1 50 146 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F3c413411ea8d1c48e6e84bda42239282.mp3 2575bc7fa8010f8e69011bf4d7f8bb42 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4e1534c3267da10f21862c5e0b5e4285.pdf e2f6bd92000c64ce2cddf98f29040189 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mike Lawrence Location The location of the interview Richland, WA Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio/mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:28:38 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 192kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor, Basalt Waste Isolation Project (BWIP), Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Mike Lawrence Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Discusses Hanford's N Reactor, addresses its unique dual mission as both a production and power reactor, the significance of safety upgrades post-Chernobyl, and the importance of openness and stakeholder engagement. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Department of Energy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project for the Department of Energy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03/28/1996 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HASI.2001.025.1 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford History Project (HHP) operates under a sub-contract from Hanford Mission Integration Services (HMIS), who are a primary contract for the US Deparment of Energy's curatorial services for the Hanford Site. HHP proudly manages the Department of Energy's Hanford Collection, an artifact and archival collection that documents the Manhattan Project and Cold War history of the Hanford Site (1943-1990). https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0201c6a419701df4fe3ce6f136ca930e.mp3 fe664c5a4c01b98dbd5ad12fe2691c30 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F60ce3df185bf624b038774b97fe7937a.pdf ba5aa898ad477f5d5e9e685af3e27db4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Gwen Lith Location The location of the interview Hanford Site (Wash.) Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data audio/mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:48:54 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 192kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor, CREHST, Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource N Reactor Opening Day Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource The document covers the opening ceremony and reflections on Hanford’s N Reactor, highlighting its historic significance, technological innovation, and its roles in both national defense and civilian power production. Speakers discuss the importance of documenting and learning from Hanford’s legacy, to include President Kennedy’s original speech, and the ongoing community efforts to preserve and share this history through the CREHST exhibit. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Department of Energy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project for the Department of Energy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03/30/1996 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HASI.2001.025.2 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford History Project (HHP) operates under a sub-contract from Hanford Mission Integration Services (HMIS), who are a primary contract for the US Deparment of Energy's curatorial services for the Hanford Site. HHP proudly manages the Department of Energy's Hanford Collection, an artifact and archival collection that documents the Manhattan Project and Cold War history of the Hanford Site (1943-1990). https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fda60a4b23b135f9cec4ca3f9d2911450.MP3 46de42bb16d7d0fde509dae03f25ad16 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb8a77edfaf1c861bd50b6868dd98dd47.pdf 0dff133268801608f23d7836f0df93ff Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John Lucas Location The location of the interview Richland, WA Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:41:32 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 192 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor, 300 Area, 117 Building, 105 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Lucas Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource The interview with Jonathan Lucas details his work at Hanford’s N Reactor, describing duties ranging from fuel handling and reactor operations to writing new safety procedures after Chernobyl. He reflects on shift work, increased security in the 1980s, and strong camaraderie among staff, as well as the impact of the reactor’s eventual shutdown Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Department of Energy Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford History Project for the Department of Energy Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/4/1996 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context HASI.2001.025.3 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford History Project (HHP) operates under a sub-contract from Hanford Mission Integration Services (HMIS), who are a primary contract for the US Deparment of Energy's curatorial services for the Hanford Site. HHP proudly manages the Department of Energy's Hanford Collection, an artifact and archival collection that documents the Manhattan Project and Cold War history of the Hanford Site (1943-1990). https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffe9a50c1a35bab2152ff15c70337877a.docx 7fae046e4f5288229ccf98b57dc5da3f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F549de1a1ba468072a9400e9179f229a8.JPG b10024e6e3b4b98104d826d85c756ada Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Heineman Location The location of the interview Richland, WA Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Robert Heineman on July 6, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Robert about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bob Heineman: My name is Robert Heineman. H-E-I-N-E-M-A-N. Franklin: And Robert’s spelled just like “Robert”? Heineman: Robert. Franklin: R-O-B-E-R-T? Heineman: Just like yours, yup. Franklin: Okay. But you prefer to be called Bob? Heineman: Yeah, sure. Franklin: Okay, so we’ll use Bob for the rest of the interview, then. Heineman: Okay. Franklin: If that’s okay with you. Okay. So, Bob, tell me how and why you came to the area. 00:00:47 Heineman: Well, I went to school at Washington State University and majored in police science because I took one of those classes as a general university requirement, and I was fascinated that policemen would actually go to school. So I went through and I got done. I was married very early and had a baby, so I had nothing else to do but schoolwork and take care of the baby while my wife worked. So I graduated when I was 20. And I really wanted to be a police officer or a sheriff’s deputy. But graduating at 20, I was too young to go to work. So I stayed in school and got my master’s degree, and then graduated. Franklin: And what did you get your master’s degree in? Heineman: In police science and administration. Franklin: Wow. 0:01:40 Heineman: And then I came back to the Tri-Cities, because I had nothing left except the end of my thesis and I could do that here at WSU Tri-Cities. My mother got an office looking out over the river where I could work on my thesis. So that’s how I got back to Richland. Franklin: And that’s when it was the Joint Center for Graduate Education, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Or as they would call it, the GE College of Nuclear Knowledge. Heineman: Yup, exactly. But-- Franklin: But you had—sorry. So you had pre-existing connection to the Tri-Cities before you came back after going to WSU? 0:02:21 Heineman: I did. We moved here—my father moved here to work at the Site when I was about three or four years old. Franklin: Do you remember what year that was? Heineman: That would’ve been 1954 or 1955. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: So we lived in a government house on the west side of Richland over on Cedar Street and then moved over—when they sold the houses, we moved over to a house actually on the river, which was great for a little kid, when I was in third grade. And my mother was going back to school to get her master’s degree in librarianship. And she was working at the library in the 300 Area at Hanford. And my father had come here to apply his physics degree from the University of Michigan. Most of the plutonium production work was pretty well staffed at that time, because it was after the war was over. So he decided he wanted to go into breeder reactor research. So he was instrumental in designing some of the cores for the early breeder reactors, and was the project manager for the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, the PRTR, and was always very proud of having participated in the design of the core and then managed the design and construction of the overall reactor in early operations. And then when he was finished with that, he moved over to FFTF and worked there for years for GE, and then transferred over to Battelle when Battelle took over that part of the work. And so he spent the rest of his career either in breeder reactor research or safety analysis for the breeder reactor research. 0:04:37 So I have a whole generation before me that was Hanford before me. It was really just kind of happenstance that I came back, because I wasn’t old enough to go to work as a police officer. So while I was finishing up my master’s degree and applying to various places, a job came open on Hanford Patrol. I was living with my father-in-law and he handed me the advertisement and said, gee, maybe it’s time you got your own house and moved, you know, go to work, son. [LAUGHTER] So I did that. 0:05:21 Franklin: Wow. So just to back up a little bit—and thank you for talking about your father. That’s a really interesting career trajectory of breeder reactor research. Your mother, though, she also worked onsite, correct? Heineman: She did. She worked in the 300 Area library, which was the technical library for the whole Hanford Site. And then after she went back to school, she came back to the library, and the decision was made by, at that time, I think it was the AEC and Washington State University, actually in cooperation with the University of Washington and I think maybe Oregon State? Franklin: Yup, yup. That’s all correct. Heineman: To develop a joint center for graduate study. One of the things they wanted to do was to build a big, new library. They would take the reading room from the Hanford Site, the public reading room, and take over that function for the Department of Energy, then AEC. And so they asked her if she would be willing to be the interface on the design and construction of the library that turned out to be the library here at WSU Tri-Cities. Franklin: Wow, okay. 0:06:48 Heineman: So she said, sure, I’d be happy to do that. So she was the primary contact. Then when they got ready to open the library, they asked her if she would run the library. So she did that until she retired. And got to help with the design of the new WSU Tri-Cities library, and was really proud of that. She worked for Brian Vollett at the time. She put everything she always wanted in a library into the design, and they gave everything that she wanted to her. So she worked there until she retired. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Our offices were in that library for kind of the first year-and-a-half we were here, and I’ve always really enjoyed spending time in there. So that’s really interesting to know. Heineman: Well, she really, she really loved helping the students. I mean, when you would sit down and talk to her about her day, all she would talk about was who came in to see her, what they needed for research, how she could help them. She really enjoyed it. 0:08:01 Franklin: That’s great. Heineman: Yeah, it was cool. Franklin: We need more library—well, we have lots of great librarians. But that’s a great quality in a librarian. Okay. So, to go forward again, you heard about this job as a Hanford patrolman. Heineman: I did. Franklin: Okay, and so you applied. 0:08:19 Heineman: I did, and I got the job. When they took me around to interview with people, they didn’t have anybody actually on Hanford Patrol that had a degree at all, much less a master’s degree. So they were all very excited that they had somebody that was the new model for what they could do for security at Hanford. So that was pretty invigorating for me. Franklin: Did you feel a lot of pressure, though? Because I imagine you’d be going in, there’s a lot of guys who had a lot of years of experience, and kind of, you’re this young guy with a master’s degree in police science. Did you feel any pressure or anything? Or out of place? Heineman: I was actually a little bit. But more I was just fascinated by the whole thing, because most of the people that worked at Hanford and almost all of the people in security or patrol had started during the war. Franklin: Oh, wow. Heineman: So they were 50 to 65 years old. And there weren’t any young people anywhere. In all the interviews I went to, they were all 60-plus and had all this experience and they were so expert at what they did, you know? That part was sort of awe-inspiring. But I didn’t really feel uncomfortable; I was just sort of awestruck by the whole situation and the people. And they offered me a job, and I went to work. So that was pretty cool. Franklin: That is cool. I bet you heard lots of great patrol stories. Heineman: Oh, yeah. Franklin: From the war. 0:12:13 Heineman: More than I could ever tell, yeah. Yeah. I think the folks who worked here during the war and in the post-war years up to when I went to work in the early ‘70s had been through an awful lot of things. The folks in security were—people were a little nervous about them, but at the same time they were pretty much revered because of the effort to keep everything secret during the production years. There were a lot of people that had security clearances at a pretty high level, but the security people, of course, most of them, had access to almost all of the information associated with production of plutonium. So I think people were a little bit standoffish from the security and the patrol folks, but at the same time, there was a lot of respect for what they did. It was a much different world than it is today in that way. Franklin: Interesting. Did you start out as a patrolman? Heineman: I did. Franklin: So how did that—was it like what you had expected, going through school and learning all—going all the way through your masters in police science? Heineman: Not a bit. Franklin: Not a bit? Heineman: Not a bit. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe that discrepancy there. 0:11:46 Heineman: So I had always wanted to be a police officer. And honestly, I really wanted to be a King County sheriff’s deputy. In that role, then, your primary role is law enforcement. So most of the education that I had dealt with the basics of law enforcement, investigative techniques, crime scene investigation and all those kinds of things. We didn’t do hardly any of that here. Our primary job here—we had some law enforcement functions because we were deputized Benton County sheriffs, and I believe they still are. But if we had what I would call pure law enforcement functions to be taken care of, we would call Benton County, and they would send deputies out to perform those functions. We did investigate thefts; we investigated areas where there might have been violations of the law regarding classified information and the control of it; we did basic traffic enforcement and those kinds of things. But anything beyond that, we would call Benton County to take care of it. Our function was to keep the Site safe and secure. And in that sense, it was completely different than anything I had ever expected to do. 0:13:22 When I came to work, there were only two other young people on Hanford Patrol, and there were only about a hundred Hanford patrolmen anyway. The other two young people had come in six months before me. Everybody else had been hired during the war or shortly after. During the layoffs in the late ‘60s, they got laid off, many of them. And then when they needed to staff up again, they rehired those same people. So everybody was 58 to 65 when I came to work. Boy, they had a lot of—as you said, a lot of stories, and they had a lot to teach me. But it was mostly about what’s going on on the Site, what are we trying to do, what are we trying to protect, and how do we do that? And then if things went wrong, our job was to go get involved and resolve that. Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you stay as a patrolman? Heineman: Three months. [LAUGHTER] 0:14:38 Heineman: Yup, in three months, I went through basic training all by myself, because, as I said, there weren’t any other new people. So I had three instructors and I spent about six weeks going through basic training. All our classroom instruction, all our firearms instruction, all of that was three-on-one. It was a marvelous opportunity for me. And then I graduated from their basic training after six or eight weeks, and then got assigned to go work with patrol crews in all the different areas at Hanford so that I could get an understanding of what was going on. First in the 100 Areas where the reactors were and where they were producing plutonium and how all of that happened. And then in the 200 Areas where they separated the fuel into plutonium and uranium and waste. And then finally, when I was ready to work all by myself, then they put me in the 300 Area, and I split my time between 300 Area and FFTF, which was under construction at the time. So we had this big construction site security challenge that we had to fulfill. 