche layers where the water would go down to the soil and then precipitate these calcium carbonate chemicals. The water couldn’t get through that caliche layer. So we wanted to know, how does that work?
Finally, we got a design for this barrier, but then it had to be tested. So we tested it in wind tunnels, lysimeters, which were like big cylinders, highly instrumented, with the layers in there. And we stressed those with water—twice as much as we usually get—and wind. We even put live animals on there to see if the badgers would harm it. Actually, they helped the barrier performance. So there was a lot of field data collecting and research that had to be done.
Then finally—this was about the time I retired—they built a full-scale barrier over one of the cribs. A crib was a water waste disposal, and some of these are highly contaminated soils. So they built one over this crib, and they’ve been monitoring now—Battelle has—for ten years or so. Actually more like 15. And keeping all kinds of data, and it seems to be working. Because the water, plants and animals are not getting through it. So that’s called the Hanford Barrier. That’ll probably be used in some form or another for this large landfill and other sites that are left behind.
Gardner-Andrews: So how do they go about monitoring it to see if the water, plants and animals are affecting it?
Adams: Well, they have instruments they can put down that keeps track of the soil water. They can go in an excavate some of the plants to see how deep they’ve gone. They can actually do a water balance; they can figure out the evaporation and how much rainfall has been on, snowfall, on the barrier. So there is quite a bit of instrumentation that they can use to do that.
Gardner-Andrews: Do you think that the snowfall we’ve had this year will have an effect on that?
Adams: No, not unless it amounts to more than 12 inches of water. And I doubt if it reaches that much. So they did irrigate the barrier—parts of it—twice the annual rainfall. It didn’t break through. They also set fires on the barrier, because we have range fires. The bunchgrass that they used is actually—the native bunchgrass is very fire resistant. I mean, it’ll burn, but it doesn’t destroy the roots. So it comes back right away. So it’s pretty well-thought-out, and so far the data looks pretty promising that these barriers will work. And the natural analogs told us that as well. Then of course, they also developed mathematical models so they could simulate if we put on four times of water, what do we predict? Those simulations looked pretty good. But you can’t rely just on simulations. You have to actually test it.
Gardner-Andrews: Was there testing done for if an earthquake happened?
Adams: Not specifically. But, actually Hanford’s in a fairly low earthquake risk area. But we were concerned with the barrier about collapses, particularly if there was a void underneath that could collapse during an earthquake. So we actually developed a big pile driver with ports welded on it such that we could—it was like a big I-beam. We could vibrate that in; at the same time we could inject grout, which is like a cement, to fill up those voids as we pulled the hammer out, would collapse the voids, and seal it up with concrete. So we’re pretty confident that earthquakes aren’t going to really destroy that barrier. It’s like a really sturdy foundation for a house, really, or anything else. My group did, though, manage the seismograph stations that are around Hanford, and they could tell us every day whether there’s an earthquake or not.
So it was a really diverse group that we had. We even had historians. Yeah, because we found that to analyze these sites to get data was very expensive. You had to either go out there with drilling equipment and portable labs and all that. But it would be much cheaper if we could figure out from the records that were left behind what we were up against. But the records at Hanford were very scattered, loosely organized. A lot of them almost got thrown in the dumpster. So we hired—because there were so many letters. Turned out that letters were the major way of communicating in those days. We hired historians and librarians to go out and rescue these, catalog them, study them, so that our engineers would know what to expect in any given place. That saved us millions of dollars.
Gardner-Andrews: Where would these historians find the letters?
Adams: Well, that was part of the job, was to figure out where all of the files were and go to those places and try to round them up, put them in our big library, before they got destroyed for whatever reason. There were libraries around Hanford that were scattered. A lot of it was in engineers’ files, so we had to, you know, plead with the engineers to let us into those, so we could pull out things we needed. So it was a big job—records management at Hanford is—was—probably still is a big job.
Gardner-Andrews: Do you know where those letters ended up?
