Interview with Edward Beck
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Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
Pasco (Wash.)
Animals in research
Industrial hygiene
Radioactive contamination
Radioactive waste disposal
Nuclear reactors
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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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Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Edward Beck on July 31, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Ed about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can state and spell your full name for us?
Edward Beck: Edward D. Beck. Last name is B-E-C-K.
Franklin: And Edward?
Beck: E-D-W-A-R-D.
Franklin: Okay.
Beck: Do you need my middle name?
Franklin: Sure.
Beck: Domenic. D-O-M-E-N-I-C.
Franklin: Thanks. And you prefer to go by Ed? Okay, great. So, Ed, tell me how and why you came to the area to work at the Hanford Site.
Beck: Well, I graduated from the University of Utah in 1973. Mostly worked in Salt Lake City doing various things. The year I graduated, there weren’t too many jobs in environmental biology, which was my degree. For a while, I worked for the state health department and then I went to work for the University of Utah in research. I later went to work for the Department of Public Safety; I was the University of Utah’s first industrial hygienist. And I started that job in March of 1981.
I was starting a family; I got married in ’73. When our last child was born, it was my daughter, we were still living in Salt Lake City and she came down with a case of e. coli. Probably, we think, from an undercooked hamburger at a fast food restaurant. It was a really severe case: she spent 90 days in the hospital. It was really, really hard. I could go into a lot of detail. But I thought that I just—I had a lot of financial pressure. I was fully insured, but medical insurance was still a quagmire in those days, too. And so I decided that the best thing to do—state employment is not top dollar. And so I started looking around for where I could find another job that would make more money.
I was working at the University of Utah—had been working up there for several years as the industrial hygienist—and the Department of Energy had a bunch of beagles up there that they were doing research. They were feeding beagles plutonium and americium, you know. Then they would sacrifice them and see what was cooking inside, cause of death, and what that radiation really did to the beagles. So, there was a guy named Dr. Edwin Wrenn, he was the head of the program for that. He was an MD, PhD. He was in charge of that program. So I would go up there and I would work, I would do his health and safety as industrial hygiene.
All of the sudden, I guess you’d say, his department, the department of radiobiology was sacrificed to bring in new money, more money, for research in genetic engineering and stuff. So I think Huntsman came in, the Huntsman center for cancer, and there’s a bunch of other researchers they brought in with more money. So they did away—they dissolved the department of radiology and they started—they had to get rid of the beagles. The beagles had been living in kennels that were on cement, and the cement was contaminated from all their droppings. So the thing we were doing, we were cutting up the ceramic and trying to keep everybody from being exposed. And we were shipping it to a place called Hanford. Gosh, I’d never seen that before.
At the same program, they also had a bunch of rooms that they were doing radiation research on, and they used to—they did several experiments there with the beagles and several types of what they called deep body, looking at the bodies to see where this stuff was located in their organs. They had some metal rooms that were built with battleship steel before the first atomic bomb so they were completely clean. That didn’t mean much to me at the time; I thought, well, that’s all well and good. But these buildings had to be torn down, too. And they were also sent to Hanford.
They make up—right now Battelle has this—or they did when I retired—they have this center, actually, I wouldn’t call it a center. It’s a suite where people go and they sit for 30 minutes and they have these sensors go over their bodies and they see where they have any radiation deposited deep in their body. It’s a very sensitive thing. This battleship steel from before World War II was a very, very scarce commodity in the ‘80s. I mean, they were making all this stuff, or—DOE was more interested in, and Battelle was more interested in the battleship steel than anything. So it was shipped to Hanford and it now comprises all the shielding on that building that they’re still using today.
Franklin: Ohhh.
Beck: So that, you know, Dr. Wrenn, he was a little—he felt bad that his department had been sacrificed—
Franklin: Do you know how to spell his name?
Beck: W-R-E-N-N, I think. His name was Edwin. We kind of formed a good relationship because he was called Ed and I was called Ed, so, you know. When I was assigned to the hospital up there to do safety and health, I did a lot of work for him. They also worked with pigs. The department of artificial organs was there. You know, Barney Clark, they put the artificial heart in him, he was the first one ever, and they did it at the university. I was working there when they did that.
But I used to go and measure all the noises, all the noise levels from the beagles in the kennel when they were feeding them. I made people put on hearing protection, because it is deafening. Absolutely deafening. Well over OSHA standards. The pigs were, too. You’d pick up a pig and they’d squeal. You can ask anybody at WSU who works with livestock how much noise a bunch of livestock can make in a building. To me, that was very surprising.
But Dr. Wrenn told me, he says, you know, if you’re looking for a job, he says, you’ve had all this experience here, and he says, you might want to apply at Hanford where we’re sending all this stuff. It’s federal and I know they use a lot of people like you. Since you’re looking for a job, that might be a great place to apply. So I did. I did some research on it, and we didn’t have computers in those days really. I remember I was collecting—I was getting MSDSs—Material Safety Data Sheets for the university over a computer. Kind of like a fax machine and it was really primitive compared to what we’ve got today. So, I did some research and I applied with Hanford Environmental Health Foundation. I found out that they were doing all the occupational safety and health for the Hanford Site. So I sent my application in, and they sent it back and flew me out for an interview. That’s how I got here. Got the job, and I worked for—I started work August the 14th of 1989, and I’ve been here ever since. I worked for a lot of different contractors.
Franklin: Sure.
Beck: When HEHF went out of business, it was kind of a—it was a situation where they wanted to cut costs, I believe. And there’s a lot of politics involved in these situations. So they eliminated HEHF’s contract and they gave it to someone who, I guess, could do the work cheaper and better and that kind of stuff. So then I went to work for other contractors out in the area.
But when I first came here in ’89 we were still making plutonium. It was not soon after that, though, that the Site was shut down and they started cleanup. Actually, when I interviewed, they were telling me that was coming. N Reactor was still operational and stuff like that. But they were saying that the handwriting was on the wall that they weren’t going to be making any more plutonium.
Franklin: But they still knew that they would need you, though.
Beck: Well, they did.
Franklin: I mean, they were still actively hiring even though production was shutting down.
Beck: Because they knew it was going to be a cleanup site, and any person who knew anything about Hanford, and I did, knew that they would need a lot of industrial hygiene folks. And there were a lot of people who were here that were industrial hygienists already. They’d been here from the beginning. I go to church with several—with at least one, whose name is Alan Lilly, and he was here before I was.
Franklin: What was his name?
Beck: Alan Lilly. I think I’ve given his name to the woman that I talked to about this interview. I think she might’ve called him already. She asked me for names of people I knew.
Franklin: Yeah, we’re always trying to work those personal referrals because those are very generative.
Beck: So, when I came here, HEHF did all the industrial hygiene. Not the safety part, but the industrial hygiene for the entire Hanford Site, all the contractors.
Franklin: Can you explain that difference to me and anybody who might be watching?
Beck: Well, safety and health, I guess you could look at as one big overall. It’s like “medicine,” right? You’ve got a pediatrician, you’ve got a brain surgeon. So as I see it, safety and health is kind that banner of “medicine.” And then underneath it, you’ve got health physics, which is closely allied but still different with usually different degrees. Then you have industrial hygiene and then you have like safety professionals. Industrial hygiene would be exposure to things like noise, particulates, vapors, solvents, those kinds of things. There’s light, various different types of light. Laser. Lasers can be—I was the laser safety officer at Battelle before I retired, for about five years. So there are a lot of things that you can be exposed to on the job that the industrial hygienist would measure. We usually did that with sampling pumps. It was very difficult at Hanford, because you always had the possibility of contamination.