0:16:12 Then after three months, they called me up and said—the context is that in 1972, the year before I went to work, there was a very significant terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. By ’73 or early ’74, they had realized that those same terrorists might be interested in diverting plutonium. And it created a huge concern for the government and so they began to expand their security capabilities. One of the things that the company I worked for, Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company, needed to do was to add a couple of professional security people. In those days, they called us security agents. And they had just lost somebody, and so they needed a new security representative that would be responsible for education and enforcement of all the rules related to classified information and plutonium production and control. They asked me if I wanted to go do that. So I said, yes. 0:17:43 Then shortly after I got hired as a security agent, the other person that was working as a security representative retired. My boss was about 64, and sort of struggling with costs, budgets, some of the more basic business aspects of doing work here. So a year-and-a-half after that, they decided that they needed a new security manager. So then all of the sudden, out of the blue, I was the security manager for Atlantic Richfield. And it just sort of, it was like January of ’75, I guess. And I was just barely out of school. I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. I went out and I interviewed with the guy that I would work for, and I said, I don’t know if I’m ready for this or not. He said, oh, you can do that. Franklin: Wow. That is quite a— Heineman: Bing, bang, bang. Franklin: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] 0:19:00 Franklin: That’s a really interesting tie into—I never would’ve put the ’72 Munich Olympic terrorist, that PLO offshoot, into increased security at Hanford. I mean, I can understand their desire to want to probably obtain plutonium for probably a dirty bomb, because they probably wouldn’t have the capability to make their own weapon. But that’s a really fascinating tie-in to the Cold War. To kind of these world events. Heineman: Right. Well, the Munich Olympics event had an effect worldwide on people’s view of what the bad guys were willing to do with their automatic weapons and their willingness to kill people. Those folks, those terrorists, they were willing to die. That was foreign to the country at that time. We weren’t used to people being willing to die for their cause. It had a profound effect on the nuclear industry, and especially the plutonium and uranium production capabilities in the United States. It lasted for—as we talk a little more, you’ll see that it lasted for another 20 years and drove the expenditure of billions of dollars in security upgrades across the AEC, then ERDA, and then DOE production complex. I was lucky enough to come in at the head end of that. So I was right in the middle of the whole thing, and it was really fascinating. Franklin: Wow. So how long did you stay as—so—well, I don’t want to ask how long. What was your primary job as security manager? Obviously, you took the job, you got the job, right, was promoted to security manager at Atlantic Richfield Hanford. 0:21:00 Heineman: So, my primary goal, I would say, was to work with the production managers and the research managers and the folks that were involved in the 200 Areas where we were taking the spent fuel from the production reactors and converting it into plutonium and uranium. My primary objective in those days was to try to help them understand the risk of what at the time seemed to be a pretty outlandish threat, and convince them that there were controls that needed to be put into place on the people, the production processes and the information in order to assure that Hanford was the last place that those terrorists would want to go at the United States production complex. If they wanted to go attack the production complex and divert plutonium or uranium or obtain classified information, my job was to work with all these production and information control managers and convince them that we wanted to look like the very last place those terrorists would go if they decided to try and get some information or material. Franklin: So you— Heineman: And— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Heineman: And it was not an easy task. They didn’t understand; they didn’t really believe that it was real. They didn’t fight me, but I spent the bulk of my time in their offices with their staff talking about the history, talking about the risks, showing them how easy diversion might have been in the old days before we put in all of the security upgrades that we did. And then trying to convince them that it was appropriate to take a big chunk of the money they had to produce plutonium and spend it on security. Franklin: That’s interesting. Interesting for several reasons. So you basically had to kind of bring this threat home to them, to make it real for them, whereas they might have thought you were maybe making a mountain out of a molehill. You know, oh, this happened so far away. Heineman: That’s exactly what it felt like. Franklin: It’d never come here, and kind of blinders on. But the money to increase these security upgrades and security systems came out of their—like they had to spend the money out of their budgets? Heineman: Sure. Franklin: Is that where some of the resistance came from? 0:24:10 Heineman: Hanford would get a set amount of money every year. And the whole funding situation, even in those days, was very complex. But the bottom line is, Hanford was only going to get so much money. Their primary job was to produce plutonium. I mean, that was the goal. It was like—like, General Motors: the goal is, how many cars can you put off the other end of the line? And anything you do other than building cars takes away from how many cars you can produce. Since Hanford, its primary mission was to produce plutonium, it produced 80%, plus or minus, of the nation’s plutonium stockpile. Anything that they couldn’t spend on plutonium production seemed like a diversion from their primary mission. It really was so new, actually, to the whole world that people were willing to die for their cause, it was very difficult. Very difficult. But I was a young guy; I had a lot of energy, a lot of emotion. I was awed by these folks and very respectful. And I think that helped me a lot, over the security folks that worked for some of the other contractors that were older. So I just put in as much time as I had to to work with them and help them understand. And help me understand what the challenges were going to be from their side. If we started putting additional controls in place, how was that going to affect their ability to produce plutonium and spend as much money as they could on that primary mission? Franklin: So, really—it does seem so simple that this would be a concern to us today, but really this was kind of the—you were working in the kind of formation of this idea of how international terrorism could—the idea that terrorists in one place could affect people internationally and that they would use a global supply chain in order to cause havoc or to get material to attack civilians indiscriminately. That’s really—I mean, it sounds so, I guess, maybe 40 years later, we’re much more inured to that kind of thinking, or we see that so much on the news. Heineman: Sure, if you remember, and maybe you can’t, but in those days, when you went to get on the airplane, you showed them your ticket. That’s all there was. Franklin: I do! Heineman: Right? Franklin: It’s been a while, it’s getting further and further, but— Heineman: There was just none of today’s mentality that there need to be some basic controls in place to protect everybody. 0:27:23 Franklin: I’m wondering if you can give me an example of a control that was instituted that affected the way in which people produce plutonium, or one of the controls that you instituted in the process to keep materials safer? 0:27:39 Heineman: Sure. There’s lots of examples. I mean, in later years, I had the opportunity to manage projects that put an awful lot of hardware in place to do that. In the days when I went to work, between the city of Richland and the plutonium storage vault, there was the barricade, the Wye or Yakima Barricade that was no fences on either side; it was only controlling cars. There was a hog wire fence around each area with a gate and a badge house. But it doesn’t take very much to go through a hog wire fence. There was another hog wire fence around the separations plants or the Plutonium Finishing Plant. And inside that, nothing. The doors weren’t even locked. In the summer, at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had 47 exterior doors, two-thirds of those doors on both levels were wide open at night because it was so hot and they couldn’t air condition it. So that’s all there was in security. So over the next 15 years, we put an awful lot of hardware in place. We spent, honestly, billions of dollars to design and procure and construct barriers and detection technology, to hire additional guards, to set up special tactical weapons teams. We procured boats and canines and helicopters. We bought some of the best weaponry available anywhere in the country. We put controls over the production statistics so that if there was any indication that we didn’t have the amount of plutonium at the end of the process that we predicted at the beginning, that we could stop and go figure out why. Franklin: Did that also extend to the publication of the amount produced? Heineman: Yes. That has always been classified. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Heineman: And was classified all the way up to the end of production. Franklin: Okay, okay. 0:30:50 Heineman: There is a lot of production data on—open source data out on the internet. But even today, my ability to talk about how much we produced or how much we could produce from a given amount of fuel is limited by the regulations on classified information. I cannot share that. But there is a lot of information in the open literature out there now about that. But in those days, that information didn’t exist, and it wasn’t tolerated. If we saw little bits of data beginning to appear somewhere, our job was to go figure out where did it come from. Was it accidental, or was somebody actually sharing that data, and what did we need to do about that. So we had a lot of control over production data, over production processes, classified information, the hardware side of security. I think at one point when I was safeguards and security director, we had something over 450 Hanford patrolmen. And that compares with about 80 to 100 when I went to work. So we really went through a huge hiring spree. And our physical standards for those folks and the training that we provided for those folks, the equipment we supplied to them, was by 1980 or ’85 was just orders of magnitude improved over when I went to work. Franklin: Wow. Hanford was also a pretty early adopter of CCTV and computer alarms, correct? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Was that part of—were you responsible for those upgrades as well? 0:33:02 Heineman: Yeah, after about a year-and-a-half as security manager, the contract changed for the production areas on the Site. Atlantic Richfield decided they didn’t want to be in the war business anymore. They didn’t want to be associated with plutonium; they wanted to focus on oil and chemical. And the contract was secured by Rockwell, which had operated the Rocky Flats site for a number of years in Colorado. When Rockwell came in, they asked me if—we were right in the middle of the recognition that we needed to do big things, and we were going to have to go spend a lot of money on upgrades. They asked me if I would be what, in their terms, was the safeguards project manager. And so I worked for two different people: I worked for the safeguards and security director, and I worked for the chemical processing director that had all of the reprocessing plants and the Plutonium Finishing Plant. He was the one that truly controlled the resources. So on one side I worked for the guy that was responsible for the technical aspects of security, and on the other side I worked for the guy that had the resources and the plants that we were trying to protect. It worked very well. It was a marvelous experience to work for both of them. And gave me quite an opportunity to interface with the plant managers in a very different way than I ever had when I was purely security. Franklin: Did you find it was easier to rationalize the upgrades and the expenditures at that point to security? Heineman: I think so, maybe partly because of the organizational set up. But partly, too, because a couple of years had gone by and there were other things happening in the world. The plant managers and their staff were reading about that in the paper; they were beginning to understand. So the job got a lot easier then. I think, the other thing that really helped was that the field office manager for the Richland operations office had this philosophy that he wanted to be—he wanted Hanford viewed as the hardest place to go to if anybody wanted to steal plutonium or classified information. And he worked very hard with headquarters—I think we’d just transitioned from the AEC to the Energy Research and Development Administration, ERDA. And he worked very hard with the folks back at headquarters to convince them to go talk to Congress and set up a discreet funding process for the security upgrades that was outside the production budget. Franklin: Ah. Heineman: So all of a sudden, I had access to tons of money. [LAUGHTER]—that I didn’t have to talk from the plant managers’ budgets. Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah. Heineman: And over the seven, actually, eight or nine years that I did the project manager job and the safeguards and security director’s job, we probably spent somewhere between one and two billion dollars, independent of the production budget to go design and construct and operate all those physical systems. Franklin: Such as? 0:37:30 Heineman: Well, the standard protection for a vital area in the Department of Energy today would be several layers of security outside that vital area, but then a double-perimeter fence with a goodly distance in between, with barriers on top of the fences to slow people down, alarm systems between those fences. Closed-circuit television cameras observing the whole area and activating immediately if you had an alarm so you could see instantaneously what was there, with a central alarm facility that was watching all of that. A space between the inner fence and the facility itself that was protected. This superior patrol force with the best of the best assigned to the plutonium facilities. Alarms around the entire exterior of the production plant. Alarms throughout the inside of the production plant that detect motion or heat or vibration or a variety of other things. Patrolmen on the inside of the plant looking out to keep people away if there is an attack, not respond too late to get them. And then a similar set that everything I just described, around the perimeter of the actual production area and the actual storage area. So you had eight to ten different layers of barriers, alarms, surveillance capability and response capability before anybody could ever even get to the door into wherever the plutonium was. And that’s a lot of money. [LAUGHTER] It’s a lot of money. And quite a bit of the funding that we had went into hiring, training, equipping and retraining our patrol force so that we had the best of the best available to respond if we did have a problem. Because it does you no good at all to know the bad guys are there if you can’t resolve that situation in your favor. Franklin: Yeah. Did the training of Hanford Patrol change—how did it change from when you had signed on in ’73 to what you’re describing now when Rockwell took over? You mentioned you went through like a three-month class. Did that expand, was there—I imagine all this would need new training as well. 0:40:50 Heineman: It was six to eight weeks, and the bulk of that was classroom training and just classified information and that kind of thing, and some of the basic production processes. Probably 50% of it was firearms and other similar training. By the time I left that part of the business in ’87, our basic training class, people had to have a background to begin with that was probably equivalent of what I had when I finished basic training. But we were able—we paid enough money and we were attractive enough to folks that we could hire them with that to begin with. Then we gave them anywhere from three to four months of dedicated training. And they had a minimum of two weeks and up to eight weeks a year of retraining, depending on what job they were assigned to. So for our tactical response folks, they were in training two out of twelve months a year, being retrained and optimizing their abilities to respond both individually and as a group. Of course, with the advanced weaponry and equipment capabilities that we provided to them, that in itself required a fair amount of additional training and retraining every year so that they could stay proficient in the use of that weaponry. Franklin: Yeah, wow. For example in the 200 Area where I imagine there was a lot of these new hardware and controls went in because of the storage and separation, were the alarms and CCTVs, were those managed centrally, or were they monitored in each facility, or was there a central facility—how did that work? Heineman: Yes, yes and yes. Franklin: Yes, yes, and yes? 0:43:13 Heineman: Each of the production facilities had its own control center. So the Plutonium Finishing Plant had one, the Plutonium-Uranium facility, PUREX had its own facility. FFTF had its own facility. And then we had a central alarm facility between the 200 Areas that both received duplicate signals independently of the local ones, and monitored how things were going on at each of the production facilities. In the early days, we even had a third level, which eventually we decided was superfluous, which was down in the basement of the Federal Building, that sort of monitored all of that. Franklin: Yeah, I could see how that—how would that third level respond to an emergency, being all the way out there, how would they have detected something that those first two levels wouldn’t have detected? Yeah. Interesting. Heineman: It was mostly information control down there. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:44:35 Heineman: And it gave them a direct access to—back in the early days, senior site management both for the government and for its contractors were all downtown. None of them lived way out here in the Site. So it gave them information and the ability to monitor stuff from down in the city of Richland that they otherwise would’ve relied on people to tell them instead of see directly. But it was about that same time that we shut that center down that by then I think it was the Department of Energy who said, you know, you contractor management teams, you really need to be out there where the action is and close to your folks and in control. So everybody began to move from the city of Richland out onto the Site. Which, actually, as a support service employee was very helpful to me, because they were now close to the reality of the day-to-day and it was a lot easier for me to deal with them. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Well, great, that’s so interesting. So I see in 1980 you became safeguards and security director? Heineman: Yes, 1980. Franklin: So describe that. It seems like you got more responsibility, then, right, with Hanford, not only Hanford Patrol, but also fire and emergency preparedness and nuclear safeguards? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: So was that kind of a similar work, just kind of monitoring all of the different emergency and security possibilities onsite? 0:46:31 Heineman: Yeah, my job really changed a lot between being in charge of security or the projects to do the upgrades, when I went to safeguards and security director. Because we did, we had Hanford Patrol, Hanford Fire. We had site-wide emergency preparedness. Safeguards, which was the accounting for the plutonium and other nuclear materials. And then the professional security folks that had been years before. And so I had chief of Hanford Patrol that ran Hanford Patrol. I had the chief of the fire department who ran the fire department. That wasn’t my job anymore. [LAUGHTER] So probably the closest thing to what I’d done before that I was still in charge of was emergency preparedness. Because it was fairly small and the senior managers on the Site really looked to me individually when something went wrong to take charge and organize and run things for them. I mean, they had the final decisions on a lot of stuff. But the rest of it, I was managing professional managers that were in charge of patrol and security and fire. And I didn’t do that anymore. So I could give them advice. I could help them decide how to respond to different kinds of both management and technical challenges in a consultation kind of environment. But my primary job was securing funding for the additional upgrades we wanted to do, which we were by then doing both, not just for security, but the Hanford Fire Department. All the old Hanford fire equipment from World War II was falling apart, breaking down. We’d take three brush trucks to a brush fire out in the desert, and one of them would make it. [LAUGHTER] So probably— Franklin: Really? You guys were still using World War II-era equipment— Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Franklin: --in ’80? 0:49:05 Heineman: Absolutely. In fact, there is a road that goes up Rattlesnake Mountain to get to the top. If we had fires on Rattlesnake Mountain or anywhere north of there, sort of like the Silver Dollar fire or the big fires before that, most of the fire vehicles couldn’t go up that road. It was too steep. And they wouldn’t make it. Either they couldn’t make it at all because they weren’t powerful enough, or they’d break down on the way. So we put a fairly substantial amount of money into upgrading all of the fire equipment on the Site, too. And up until that point, we were buying excess equipment. When something would break down and we’d need a new brush truck or a new fire engine or a new ambulance, we would go out on the government’s excess list—[LAUGHTER]—and get stuff that had already been used, mostly used up, someplace else. And we decided we couldn’t keep doing that. So we worked with the government and we worked with our companies to secure funding to go through and upgrade all of that equipment. And we began upgrading training and all the other stuff to go with it. So at that point my job was almost entirely securing funding, being the liaison between the security and fire functions, security and emergency services functions and the production management, interfacing with the Department of Energy on where we wanted to go years from then. It was a very different job than I’d ever had before and very enriching. I mean, it was—it really was—it was something I was very proud to be able to do, and something I think, between myself and the management team I had, that we did very well. Franklin: Wow. And you were also still in charge of nuclear productions safeguards and securing that production information, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: And making sure that every bit of plutonium was accounted for from what would be possible to generate. 0:51:39 Heineman: Right, and in fact for a number of years, we hadn’t really had much production going on after the Cold War was over, most of those production processes were either phased out or phased way down. Then under Ronald Reagan, there was a decision that we needed to increase our nuclear capabilities. We moved forward with, again, we spent a ton of money upgrading both our production capabilities and our security capabilities for restarting the PUREX plant to process K Basin, K Reactor fuel that was in storage in the basins and separate out the plutonium and uranium, restart the Plutonium Finishing Plant to purify the plutonium, and restart what was called the UO3 plant to process the uranium from the fuel. Franklin: And before that, these had all been in shutdown mode? Heineman: Pretty much in standby, yeah. Franklin: So not taking a lot of security resources then? I mean, still a basic level, right, but not in active use, so much easier to monitor when they’re in shutdown. 0:53:10 Heineman: Actually, in some ways it’s easier; in some ways it’s harder. Because you don’t have active operations going on, but you still have the presence of the materials, both in the process and in storage. The decision to deactivate plutonium production was always a political decision, both when they slowed it down at the end of the Cold War, and then—I’m not sure I remember which president, Jimmy Carter, maybe—decided that we weren’t going to produce nuclear material anymore. It was always a political decision that had to be executed in days or weeks, leaving a huge amount of material still inside the chemical processes at the various plants. Because it takes a long time to process a batch from one end to the other, and they never gave us enough time to do that clean-out. Franklin: Right, they just wanted you to turn off the lights, lock the door— Heineman: Just stop. Franklin: Yeah, send everybody home. Heineman: Just stop. Franklin: Which is where we get the K Basin spent fuel. 0:54:40 Heineman: The K Basin fuel, all the material that was held up and in storage at the PUREX plant. The Plutonium Finishing Plant had—there are some articles, I don’t remember the numbers now—but there were some articles that we published publicly on how much and how many different varieties of plutonium types of products were at PFP, the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the time we couldn’t process anymore. A wide variety of different kinds of materials, each one with its own unique safety and security challenges. A lot of it. [LAUGHTER] And so in some ways, it was actually harder form a security standpoint to control things during the shutdown days than it—or suspended operation days—than it was during the production days. Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense. There’s less eyes on it. It’s got lots of safety issues of just sitting there. Yeah, okay, thank you. 0:56:08 Heineman: The whole McCluskey room event was purely a function of being directed to shut down a process without having the time and the resources to come back and clean that system out. I don’t remember, frankly, what the instigator was for that particular shutdown in the americium recovery facility, but it was down for a long time and ultimately resulted in a chemical reaction and an explosion. There are examples like that, not as public and not as dynamic maybe, across all of Hanford. In the reactor areas, in the separation areas, in the finishing areas, in the lab areas in 300 Area. Just tons of examples there. Franklin: Hmm. Wow. So when production is restarted, then, and they were kind of bring back up PUREX and PFP, and UO3, did your job change significantly, or did it kind of feel like the Cold War days again? 0:57:32 Heineman: Yeah, it felt like going back to the ‘70s and very early ‘80s. Mostly in the ‘70s. There was a high degree of esprit de corps across the whole Site. People were focused on a common mission. Everybody was rowing the same direction. We were excited that the government had provided enough money to hire the people and to get the processes upgraded to restart. There was a real energy and an enthusiasm again that had been missing for a number of years. That was really fun. Franklin: And your job still stayed mostly the same through those years in the ‘80s, then, safeguards and security director? 0:58:31 Heineman: Right. I left that job in 1987. Westinghouse—again, DOE had rebid the contracts and they went to a single site contract. So what had been run by eight different contractors became the responsibility of Westinghouse Hanford Corporation. Westinghouse had their own safeguards and security director at the time they won their contract. I told them I still wanted to work for them even though they already had somebody to do the job that I had, and they had me consolidate the emergency preparedness programs from the eight different contractors into one. So I spent about a year doing that job. And then my world changed yet again. [LAUGHTER] And I started doing something completely different. Franklin: Which was? 0:59:39 Heineman: They called me and said they thought I’d gotten that done to their satisfaction. They were having difficulty because they were now in charge of radiological control, health physics, radiation protection technicians, all those functions. They were now in charge of radiological protection for the whole Site. Which was bringing together a whole bunch of people that had never worked together, that had different systems, different processes, different procedures, different regulations. The poor manager that was trying to manage all that was really struggling. They had decided that they needed somebody to come in fresh, and so they asked me if I would go do that. And I tried to explained to them I didn’t know anything about radiological protection. I wasn’t a health physicist. I’d never been an HPT or an RPT. I really didn’t know much about it. And they said, that’s not what we need you for. We need you to go create a well-functioning organization. They asked me to go do that, and I did that for the next seven years. That was a very rewarding job. Franklin: How so? Heineman: In two different ways. First, again, I was responsible for supplying support and services to all the individual plant managers. So it gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with all of them and some of the newer ones, and to be talking on a different plane than security about what we could do different, what could we do better, where were they frustrated with the support that they were getting, where was I or my folks frustrated with the way they were doing business that might have involved risks, radiological risks we didn’t need to take. So there was a whole new relationship between myself and all the plant managers across the Site. And the other one was that the business agent for the HPTs, health physics technicians, sometimes called radiation protection technicians, was a young, very forward-looking person. He and I really teamed up and resolved an enormous number of management labor problems between radiation protection management and the bargaining unit, RPTs, HPTs. He and I were so in sync with each other over what was best for everybody that there almost was just not a problem that came up that we couldn’t resolve, working back together with the people in conflict. Franklin: Do you remember his name? Heineman: John Jeske. Franklin: John Jeske. 01:03:10 Heineman: And John is still employed at the Site. In fact, when the Site—we sent John over to Idaho late in my radiological protection career. We sent him over to the Idaho site to find out what was going on in this new program, safety—shoot, I can’t remember what we called them. But let’s call them safety stewards, where a union representative would be appointed from every facility. That sole job was to be the safety representative for all the folks that worked there. Something that prior to that time had always been the job of the safety manager or the safety professionals. We gave a job just like that to a union person. That’s what they were doing at Idaho. He came back and was able to sell that concept across Hanford. When he was approaching the time where it was time for somebody else to become the business agent for the RPTs, he decided to start up and run that kind of a program across Hanford. And has been doing that until just this last year when a new person took over that job. So John has—he’s always been ten years ahead of his time. He’s just an amazing person. Franklin: That’s great. Well, I have two questions—or, I guess a comment and then a question. I’ll start with the question. Did that—radiological control management, did that include environmental control as well, or was it just health physics? Heineman: No. Franklin: Just human—okay, so worker-oriented— 1:05:31 Heineman: Yeah, environmental was a completely separate discipline with a different set of skills and capabilities. I mean, obviously, radiological protection is out there to protect the environment as well as the people. But it was strictly from a radiological contamination perspective. Franklin: Did you find quick acceptance from the RPTs and health physicists that you were asked to manage, or was it kind of a—did you have to kind of grow—because you’re obviously coming at this from not their profession. So, would you find a pretty quick acceptance to your management, or did you have to kind of grow into that role and kind of earn their trust? Heineman: It took a fair amount of growing, I would say probably a good two years of the seven. I was accepted much more quickly by the bargaining unit representatives than I was by the professional staff. The professional staff didn’t understand why they would have a boss that didn’t have a background or know anything about their business. They didn’t understand that I would let them do that job and make those decisions. And it took quite a while for them to begin to trust in that. The bargaining unit folks were pretty—as I said, they were in a lot of conflict and having a lot of trouble as the previous manager was trying to merge all these different cultures and procedures. Franklin: These are the eight different contractor units we’re talking about? 1:07:20 Heineman: Right, of those, probably four had radiological protection folks. And so the rank-and-file employees, both bargaining unit and non-bargaining professionals at the non-management level, they were not very happy with their management. And my job in the safeguards and security business from almost the get-go had been to create people that had capabilities they never had before. And to equip them with materials and logistical capabilities that they’d never had before. So it was a builder’s job. It wasn’t a manager’s job; it was a builder’s job. So when I went into radiological control, I kind of had that same attitude, that the most important people in the organization were the ones that had the instruments in their hand, just like the ones with the guns in their hands or the firehose in their hands. It wasn’t the managers. It was the people that were going to protect things. And they were really resonated to that. So it was pretty easy for me to connect with the HPTs and the non-management professional people. The management team took a little while. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s interesting. Heineman: Yeah. Franklin: But that kind of makes sense. So during this time while you were doing this or a little before, you were also responsible for shutting down the B Canyon, and upgrades for the waste encapsulation for cesium and strontium. Heineman: That came after—that was the next— Franklin: That came after, oh, okay. Heineman: The next big change in my career. Right. Franklin: The next, okay, then let’s go there. 1:09:19 Heineman: So—[LAUGHTER] one of the five reprocessing plants at Hanford which separated the fuel into its constituent parts was B Plant. Very similar to PUREX but built in the early ‘50s instead of later like PUREX was so it wasn’t as technically capable. And really never got used for separating fuel. Franklin: What was it used for? Heineman: B Plant was built—there’s a long story associated with how the reprocessing plants advanced from T Plant, which was the original one, to REDOX, which was a dramatic new technology over in West Area. And then from REDOX to PUREX. And B Plant was kind of built right in the middle of there. It was almost unnecessary from the beginning, because REDOX and then especially PUREX—PUREX was able to process the fuel from all of the production reactors all by itself. Even though the original design was we needed six reprocessing plants, by the time it was built, the technology had advanced and it did the job all by itself. Franklin: But it was also producing a different finished product—or, no, sorry, that wouldn’t go to the PFP. Sorry, never mind. Heineman: No, everything from all five or six or those reprocessing plants was supposed to go to PFP. Franklin: PFP, okay. Heineman: And then PFP converted this less-enriched plutonium solution over to the final product, either plutonium powder or plutonium metal. That we then sent to the weapons facilities. Franklin: Right, but PUREX as an extraction process was able to handle the different fuels coming out of all the different reactors. 1:11:24 Heineman: All of the reactors. So it basically just made all the other four obsolete and prevented the construction of the other one that was going to go up in East Area. So B Plant got the job, because it was there, it was online, it was proven using cold chemicals. It was ready to go, but we didn’t need it. So the government realized that we had a huge amount of uranium in the tanks that went with the tank waste when you extracted the plutonium from the fuel. And the idea was that we could take uranium and pull it out. So they gave that mission to the third reprocessing plant over in West Area, which was U Plant. And the key question for B Plant, then, became how can you contribute? And about that time, the temperature of the liquids in a number of the waste tanks was becoming hot. The tanks were actually boiling, and there were huge safety concerns developing about how are we going to control this wild combination of chemicals in liquid in these tanks. So they redesigned the process inside of B Plant. Didn’t involve a lot of physical changes, but the chemical processes, to take waste that was sluiced with high pressure water jets out of the higher heat tanks, and through the chemical process separate out the cesium and the strontium, which are the two radionuclides that contribute the most heat. So they would remove the cesium and the strontium and then put the waste back in the tanks, subsequently, much reducing the heat load in those tanks. Franklin: Right, making the tank safer. Heineman: So they began to do that and they realized that they needed a way to store the cesium and the strontium. Franklin: Right, because these are very dangerous radionuclides for human health. 