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United States
Jun 14, 2023 No one ever thought the site at Hanford would cause harm to "patriotic American citizens." Construction began on the facility, known as the Hanford site, eighty years ago, in 1943, and involved the building of the world's first large-scale nuclear reactor. Through the Manhattan Project, a U.S. government research and development program for building nuclear weapons, the site's B reactor, erected on a 580-square-mile stretch of land next to the Columbia River in south-central Washington, produced the nuclear material for one of the only two atomic bombs ever used in an armed conflict. Codenamed "Fat Man," the device was detonated over the city of Nagasaki in southwestern Japan on Aug. 9, 1945. The 6.2 kilograms of plutonium contained in the nuclear device released energy equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, taking the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people while subjecting the surrounding area to deadly radiation that killed countless more. But citizens of Nagasaki may not be the only victims of Hanford's plutonium production. Bailie, 76, grew up and still resides just miles downwind from Hanford in a farming community. In 1985, Bailie began to have doubts. Nearly all the families living nearby suffered from cancer, birth defects, or thyroid disease, he says - health issues that could be attributed to radiation exposure. Bailie said that his wife, father, and three uncles all had cancer before passing away, while his two sisters also have cancer and take thyroid medicine. The year before Bailie was born, his mother had a stillbirth. Bailie himself was born with birth defects and was on an iron lung when he was 4 years old. He now requires medication for a thyroid problem. Bailie vividly remembers encounters with "men in space suits," equipped with dosimeters to measure radiation levels, walking on his farm. The men would collect soil samples and even ask the farmers to send the heads and feet of ducks and rabbits they would kill while hunting to Hanford for analysis. Documents that were declassified in the late 1980s showed that Hanford had contaminated the surrounding farmland, air, farm animals, and crops with unsafe levels of radiation for years. One such document shows that in December 1949, in an experiment called "Green Run," Hanford scientists knowingly released thousands of curies of dangerous radioactive Iodine-131 from the site to track its course and better understand how it dispersed. Before being decommissioned in 1989, Hanford produced around 74 tons of plutonium - nearly two-thirds of all the plutonium produced for government purposes in the United States. One of the consequences of the site's work was massive amounts of contamination and dangerous leftover byproducts, most of which remain on the site today. Currently, 177 underground tanks containing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste, contaminated buildings, and cocooned reactors still exist there, alongside multiple other buried waste sites. The same year Hanford was decommissioned, cleanup efforts began to deal with the dangerous byproducts left over from the production of plutonium. According to Hanford's latest estimate, released in 2022, the total cost of the cleanup is projected to range from $319.6 billion to $660 billion, with a completion date not expected until at least fiscal 2078. A recent survey of the workers by Washington state revealed more than 50% of them had been exposed to radioactive or toxic chemicals. Workers exposed to these dangerous materials and vapors have developed beryllium disease, cancers, organ damage, and occupational dementia. Until recently, these workers had to prove that their health issues were directly caused by their work at the Hanford site to receive assistance with their medical expenses. Proving this was extremely difficult, costly, time-consuming, and often fruitless, as most occupational illness claims were rejected. But a recent law has changed this, presuming that any health effects suffered by workers who spend just eight hours working at Hanford are caused by working at the facility, making it easier for sick workers to get their treatment paid for. Even with the documents, some living downwind who joined the class action suit against the site were unable to explicitly prove their medical problems were caused by the contamination from the Hanford site. Bailie said "the government should be ashamed of itself" for what it did to its citizens, and that he thinks,at the very least, the government should cover the medical expenses of those who lived downwind. (JapanTimes)
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