Franklin: Radiological contamination?
Beck: Yeah. You’d collect it with your sample. Like, for instance, suppose that you were working in an area where there was a particulate that you wanted to collect. You’d have these little plastic jobbies called cassettes that you’d put on the end of a sampling pump. They’re connected by tubing and they’re attached to the person’s lapel. So they’d go in and they’d do their work and you’d collect, you’d pull air through that. And that gives you an approximation of what their exposure is. And OSHA requires that kind of sampling. That’s the basis for the exposure limits for OSHA for many chemicals.
If it’s a particulate, you do it with a cassette and filter. If it’s a solvent, you do it with what’s called a sorbent tube. At the time, you did it with a sorbent tube. Things have really changed; they’ve got a lot of very, very nifty ways to sample now they didn’t have back then. Noise, you do with just a regular microphone and a recorder that records the noise levels.
All those pumps have to be calibrated with class 1 calibration, so it’s very accurate. Then you’d send it to a lab. You’d take those cassettes and whatever tubes you used, and you send them to the lab. They have to be analyzed, but you can’t send them to any lab if they’re contaminated, because you’d spread radioactive contamination where they’re contaminated. So, we couldn’t use just any industrial hygiene lab. So that was what 222-S was for. That’s one of the things they did. They did the contaminated samples. People that worked at Hanford in industrial hygiene, and people that work in other radiological companies that do sampling, we had to find ways around—if you wanted to know if a sample was contaminated radiologically or not, you can’t tell just by looking at it.
Franklin: Sure.
Beck: So what you do is you collect two samples side-by-side, which the people working for General Electric probably didn’t have to do. One sample would do, because they were sure theirs wasn’t contaminated. You’d collect two samples side-by-side and you’d send one over to the rad—radiological people. They’d scan it doing a slow scan to see if they could detect any radiation on the filter. If they detected radiation on the filter, or if there was any contamination, then it would go to 222-S lab. If they didn’t detect any radiation on the sample, then you could send that out to another lab.
It was actually checked three or four times before it went offsite to make sure nobody made a mistake, because DOE had already seen what they could do to laboratories when contaminated samples were sent. And people said, gee, we didn’t know. I even saw that while I was working at Battelle before I retired. But there were a lot of things that happened, too, where everybody’s going, wow, how’d this happen?
So, anyway, that’s the basis for industrial hygiene and that’s really what we did at the Site. We also did sampling for a lot of the power plants that were onsite. There were coal-fired power plants.
Franklin: Still in operation?
Beck: No. No, no, no. They took those down. Those were shut down; they didn’t operate—I think it was about three or four years after I got here. I can’t remember exactly when those were taken down. But there were—1970 was when OSHA came into being. I graduated from college in ’73, and EPA came along not long after that. EPA had some requirements for power plants, for coal-fired power plants. DOE had to comply with those. They had an air quality program in the State of Washington and we had to comply with those.
So we had to do what was called isokinetic sampling. You’d have to actually climb the stacks, those big smokestacks, and do sampling. You’d have to put samples in stuff, sampling apparatus. We used glass lines with—you’d put grease on the fittings on the lines to make a seal, and we’d go up there and sample those. Usually, we were a couple hundred feet up. When the wind was blowing, it was cold. And those things would move back and forth so you couldn’t always keep your glass tubing together. If that glass tubing came apart because the wind was blowing a bit and those things were moving, you know, you’d have one over here and one over here and this would move in a different, you know, so it would pull it apart. You’d have to start the sampling all over again. So we had to pay careful attention to how we did that.
Franklin: How would you get up there?
Beck: We climbed ladders that probably weren’t OSHA compliant. They didn’t require the fall protection then that they do now. We did everything that was required for safety. But stuff progresses over years. You know, you get better and better at it. That’s one of the things I didn’t like so much. I’ve climbed those towers and it didn’t scare me being up that high, but it did—when wind blew, boy, it was cold. It was not a good place to be. And you couldn’t pick the day you sampled, necessarily, for wind.
Franklin: Oh, yeah.
Beck: Not always. You’d try. But they couldn’t predict the weather as well as they can now. And Battelle used to predict all the weather on the Site, you know. They still do as far as I know. They had a lab out there. A building where they had Battelle meteorologists, they were there 24/7. I think they still might be; I’m not sure. I think they might have a lab 24/7 doing weather forecasting and stuff.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: Just in case they have an incident or something like that, they know where the plume might go or know where fires might go. I think that, as I remember, that was probably a really, really good thing we had that going on when we had the big range fire out there. You probably heard about that.
Franklin: Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Beck: Well. I was working out in the 200 Area. HEHF had dissolved and I had went to work for Waste Management. Waste Management had a contract out at Hanford to do many things. They day of the accident that started that fire, I was out at 200 West. I was out not too far from T Plant. I was out by the Yakima gate, kind of facing the Yakima gate, and I was inspecting a chemical storage, I guess you’d say, I don’t know what you’d call them, but they’re like the storage boxes that you see on trains that go back and forth that got the doors that open. We were putting a lot of chemicals and stuff in there, and as I remember, the painters were kind of complaining when they opened the door, they’d get chemical odors. So we were taking a look to see how we could collect samples and see what they were exposed to.
And I heard the accident. I heard the collision that actually started that fire. And I heard this pop or bang. It was a distant thing. I looked—you know, you can’t see anything from the distance I was at. But not long after that, fire started. Later I heard that it was probably caused by that accident that I heard, that’s how fire got started.
So when the fire really got going, I think I was out there the day after. It’s been a long time ago; hard to remember exactly when the days I worked. But I didn’t work out there for very long, because they closed the Site down and only the required people were out there. So when the fire finally was done, we all went back to work out there, and it was very different. There was nothing but dust and I guess you’d say ashes. The fire had come really close to the place I had my office. I can’t remember the number on the building. But it had come really close and actually some of those buildings had been scorched. I mean, they got really hot. They kept the fire—DOE had done some really good things. They had a lot of fire alarms around the buildings, and they put big rocks everywhere to keep the contamination down. Because when the wind blows, if you have any radioactive contaminant, it blows around.
Franklin: Right.
Beck: So you could almost pick the areas that had some ground contamination out there, because they were full of big rocks. Around Tank Farms, there’s big rocks. I mean, they’re everywhere. Like beds of rocks. So when the wind blows, it really stops the movement of any contamination. You’d have the RCTs that would go around with their meters, and that’s all some of those guys did was just constant surveys to see what the contamination was going.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the stories about the tumbleweeds being contaminated. At the time when they started to burn those tumbleweeds and the smoke was radioactive, they soon figured that out and quit burning the tumbleweeds.
Almost all the mice had radioactive. They actually had some people from Battelle that used to go out and collect animal specimens on Site. They would come in and analyze them and they would tell them what the contamination levels were. But you’ve probably heard that story, I would suspect.
Franklin: A little bit, yeah.
Beck: Yeah. Well, those, when I went to work for Battelle, I was supporting those people that used the firearms to go out and collect some of the animals.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Beck: Yeah. It was—
Franklin: I’m wondering if you could tell me a little more about that.