1:14:10 Heineman: Yeah, they’re high radiation radionuclides. That is, they have a very short half-life, so they’re giving off tons of radiation. That’s what generates the heat, and the radiation is pretty dangerous all by itself. So they built the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, WESF, on the end of B Plant. And its job was to take the cesium and convert it to cesium chloride, a powder, and the strontium and convert it to strontium fluoride, a powder. Load those powders into double-thick stainless steel capsules about 30 inches long and about this big around. And you had one welded shut inside of another welded shut. And then store those capsules under 20 feet of water, which both kept them cool, so that the capsules didn’t melt, and protected the people in the facility from the radiation. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard about this facility before. Heineman: It’s a fascinating facility. And it’s still operating and still has all 1,930 capsules in the pool cells. It’s a beautiful facility when you turn the lights off, because you got a beautiful blue Cherenkov radiation glow. It’s gorgeous. But the sooner they can find a way to dry store those capsules, the better, because they’re—in my mind, once I went over and understood them better, I really believe they were one of the highest risks anywhere at Hanford. Franklin: More so than the tanks, or equal— 1:16:23 Heineman: Oh, yes, in terms of human health, as opposed to the environment, way, way worse. Way, way worse. We used to joke that if you had a capsule sitting in an empty field and it hadn’t melted yet from the heat inside, you couldn’t get within 100 yards of it, no matter how fast you ran, because you would die before you got there of radiation poisoning. Franklin: Wow. 1:16:54 Heineman: These capsules—and you can find, I think, some of the data on the ‘net on their radiation levels. Honestly, by now, I’ve forgotten the numbers. But they’re easily the most radioactive things anywhere at the Hanford Site. They contain a third of the—in these, just these 1,930 capsules, they have a third of the radioactivity of the whole Hanford Site. In one little set of pool cells. They’re just amazing, amazing things. And now they have a project going they pretty well completed the design. The heat transfer is the problem: how do you put them inside a dry capsule, or a dry cask and not have them melt inside? Because someday you might have to open that cask, right? Franklin: Sure, sure. 1:17:58 Heineman: So they’ve pretty well completed their calculations, and thy have a project to move those things from the pool cells, where if they ever got uncovered, you’d have a disaster, to dry storage where they could live for a long time without hurting anybody. So anyway I was doing this radiological control job, and things were sort of starting to run pretty flat. Everything was going good. B Plant had been—once they terminated the cesium and strontium recovery process, it had been sitting there in a standby condition for, oh my goodness, 20-plus years. And for the staff just to keep it safe, to keep the utilities and the other stuff, to keep it from falling apart and harming the environment, my recollection is it was about $35 million a year for a stay-safe condition. And another $10 million on top of that to operate WESF and keep the capsules safe. Franklin: Well, I imagine B Plant, processing all that cesium and strontium, it would be pretty hot itself. 1:19:39 Heineman: Yeah. It needed to be controlled. And so they were beginning—the cleanup mission was beginning in earnest then. And they realized that there was a lot of stuff they couldn’t do because they were having to put $35 million a year into the B Canyon. And it was giving them nothing except a safe condition. And they decided if there was some way to clean it up, isolate it from the environment so that you wouldn’t have any leaks or anything, and basically take all the people out, they’d have $35 million they could go use to clean up other stuff. And so they called me up and said, we don’t really have any money— Franklin: That’s a great way to start a— 1:20:38 Heineman: Yeah, it was a great conversation. The vice president that called me, his name was Ron Bliss, and he was another one of those guys that was always ten years ahead. But he called me up and he said, there’s kind of a no-lose thing here. We’ve got this facility that’s costing us $35 million. We don’t have a lot of money to put into cleaning it up. But would you be willing to go over there, kind of investigate what the money’s being spent on, how it’s being spent, see if you can’t find a way to convert the workforce from babysitters to cleaner-uppers, and see if you can get us out of this $35 million. So I said, I don’t know anything about that either, but sure, I’ll go over there. So I went over, and fairly quickly realized that there was quite a bit of money going in there for the effort that was truly required for safety. A lot of it was just carryover from the production days, and nobody’d ever really looked at, does all this stuff still need to be done? And so I began putting some information together and some different approaches. And the deputy manager for DOE’s Richland office came out to our facility one day, and I think he and my boss, the vice president, had talked a little about how he could help. So he came out. His name was Lloyd Piper. And he had a bunch of get-out-of-jail-free cards in his wallet. Franklin: You mean like from Monopoly? 1:22:30 Heineman: Yeah. Yeah. Except he’d had them made for him, with his name on it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Heineman: And it said, one get out of jail free card, on one side, from Lloyd Piper. And on the other side it said something like, if you don’t strive you never achieve, or something like that. So he came out and met with me and my team. He said, I’ll tell you what, he said, I’m going to challenge you to try to get this done in three years. And I’ll give you access to x amount of additional money on top of the $35 million a year, because I know you’re going to have to go separate WESF which used all the B Plant utilities: power, water, all that stuff. Franklin: Oh, so you’d have to get separate utilities out to it. 1:23:26 Heineman: Right, because WESF still needed to be functional. He said, so I’ll give you this amount of money or access to that much money if you need it to do that separation. But I’d like you to try to get done in three years. In three years, let’s see if we can’t have WESF separated, and nobody working at B Plant at all. And we said—and he handed out these cards. And so we said, ah, hell, sure, it’s free, right? Get out of jail free. So we took that challenge on and over the next—it took us about six months to do the detail planning. We put together various task teams and at the end of the six months, we had a plan. We had to hire a few more people that we didn’t have at B Plant that we needed. We had a lot of piping work to do, because we had to flush the entire system, as you said. The residual cesium and strontium was pretty high radiation levels and we needed to clean the inside of the canyon out. So we had to hire a few additional staff, and mostly craftsman. Over the next three years—the original challenge was out the gate in ’98. And we did that. We did that. We got it done, and we put a padlock on the front door. We found jobs for all but two of the 150 people that worked there. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: So we didn’t have a big layoff, and the $35 million went to like $500,000. The cleanup was completed for about $100 million less than the long-range plan for environmental cleanup of B Plant. So we saved that $100 million in addition to making the $35 million a year go away. Marvelous opportunity. It was really terrific. Had a great relationship with the DOE folks here and with the DOE folks at headquarters. So we did that and B Plant has a padlock on it today and WESF keeps operating and doing its thing and everything’s cool. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. You should be really proud. 1:26:09 Heineman: Yup. Yeah! We were. It was a great team. We had people that did some stellar things, that came up with some incredible solutions to what seemed to be intractable problems. We had—the team got along so well, we really had a good time. Franklin: Wow. So after B Canyon shut down, you switched to your last job on site, right? Heineman: Right. Franklin: Which was— Heineman: Wasn’t supposed to be my last job, but it was. Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] The beginning of decommissioning the PFP, right? I’m wondering if you could talk about, why’d you come over to PFP? 1:26:51 Heineman: Well, we were about three months from putting the padlock on B Plant, and the rest of it was just sort of, kind of the last few things. And we’d found jobs for almost everybody in. So I felt like I was pretty well done. PFP had been shut down by the government. It was in its cleanup mission, which was really critical. As I said earlier, there were a lot of different kinds of materials, some of them not very stable left at PFP when they said shut down, because we didn’t have time to do anything, we just had to stop. So it was a fairly fluid situation in terms of trying to keep everything safe. But they had made some errors and had three what are called criticality violations over about a two-week period where employees had done things that were prohibited by criticality preventions standards. The government stepped in and said, stop. You can’t do anything. You can’t move anything. They even had to get special permission from the government to move bags of used laundry. It was a terrible situation. And they had been in that mode for about nine months, and had tried twice to upgrade their operations, prove to DOE that they could do it better than they did it before DOE shut them down, and failed. And so I start thinking, well, what’s my next challenge going to be? And I thought, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. But I went to my boss, who was by then the president of Babcock and Wilcox, B&W Hanford Company. And suggested to him that since we didn’t really know what I should do next, the guy that had finished up putting a padlock on PUREX was available. So I suggested that he come over and do the final three months at B Plant and that I go over to PFP and help the plant director there with upgrading all the operations and procedures and things and trying to convince DOE to give us another chance to restart the cleanup operations. And so I went over there in June of ’98 and thought I would be there six to nine months, until we could get it restarted. And by then I would find something else fun to do. And I retired from there in 2012. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: 14 years later. Heineman: I never got out. That’s right. That’s right. Franklin: So what happened? What turned what you thought would be a six-, nine-month job and took the rest of your career out there? Was it something about the job that made you want to stay, or was it the job so big that you felt like you couldn’t walk away from it? Heineman: I think it was both. The Plutonium Finishing Plant is easily, easily the most interesting place that I’ve ever worked at Hanford. Franklin: Why is that? 1:30:50 Heineman: The variety of processes, the degree of control that’s needed over the process, the procedures, the people, to be able to do work safely and avoid a really serious problem. The history of the facility, the nature of the commitment of the people who worked there. There was nobody that worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant that couldn’t, based on seniority, have transferred out and gone to work someplace else. And there were a lot of people that transferred over to the PFP, didn’t like it because of all those controls, and turned around and left. But the people who stayed were people who were really committed and really good at what they did, and very willing to accept controls because they understood the safety implications and why it was necessary. The whole place is just the most fascinating production plant I could ever imagine. So that was certainly part of it. The people, the quality of the people and their commitment was part of it. Part of it was, frankly, the personal challenge, because there was not one day that things ran steady in trying to clean up that Plutonium Finishing Plant. Not one single day, from the time I went to work until I went home at night, went the way it was supposed to. Dynamic, exciting, energizing, making a contribution. I just never, never felt a desire to go do something else, and frankly as I looked around at the cleanup activities in other areas, nothing compared in complexity and importance to PFP. Franklin: What were some of the milestones that were accomplished while you were at—sorry, was your job managing the decontamination—or what was your specific job at— Heineman: Until— Franklin: At PFP. 1:33:40 Heineman: Until CH2M Hill took over the contract fairly recently at that time, I think I spent three-and-a-half years with CH2M Hill. But up until the time that they took over the contract, I was variously the deputy director for PFP or the senior project manager for cleanup. I had a variety of titles, depending on the organizational structure. But I was typically the number two guy at PFP, and responsible for, I would call it, the strategy of how to go about cleaning it up as quickly as possible for the least amount of money in a safe way. The director, then, was responsible for all the crews that made that happen, once the plan was laid out. So he managed all of the folks that worked in the plant; I managed the people that strategized and designed the cleanup processes. As far as major milestones, I think those are, as I look back now, they seem fairly obvious; they weren’t obvious at all at the time. But there were, let me just say, 15 completely unique kinds of plutonium compounds left in the plant. Some of them liquids, some of them powders, some of them metal. All different kinds with different qualities and characteristics. One by one, we took each of those types of plutonium from whatever condition they were in at the time we shut it down, to the point that they were a stable material that could be containerized and stored without risk of a chemical reaction or causing other kinds of problems, like fires, et cetera. So, there were like 15 mini-milestones as we completed—because every one of those 15 needed a different process to convert it from this unstable form it was in, into something that we could put it in a can and be confident it was safe for the long-term. We could talk about some of those kinds of processes, but each one of those processes had to be designed, had to be proven in the laboratory with small quantities, had to be constructed, operated, and then we’d claim victory on that particular product. So there were 15 little mini-milestones. 1:37:15 But the completion of the plutonium stabilization mission, to me, was huge. Because it gave us material that we could store safely, that we could ship across country. Because we couldn’t—if we’re going to clean up and shut down PFP, we couldn’t have all this plutonium in there. So we had to ship it someplace. It had to be safe to ship. So getting all of that stabilized and put into the vaults, waiting to be shipped across the country, either to Rocky Flats in Colorado, or mostly to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina—huge. Huge, from a safety standpoint, a money standpoint, manpower, the type of mission. Because that was very technical, very research-intensive. We needed plutonium chemists. We had all kinds of capabilities that we would never again need at PFP once that was done. So that was a really key point. The next key milestone was easily when the last of the plutonium was shipped offsite. When we shipped the last safe, secured transport vehicle—they’re high-security shipments to move plutonium—when we loaded and watched the last of these shipment vehicles leave PFP for Savannah River, knowing we now had no more discrete plutonium anywhere in the plant—we had residual contamination in the pipes, the ventilation ductwork and stuff we were going to have to go clean up—but the product was now gone. That was another major milestone. Franklin: You kind of closed out the whole—I mean—it was the last shipment. Heineman: That was the end of the production mission, yep. Franklin: Yeah, that was the actual end of the production mission. Wow. That’s really something. With the 15 different processes, did it get easier as time went on? I imagine the first couple would be, you know, you’d be doing something new here. Did it get easier? Heineman: They were all completely unique. Franklin: Really? Okay. Tom Hungate: Sorry—oh, I’ve just got to change the battery. Franklin: Oh, okay. Hungate: Yeah. Heineman: We’ll take a break. [VIDEO CUTS] Hungate: Sorry, you can go whenever. Heineman: I think we were talking about those 15 types of plutonium? Franklin: Yes. Yes, we were. Heineman: And each one of those was so entirely different from another that I wouldn’t say it got easier or harder. Each one started out as a material that we would need the scientists for characterize for us: what’s the safety risk, what are the bad things that could happen, what causes that to happen, what do we need to do to it so that it’s safe and stable and can go in a can? And every one of them was different. So, for example, one of the largest quantities we had to deal with was—I think we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of relatively rich plutonium nitrate solution, which was the product of the PUREX plant. Franklin: Yes. 1:40:54 Heineman: Late in the PUREX process, we installed an oxide conversion line where—we didn’t want to ship that liquid by truck across the Site anymore because of the safety dangers—so we converted that liquid into powder before we took it over to the Plutonium Finishing Plant. But prior to that being installed, there was all this plutonium nitrate liquid that had been sent over to PFP. And PFP actually generated a fair amount of plutonium nitrate liquid in the plutonium reclamation facility. When you had product that didn’t meet specification, we had to burn it or dissolve it in the PRF and dissolve it in nitric acid. And then that would be the head end of the PFP processes to create metal or powder. So we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of plutonium nitrate solution. Well, you can’t ship it. It’s not safe. The containers had to be vented because they create pressure, they generate hydrogen, because of the acid inside. So you have hydrogen being generated inside these enclosed containers. Franklin: Hydrogen’s very explosive. 