Adams: Well, when I left, they were in a library in 2750 East. We had a librarian. I don’t know if they still have a librarian. There was a lot of photos that were taken inside of tanks, which could be very valuable. Towards the end of my career out there, we started getting data overload. There was so much data being collected from the tanks of just about every isotope on the periodic table [LAUGHTER] that it was very hard to keep track of all this data. And the engineers wanted to know, okay, if we make a transfer from one tank to another, how does that change the chemical composition of both tanks? Sometimes it would take these engineers and scientists months to figure that out.
So we went to Battelle with some money--[LAUGHTER]—a lot of money. And we said, build us an electronic database to have all this data cataloged and accessible. And they did a good job. But then we said, okay, now design us a way to do an automatic report when there’s a tank transfer. And they did that, so eventually the scientists could order a report from Battelle, a few hours later get back a report that used to take them months to do. Major breakthrough. I think that’s still in operation.
Gardner-Andrews: And would that be more of a here’s-what-would-happen report, or was it more of a this-already-happened and now what chemicals are going inside?
Adams: Well, at that time we were more interested in what happens when you make a transfer. But the tank data can be, of course, used—like with the Vitrification Plant—to project what’s there and figure out what it’s going to look like as it comes into their tanks. So it’s both. At that time, the major emphasis was on tank transfers.
Gardner-Andrews: And was there major concerns for how certain chemicals would react with each other, in terms of—like, for lack of a better term—bad ways?
Adams: Yeah, like what drugs are you taking here? Yes. That was a concern. That’s one of the things they looked at. If we do this transfer, what’s the waste going to look like? Are we going to have more concentrations of one thing that might adversely react with something else?
Another thing was criticality. You know, if you get too much plutonium together at the right place at the right time and the right configuration, you get a nuclear reaction. It’s not like a mushroom cloud, but it’s the same concept. And we didn’t want criticalities: bad news. So they could use this to determine, hopefully, if there’s any critical elements building up during these transfers.
Gardner-Andrews: And so, to avoid that, it would just be, don’t mix this tank with this tank?
Adams: Or don’t move as much. Or, if you do, mix it with something else, so it doesn’t get concentrated. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to prevent criticality.
One of my chapters in the book that I wrote is about one of the cribs, which I didn’t work on, but it’s so fascinating. There’d been so much plutonium put in that crib that they were actually—and a crib is basically a drainage field in the soil—that they thought it might go critical. It’s hard to think of enough plutonium being in the soil to create a—phew—you know. But they went in and started removing some. To do that, they had to use a robot. A robot, and they used a mechanical arm to dig some of it out. They ended up digging—I forget the exact figure—pounds of plutonium from that crib so it wouldn’t go critical. So, yeah, that was one of the concerns: criticality.
One of my favorite sites at Hanford was called U Pond. When I got to Hanford, one of the first environmental engineers, we had four ponds where there’s billions of gallons of water going to these ponds for waste—for disposal. They would drain into the ground. He said, I want you to look at the laws that you studied in environmental school and tell me if we have any regulations coming up that are going to impact these ponds. So I remember my first document out there was Pond Management and the Law. And being fresh out of an environmental law class, I said, oh, man, you’re in for trouble! [LAUGHTER] There’s RCRA, there’s CERCLA, there’s TSCA, there’s a lot of other minor laws, and they’re going to have a major impact.
Well, the document went out to review, mostly at that time, chemical engineers. And they said, well, this is nonsense. We only have to worry about the Atomic Energy Act. So the report got put in my desk and was basically shelved. About maybe two years later, [LAUGHTER] the Department of Energy signed an agreement with the Department of Ecology in the state of Washington and the EPA, saying, you must follow RCRA, CERCLA and comply with them. That was a huge impact—still is to this day.
And so I pulled the document out. [LAUGHTER] One of the things I learned at Hanford: if you write a document that is not well-received, just put it away for six months, and then you’ll need it. So now—and that led to a lot of job opportunities. Because later on my group got involved in cataloging all the sites. Are they RCRA/CERCLA, who’s in charge of them, which regulations apply, and all of that, was a big job.
Gardner-Andrews: And what do those acronyms stand for?