Beck: Well, some of that might not—might be classified still. I’m not going to say much. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Okay, sure, sure, sure.
Beck: There’s things I’ll be very careful with in this interview, because I had a security clearance for many years. I don’t keep up with what has been declassified and what’s still classified.
Franklin: Perfectly understandable.
Beck: But things that are common knowledge, like the collecting the specimens, deer, rabbits, things like that and all kinds of plant stuff, that was done probably from the 1940s. But it was done much better in later years. I don’t know when they really started collecting those samples. You’d have to do research on that. But it was definitely going on when I went to work for Battelle. I think it was 2000—
Franklin: And you were seeing or hearing reports of even then collecting specimens that were radiologically hot?
Beck: Yeah, well, they would go out and see what they could find. Let’s see. That’s probably not classified. We had a situation with Hanford. I was still working at HEHF at the time. So it would be before I went to work at Waste Management, which I think was 1999. Not too sure; I think it was. They had a hydrogen sulfide smell out around Tank Farms. Tank Farms had odors for a long time. If you worked out there—we did a lot of sampling around Tank Farms. You’d pick up stuff in the air all the time, even in the old days. That’s because the risers—this might be my own personal opinion. I don’t know how much fact there is to this. But over the years, I always picked up this reason for why they never could put those exhaust stacks up in the air. Because if you were to put some high exhaust stacks up in the air from those tanks, you’d dissipate a lot more of those, and people wouldn’t smell it, and it wouldn’t be a problem.
But to do that, you have to change your air quality permits, and that’s pretty tough to do and it would pretty hard to get the State of Washington to buy off on it. It’d be pretty expensive, because you got to put special filters. I mean, even now, those tanks, those underground tanks, they have special filters on the exhaust so that they can keep the contamination level down. You don’t stop the vapors, but you can certainly stop radioactive particles.
Well, anyway, so they shut the entire Site down because of that hydrogen sulfide smell out at Tank Farms. And everybody was on, I believe they went to airline respirators or actually SCBA respiratory protection. As an industrial hygienist, you’re also very involved in respiratory protection, because you choose the respiratory protection, you make sure the mask fits. It’s all got to be to OSHA spec.
You know, DOE, because they’re a government agency, they really aren’t under OSHA requirements. They’re like the Army. They’re like the Forest Service, the Parks Service. They’re really not governed by OSHA. OSHA was a law that was mostly just for people that weren’t government. I mean, you can’t tell somebody who’s in the Marines that he’s got to wear hearing protection because his rifle makes too much noise. I mean, that’s probably not going to go, because the Marine needs to hear his buddies, right, and he’s not going to put on hearing protection to save his hearing. I mean, you can see the Army operates a bit different.
Franklin: Right.
Beck: So most of the military and most of the government agencies are exempt from OSHA. DOE didn’t have a lot of their own standards, so they rolled over and accepted OSHA, a lot of the exposure limits and so on and so forth. But it wasn’t up—when I first came here, it was a little—It became more formalized as we rolled along, but in 1989, they were still doing pretty good on it, but there was a lot of things that they just weren’t required to do. So they later wrote those things in. But at any rate, we had this smell out at Tank Farms. This is a long story, but I’m getting to this—
Franklin: No, no, no, no.
Beck: This contaminants. It’s a story that I’ll never forget. So, they put us on 24/7 shifts at Tank Farms. All of HEHF’s industrial hygienists had to work graveyard and daytime as did all the other health and safety people. We all went on. That had not been the case. There were a few health and safety people that worked staggered shifts, but most of us worked day shifts. So we found ourselves out at Tank Farms. Myself and another industrial hygienist who worked for HEHF who now works at Battelle, [LAUGHTER] we were riding around in a car and going from place to place at Tank Farms and taking chemical measurements all night long.
Everybody was—it was kind of crazy. There was SBCA respirators. And then they stepped down, a few people were allowed to wear cartridge respirators that you can still take the vapor out of your breathing zone, but if it’s at a certain level then you’ve got to go to the airline because it’s considered to be dangerous. Well, that’s what OSHA says, anyway. They’ve got these exposure—these limits.
Well, went out there one night, and I’m walking through one of the facilities out in Tank Farms. And I see this big—there’s a pop machine and a candy vending machine in this area. I see this big V shape cut out of the concrete. It’s gone. I hadn’t seen that before. I said, gee, I wonder what happened. So I started asking people, how’d that happen? And they said, well, what happened was we found that the mice were going here and running along the wall. You know where the wall and the floor come together, you’ve got that 90-degree bend straight up and down. Well, they had mouse dropping and urine and it was hot. Then they found that a mouse—later on they found that a mouse had gotten up in the candy machine and there was contamination in the candy machine. So the candy machine gets removed. That’s going back to what I was telling you about the contaminated animals.
Yeah, you just knew, if you dropped something on the ground at Hanford, you almost never picked it up. If you dropped any pen—I don’t know how many ink pens the government bought for people, but ballpoint pens, they were laying on the ground a lot of places. You knew why they were there. You just couldn’t be sure, when you picked them up, if you did pick them up, they were clean, and you didn’t want to do that. Because when you go out of a zone, you’d have to survey out. If you contaminated your hands, it was a big deal. So if you dropped something on the ground, rather than pick up the pen, you would prevent further contamination. That was part of the training, that you don’t be picking up things that could be potentially contaminated. So we didn’t pick up—
I mean, it was a well-known fact that the tumbleweeds and stuff that grew in a lot of places at the Hanford Site—because there was ground contamination—would become contaminated and they’d have lot of radioactive isotopes up in the tumbleweeds. They first thought that they’d go around and they’d reduce the fire hazard by burning the tumbleweeds, so they picked them up in a truck, you know. They had this truck, I think that was—I don’t know how they burned them; I can’t remember exactly. I think they actually embedded some sort of a truck or designed one so they could keep the tumbleweeds in this truck, keep the sparks from going and causing other fires.
Everything is required to have a survey—everything out there that goes into any type of a zone is required to be surveyed. As I remember the story—you’d have to talk to somebody who remembers it better than I do—but the RCTs were surveying that operation in that truck, and they found that, lo and behold, the smoke was coming from the tumbleweeds, and any particulates made by those tumbleweeds were radioactive. So I don’t think that burning of tumbleweeds lasted very long. So we don’t do it anymore, I’m sure. But anyway.
Franklin: Yeah, now, when I’ve been out there, I’ve just seen them, they get piled up in the ditches and along the fence lines.
Beck: And usually hauled away.
Franklin: Usually—yeah.
Beck: They put them in the landfill and usually bury them. You know, it’s—you just assume that if there’s one contaminated—if you just find one, say, in 100 acres, you would assume that potentially you could have more. So they just all get collected and buried.
Franklin: Sure, and you don’t know where they came from, so. You know? It’s the nature of the beast.
Beck: And the same with the animals. We used to laugh about it a lot. How do you keep a jackrabbit from staying on the Hanford Site? He’s eating vegetation that may be contaminated, may not. So anything he takes in gets bioaccumulated, stored in his body, you can probably find it. Now this little bugger, he wants to hop over, maybe he even swims the Columbia River, I don’t know. But suppose he gets somewhere. I don’t think that’s a serious issue, but I think it’s one that they’ve been watching. They’ve always watched.
Franklin: Sure. It makes sense. I’d like to ask you about the history of the HEHF as you know it. How long were they in existence before you joined them?