1:42:31 Heineman: Absolutely. And it’s just a bad situation, unless it’s for a short-term. So we had to design processes that would take that plutonium nitrate liquid and turn it into a stable powder, plutonium oxide. We couldn’t use the massive plutonium production processes. There wasn’t near enough material to be able to do that. So we had to build a new process. Franklin: Well, I mean, it was also to clean those processes up in the first place, so why would you want to run a crew— Heineman: Yeah, we had crews in there doing clean-out of all the gloveboxes and everything at the same time that we were trying to stabilize all these types of plutonium. Franklin: So you basically had to scale-down the refinement process and create—like, create a scaled-down version for each type of plutonium. Heineman: Yes. Yes. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: Yes. Franklin: And do all this in the PFP. Heineman: At the same time crews were cleaning out the rest of it. Franklin: Wow. 1:43:37 Heineman: So, it led to an amazing series of projected plans and milestones and then accomplishments when we got each one done. We just started filling the vaults up with all this stabilized material getting ready to ship it. Franklin: It’s easier to see now why that cleanup mission took so long. Heineman: Oh, my goodness. Franklin: I mean, I’d never known about that specific aspect of it. And that seems—very important work, but also very time-consuming, too. Heineman: And I neither remember, nor do I know if I can talk about, how much plutonium, in terms of stabilized kilogram product we produced. But we probably did get to talk about that in some of the interviews and articles that were generated during that process, probably have some of that data in it. But let me just say, it was an enormous amount of plutonium. I would guess that there wasn’t that much plutonium in one place anywhere in the United States. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: We had to get it all stabilized and packaged and shipped out of here if we were going to clean up the plant. Franklin: Wow. That’s really fascinating. I’m definitely making a note to look to see if I can find out that number. So, after these 15 processes—after this 15 different types of plutonium were done, when did that finish, by the way? When did the last shipment go out? Do you remember? It’s okay if you don’t. I was just curious. Heineman: I don’t, actually. Franklin: That’s fine. 1:45:35 Heineman: You’d think that would be burned in my memory, but it was just another step in the process, as I say. It’s easier looking back to pick out what some of those key milestones were than to remember. I remember we had the public and politicians out. We did speeches, we did all kinds of things. So it’s out there in— Franklin: Oh, sure, sure. Heineman: Yeah. And the folks in CH and MSA communications should be able to very simply—from their archives, should be able to very simply pull out some of the briefings and things we gave to the press on quantities and dates and all that kind of—I mean, it’s all out there. I just don’t— Franklin: Oh, no, sure, I understand. Heineman: My mind’s too full. Franklin: No, I understand. And we work for MSA, so it’d be easy for me to get ahold of that. Okay. So what else happened in that time you were out there? 1:46:46 Heineman: Since you work for MSA, one of the best sources for that kind of data that’s still out at the plant is the business manager at PFP. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: Her name is Julie Widney. She and I managed the two groups that did all the planning and we created almost all of the presentations and briefings and things. So she still has all that in her files. If you said, what were the major types, how much plutonium was in them, when did they get done? She’d just send you a little summary of that. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. I actually made a new contact at CHPRC when we had our initial problems with the interview. I found Tanya Reyes— Heineman: Oh, did you? Franklin: --in Pop Fone. And we had a really interesting conversation about what they’re doing at—because they’re doing that mini-documentary about— Heineman: I have no idea what they were doing. I thought it was you guys. Franklin: I know! But it was actually really great, because it opened up a new source of information, and she’s talked to people out at Site. So it was very interesting to hear about what they were doing— Heineman: Did you explain to her, by the way, what happened? Franklin: Yeah, because she was confused, because she was confused because she didn’t know about us. So she thought she was scheduling you for something and then you didn’t show up to that; you thought it was us. So she was also very confused. But it made sense how the confusion happened. As soon as I got to talking to her, I was like, everything makes sense now. You got caught in the crossfire of two different worlds, two different projects. Heineman: Well, I just didn’t understand it was two different things. Franklin: Yeah, it was just really funny. It was a very good conversation, though. Okay, so anyway. So, you do the 15 different types, and then was there any other major milestones out at PFP besides those, the last shipment and the cleanup of these 15 types? 1:48:48 Heineman: Well, sort of like finishing the cleanup of all the material was a major milestone that was supported by a milestone for each of the 15. So the cleanup of the facility itself, which obviously was completed for the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and for the Americium Facility, what they call the McCluskey Room. The cleanup was completed for each of those and there’s a milestone associated with when they said this is now ready for demolition. But the main plant, the 234-5 Building, has a whole series of sub-milestones associated with cleaning out various geographical portions of the plant. There were three different laboratories inside the main PFP facility. There were three different primary production process areas. There were a lot of storage and support areas that needed to be cleaned out. You had—I don’t even remember the number anymore. I thought I would never forget, but—gloveboxes. There were x number of gloveboxes, hundreds and hundreds of gloveboxes. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Stacked on top of each other—or not— Heineman: Yeah, sometimes they were some-four high. But mostly the production ones were long. And the material would move from liquid at one end, and then go through a whole series of things, all the way down the line until you had plutonium oxide powder or plutonium metal at the other end. So you had all those gloveboxes that all had to be cleaned out inside, through the gloves. Then they had to be isolated from the work area somehow, and cut up, and separated from ventilation and piping and everything, and all the instrumentation, and then removed. So all of those things, like cleaning out the analytical laboratory was a milestone. And when it was done, there were no gloveboxes. It was virtually clean. Franklin: I just realized, we’ve been talking about cleanup so long, I—how does one—I understand removing these things and putting them in, like, ERDF, like solid waste. But how does one clean up, like, contaminated ductwork? Is there a special chemical process that one uses to neutralize the radiation, or how does—what exactly does “clean up” mean? Heineman: So, let’s talk about a piece of ventilation ducting. Franklin: Okay. Heineman: There were a few areas in the ventilation ducting just like the drain lines and sewer lines in your house that have a tendency to collect material as it goes through. Franklin: Sure. 1:52:31 Heineman: And in the case of ventilation ductwork, it’s going through as an airflow. And at certain points in the way the ductwork is designed, it would collect material. It’s generally distributed in a fine layer on the inside of the entire duct. But there were some areas that had enough plutonium that it was of a criticality concern, which means you could have an uncontrolled reaction if you added water or you consolidated it into a particular form or configuration. So we had to go into those—and you find that by using instrumentation that measures the radiation being emitted through the wall of the ductwork. We would have to go in and remove those concentrations of plutonium and that was all almost by hand. You would penetrate the duct under tight radiological control so that you didn’t lose plutonium into the environment or your workspace. And you would go inside, and with various tools and instruments, remove those deposits of plutonium, package them, and prepare them for disposal. The bulk of the ductwork simply had this fine deposit of plutonium, which might have a lot of plutonium, but it’s over 250 feet of ductwork. When you break it down into removable sections that will fit in the disposal boxes, it’s a small enough amount of plutonium that you don’t need to do anything except cut the pieces of pipe out so they’ll fit in these boxes. And then ship those boxes, when it was operating, down to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant out of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Which is where the majority of the waste from PFP has to go because the law says over a very small amount transuranics—of which plutonium is one—transuranic material has to go to WIPP. It cannot go into ERDF or any of the onsite burial grounds. So it has to be very dilute in order for us to send it over for onsite burial in the ERDF facility. So, all of that ductwork would be measured, cleaned out if it was needed, then they would separate it into sections using giant plastic sleeves, and then cutting inside the sleeve. Franklin: Oh, wow. Heineman: And then tying off the ends and putting it in a box. Then you’d go back and do the next section. Franklin: And the workers, of course, would be wearing full radiological— 1:56:02 Heineman: Completely outfitted in protective clothing, often two layers. Respirators, hoods, everything. Franklin: Wow. That sounds really challenging to perform even basic labor in that kind of suit, in those suits and in that environment. Heineman: As I mentioned earlier, there’s a reason I never left PFP. And it’s because it’s such fascinating work. And the people that do it, they’re like nobody else at Hanford. They are so inventive and so capable of operating in such a highly controlled environment that I just have nothing but respect for those folks. They’re just amazing people. It is just a struggle, everyday, to make progress when you have to do the work under those controls. But the downside is somebody has an accident and gets contaminated or, god forbid, an uptake, inhaled or whatever, you just can’t afford that. Just can’t afford it. So, a simple thing like removing 50 feet of ductwork turns into one to three months’ worth or work and a bunch of burial boxes. And when you take that and you start thinking about what you have to do to clean out and cut up a glovebox that might be 50 feet long and eight feet high, or 15 feet high, because it’s a double-layer box—when you start thinking about expanding the challenge to something like that, where you’re actually cutting sections out of this box, always having to keep it contained, and using that machinery inside that plastic containment, it’s just incredibly challenging. Franklin: Because they’re stainless steel, right? Heineman: Yes. Franklin: Yeah, we have one in our collection, which was never used, but it’s eight feet tall, it weighs about 10,000 pounds, had to come in with a really big forklift. Heineman: I think that one originated at FMEF and went to PFP and we never ended up using it. So we sent it down as kind of a demonstrator. Franklin: Yeah. And it’s great. It’s one of the best things in the collection. But now, thinking, all right, how would you be inside a facility and cut that thing up when it’s hot, radiologically hot—you need heavy equipment to move that thing. People can’t— Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Franklin: It’s not like ductwork, which is very— Heineman: Oh, no. Well, even the ductwork is super-thick stainless steel. So even the ductwork needed machinery, hoists, and lifts and all kinds of stuff, just to handle a five-foot piece that would fit—actually those boxes are only four feet long, so—wow. Franklin: Yeah, wow. That’s amazing. That’s such an intense job. Yeah, I can see why you would stay so long. So, you ended up retiring in 2012. Heineman: September of 2012. Franklin: September of 2012. Heineman: Yeah. Franklin: And what—was it just time to go, or--? Heineman: It was. Franklin: Yeah? Heineman: Yeah, I’d been at it long enough. Franklin: 39 years, right? Heineman: I was a month short, I guess, of 40. Franklin: Wow. Heineman: Yeah, I went in September and I think October was my anniversary date. Franklin: Yeah, that’s what I have here. Wow. That’s really—that’s quite a career out there. Heineman: I loved every day of it. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. It sounds really fascinating. 2:00:22 Heineman: And who would ever have the opportunity to do such a wide variety of things as they let me do over that period of time? I mean, it’s just, even today, it boggles my mind that they would give me that opportunity, you know? It was really fun. Franklin: Yeah, you really moved around and managed some really like amazing projects. So I just have one kind of final reflective close-out question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War? Heineman: During the Cold War? Franklin: Yeah. 2:01:05 Heineman: Well, the Cold War was ending as I went to work. It was that post-Cold War environment that I came into, which was a huge transition for all the people that were here. So the perspective that I have on the Cold War and the attitudes and that sort of thing are what were held by the people that I was working with when I came to work. As I said, there were very few young people; it was mostly people that start work here after the war or afterwards. Even if they’d been recently hired, it was because they were re-hired, not starting. And I guess I would say those folks were beyond proud of the contribution that they had made. I think they were distressed that the government was beginning to make decisions not to use their talents and these amazing facilities to continue doing what they’d been built for. I think they were afraid of what was to come. Partly on a personal level: what’s that going to mean to me as far as my job and my welfare and the welfare of my family? But partly, it was just a complete unknown regarding this Hanford Site and everything it had always stood for, and it was never going to be the same again. What it was going to look like was never clear. What cleanup meant was never clear. It evolved over decades. The first ten years after we shut everything down, I’m not sure we even understood the scope of everything we were going to have to do to clean up the Site. But those folks were very proud, and concerned, and I think a little fearful of what the future might bring. If that’s what you were asking. Franklin: Yeah, I mean, it’s just, you know, that’s a very understandable and very human reaction to these very large events and the role that Hanford plays in them, and how Hanford’s fortunes are tied to politics and to international events. Yeah, I’m guessing—I want to ask you kind of a follow-up that’s not on my sheet but kind of directed towards your experience, and that’s, so you started kind of at the draw-down of the Cold War, although there’s that Reagan kind of blip. But then you spent a large, majority of your—at least half of your work in the cleanup area. I wonder how you felt about—what are your thoughts on cleaning up all the waste generated because of this Cold War mission and where—just your thoughts about that. I don’t want to put anything into your mouth. 2:04:29 Heineman: Well, it gave me a great career, so, from that perspective, I’ll never think badly about the Site and the opportunities that it provided to me. But in hindsight, using information that the government and the Army would never have had access to, I think nobody would ever make the kind of investment in manufacturing if they understood even 10% of what the cost of cleanup would be. And it’s not just monetary, either. It’s in terms of human beings and the environment. I think it’s a real dilemma now. The advantage they had is they had no idea. And if they did, cleanup defined in the context of 1950 or 1960 would be very different than cleanup in 2000 or 2020. And in fact, cleanup as defined—cleanup of the Hanford Site and the end of that cleanup is incredibly different, incredibly more complex, incredibly more costly than we ever envisioned in the first 20 years of the cleanup mission. We had no idea where society was going to go in its values, where science was going to go and its ability to detect and predict and all those—just amazing. And I think it’s pretty hard to judge people in 1940s or even late ‘30s by today’s standards. So I’m hesitant to do that. But if we were facing an equivalent question today, we would never have built Hanford. Never. Franklin: Interesting. Maybe because we knew—we have a greater understanding now of the long-term costs and risks. Heineman: Yes. Franklin: With building that—with producing that kind of material. Heineman: But we wouldn’t have had to do it in a couple of years. We wouldn’t have had to do it with technology that was being upscaled from a lab to a 570-square-mile production complex. So it couldn’t ever happen again. But we would never do it again. I know that. Franklin: Interesting. Well, Bob, thank you so much. That was a really thoughtful—what’s the word I’m looking for?