Adams: Let’s see if I can remember. RCRA is Resource Environmental Conservation Act—Recovery Act. And CERCLA was the Comprehensive Environmental Reclamation Act—close. It’s been a while since I worked on those. So RCRA and CERCLA were big deals. Anyway, so environmental regulations are—take a lot of time to comply with at Hanford. And that’s—some people say, well, that’s just bureaucracy. Well, yes and no. The RCRA and CERCLA really helped us group the waste sites and manage them in such a way that was efficient. So it wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t all just paperwork. In fact, there was a lot of analysis that went in: what’s the best way to go about cleaning this up? And it forced you to look at options.
Gardner-Andrews: What would you say are—or were—the most rewarding aspects of your work?
Adams: Well, for many years, the most rewarding aspect is that we would write papers and get them published in journals and go to conferences and make presentations. It was a lot of original work. Because we were doing things that had never been done before. Towards the end of my career out there, that went away. Not necessarily because it was all done [LAUGHTER] but the emphasis changed to, let’s just go in there and get the job done. So there was less opportunity to be creative, to solve problems, and to present that to your peers. So that was a real loss. But that was certainly one of the most rewarding aspects of it, was to be able to do that.
Gardner-Andrews: What are some of your memories of major events on the site or in the Tri-Cities, such as the plants shutting down or any local, political or social things that you can remember from your time in the Tri-Cities?
Adams: Well, I’d say one of the biggest changes while I was there was the transition from plutonium production to cleanup. A lot of things changed. Like security was not as strict. Didn’t need a Q clearance any longer, which means that the federal officers wouldn’t come in and interview your neighbors every year—does he drink? Does he pay his bills? All that kind of stuff. So that kind of went away. Our lunchboxes were not searched as thoroughly coming in or going out. There isn’t any plutonium really left at Hanford, except in some of the waste sites, dispersed in the soil. So that’s really a big change. A lot of the buildings have been torn down that were problematic.
Like one of my first assignments was, we had this laundry that washed contaminated clothes called whites. Every once in a while, there would be contaminated lint blowing around on the street. So we were sent over there and I was just a junior engineer at that time, with one of the senior guys, to figure out what was going wrong. We traced it to a piece of equipment in the laundry called the hydroclone, I think it was. And it was clogged up and it was—the wet lint was getting into some of the ducts and so forth, drying out, and then ending up blowing out onto the street. Which is kind of disconcerting. So we got the rotoclone cleaned out and back in service. Well, that laundry no longer exists. There’s a modern laundry that they built, I think in town here somewhere, that does the laundry now. And it’s all automated and everything.
But that was the most bizarre place I’ve ever seen. Because you go in the laundry, there was a line painted on the floor. And one side was clean laundry; the other side was contaminated laundry. There was no barrier or anything. Just a line painted. And the procedures on each side were completely different. Like the people over there were wearing whites, had certain protocols. And on the clean side, you didn’t need to wear whites, you know. That kind of thing. Just really strange.
So a lot of those facilities no longer exist. And just as well. But that was a big change. So the cultural change from more rigorous secrecy to less secrecy was a big change.
Gardner-Andrews: And when did you start noticing that happening?
Adams: Well, the plutonium—let’s see, PUREX shut down, I think it was in 1980—I have to look in my book to see. 1988 or something like that. So after that is when it really started to change. Now, right now they’re finishing tearing down the PFP, the Plutonium Finishing facility. And so that means that the plutonium’s all shipped out, a long time ago. And so that’s just a big change. Like, to get in that place, you had to be escorted, even though you had a Q clearance. Yeah, so that was one of the major ones.
Another change is, like I said before, when I first went to work there, it was a culture dominated by chemical engineers. And that changed drastically, because now we needed a very diverse bunch, including geologists, groundwater hydrologists, biologists, historians, environmental chemists—you know, the whole—geophysics—we needed a whole bunch of different specialties. That was a big change. Particularly from a management point of view. Because now you had to manage all kinds of different engineers with different outlooks on life. That could be interesting at times.
Gardner-Andrews: Going back to talking about security, before PUREX shut down and you noticed a drop in the secrecy and everything, how did the intense security and secrecy onsite affect your job?