Beck: A long time. I came to work in ’89, and they were the medical group in 1969 when the McCluskey accident happened. You’ve probably heard of that.
Franklin: Yes.
Beck: Okay. Those were the docs that treated him. They used chelation therapy?
Franklin: Which is?
Beck: Which is they give you IV. IVs of salts that will go out and grab onto certain chemicals in the blood. They do that for heavy metals, too. It doesn’t necessarily have to be radioactive. There are people who might have mercury or lead or something in the blood, and they can do that sort of therapy. What it does is it makes chemical complexes. They get it out of the blood and it’s excreted. So that was pretty successful, as I understand it. Never had been done before, that I was aware of. At least that’s what I was told at HEHF.
You know, I told the young woman that I talked to on the phone that I scheduled this interview that they used to have lead-lined bathtubs. For accidents. And the McCluskey was the first one who was ever, I think, put in a lead-lined bathtub. Those were located about, I don’t know, a couple hundred feet behind Kadlec. In a—you probably heard of that before?
Franklin: Mm-hmm.
Beck: Well, I was the guy—I was one of the industrial hygienists used to go in there, because the bathtubs were made of lead. You want to make sure there’s not a lot of lead contamination. You do get oxidation of lead, right ?
Franklin: Sure, yeah.
Beck: So we’d go in and we’d do what we call swipe samples and we’d have them analyzed for lead and make sure there was no excess lead dust, or not a lot. See, the medical staff or the people being treated to be exposed to. So I used to go in that facility once or twice a year. And so did a lot of other HEHF employees. But I’d never see that facility before, but I’d actually seen the bathtub where McCluskey was—I think it was the bathtub where he was actually treated. But they had these bathtubs and they put the person in it and they’d try to decontaminate him. And the people that did the decon—decontamination—they had the lead that would shield them while they did the work. And they wouldn’t—they’d take turns to limit their dose. They’d move around.
So HEHF was here in 1969 when that happened. We had our 65th, I think, anniversary when I was still working for them. Which would’ve been prior to—I don’t know, exactly. That may not be right. I don’t know how long they were here. Maybe it was Battelle had their 65th anniversary when I was working for them. I was working for Battelle when they had their 65th. I don’t know how long HEHF was—
Franklin: Okay.
Beck: You’d have to research that out. But they soon—I started to work in August 14th of ’89. When I went to work for Waste Management, there were few of us left. Soon after that, the contract was put out for bid, and somebody else won the contract. So then HEHF went out of business. I mean, there’s other people to do the contract, but I actually gave several names of employees that still live in the area to that woman I talked to. She’s hopefully trying to get them to come in for interviews like this, or maybe even meet them for lunch. They meet every month on the fourth or third Thursday for lunch.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Beck: A lot of the people that have been worked for HEHF longer than I did. I really didn’t work for them that long. I worked for them for ten years. But there were some people who worked a long time. They’re still here.
Franklin: Maybe we can come and give them a presentation.
Beck: Yeah, I really think those guys—I don’t know about the docs. I think the docs that actually did the McCluskey treatment stuff, they may have passed already. I don’t know where those guys are. I never met any of them, other than just when they’d come back to visit HEHF after they’d retire. You know, they’d come in the office and I got to shake hands with them and that, but I didn’t know—
Franklin: You didn’t work with them?
Beck: Didn’t work with them.
Franklin: What—oh. Sorry. What other types of activities and people did HEHF employ, besides industrial hygienists?
Beck: They employed doctors, and most of the docs were occupational physicians; they specialized in occ med. That’s a specialty usually—at the University of Utah, when—I took some graduate classes for industrial hygiene and we were in the division of occupational medicine, which is a part of family and community medicine at most medical schools. So almost everybody that goes to medical school does a rotation through family medicine and they get probably three months’ worth of rotation through occ med. These docs would’ve specialized in it.
There was a guy named Dr. Culkeeny, for instance. He was—I still consider him a great guy and one of my best friends, and I don’t know—he comes back from time to time. But he was a retired Navy physician that worked on aircraft carriers, nuclear powered aircraft carriers. He was a very, very knowledgeable doc. Those were the kind of people that they went after and tried to find. When I first came to HEHF in 1989, we had, I think it was either a one-star or two-star general that became the head of HEHF, and he was an MD. He was a medical doctor. He came from the Air Force, I think. His name was Dr. Neider. He’s retired now. I think he’s still living here in the area. I know that there’s a guy that I worked with at Battelle that married his daughter. So I think he has grandkids and I think he’s still in this area. But, gosh, I haven’t seen most of those people.
There’re some of those people that work for HEHF working for the medical contractor now. They’re physicians’ assistants. I think my exit exam when I left PNNL when I retired—everybody gets an exam, you know, when you quit or when you retire you get an exam on record to see if there was anything wrong with you. Actually, one of those PAs did my exit exam so I had a good time telling her, a lot of reminiscing of old times. Those lunches—there was a lot of reminiscing at those lunches about what we used to do and some of the outrageous things we used to have to do on site that we thought, like climbing those stacks. Ha. Got to tell you, that was a—it wasn’t a high point in your day when you had to do that, but it had to be done by somebody. So we were the ones that—some of us; not everybody.
Franklin: So it sounds like the nature of your job was largely having a lot of a presence out on site, being—not a lot of lab work, but a lot of going out in all different times of the year and sampling—what were some of the challenges of a year-round position like that?
Beck: Well, the weather. We’d work out in, it’s going to be 108 degrees next Friday. Like I told you, Trench 84, very interesting trench. It’s a burial trench out in the Area. I worked out there when I worked for Waste Management. This is just to point out how the weather really affects things. The heat out there, when you’re in that trench, we measured just a temperature off an ordinary thermometer of 114, 115 degrees And it was a trench they’d dug out with Euclids, which are those big earth-moving machines, that you just drive and they just keep digging the—and then they drive up and they put it on top. And then they’d move those big reactor components from all the nuclear ships that they deactivated, and move them in there. They never cover them up—they’re going to cover them up at some point in time, but they have to leave them uncovered so that the people that are part of the treaty, the Russians, number one, can fly over with their satellites and still count those reactor components. Because that’s how you prove they’ve taken the ships out of service. That’s part of some treaty; I was never sure which treaty. They even had to be painted specific colors so that the satellite can see them. But it got so hot out there in the trenches that you couldn’t paint them, the reactors, until—as a matter of fact, we tried to paint them in April one day and the paint was drying so fast, it was popping off. It wouldn’t stay on the reactors, it was that hot.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: It wasn’t that hot. It was like 90-something degrees, but it was—they were black underneath. They had kind of a black tarp covering on them. So when you prepped those—and we had professional painters, you know, who would go up on scaffolds and try to paint those things. They’re huge. Wouldn’t fit—one of those probably would be a challenge to fit in this room. They move them with big cranes, Lampson cranes. If you’ve ever seen one of those, you ought to—that’d be something to really televise, for this show, I think, as part of the history. Because they move them out—they close all the roads on the weekends and they put these big trucks, I don’t know how big these trucks are, but they weigh like 200 tons or something like that.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Beck: And they’re contaminated. So they put them on these trucks and they truck them out and put them in that trench. Push dirt underneath them. And they’ll be buried there for—yeah, that’s Trench 84. It’s a well-known trench. I don’t think it’s classified or anything because everything that we used to work on—used to have to have a security clearance to work in there.