—reflection. And thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us. Heineman: Sure, it’s fun. Franklin: I had a great time. Heineman: It’s fun to go back and think about it again and kind of put a little different perspective on how I think about things, too, so I appreciate the opportunity. Franklin: Well, great, thank you so much. I think this interview’s going to be very interesting to a lot of folks, so I appreciate it. Heineman: Cool. I hope it’s helpful. Franklin: Well, great. All right. Heineman: All right, thanks. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:08:13 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 10303kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area, PFP, PUREX, 100 Area, 200 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951-2018 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1972-2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Heineman Description An account of the resource Interview with Bob Heineman for the Hanford Oral History Project. Bob talks about his parents work at Hanford, his education in Police Science, and his work on Hanford Patrol. View the interview on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmQWfstxiTY">YouTube</a> Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/06/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fec6c8f7c3bbb31f56925babeecf6b4ea.mp4 f93d3a58c920203a28c20c15faa00ad6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F88cdb1fa45ad2f4e200b759062e541f1.JPG 42ba19f559413681d72de561bf6a41dd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Christina Robison Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Christina Robison on January 11, 2018. I need to fix that there. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Christina about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for me? Christina Robison: Yes. Christina Robison. It’s C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A. R-O-B-I-S-O-N. Franklin: Okay, thank you. So, tell me how you came to the Hanford. Tell me how you came to the area, and then how you began work at Hanford. Robison: Sure. Well, we came from--well, I grew up in California. But we had moved—my mother had remarried and we moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where my stepfather worked for Rockwell International on the space shuttle. Franklin: Oh, wow. 0:01:00 Robison: Yeah, he was a supervisor on the space shuttle there. His name’s Racy Storm. He’s since passed away. But Rockwell asked him if he’d be interested in transferring. And it’s kind of funny, because they gave him three different states to choose from, and my mother picked Washington to come to, because it had four seasons, was her reasoning behind going. So, I was only 15 at the time. He took the position with Hanford and we moved here to the Yakima area. He started working, you know, right away when we moved here. And then followed by that was my stepbrother, also worked. He worked at the REDOX labs, 222-S labs. And then my sister got a job as a nuclear process operator at the PUREX facility. Franklin: Oh, wow. Robison: And following that, probably a year, year-and-a-half after she started working, I graduated from high school and then got my job out at Hanford. So it was kind of a family affair. Franklin: So what did your father do—or, your stepfather, sorry—do out at Hanford? 0:02:08 Robison: He was an engineer. I couldn’t tell you for sure exactly what kind of engineer, but he was an engineer at Dash-5, at PFP. I know he could—they’d call him in the middle of the night, from what my mother tells me, and he could recite procedures from memory. He would tell them what page to look on, and which section it was. Yeah, he was a pretty smart man. Yeah, so he kind of started, I think, a lot of the family’s careers out at Hanford. And that’s how mine started. Franklin: Do you know what he did on the space shuttle? Like, I’m just wondering how that experience translated to plutonium processing. 0:02:48 Robison: Well, I don’t know--I probably couldn’t tell you a lot about what he did at the space shuttle. I actually had an opportunity to go look at the space shuttle and actually board the space shuttle, but I was 14, and wasn’t interested. So I missed that opportunity of a lifetime. So, yeah, that was disappointing when I looked back on it. And he told me I would regret it, and I did, and do. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, you know, hindsight is 20/20. There’s a lot of--when I interview-- Robison: Yeah-- Franklin: Oh, sorry-- Robison: No, well, when you’re young, you just--you don’t realize the significance of something. And I didn’t, and so I didn’t go. Franklin: Yeah, it’s just a fact of life. So, it was kind of a family--it became a family affair then, that kind of work. And tell me how you got hired on at Hanford. 0:03:39 Robison: Well, I had originally applied for a custodial position. When they actually called me to come to work, the gentleman on the phone--I don’t recall his name--asked if I would be interested in being a D&D worker, and that stands for decontamination and decommissioning. I recall my sister telling me that was a horrible job and not to accept it. But I asked him why, because I had applied for custodial; I had not applied for D&D. And he had told me that they needed their quota of women. And so I accepted. Wanted the job. So I accepted. Franklin: What led you to accept the job when your sister had warned you about it? And I guess--let me back that up a second. Why did she say it was--do you recall why she said it was such a terrible job? 0:04:32 Robison: Well, D&D—this was in 1983, and D&D then was one of the lowest paid positions on the Hanford Site. It was a relatively new, for lack of better term, new craft. And you had to do some really dangerous work. And a lot of hard work. You know, we, D&D, did a lot of other crafts’ work in radiation zones. So, it was, from her experiences being a nuclear process operator, being one of the crafts out there, you know, the knowledge that she had of D&D, it was just not—it wasn’t one of the top ranking jobs, you know, on the Site. I chose to take it because I wanted my foot in the door. I wanted to work. I was extremely independent person; I still am. I wanted to have a job and move out of Mom and Dad’s house. So I accepted it. And I thought I could move on to different positions once I was out there. Franklin: Right. Had you thought about going to college at all, or did you--were you kind of focused straight on working? 0:05:52 Robison: I was focused only on working. I had always—I’d worked since I could, since I was 11, baby-sitting, and had no interest in going to school. I was extremely glad I’d graduated high school and was out. I just wanted to be in the workforce and start making my own money and paying my own way. Franklin: Cool. So tell me about entering this world, this D&D world, as part of a quota. Like, I guess, I’d like to know about the kind of social aspect of being a woman in a male sphere, but also if you could talk about the kind of work that was happening. 0:05:31 Robison: Okay. Sure. Well, D&D is like what it says, it’s decontamination and decommissioning. So as far as what it was like, you know, I was a 19-year-old, young girl, fresh out of high school, the only thing I’d ever done was waitress. So it was a bit of a shock, going to work at Hanford. I really didn’t have a clue about what was involved and what to expect. It was truly a man’s world. I was surrounded by men, and being young you’re a little bit interested in that, but it was a bit of a culture shock as well. So, I had quite a bit of adjusting to do. And as far as the work, you know, again, the only thing I’d ever done was waitress and go to high school, and within six months, I was climbing scaffoldings and running jackhammers. So it was quite the change. But I really enjoyed the work. In D&D, then, and I believe even probably it’s true today, because they still have the D&D craft out there, you were successful every day. Every day brought a new challenge and once you’ve finished decommissioning or cleaning something up, you got to move on and do another project and do something different. So it was really enjoyable. Franklin: Wow. What kinds of buildings did you work on, and areas? 0:08:04 Robison: Well, I’ve been in probably every building on Site, except for N Reactor, K, PUREX and a bunch of the facilities in the 300 Area. D&D has touched a lot of the areas out there. So, we could decommission a change facility, a change room, meaning we’d go in and cut it, essentially demolish it. We did asbestos abatement in all of the reactors. We did fuel storage removal--fuel storage—the fuel rods from the reactors, cleaned out all of those from all the basins in all the reactors. We tore down buildings. I don’t know, you name it, we probably did it. Jackhammered, took up railroad ties. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I enjoyed it. Franklin: So was your job similar to the remediation today, where it was just to take the building down to slab? Robison: Yes. Yeah. It was probably a lot like what it is today. Only more sophisticated, because technology’s so far—so much more advanced than it was in the ‘80s. But-- Franklin: What was the monitoring environment like when you started with D&D? I assume there was a radiation protection-- Robison: For personnel, monitoring? Franklin: Yeah. Well, like the radiation monitoring. And what’s changed from then till today? Robison: Well, I couldn’t tell you a lot about what’s changed; I don’t really do radiation work anymore, so I don’t go into any kind of zones. But we had dosimetry then. We had air monitoring. You know, it would be set up on us or that would surround us to monitor the air. So I don’t know that the monitoring has changed significantly from when it was in the ‘80s. I think it’s pretty much the same, but I really haven’t been involved in that. Franklin: Sure. You mentioned that it was kind of a culture shock, and it was a real—it was a man’s world, or like a boys’ club. Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: I kind of want you to expand on that a little bit, if you could. How did people initially treat you, and did that change over time as they got to know you, or, like, what kinds of attitudes--the spectrum of attitudes that you encountered? Robison: Well, I think that they were—it was probably wide-ranging. You know, again, I was young, so--a lot of the people that I worked with were young. I don’t know then that I could tell a lot of difference on how I was treated. You know, reflecting back for the age I am now and my life experiences, I know that there were times that I was treated less than a human. But at the time I didn’t realize that. That was just kind of the way it was. Franklin: Sure. Are there any notable memories or moments or people that stand out from that time? Robison: Well, moments—when you asked me about, you know, the way things were back then in terms of how women were treated, one of the memories that I have, and a lot of women that I worked with could attest to this, was the dress-out procedures when you’re coming out of a radiation zone. Then, some of the companies, men didn’t have to wear modesty clothing. And being a D&D worker, that was one of my jobs, was to undress as individuals were coming out of the radiation areas. So, it didn’t faze them at all to walk around in their underwear. You know, as a young girl, that was a bit—I didn’t quite know what to expect from that. So you just do your job and keep moving forward. Today, it’s different. I mean, I know they have modesty clothing. Franklin: Sure. Robison: So that doesn’t happen. Franklin: Did you—forgive me if this is too personal, but did you also have to walk around in your underwear? Robison: No, I wore modesty clothing. Franklin: Okay. 0:12:27 Robison: So, yeah. I had a T-shirt and shorts. The problem was that if they became contaminated while you were in the zone, and it did occur on occasions, you didn’t get to keep those. So that was part of the reason a lot of people didn’t wear modesty clothing, because if it got crapped up, is what they called it, they’d lose it. That was just money out of their pockets. So a lot of people weren’t willing to do that. But, no, I would wear shorts and a T-shirt. Franklin: Sure. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: When you started, were there separate facilities for men and women? Like, restroom facilities and-- Robison: Yes. Mm-hmm, yes, there were. Uh-huh. Franklin: So, you mentioned a couple times when we were talking earlier about the 183-H-- Robison: 183-H, yeah. Franklin: --project. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because you had that—we’ll put that picture online, but that picture of you in the gunk, I guess, is the best way to-- Robison: Yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about a project in your work on that and what you accomplished. 0:13:24 Robison: Well, so, the 183 solar basins, I believe there were four of them in total. And two of them were filled up—well, the basins were constructed a lot like a pool would be where you have a shallow end and a deep end. The muck that was in these could range anywhere from a foot in the shallow end all the way to six or seven feet deep in the deep end, at the back part of the solar basin. And all of this muck came from the 300 Areas, places that would generate chemical wastes and wouldn’t have any place to put them. They were in a liquid form. So the material, evidently, was trucked out to the 183-H solar basins and placed there for, essentially, the liquids to volatilize off, to vaporize. Well, that happened over a number of years, of which I wasn’t there. But when we did go and D&D went to clean these solar basins out, what was left of course was the muck. The stuff was just really strange, because if you--it’d be a hard surface, and then when you stepped through it, it would just liquify. It was very different. And then we didn’t—because of the depth of some of this muck, they couldn’t really put a piece of equipment in there to clean it out. It was such a large basin that if you put a backhoe or something in there to try to lift this muck out, it would’ve just swallowed up the equipment. So they put people in there, me included. And we wore protective chest waders and plastics over the top of us, and mind you, this was in 100-degree heat. So it was very hot. And we used buckets, five-gallon buckets, and we literally bent over and picked up a bucketful and filled up drums. I would expect we probably filled up about 5,000 drums at that time. Franklin: Of 55-gallon? Robison: Of 55-gallon drums, uh-huh. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yeah, it was a long project. It was one of the places that I was stationed at for any length of time. But, yeah, it was quite the project. But I have a lot of good memories from there. It was a good crew that I worked with and good managers. Again, the technology wasn’t available then like it was today. I’m sure they would’ve done it differently today and taken more precautions for their workers. But at the time, it was all manual labor. It was all very physical. Franklin: Well, at the time, too, Hanford was still producing, right? Robison: Yes. Franklin: Its primary job in there--because I assume this would’ve been sometime in the mid-’80s, late ‘80s? Robison: Yeah, I want to say I was probably—I think I was probably out there about ‘86, ‘87, yeah. Franklin: Okay, so still in production. Robison: We were still in production, yeah, at the time. Franklin: And so cleanup not--I mean, obviously, a priority, because they have D&D, but certainly not the major priority it is today, right? 0:16:51 Robison: Right. No--yeah, it’s definitely more of a priority today. I mean, Hanford’s in environmental cleanup status. But I would like to say that even though we were in production and--because I kind of feel like Hanford gets a bad rap sometimes when they really try to do a lot of good, too. But DOE was actually in environmental restoration back in the ‘80s when I worked there, because that’s essentially what D&D was. It was decontaminating and decommissioning. So they had already begun doing cleanup activities in the ‘80s. At least when I started. And they, obviously had probably started even before I arrived. Production was their focus at the time, but they did think about the environment. They had started the steps towards cleanup. And, keep in mind in the ‘80s when I hired on, a lot of the regulations didn’t exist. There were none of the regulations that governed Department of Transportation and Shipping. And none of those regulations were there. But DOE was taking—had the stance to start doing some environmental cleanup. And they knew they needed to do something. And I was happy to participate. Franklin: Awesome. Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Where else did you work doing D&D? Robison: Again, all over the Site. You know, I worked in 200 East area and 200 West area. I was stationed at Dash-5 for a while, the PFP building that they’re currently trying to bring down to slab. Let’s see. At semiworks, although I couldn’t tell you a whole lot about that facility. I didn’t work out of that building very long, but it was alpha contamination there. Where else was I at? Franklin: Were you at REDOX? 0:18:50 Robison: I was, when I first hired on that’s where I was stationed. My very first--that’s where I learned to climb a scaffold, and that’s where I first learned to use a jackhammer, and that’s where I first learned how to take up railroad ties and railings. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yeah, did quite a bit there. There was nobody in the facility at the time. I mean, other than us. It wasn’t being utilized. But, yeah, so REDOX--I had been there, worked, again, at PFP. D&D, we didn’t stay in one place for any really long length of time, because new projects would come up and so we’d have to go work out of this shed, or—a little bit like construction work, I suppose, where those guys have to go to motel to motel. I just went from building to building. Franklin: Yeah, like, the opposite of construction, really. Robison: Right, except we got to tear it down, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. How long did you do D&D for? Robison: I was probably D&D for about seven years. Franklin: So through the ‘80s? 0:20:00 Robison: I wanna say--yes, all the way through the ‘80s until about 1990. And then I worked in the powerhouses that no longer exist. Franklin: For the reactors, right? The reactor power? Robison: The steam power--the coal-fired powerhouses. Those powerhouses used to supply steam to the production facilities, like PFP or PUREX. Franklin: They’d use those old steam lines that still—did they use the old steam lines that are still all in the 200 Area? Robison: Yes, those are still operational. Franklin: Wow. Robison: I was called a power operator. So, I did do some work in the main powerhouse where they actually fed coal into boilers and created the steam that supplied energy. Franklin: They were still using coal in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s? Robison: Yup, yup. Franklin: Wow. Robison: Yup, they were. Franklin: That’s always struck me as--I don’t know if it’s--it’s not irony, but the fact that the energy and the steam to supply nuclear--this high-science nuclear processing was coming from coal, you know. This very basic energy source plays a role in creating a very technical scientific energy. Robison: Yeah. Well, you know, I guess in hindsight, you look back on it and it is kind of—again, technology’s just so far advanced today than what it was then, but, yeah, it’s-- Franklin: What was it like working with coal? I mean, did you get regular shipments? Robison: Yup! Franklin: And did you have to wear special protective gear and-- 0:21:41 Robison: No, didn’t really have--unless you were right up in it. They’d provide you with paper masks if you didn’t want to breathe in the coal dust. But, yes, the coal was brought in by rail and poured into hoppers. It went up a conveyor belt and fed the hoppers, and those hoppers in turn fed the boilers that were down below. Again, I didn’t operate those that much. I ran the filter plant which supplied the drinking water for the Hanford Site. But, of course, you know, you’re around it all the time, so you pick it up. Pick up different things here and there. Franklin: And which powerhouse and filter plant did you work at? Robison: Both. I worked at both of them. Franklin: Which reactor area? 0:22:21 Robison: Well, so, 200 West area would’ve fed PFP, REDOX, T Plant, U Plant--any of those that required heat or--and then East Area, of course, fed the Tank Farms and PUREX and all the other facilities that were in operation at the time. Franklin: The water--the purification, that came from the river, right? So would that use one of the river pumphouses? Robison: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Robison: The water—in fact, it’s still being used today. Franklin: That’s the one by B Reactor, right? 0:22:54 Robison: Yes, mm-hmm, yup. That pumps raw water from the Columbia River. DOE has a water right to be able to do that. It pumps the raw water up to the 200 West Area now--because East Area’s filter plant is closed up. But the West Area still produces the drinking water, and sanitary water, in probably close to the same fashion as I did back in the early ‘90s. Franklin: Oh, wow. That’s really interesting. I’m wondering if you could talk about--when Hanford got the order to shut down, you were working there, right? Robison: I-- Franklin: With the switch from production, when they got the order to stop production? Were you-- Robison: Yeah, I don’t--I don’t remember the date they did that. I actually couldn’t talk very well to that. I don’t recall it, so--of when it actually happened, I don’t remember. Franklin: I was just--I was going to ask, because I’m wondering if you remember kind of the general mood of the community or of your coworkers, how people dealt with that switch. Was it a big deal, or did the work continue on? 0:24:09 Robison: Well, what I recall, which isn’t very much--I left the Hanford Site in 1993 and went to work for Department of Ecology, so I don’t recall a lot. But I know the Tri-Cities—and I was living in Yakima. The Tri-Cities went through booms and busts quite frequently. A lot of it dealt, or was a result of whatever happened to be going on at Hanford. So when there’s big layoffs, Tri-Cities would plummet, housing would plummet. And then when it was up and running, things were really good. So, as far as when they actually made the shutdown, I want to say that that happened a little bit later, after I had left the Site. Franklin: Okay. Robison: Yeah, sorry, I couldn’t really talk too much to that. Franklin: That’s okay. So what kind of work did you do for the other DOE, ecology? Robison: For Department of Ecology? Franklin: Yeah. 0:25:07 Robison: Well, when I originally left in ‘93, I hired on as a hazardous waste inspector. And then I moved to underground storage tanks. I did that for about 16 years. Franklin: So were you still working—and was that Hanford Site, Hanford underground storage, or was that different? Robison: No, I actually went to work for the Yakima office. Franklin: Oh, oaky. 0:25:26 Robison: So, the Yakima office, or central region of Washington, actually does regulate, even today, does regulate underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site. But the nuclear waste office that’s here in Richland regulates everything else at Hanford. So, when I left, I left the Hanford Site, essentially. I hadn’t been here for about 16 years. Franklin: Okay. But your work was still connected to the Hanford Site? Robison: Yeah, in a roundabout way it was, because the Department of Ecology regulates them. So my interaction with the Richland office wasn’t that frequent. Being from the Yakima office, we regulated different things, and Hanford wasn’t among them. Franklin: Okay. Robison: But I always had stayed in contact with Hanford. I’d been out here long enough and knew quite a few people. And then in 2009, I just decided to come back. So I’ve been back to Hanford since then. Franklin: Why did you decide to come back to work for MSA? 0:26:36 Robison: Well, because the amount of things that you can learn working at the Hanford Site are infinite. It’s a continual learning cycle every day you come to work. So it’s challenging, and I just knew that I would enjoy playing that role again, and being part of Hanford. Especially today because they’re doing cleanup and the restoration work. I wanted to be part of that history. Franklin: Yeah, because you had kind of started doing that. Robison: I started it when they were in production and had a really good time while I was out here. Franklin: So you’re currently environmental compliance officer, right? Robison: I am, mm-hmm. Franklin: The eco—yeah. And so, part of your job is ensuring regulations are met, right? Or being followed on the Site. 0:27:28 Robison: Yeah, it’s a little bit like consulting work, only MSA’s comprised--well, we take care of the infrastructure of the Hanford Site. So we make sure everybody else keeps running, essentially. We take care of the roads and the grounds and the water and power and all of that. So, my job is to help those organizations that supply, or that provide that support for infrastructure that make sure that they comply with all the regulations. So I deal with all kinds of stuff, whether it’s water or solid waste. I deal with hazardous waste; we deal with air requirements. Just about everything that’s environmental, my job is to make sure that they follow those rules and regulations. Franklin: Okay. So, I would imagine that includes working with a lot of tradespeople. Robison: Yeah, from time to time, I do, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering, in terms of regulations, how have things changed from when you started doing D&D work, kind of this ground-level, to where you are now? Robison: Oh, immensely. Franklin: How has work on the Hanford Site changed? 0:28:36 Robison: Immensely, because none of them really existed when I started in ‘83. You could kind of do whatever you wanted. They’ve come a long way, and I have to tell you, from the time I left in 1993 till I came back to work at Hanford in 2009, the change at the Hanford Site has just been—it’s been huge. It’s been significant. They’ve accomplished a lot. And they did so following all the rules and regulations. So there’s a lot out there now. Good example of that would be, in 1983, people were still dumping their waste oil that they’d removed from their cars down storm drains that fed straight to the Yakima River to the Columbia River. And today they don’t do that anymore. And that’s a result of regulation and saying not to do that and education, yeah. So it’s changed significantly. Franklin: So, wait, out on Site, people were dumping--? Robison: Well, yeah, well--they used to use waste oil for dust suppression. Of course, that’s not done anymore. Franklin: Right, to spray it down and then of course you’ve got waste oil all in the--which is going to get into the water. 0:29:49 Robison: Yes. And in groundwater. But we’ve learned so much from the ‘80s to today that--and it’s always evolving. Regulations are always changing as you learn new things, you know, more studies. I mean, you’re a historian, so if you were to study the history of regulations, every year they learn something new through technology or something, and so regulations change. That’s part of my job, is keeping up with those changes and helping the organizations out there implement those. Franklin: Right. Because the status quo today is only today’s status quo; it’s not the environment that you would’ve worked at in the ‘80s. Robison: Yeah, it was very different in the ‘80s. Franklin: So you mentioned that the D&D work initially there, it was great because you always felt like you were accomplishing something. Do you feel the same way today with your current work? 0:30:49 Robison: I do. Probably it’s--you know, I don’t get to see daily changes like I did in D&D. But I do, because I’m playing a small role in the overall picture of the Hanford cleanup. And that matters to me, it means a lot to me. Franklin: Great. Let’s see here, da, da, da. Okay. I’ve gone through all the fun--I have some stock questions. I’m just wondering if I had missed anything. Robison: Okay. Franklin: But we’ve really covered a lot of really great stuff. Robison: Well, I probably didn’t make much sense, and-- Franklin: No. Robison: I was trying to make sense. But you know, you get a picture in your mind, and getting it out of your mouth is-- Franklin: No, you’re doing great. And I do understand that, though. So you always lived in Yakima when you worked at Hanford. You’ve always lived outside of the Richland area, outside of Tri-Cities? Robison: I lived in Tri-Cities for a few years. Franklin: Okay. 0:31:41 Robison: Just prior to taking my job with the state. So that would’ve been in 1993. So I lived here from--I think I moved to the Richland area, I want to say, around ‘91. So I lived here for about two years. But, yeah, primarily in the Yakima area. Franklin: What sort of housing did you live in in Richland? Did you live in an Alphabet house or anything like that, or did you live in a newer-- Robison: I did. I actually bought a prefab when I lived here. It was a small three-bedroom. I just—I loved it. I was a single mom, and it was perfect for my son and I. Yeah. Yeah, I loved it. Franklin: I lived in a two-bedroom when I first got here, a two-bedroom prefab. Robison: Did you? Franklin: It was small. [LAUGHTER] Robison: Yeah, they’re notably--well, it’s less than 1,000 square feet. What is a prefab, like 900 square feet or something? Franklin: A three-bedroom, yeah. 0:32:43 Robison: I remember, I was doing--I had a boyfriend at the time, and we were--I wanted to do some remodeling because they had put--they had completely covered the entire house in brown paneling. So it was very dark, which, you know, for a small house, makes it even smaller. So I wanted to pull--we pulled--I wanted to pull all the paneling off and paint, or just paint the paneling. My boyfriend convinced me, let’s pull the paneling off. And it was sea blue plywood underneath of it. It was no insulation, no drywall. It was just plywood that had been painted a sea blue. It was horrible. So we quickly put up drywall and painted. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, those weren’t--I know if you know much about the history of those, but they weren’t meant to be any kind of permanent housing. Those were from the Great Depression, just relief houses. Robison: Yeah. Was that true for all of them? For the A? Because I remember an A house--I lived in an A house--it was a two-story-- 0:33:43 Franklin: No, those were built to be permanent houses. Those were built with like Douglas fir and they were constructed by an architect out of Spokane who--and DuPont demanded that they provide quality housing. But they couldn’t build the Alphabets fast enough, so the Army Corps kind of forced DuPont into bringing in all these prefabricated units. They didn’t want them, but they gave the prefabs to more blue collar-type folks. And the Alphabets were more for managers or white collar. Robison: Wow! Franklin: So there’s definite quality—because I live in an A now. There’s a definite quality difference. Robison: Wow, no, I had no idea. Because the quality of the house I was in was not good. Franklin: Yeah, they’re basically plywood. Robison: And that’s about all it was, was plywood that had been painted sea blue. It was—yeah, it was, oh my gosh, I got to get drywall up pretty quickly, because—yeah. But I still--I’d love to, when I was living there, I would’ve loved to known who’d owned it before me and when it was actually built. I never researched it. Franklin: What was the address? Robison: 803 Winslow. Franklin: Oh, okay. I used to live almost right next to there. Robison: Is that right? Franklin: It was 804 Stanton which is just like two blocks. Robison: Yeah, I think I-- Franklin: Two blocks down. Yeah, I know that neighborhood very well. 0:35:04 Robison: I’ve driven by there—when I worked for the state, I would have to come to the Tri-Cities, because I was underground storage tanks. So I regulated a lot of the gas stations—well, I regulated all of them for all of central Washington, including Benton County. And so I would go by my old house and I couldn’t hardly even recognize it. I had big, huge maple trees and they’re gone. Somebody took them all out and---yeah, but I would’ve loved to have known who lived there. Franklin: Oh, interesting. Robison: --back when they were in production. I had no idea about the quality of construction was so different, though. Franklin: Yeah, they were really meant--they were Depression era; they were meant for families in the Tennessee Valley—or, they were built by that Tennessee Valley Authority to just get people in houses and in relief communities. Yeah, it’s a very interesting socialist beginning of these--you know, yeah. They’re really meant for people who were in hard times. Robison: Wow, that’s interesting. Franklin: The fact that there’s so many of them--because you know that that neighborhood, it’s all--you know. Robison: It’s all prefab. Franklin: One-bedroom, two-bedroom, three-bedroom, two-bedroom, two-bedroom. And then you go in the Alphabets and it’s like A house, A house, A house, F house, A house, B house. Robison: Yeah. That’s true, yeah. Wow, interesting. Franklin: Yeah, I could tell you tons about them. I know too much. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. 0:36:35 Robison: Well, as far as secrecy, you know, we weren’t allowed to talk about anything. Security was really tight. Yeah, even in ‘83. It was really tight. Any sign of incident when you were inside the 200 East or 200 West Area, it was a total lock down. And they didn’t care if you were just getting off work. Gates were locked, and everybody stayed inside the gates. You were not allowed to leave. That was same true for—not leaving all the facilities, because they weren’t all high security facilities—but places like PFP were. And so you were searched going in and you were searched coming back out. That was just a daily occurrence; that’s just kind of the way that they were—they were pretty secure. All the badges checked every day. You weren’t allowed onsite without one. Everybody had to have a clearance. If you didn’t, you had a worker’s clearance, a W badge, and you weren’t allowed to do a whole lot. You could come to work and do some things, provided they weren’t inside any kind of secured areas. Franklin: Did you ever, like, forget your badge? Just like accidentally left it--? Robison: Oh, yeah. You had to bring Spudnuts if you forgot your badge. Franklin: Really? 0:37:51 Robison: Yeah, you had to bring doughnuts, yes. You’d be issued a temporary badge, but you’d be restricted as to what you could do for that day. Franklin: And everybody knew you and your crew-- Robison: Oh, you got harassed, yeah. You got harassed because, you know, when you couldn’t go into zones or do the job that you were supposed to do--and this wasn’t just true for D&D, it was for all the crafts, for everybody--you know, it impacted everybody else. They had to work that much harder because they were a man down, because that person forgot their badge. So, oh, yeah, you were harassed, yeah. Franklin: That’s funny. Robison: Yeah, I remember having to bring Spudnuts, yeah. Franklin: A Richland institution. Robison: Yes, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, I just had something on the tip of my brain and now I can’t-- Robison: About-- Franklin: Oh! Could you drive onto Site at that point, when you started work, or did you get bussed in? Robison: Yes. Well, you could do both. Franklin: Okay. 0:38:42 Robison: You could do both. I actually--I forgot, I probably should’ve mentioned, I did live in the Tri-Cities after I first hired on. I lived here for a couple of years. I lived in the Brass Lamp Apartments. What street was that on? Was that Van Giesen? I can’t remember. Anyhow, that’s how I was able to pick up Spudnuts out of--because I lived in Richland, so I would go pick those up. But, yeah, you could drive your car or take the bus, and I did both. Hated the bus. Franklin: Why? Robison: Hated, hated, hated the bus. Franklin: Really? 