Adams: Well, like in my book, they ask me, don’t you have some pictures from your time working out there? I said, no, I was never allowed to take a camera in. To take a camera in, even after PUREX shut down, we had to get a special permit. Well, so, the secrecy was—you had to be careful what you took in your lunchbox. You didn’t want to lose your pass card, your ID card, because that could [LAUGHTER] cause you some problems. You were restricted from going into certain areas. All your documents had to be screened to see if there’s anything classified in them.
Like I said, your security review wasn’t as rigorous; you didn’t have your coworkers or your neighbors, you know, saying, well, he’s smoking grass or whatever. When they asked questions, it would be unheard of today, like, is he a homosexual? You couldn’t do that today. Shouldn’t do that. But those were legitimate questions back in those days, I guess, because of the threat of blackmail. They were really worried about—they knew that there were foreign agents working to get access to information. So I guess anything that could cause you to be blackmailed, like being in debt, or drinking heavily, would be a concern. That all loosened up and changed, quite drastically.
Let’s see, what else? Well, I guess those were kind of the main things. Like, my wife never saw where I worked. Never. So there was still some walls between you and your family. I remember sometimes I’d go out and work overtime, and walk out into the hall, and all the sudden there’d be a guy with a rifle, or a woman with a rifle, body armor, the whole nine yards, pointing the gun at you. What are you doing here? And I’d have to pull out my ID real quick. [LAUGHTER] So there was constant patrols all over the place.
Gardner-Andrews: Why would it matter what’s in your lunchbox?
Adams: Well, they didn’t want you bringing anything in that might blow up or contain a tape recorder or a camera or anything that could be used to gather information. Same way going out, they didn’t want you going out with a tape recorder or a classified document or whatever. It was very, very rigorous.
Gardner-Andrews: And when you mentioned that your wife never went to where you worked, did you find it difficult to talk about what you were doing? Were you concerned about talking to your wife or family members about the work you did onsite?
Adams: Not so much, but in the early days of Hanford, that was really something. I mean, until the bomb was dropped, there was probably only half a dozen people that knew what 50,000 people were building out here, you know. And it was very rigorous security. I didn’t hesitate to talk much about what I did, except there were certain projects where I had to use classified documents. And I couldn’t talk about those. But she was restricted from coming out to the Site. Now, I understand that’s changed somewhat. It’s easier to get a pass to go to your son-and-daughter work day, that kind of thing. But yeah, it was—and that didn’t bother me. I mean, that was just part of the job.
Gardner-Andrews: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford? Or living in the Tri-Cities during the Cold War?
Adams: Well, during the Cold War, it probably wasn’t any more tense living here than it would be anywhere else. I mean, most of the neighbors didn’t build fallout shelters that I know of. When I was a kid, of course we had, you know, drills where we had to crawl under our desks, that kind of thing.
So I did notice that the Tri-Cities had, and still does to some extent, a very unique culture. It’s not so much a culture of secrecy anymore. But you can still see the influence of the early days of Hanford if you look for them. Particularly some of the old-timers are—you know. [LAUGHTER] Of course they’d probably consider me to be an old-timer now, but—are not as willing to talk about it as some of the younger folks.
There was a time when, before Richland became a city, that if your light bulb went out, you just called up the GSA, and they’d come and change it. [LAUGHTER] That doesn’t happen anymore. [LAUGHTER] Once Richland became a city, everything changed as far as—you could buy a house, including a government house. Like, I go to one of the first four churches that was actually established by the government in the beginning. Now there’s all kinds of churches. But at the beginning there was only four churches, and they were sponsored by the government. So kind of interesting. You don’t find many places where that is the case.
Also, many of the street names in Richland were named after officers that graduated from West Point that worked in the Corps of Engineers, and those are the street names. For instance, I live on Goethals Street. Goethals was a West Point graduate, worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, and he is the one that finished building the Panama Canal. Who would’ve thought? So even the streets are named after, you know, a certain class of people—certain people. So that’s part of the culture.
Gardner-Andrews: Did you find it to be shocking, I guess, going from being a high school teacher to an environmental engineer?