Franklin: Pretty sure the cleanup tour now goes right by—I’ve seen that. I’ve seen what you’re talking about.
Beck: You’ve seen those big things?
Franklin: Yeah, they’re huge.
Beck: And some of them are bigger than others because some come out of cruisers, some come out of destroyers. But they’re huge.
Franklin: They’re huge.
Beck: And they’re very hard to paint.
Franklin: Yeah and there’s many of them.
Beck: They are very hard to paint, let me tell you.
Franklin: Oh, I imagine so.
Beck: But anyway, it was a 115 degrees down there one day. You have to send people out to work for 20 minutes and then they come in and rest for 30. Because they’re in their anti-Cs.
Franklin: What’s that?
Beck: Well, it’s anti-contamination clothing, usually a pair of coveralls, and then some, like, a plastic suit or—I guess the way you describe the suit—actually, the name of the suit escapes me. But you sweat. Boy, do you sweat. You wear another pair of shoes. You wear your boots and then you wear plastic over-shoes over that. Then you wear a coveralls and you tape it around the bottom and you wear your other—so you’ve got about two layers, sometimes three. Your rubber boots, you’ll have that much water in your shoes from your sweat.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: It’s icky. [LAUGHTER] I’m going to tell you, when I first came here in ’89, it was hard to get used to. It really was. And I have a little sensitivity to heat exhaustion and heat stroke now from the Hanford Site, because sometimes even the safety people—you wouldn’t realize it; it sneaks up on you. You just, before you know it, you’ve got a headache, you’re feeling sick to your stomach, and that’s heat exhaustion. Heat stroke comes later. But you want to stop it before it ever gets there. That’s one of the bigger challenges. Then in the winter, you freeze. It’s really cold. The wind blows like crazy. There are days you can’t collect samples. As an industrial hygienist, the wind’s blowing like 40 miles an hour, I guarantee you, your samples will be worthless. So you don’t sample it. Do you stop work? Well, OSHA says you should know what your employees are getting exposed to. But how do you do that? And actually, I think, when the wind starts blowing, usually more than ten miles an hour, we would not collect samples, because if you’re outside, it can blow dirt in picked up with the wind that these guys weren’t creating. They’re still exposed to it, but it really kind of, what you’d say, salts the sample and makes it maybe a little higher than what it should be.
They also had to shut down any heavy lifting. They used these big cranes on the Hanford Site. Since I was a certified safety professional and a certified industrial hygienist, I did safety—I did IH and safety both, and most people did. I mean, there are some safety people out there that just do safety and don’t do industrial hygiene, but I think most IH folks used to do both. I’ve done both on my career of 31 years, safety and health, I’ve done both.
So you’re doing the lifts out there with these big cranes, and usually you’re—well, you’re lifting all kinds of things. But hey have these leaded drums that they put waste in, other isotopes in and plutonium. They weigh 5,000 or 6,000 pounds. They lift those up. Well, if the wind’s blowing more than ten miles an hour, all lifts are canceled. There’s a reason for that. They get swinging. Do you want to try to stop 5,000 pounds of—whatever you pick up can be moved in the wind, and you just don’t want to have—
So, lightning. When lightning comes close, within 30 miles, a lot of that stuff gets shut down because those cranes are just lightning rods. But it goes inside. So you have a lot of things—I mean, there’s a lot of people that put up with lightning. I mean, in the Midwest it’s worse than here by far. So a lot of people deal with lightning. But our winds, if you’ve ever seen the wind blow around here, it can get to be a big deal. I remember the first year I was here in 1989, I came in August. That November or sometime, I think before Thanksgiving, we had winds that knocked down all the trees down in the park along the river, tore up signs and everything. I remember sleeping that night in my house, the same one I’m living in now, and I thought the roof was going to come off the house. The winds were like 85 miles an hour.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: I mean, you went up to the Area the next day, and boy, there was a lot of changes. That’s how the contamination really moves. [LAUGHTER] Could potentially go off-site.
Franklin: Sure.
Beck: Anyway.
Franklin: Wow. Earlier, before we started the interview, you were also telling us about how the shift from providing large drums of water to bottled water and I wonder if you could talk about that briefly.
Beck: Well, I’ve already mentioned one of the biggest challenges we have in the weather realm is the heat. And heat exhaustion and heat stroke is a big-time deal; it can be very serious. It’s like the Army used to find, if you didn’t have good food and good boots, everybody gets calluses on their feet, the Army doesn’t go very far. If they get sick and they’ve got dysentery, bad water, bad food, the enemy doesn’t need to fight you, right, because you’re done. You’re pretty much done.
Same thing when you’re working in the workforce like that. You take out half your workforce with heat exhaustion, heat stroke. And it takes a while to recover. And sometimes, it takes IV therapy, if they’re really, you know, if people are really sensitive and they’re like I am. I’m 66. I have to watch what I do. Not only have I been sensitized out there at the Site, but I also have to watch what I do now because the older you get, the less your body cools itself. I mean, there’s lots of things that are different. So you’ve got to be smart about what you do.
So we used to have to try to prevent heat exhaustion, heat stroke. Hydration is key. But when you’re in all those layers of anti-contamination clothing, right, and you sweat a lot, not only is it key, it’s crucial, in my opinion. So there was a time when I came out here in 1989 that we were accomplishing this, the hydration part, by having 5-gallon containers of chilled water with ice in it. We had to make sure it wasn’t contaminated; it was clean; that there weren’t any viral-borne illnesses or anything that people would get, because that’s bad, too, and people don’t want to drink it anyway.
So we had these containers that were purchased that were used for nothing but that. They were sanitized every day at the end of shift with a Clorox solution—chlorine solution. They were rinsed and they were put in an area that was clean to dry. Turned upside-down, sitting on things, so they would air dry. And then in the morning, way early in the morning—some of these shifts, because it was hot, we’d alter the shifts and you’d start work at 6:30, maybe 6:00 in the morning, maybe even earlier. And then you’re done earlier in the day, and that also helps.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet.
Beck: For those of us that had to drive out there 35 miles, it wasn’t terribly helpful. Because that means you have to get up at 3:00 in the morning to get out there. That was the other thing in the summer: your schedule changed a lot.
But at any rate, they had some of the craft that were union employees that would fill these things up with ice and water and monitor them all day, and would also sanitize them and clean them at night. And they’d do other things in the day, but that was part of their duty. It’s very difficult; you got 15 people working in an area doing something and you’re trying to count these 15 people and make sure they’ve had enough water, enough fluid. How do you do that?
It’s kind of hard, because you’re—to not get too complicated and take too long, if it’s a contaminated area, you can’t do that anyway. Because they’re on a respirator and they’re not allowed to eat and drink. So that’s a big problem. So a lot of times, they have to take breaks and they have to maybe take off the outer layer of their anti-Cs, they have to survey out, then they get to go sit and cool down. Now, a coffee break takes about 45 minutes when you do that. Because they get their clothing off, they get surveyed to make sure they had no contamination, then they get to go sit and drink the water. That’s always kind of hard to say, well, how many cups has this guy had, how many cups have you had? Because you’ve got to have so many ounces in so many hours.
Franklin: Sure.
Beck: But when bottled water came, we eliminated the cost of those jugs and the ice—because it had to be ice that was drinkable. We still kind of gave them drinkable ice, but we got the bottled water, we just put all the bottles in kind of like a big plastic tub with ice in it, let them cool down. Each guy, each individual would go and get six bottles of water and write his name on it or whatever, however many bottles. And we would count the number of bottles he drank and he would, through the safety officer on the Site, he would require that those people bring the bottles to you, and show you that they’ve—you couldn’t stop them from pouring it on the ground the moment you saw them, but if you saw them doing that, they were done working.
Franklin: Right.
Beck: They just were. Because if someone goes down in a contaminated area, if they pass out or they get sick, then you got to have the Hanford Fire Department come in and pick them up. It’s just—it’s a huge issue and there’s lots of risks to that. People get hurt. You want people making good decisions. You don’t want people feeling light-headed and not feeling good. That’s going to happen anyway, maybe, because it’s just so blasted hot. You want to try to get them as good as they can be.
So bottled water, as a safety person, I thought bottled water was one of the coolest things that came around. It really made our job a bit simpler. And I think overall for the safety and health of the people that worked out there, they could have as many as they wanted; we didn’t restrict the bottled water. But, golly, I mean, we absolutely knew for a fact that that guy was really at low risk, or lower risk, for heat exhaustion because he’d had all the water he needed.
Franklin: Right, you were able to measure it, basically.
Beck: Yeah, you could measure it instead of just guessing at it. How much—did he drink the entire cup or did you drink half of it and throw it away? That was kind of important.
Franklin: So you said in ’99, HEHF was shut down. And then you moved to Battelle shortly after that?
Beck: Well, HEHF was shut down, and I had to have a place to go to work. Because my job was going to end. I think what happened there was that most of the contractors thought HEHF was too expensive. I mean, they were each given $2 or $3 million a year for health and safety, I think. What you had to pony up from your contract was proportionate to the employees you had, right? And each time a doc examines somebody and they each got to handle a physical, you know? Say there’s 12,000 or 15,000 employees onsite. I don’t know how many there ever were. I know that Battelle themselves employs around 4,500 workers. But if you have that many employees, and they’re all getting exams, it’s constant money.
They all thought that they could do it different and cheaper. So HEHF, their contract was put up for bid and somebody else won the contract. Then there’s other people that left. They were using their own physicians, putting them on the records. So I’m not sure exactly what happened, but the crux of the matter was they started doing their own industrial hygiene and safety and they were hiring on people.
They actually hired many of the HEHF staffers. We were kind of at a premium because we’d been here a while. We had our clearances already. Security clearance costs—I don’t know, they told me once it used to cost $10 grand for a year. I mean, they have to maintain it. They check on it every year. I had a Q clearance. I don’t know if that’s similar to what the politicians who’ve been in the news recently with the election have. But, you know. They check. They check all the time. So if you have all those things already done and your training’s already done, you don’t have to be trained and receive all the rad training. I mean, you have to have the annual refresher but you don’t have to go for the two-week course. That costs a lot of money, to send people for a two-week training. Then, wow, we get this person and he’s actually been out here and he knows where T Plant is, and he knows where this is? And you might have an idea where things are buried where other people have forgotten, okay?
Give you an example, those tunnels that just collapsed? We knew they were there. For a long time. And I believe that used to be classified. Obviously they’re not because they’re in the news. But we used to walk across them all the time; we knew they were there. How anybody could’ve forgot they were there and let them deteriorate is—but anyway. Another story. So I needed a place to go to work, so I first went to work for Waste Management. Probably of all the contractors, HEHF was the very best at it, and that was the very best job I ever had. I was devastated to see that job go. I really was. Because it was the—when you go to take graduate courses in industrial hygiene, it’s the cat’s meow to have occupational health nurses, and occupational docs and industrial hygienists and safety people all over the gamut, all going in and talking about John Smith who’s got this problem, how do you think he got it? And then going out and sampling for it. Man, that was good. It was just like graduate school, just like—a lot of companies work—well, anyway, that ended. And so I went to work for Waste Management. I think Waste Management was probably the second best company at Hanford I ever worked for.
Franklin: Why was that?
Beck: Management. The manager I had was—he was fabulous. I just can’t say enough about him. He was—his name was Gordon Meaney. He was a great guy. He was a great guy. Then I worked—something happened with the politics. There again, these contracts out at Hanford, they’re all full of intrigue and drama and politics and whatever you want. Follow the money, you know, but. Fluor Hanford wasn’t getting along with Waste Management for some reason. So they swallowed up Waste Management. We didn’t get choices; we were Fluor Hanford employees. I mean, we had a choice: go find another job or work for Fluor Hanford. Because Waste Management was done. Maybe they’ve come back to the Site; I haven’t paid much attention.
Franklin: Do you remember when that was?
Beck: Oh.
Franklin: You got notes?
Beck: Well, I just have some information here. If you’ll pardon me, I can’t remember dates really well.
Franklin: No, that’s totally fine.
Beck: I know the date that I started, I stopped working for—
Franklin: It’s not a crucial thing if you can’t remember it.
Beck: Oh, I can. I worked for Waste Management until November 15th of 1999. November 15th of 1999, I became a Fluor Hanford employee. So, it was in the late ‘90s that they had this little problem with Fluor. I don’t know what it was. I used to kind of think I knew, but the years have gone by, you know? It’s not the most important thing I ever thought about, but it happened. So I only worked for Waste Management for a year. I worked for Fluor Hanford for a year. And then Fluor Hanford was probably the worst job I ever had. I worked for other companies that had worse management but I don’t know when. I mean, I’m not trying to trash them; I’m just saying.
I was matrixed out in the area to six different projects. I read about it this morning before I came, because I sent my letter of resignation, I sent it by email. The human resources specialist that I sent that to wrote me an email back saying, why are you leaving? So I wrote this discourse why I was leaving. I was matrixed to about six projects; I had three different managers I was responsible to. It got so bad, I mean—I want to say this nicely. There were managers that would schedule meetings at the same time, or maybe I’d have a meeting from 1:00 to 2:00 and this guy wanted a meeting from 1:30 to 2:30 or whatever. They would write me nasty letters and put on my evaluation that I didn’t attend meetings. But I had conflicts.
These managers, it’s like the current political administration, if you’ve been noticing what’s been going on in Washington, DC. They were warring against each other. I was absolutely amazed. I said, look, guys. I’m matrixed to all these projects. If you guys want to have a meeting with me, I’m more than willing to attend but I can’t be two places at once. Well, where’s your loyalty? Do you have a loyalty to this plant, this project, or what? What do you mean loyalty? I’m going to lose my job one way or another. After a while, I just said, you know?
So I applied for Battelle. It was a job that was in town. No more driving. I mean, I didn’t really mind the drive out there. But they actually drove me from the Site, the bad management and their attitude. Gosh, a nine-hour day was not enough for them. I had to do ten hours a day, four days a week. When I went to work for Battelle—I retired at Battelle, so. When I worked for Battelle, things changed a bit on my safety and health slant, because I was the first industrial hygienist for the University of Utah. They were in research, laboratory research. Well, Battelle is laboratory research, too. So they hired me for my experience in laboratory research.
Franklin: Mm. So you kind of ended your career where you started.
Beck: I ended my career where I started. Much happier. Battelle had good management for the most part.
Franklin: What types of projects did you support at Battelle?