[LAUGHTER]
Adams: Being an environmental engineer was a lot easier job. [LAUGHTER] And it paid better. [LAUGHTER] A lot easier job. I found some of the things I learned teaching high school helped me a lot on how to manage people and motivate people. Really helped me a lot. So I didn’t—other than being glad to be out of the classroom for a while—now I’ve kind of gone back to it; I teach science in my basement to kids.
Gardner-Andrews: Oh, really?
Adams: But—well, my wife teaches piano and some of them want to do science also, so they just come downstairs. Anyway, no, I didn’t notice a big difference, as far as—except it was a lot easier work. I do remember, they sent me to a week at UCLA management school one time. And this was many years ago. There was an executive from Silicon Valley there, and he said, you need four kinds of people in any successful organization: artists, judges, warriors, and explorers. Well, almost everyone at Hanford was either a judge or a warrior. There weren’t any artists; there weren’t explorers. Well, I actually took that advice to heart, and when I started hiring for the environmental engineer group, we brought in—it doesn’t mean they have a degree in art, but—people with more of an artistic temperament that could present things attractively, and people willing to explore new ideas. That helped a lot.
Being a teacher, you were surrounded by people of diverse fields. Whether you wanted to be or not. Like, we had an ongoing battle with the English department. Like, you’d send a student over there to the reading specialist, and they would say—I’d say, he can’t read. And they’d come back after doing some tests: yeah, you’re right, he can’t read. Well, what are you going to do about it? I don’t have time to teach him to read. That kind of thing was very irritating. I found that some teachers were really slackers, and they wanted to be carried by the union and they were, to some degree. And I didn’t like that. [LAUGHTER] So I was kind of glad to leave teaching. But I did bring a lot of those skills with me.
Gardner-Andrews: All right. Can you tell me about your books, but specifically your most recent one?
Adams: Okay. Well, WSU has published three of my books—WSU Press. One was about the time I retired, which has been 14 years now. It was about growing up in the desert of Oregon, eastern Oregon. It’s called Netting the Sun. It was kind of a memoir, but like my latest book, it kind of wove the cultural and physical geography and history through the memoir.
Then about a year ago, they published another book about eastern Oregon which was more of a guidebook with maps and photos, called Remote Wonders. And it has a pull-out map and a lot of photos. It’s designed to take you on a trip around the eastern Oregon outback, and see a lot of the interesting places that I knew growing up as a kid, that I’ve gone back to many times.
My most recent book came out about three months ago. It’s called Atomic Geography, and it’s a personal history of Hanford. It kind of weaves some of the stories of Hanford and some of the cultural history of Hanford through my personal experiences. It’s not a real long book. It’s definitely written for the general reader, and it’s gotten really good reviews. It was named one of the top ten books from university presses this year. And that’s good, because university presses publish a lot of books. So I don’t know how well it’s selling, but I think it’s selling okay. They only pay me once a year, so.
Anyway, WSU Press has been really fun to work with, but it takes about two or three years to get through the process of writing a book, they have to go through all of their committees, and there’s all kinds of editorial steps: it’s a long process. But that Hanford book is intended for the general reader. You can get a flavor of how the culture’s changed going clear back to the fishing by the tribes. You can get a feel of what’s out there: plants, animals, geology. Some of the engineering challenges, I go through in the book. And some of the supreme ironies of Hanford.
Let me think here. Probably the major irony of Hanford is it’s basically a huge wildlife refuge! It’s not a wasteland, like a lot of people think. It’s 580 square miles, but only about 100 square miles of it—and most of that’s groundwater contamination—was ever used for any kind of activity that created waste. And part of it is now a national monument and a national park. So, yeah, it’s really irony. [LAUGHTER]
Gardner-Andrews: Okay, Mel, is there anything we haven’t discussed yet that you want to talk about?
Adams: I don’t think so. I’m kind of running out of steam. I’d just summarize by saying it’s a really strange, bizarre and interesting place.
Gardner-Andrews: That it is, I agree. All right, well, thank you so much, Mel.
Adams: Thank you.
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Hanford Sites
PUREX
2750 East Building
Vitrification Plant
PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant)
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Years on Hanford Site
Files