Beck: I supported—I don’t know how they’re organized now; I haven’t really kept up with it since I left. But Battelle had different directorates. My last directorate where I retired from was NSA, or the national—NSE, excuse me. The National Security Directorate. NSA, the National Security Administration, after 9/11, that’s where they got most of their money. Working there, working for Battelle, you know, I’d heard that most of the money was in NSD. From time to time, everybody at the will of the government goes through budgeting crises at the Site, particularly Battelle. I was energy science and technology directorate. ESTD was the one I first supported. They were more subject to losing money through the budget. So I was working, the day of 9/11, I was working, still supporting ESTD and I was over in PSL when the—actually, I was home when I heard that 9/11 occurred, you know, the planes and everything. I was in PSL when that tower collapsed.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: And I was with a bunch of ESTD people, and they said, man, this is obviously terrorism. We were all talking about it. And they said, wow, now would be the time to change directorates, because I’m never going to get—National Security Directorate’s going to get a lot of bucks. So I changed and went to work for the National Security Directorate and, boy, did we ever get money.
So they do all kinds of research. NSD is almost completely classified. There’s some things that aren’t, but by and large, that’s all I can tell you. Don’t mean to be cloak-and-daggered, but I don’t know what’s—because I would go in to do inspections and some things would be covered with cloths and sheets and I would be told, you can’t see this. My clearance, I had a Q clearance, it wasn’t even high enough.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Beck: So, I mean, there’s some of those things. But the Energy Science and Technology Directorate does research into load handling for the power grid. They’re really famous for that. They’re working on battery technology. When I worked at the University of Utah in the early ‘70s, I actually—I worked as a research specialist until I started working for the Department of Public Safety where I was the industrial hygienist. My boss there was the chief of police for the university police. So before that, I worked for a project that was funded by a government agency called ERDA. Any of you guys heard of ERDA before?
Franklin: Energy Research and—yes.
Beck: Energy—yeah.
Franklin: I know the acronym.
Beck: It was DOE but not on steroids.
Franklin: Right, they were pre-DOE, right? But post-AEC.
Beck: Right. And I was working on a sodium sulfur storage battery. The military was funding it. Ford Motor Company was funding it for electric cars. The military was really interested in having a good storage battery where they could have electric motors in tanks. They could mount tank offensives and stuff without making noise. Like when you fire those big diesels up? Oh, the element of surprise is not there. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: Right. No, it’s very different when a Chevy Volt goes down the street than even a regular car.
Beck: I drive a Prius and I have to be very careful in parking lots because people don’t hear you. Because I’m totally electric when I get rolling. After I back out and I’m just going really slow, I’m on total battery power. And unless I’m making noise going across the asphalt, I can sneak up on people. And they look up and you actually scare them. You know?
Franklin: Yeah, that’s happened to me.
Beck: You have to be really careful. Well, anyway, so, they have five different directorates at Battelle. Battelle used to do research on water going through the dams and the fish. They used lasers to do that research. They have special things that they’ve built to simulate dams and they made special little floats that are smolts that they run through the—and they did these different aeration things and they had these lasers that they can actually see what was happening to these smolts. Because it takes pictures, so many frames a second, with the laser beam. I mean, it’s pretty cool. That sort of stuff’s not classified.
When I worked there, I was the laser safety officer there for about five years. So I inspected all the lasers, made sure as best I could that we were operating them correctly and safely. There was one time in DOE that DOE had eight or ten accidents within a couple years where people had damaged their eyesight, lost their eyesight or were otherwise injured from lasers. So they got a really big deal on laser safety. They actually sent me from Battelle to Stanford. DOE has a lab at Stanford. And they gave us additional laser safety training.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Beck: So they use a lot of lasers at Battelle. They use it at NSD, too. NSD, they use lasers for classified stuff, too. So if you’ve ever wondered how our drones are so accurate. Chk chk. [LAUGHTER] And that’s enough said.
Franklin: No, and they are very accurate. My last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War and cleanup?
Beck: Well, I’d like to go back just a step further. I’d like to go back pre-, say, World War II, say. During World War II and just after. The men that worked here at Hanford were absolute heroes. Because when you look at the history and you look at the exposures—try to document and calculate some of the exposures of these guys. They were every bit as brave, and, man, they were—I mean, B Reactor and some of the things that were done, they didn’t know if some of those things were even going to work. They didn’t know how they were going to work. They knew a little bit about radiation, but they didn’t know the doses they were going to receive. And they didn’t have any way to measure it like we do now. So I’d like people to remember that, boy, those veterans that worked and made the plutonium—whatever you consider about the atomic bomb, the two that were dropped—the people at Hanford that made the plutonium for the second bomb, they were heroes. Those guys really gave.
And after that, during the Cold War, there was more of that. You know, McCluskey was hurt in ’69 and there was a lot of injuries and a lot of exposures. We’ve got beryllium exposure, sensitization of beryllium from machining triggers and from the rods that went into the reactors that got beryllium on them in some places. And there’s all kinds of other illnesses that these guys have gotten, right? That they got protecting our country and they got by ending, by winning the Cold War, essentially. I’m a member of Cold War Patriots, and I think they’re right on. Wasn’t so much my generation, but the people that worked back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s, those are the people that really won the Cold War, in my opinion. And when the wall came down, when the Soviets—that wall came down, that was—I have no doubt that was a direct result, at least in partial of what was done here at Hanford and at Oak Ridge and at Lawrence Livermore and all the DOE labs. There’s 12 of them.
You know, there’s more research, I think, done in most of the DOE labs than the rest of the universities put together, realistically. Most of those, most of these DOE sites are associated with major universities. It’s quite phenomenal what the Department of Energy and these labs and the Hanford Site and other places have done. I mean, yeah, there’s contamination and there are things that happen. But, man, there was a lot of stuff that was done that needed to be done and was done.
I’m just—it’s kind of cool to be associated with it, actually. And it wasn’t a big deal, actually, from ’89 to when I retired in 2010 or 2011, it’s not a—we did a little. But it was those people before ’89 that were really, really—I think every time I go somewhere and I tell people about Hanford—where’s Hanford? What did you guys do? I’m on an airplane or I’m telling a relative. All my relatives in Denver think, you know, hey, you glow in the dark. Well, you talk with them about it and most of those people—the only thing they have, the only conception they have is how inhumane the atomic bomb was. I’ll give you, it’s a wicked weapon, but—they probably shouldn’t have killed—I don’t know. But those guys did what they were told. They did the very best they could, and there were some great, brilliant people that did this.
There’s brilliant people working on these DOE sites today. They certainly get marginalized by the people in Washington, DC that don’t even know what’s going on. I’ll get a little political here, and I’ll tell you that I read an article recently that when the current administration came in, the guy who’s the head of the Department of Energy, they went out in Washington, DC, the head office of the DOE, they reserved all these parking places, and they got everybody ready to give these people that they thought from this administration would come to get all kinds of information, to get information on what do you guys do? Because the previous administration had done it, the administration before that had done it, the administration before that had done it. [WHISPERING] Nobody even showed up. [FULL VOICE] So the camera can hear me, nobody even showed up! It’s disgraceful. I’m sorry? [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: No, no, that’s okay.
Beck: I just say, you guys don’t even—you’re voting on a budget, you want to cut DOE’s budget. You don’t even know what the labs do! I mean, if you’ve got an opinion, that’s okay. But be informed. They didn’t even show up; it was like, well, we know exactly what you guys do and it’s nothing and it can be done away with. It’s just crazy.
I think the future is in these small nuclear reactors, these pod reactors. I do not think solar and wind is going to replace coal-fired power plants. If we’re really going to have an energy renaissance, if we’re really going to get on a good energy program, we’re going to have to get on nuclear energy. It’s the only option. There are some people that will have some cold showers and they’re going to figure that out. I really believe that.
So I think DOE, well, DOE labs, these labs that they have, the 12 of them are the ones that are going to make that happen and happen really well. And I think it can be done safely. I don’t know why people are ignoring the Department of Energy, it just—it baffles me. But, see, I’m one of the outspoken people that believes in nuclear energy and everybody else, I mean—I get people that just—[LAUGHTER] They’d like to beat me up, frankly. So, any other questions?
Franklin: No, thank you so much, Ed. You know, I did have one other question and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask—what did your wife do the whole time that you guys were here and that you were working out on Site?
Beck: Hmm. Well. She raised the family. Did a great job. This is our 44th year of marriage. We’ll be married 44 years August the 18th. I’ll tell you one funny thing about coming here. When I got the job, and I said, you know, this is a really good job. The reason it was, I got a 50% salary increase when I came here.
Franklin: That’s pretty significant.
Beck: That’s from working at the University of Utah. It’s a little bit, deals with the risks that were here, but they also paid very well. So I said I think we ought to go. So we sold our house and everything. Well, we came for the house hunting trip. We had—[LAUGHTER]—so I get the family in the van, and I drive them from Salt Lake City. And we come down over Cabbage Hill, Cabbage Mountain which is by Pendleton. Wow, this is beautiful! This is just beautiful! We go out through the wheat fields, you know? I-84. Wow, this is nice, this is nice. Then I turn on 82. We go across the Columbia River. Oooh, this is good! Look at that dam! Look at the water! Then we come up to Kennewick, and she says, where are the trees? She says, where are you moving us? She says, there’s nothing green! And I said, well, when they flew me for the interview, I says, it’s green from the air. I says, they’ve got lots of corn fields and stuff.
And then I—I didn’t know much about the place, so the house hunting trip, I rented—I stayed at the Motel 6 in Pasco. You’re on fixed income, they give you so much money for a house hunting trip. I shouldn’t have done that, but I thought, Motel 6, usually they’re pretty good. Not a really good area, and we got in the van, and the sun came up the next morning going to get breakfast in the hotel and she says, gee, I hope there’s a better part of town. So we ended up over by the mall. We bought—we’re living in the same house that we lived in, we bought that house in ’89, we’re still there.
She raised our three kids, they went through high school here, they went through college. One went to WSU, one went to UW, and the other one was an National Merit scholarship winner and he got his choice of where he wanted to go, so he went to Arizona State. Then he got his PhD from University of California San Diego.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: So. We had two transplants in that time because of our daughter having e. coli, she lost the use of her—she had destroyed her kidneys, and that’s another long story. But I donated a kidney in ’90 and then my wife donated one in 2003. So that’s basically what she did. She did home hemodialysis for six years after my daughter rejected my kidney. Until she was in good enough health that we could do the transplant, give her a kidney.
That’s what I was going to tell you about health insurance. It was—this is an off—you know, I don’t know if you want to stop the camera, but this is, I think is kind of important for the where we came from and where we are now. I was at the University of Utah and I chose this program for insurance called the Preferred Provider Program. I mean, it started, it was new, they were starting all kinds of things back in the ‘80s. This is in ’81. So FHP had just come on. FHP I think is still in California. But for a while, FHP was our insurer, then I chose this Preferred Provider Program. And I thought, well, in the state of Washington there was no—you could not exclude previous illnesses. What do they call that now?
Tom Hungate: Pre-existing.
Franklin: Pre-existing condition.
Beck: Pre-existing conditions. The law in Washington with all the insurance was no such thing as a pre-existing condition. And they paid well. Well, at the University of Utah, I was on a preferred provider program. When my daughter got sick, she spent 90 days in hospital, 30 in intensive care. The doctor that took care of her was from the medical school there. He was a specialist. He was a nephrologist. Because she started losing—hemolytic uremic syndrome can destroy your kidneys, and it did destroy hers. I was deeply in debt to that man, because he wasn’t one of the preferred providers on that program, and I didn’t know it. He was the only game in town. He was the only guy that could take care of her. He was on faculty at the University of Utah and he was insured through the same—he felt so bad. He says, I do not believe what’s happened. This is back in ’85—well, actually, ’87. He says, I don’t believe this could be happening in our country. How could this be? He says, you owe me this much. Because the insurance company wouldn’t pay because he had to sign up on the dotted line, you know? So he wrote off that entire amount of money I owed him, which was lots.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: And so—and I had a lot of other expenses, too. I almost declared bankruptcy. So then this job—I started looking for another job because I had to pay off the bills. And we came to Washington State. One of the reasons I came here—I was interested in working at Hanford and I had a lot of experience to give them, but also they pay high salaries and there was no pre-existing conditions on their health insurance. And to move anywhere else would’ve been suicide, economic suicide. There was a time everybody was telling me, well, you ought to divorce your wife and if you do that she’ll be able to get medical assistance from the state. They were telling me to do that. I said, no, I’m not going to do that! But that was—there were a lot of people that were thinking and probably did do that to solve the—and then they’d just live with their wife, anyway. They were divorced, but—
Franklin: Sure, to get—to be legally single.
Beck: Anyway. That’s another—I think that’s kind of important. So, when my daughter lost her kidneys, use of her kidneys, we’d been living here for about ten years, she had about 10% left. We were told when we went over to children’s hospital for a physical that she had to have a transplant. So then I donated and I was working at HEHF at the time. So I donated, and since it was my daughter, the medical insurance covered her because it was a pre-existing condition and it paid for my hospital stay and my removal of my kidney, you know, and all of that. It was just so much better system.
And then she rejected mine, and so she was on dialysis for six years and she was such a young age, she was in grade school at the time, that my wife wanted her to have a really normal, as normal a childhood as possible, and not have to go to a dialysis center with adults where the prognosis is not that good, and most of them are—you know, this is a little girl, she’s just seven or eight. So she went to Children’s Hospital and learned how to do dialysis herself. They trained her at Children’s to do dialysis on our daughter.
We installed a dialysis machine in our basement. I got a water softener, I can put out a stream of water like that, still. You don’t need one like that, but I went over to Pasco to their dialysis center and I asked the engineer there, I said, what kind of water softener did you use? Because they said, you’re going to have to have a really big softener to do this, because it’s a lot of water. I paid the big bucks, we got it put in the basement and my wife dialyzed her four times a week for six years.
Franklin: Wow.
Beck: And that’s pumping blood through a filter. It’s not just pumping water. They have a type of dialysis where you can fill up a sack inside, but we actually did it, blood dialysis. That’s what she did when she was here. She couldn’t work.
Franklin: Sure, no, that makes sense.
Beck: But that was a good thing because Hanford paid so well. And I’ve never been in debt since.
Franklin: Wow, that’s great.
Beck: So, I don’t know, I’m pretty emotionally attached to this part of the country.
Franklin: No, there’s a lot of good reasons for that. Well, Ed, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview with us today.
Beck: You’re welcome.
Franklin: Okay.
View interview on Youtube.
Hanford Sites
N Reactor
222-S Laboratory
200 Area
200 West
T Plant
Tank Farms
B Reactor
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Files