0:39:18 Robison: Oh, yeah. I didn’t ever--I tried hard not to ever have to. When I had to work shift schedule, the A, B, C, D, shift schedule, I took the bus a few times. Because it took forever. It’s slow. I hated the bus. Franklin: There wasn’t any like fun camaraderie on the bus-- Robison: No. Franklin: --with the people? Robison: No, no. Franklin: Oh. Must’ve been for a different--because I’ve--some of the older folks I’ve interviewed that you could only take the bus out there, they had special tables where they would play cards on the bus, and they had these very kind of fond memories. Robison: Oh, is that right? Franklin: Yeah, these very fond memories of the bus. Robison: No, they didn’t have any of that when I-- Franklin: Picking them up outside their house and dropping them off. Robison: Yeah, no, not when I took the bus. It was boring, everybody slept, it was--no, I hated it. So I drove myself a lot. Just--yeah. Franklin: Interesting. What about--I’m wondering if you remember, you know, how the community or you dealt with major international events, such as, I guess the first one I’d like to ask about is Chernobyl. Because you would’ve been working onsite at that time. Robison: Yeah, that was, when, I want to say ‘86? Franklin: Yeah. Robison: Is that when that happened? Franklin: Yep. 0:40:36 Robison: You know, there was concern, even on the parts of all the staff, on the Hanford Site. It was a long ways away. I think the talk, which was probably among just the general populus, was is the cloud going to come over to the United States? And then, is Hanford going to blow up? I mean, yeah, that was pretty scary. I remember receiving security briefings from our supervisors and managers about, you’re still not to talk to anybody about things. And then some reassurances that, we’re fine, we’re not going to blow up over here. And of course we didn’t. But, yeah, I do actually remember Chernobyl. That was a scary time. Franklin: I bet. And then just a couple years later, the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War pretty much ended. Robison: Ended. Franklin: Kind of in a—you know, not so much a bang, but kind of a whimper or a fizzle. And I’m wondering if you could talk about how that may have affected you or the community, you know, to have this decades-long conflict, and the whole reason, really, for all this activity at Hanford is now kind of gone. 0:41:55 Robison: Yeah, and the Berlin--you know, I’m probably not one of the better--yeah, probably not very familiar with that. I mean, I don’t recall the mood of the people. It wasn’t something I stayed focused on. Franklin: How did you feel? Robison: You can probably scratch that part right out of the interview. Pbbt. Franklin: Sure. Well, how did you feel about it, though, because I imagine that--you were aware, right? How did you--or, what did you see that Hanford would do after that? Robison: You know, I didn’t—I don’t know that I gave it a huge amount of thought, but--because, again, even in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, environmental wasn’t real concept then. So I don’t know that I’d be very good at telling you what my frame of mind was at the time. I was in my 20s. Yeah, probably, you could scratch that part from the interview. Franklin: No, it’s-- Robison: Aaaahh, cut! No. Franklin: We all experience things differently and often when-- Robison: I honestly--I mean, I remember watching the Berlin Wall fall and all that on TV, but I don’t--I really don’t remember what my mood was or what my thought processes were then, so-- Franklin: It’s fine. You know, it’s one of those events that maybe grows more—or we think about how significant it was later, you know? Or people that didn’t experience it and lived through it maybe attribute more to it than people that--where that was just life for a while. Robison: Yes, yeah. Franklin: Don’t worry about it. What was I going to ask? Shoot, I had another question. Robison: I know when you were out on the Site, you were talking about wanting to know more about Affirmative Action. Franklin: Yes, that was actually my next—yeah. I’m wondering if you could tell me about that. Just, how--yeah. How it played out for you and for others, and how it changed the workforce. 0:43:53 Robison: Well, for me, I didn’t realize it at the time that that’s why I was being hired, was that it was part of Affirmative Action. You know, being 19, I just—it didn’t cross my mind. All I cared about was getting a job, but I actually attribute my entire career to this day to that affirmative action, to that one phone call, because I wouldn’t be sitting here today after 30-plus years doing environmental work, had it not been for that affirmative action. So, my whole career is based on it and I’m appreciative of it. I know that there’s some controversy that surrounds Affirmative Action and whether it really did any good, or does it play any role anymore. And I guess I’m living proof that it does, or that it did. Did it work for everybody? Probably not. But it did for me. And so I’m glad that it was around. Franklin: How did the workforce change that you noticed from when you started to--did it really open up a lot of positions for women, did you find yourself over time working with more and more women and minorities? 0:44:58 Robison: You know, truthfully, I did not. And there’s still, in my opinion, there’s still a considerable amount of men on the Hanford Site, as compared to women. That could just be, there’s people that worked out there for 40 years and a lot of people that have worked out there for 30 and 40 years. So, could just be that that new workforce just hasn’t been able to inch their way in. I mean, I do think that Affirmative Action has certainly helped, because I think that there’s women in their careers today that, like myself, that wouldn’t be there without it. There’s other minorities that are in their careers today that wouldn’t be here without it. So, do I think that there’s some room to grow still? Absolutely. But I think it’s coming along. I certainly saw a lot more changes off the Hanford Site when I worked for Department of Ecology than I do on the Site. Life outside of Hanford’s a very, very different place. It’s much more sophisticated and--what’s a good word? It’s more--it’s a more diverse world off the Hanford Site. Franklin: How is Hanford less sophisticated than the outside? 0:46:37 Robison: I think that Hanford--that they could--and maybe it’s because I’m not involved in some of the more newer technologies like what they have at Tank Farms, so I’m certainly not an expert at speaking at it. But in my own little world of environmental and where I’m located, I think that there’s easier and better ways to do things, but process and procedure’s so ingrained on the Hanford Site that everybody’s afraid to deviate. And I think that that’s not a good thing. I think finding new ways and new alternatives should be a goal. Franklin: Right. Robison: But, you know, they’re getting there. They’re coming around. I mean, they have recycling programs today that they didn’t use to have in the ‘80s. They’re getting caught up. But it is more diverse offsite than it is working on the Site. Franklin: I’ve noticed that, too. It’s-- Robison: Yeah. Just don’t use that in the interview. I want to keep my job. Franklin: Well, no, I think-- Robison: I don’t want DOE to get upset with me. Franklin: Oh, I don’t think—I mean, that’s of levels so far beyond. Maybe that’s something that they still need to hear. I think it does matter, too, by profession. I’m a subcontractor in the cultural resources department, and that department is majority-women. And I find, in the work I’m in, in archives, male archivists are a minority. Largely because librarianship and archives has commonly been a woman’s profession. Robison: Yeah, yup. Franklin: Which is—and I think maybe a lot of these trades, crafts, D&D, you know, have been--there’s that disparity--I mean, it’s hard to over-- Robison: To overcome that, yeah-- Franklin: Decades, years--I mean, decades of-- 0:48:40 Robison: And you’re absolutely right. I mean, a lot of the crafts out there has traditionally been men’s jobs and women just don’t enter those fields. Excuse me. They’re more into the professional, you know, environmental-type work that I do. And there are several women that work out there. It’d be good if they could recruit or try a little bit harder to have more diversity. I don’t just mean women, I mean the minorities as well. But again, I think that’s coming. I mean, I could see that coming even before I retire from the Hanford Site, just because the workforce out there is a much older workforce. They’ve been there for thirty-plus years. All the contractors know that a big retirement’s coming for a lot of different people out there. That’s when I think that the diversity and the changes will start to occur. And maybe some changes in procedures and processes that will help make a big difference. Franklin: Yeah, that really struck me when I meet a lot of folks out there, there are so many people, oh, I started here in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, late ‘70s, you know? Robison: They’ve been there for a long time. Franklin: And they’ve endured all these contractor changes. And it seems maybe it’s a result of having so many contractors that they just keep the people that know how to do the job, because the new contractor needs that expertise and so-- Robison: Oh, yeah, I mean--well, you know, DOE just recently sent out a request for proposals and new acquisitions. So even my company, Mission Support, is having to rebid. Franklin: Oh, I know, we’re a subcontractor of MSA. Robison: Yes. Franklin: And this is funded by MSA. Robison: Yeah. So whoever gets the contracts, it would be crazy for them to just bring in a whole new workforce. You couldn’t do it. Franklin: No. 0:50:36 Robison: I mean, Hanford is truly a unique operation in what they deal with daily. You do have skilled people, you do have to have knowledgeable people about what they’re doing, or things would be really, really bad out there, could be really bad. So it would be good, and I think that they’ve got a plan in place where they start training some--bringing on some newer people so that the ones that are still there could get them trained up on how they do their jobs. It is a unique set of skills that’s required to work out there. You have your basics and then you have to kind of learn the way Hanford does things. And that’s not, you know, trying to diss them or something. It’s truly because it’s unique. They have to handle things a certain way. Franklin: Right, there’s unique challenges, there’s unique regulations. Robison: It’s chilly in here. Franklin: It is, I’m sorry. There’s a lot of-- Robison: He’s freezing, too. Franklin: We turned the heat--they keep this room unheated when it’s not in use. We turned the heat on earlier in the day, but, I’m sorry, it takes a little-- Robison: Oh, it’s all right. It’s just why I’m kind of like grinning because it’s a little chilly. Franklin: No, I know. I have my coat on, too. Because it’s cold! So, yeah, because there’s a lot of institutional knowledge that may leave soon. Robison: Yes, they’re already starting to leave. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve noticed that. 0:52:00 Robison: Yeah, that’s a true statement. And Hanford needs that knowledge. What you’re doing, I think, is just, it’s phenomenal. I think it’s really great that you’re going to capture, obviously not all of the history, but some of it. Franklin: Going to try. Robison: So that you know, kind of, where we came from and where we’re going. I mean, I just think that’s great. And they need that at Hanford as well, because things like with what just happened at the PUREX tunnels. If some of those individuals had been gone, we wouldn’t have known what was in there. Hanford’s really good at documenting everything, but I just think having the people there--you got to capture that knowledge somehow. Franklin: Hanford’s also done so many things that aren’t documented. A lot of burials, for example, were not well-documented. Which is why they find things every now and then, right? You know. You’ve probably found stuff-- Robison: Yeah. Franklin: --that wasn’t supposed--I’ve always found that to be interesting, too. Hanford’s really good at documentation on some things, and then-- 0:53:09 Robison: And then others maybe not so much. Well, I think that was probably more in the ‘40s and ‘50s when things were quite, you know, really secretive. One of the things I like to give Hanford credit for, for knowing—for accomplishing what they did in such a short amount of time—in less than two years built an entire nuclear reservation. That’s pretty impressive. And not having any knowledge on how to deal with the waste and the cleanup. You know, to me, they’ve done phenomenal at addressing the issues that were done back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and figuring out how to deal with them today. I think they’ve, so far, they’ve done a--they’re trying to do a good job. I realize it’s slow, but it is a big task. Franklin: Well, and also the processing waste wasn’t a priority for Hanford for a long time. Robison: Correct. Franklin: It was production. They had quotas and so many of those folks came from regular industries, from chemical industries, where they’d processed the waste in the way they knew how. They pumped it in tanks, they stored it. Robison: Yeah. Or dumped it on the ground. Yup, yup. Franklin: In the ‘40s, that’s what you-- 0:54:26 Robison: That was an acceptable--well, they didn’t know what environmental harm, you know, would come of that. I mean, and again, that’s a good example. In the ‘80s, environmental rules, regulations, didn’t really exist that much, where today, they do. At least now they’re addressing them. Franklin: Right. I guess it’s funny, as a child of the ‘80s, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in just my lifetime. I mean, in terms of like you said, in ‘83 when you started, you just couldn’t do that kind of work now. You wouldn’t suit up and go into the solar basin-- Robison: Right, and-- Franklin: And use five-gallon-- 0:55:07 Robison: And use buckets to muck muck into drums. No, they’d find something more sophisticated to--and keep the workers out of harm’s way. But, you know, again, the technology just didn’t exist like it does today. So they have, in my opinion, they have come a long ways. I mean, Hanford has. And when I left in ‘93, all the reactors were still in process of being shut down and cleaned up. When I came back in 2009, almost all of them had been cocooned. So in that 16 years, that was an enormous amount of work. So I thought that was really impressive. 300 Areas is completely changed. For cleaning up literally a radioactive site, I think they’re doing pretty good. Franklin: Have you been out to B Reactor since it’s become a national park? Robison: Yeah, briefly. Yeah, a couple times. I actually was stationed out at B Reactor, so, like I said, we did fuel storage-- Franklin: Oh, during D&D? 0:56:11 Robison: Yes, during D&D. And we did asbestos abatement in all of the reactors. So I’d been in B Reactor a number of times. In fact, I could show you where my changeroom was at in there. Franklin: Oh, wow. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on B Reactor being a museum. Robison: Oh, I think that’s awesome. I think it’s one of the coolest things that DOE said that they wanted to do. I just think that having--preserving that history to show the contributions that those people made and that all the scientists, and even the government, made to the war efforts, I just think is phenomenal. I think it’s really cool. Franklin: Cool. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: So my last question is a big open-ended question. And so, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? 0:57:11 Robison: The amount of commitment and patriotism--and that seems like kind of a corny word to young people today, but--I just think that the people that worked here during the Cold War and even today are really just out there to do the right thing, and to give their small contribution, to make this country better. I’d like for them to know and learn or come to appreciate the level of effort that was put into what they accomplished out here in such a short amount of time. To me, it’s awe-inspiring. Franklin: Well, great. Is there anything else that you’d like to add? Robison: No. I can’t really think of anything. Franklin: Okay. Robison: It was easier to talk to you out at my office than right here. Franklin: Sorry! Well, I hope it was still enjoyable. Robison: Yeah, no, it was. It was. I’m thrilled to get to be a part of this. I really am. Franklin: Yeah, the imposed environment of the studio can sometimes change things. But for continuity reasons and things, we like to have a-- Robison: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Also the sound is--we have good sound. Robison: Do you? Franklin: Soundproofing. And lights. Well, thank you, so much, for coming-- Robison: Thank you for having me. Franklin: --and talking about everything. And you know, and thank you for doing what you do in continuing to do environmental work. It’s a good mission. Robison: Oh, you’re welcome. I really do thoroughly enjoy it. Again, I feel like I get to play a small role in a really huge picture, but it’s my role; it’s my contribution. I love history and happy to do it. Franklin: Well, now you’ve helped our collections two ways. By first helping with the lamps and now by doing an oral history with us. Robison: Yeah. Franklin: So your imprint there. Robison: And you can count on my continued support. I’ll keep looking for stuff for you. Franklin: Good. Please do. Tom Hungate: Okay. Franklin: Awesome. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:29 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor Plutonium Finishing Plant Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Christina Robison Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Christina talks about her career as one of the first women to do "D&D" (decontamination and decommissioning) work at the Hanford Site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01-11-2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F10b72a1bb887a33181ac6eabae5a358e.jpg e4bfb4cd44077ca2ec6d0844208858b6 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F02706db0d9e51e4754e345df41b8f353.mp4 f2c38a4f81e871c00bf44e4b0f9b7d96 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Margie Ann McCormack Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Margie Ann McCormack on April 27, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Margie about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. ANd for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Marjorie Ann McCormack: Yes. M-A-R-J-O-R-I-E. A-N-N. McCormack, M-C-C-O-R-M-A-C-K. Franklin: Great. And thank you, Marjorie for coming in here to do this oral history interview with us. So I understand that your involvement with Atomic Energy and kind of what became the National Labs and thigns starts before you came to Hanford, and it starts at Oak Ridge. So I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your time there and what led you to come to Hanford. McCormack: Well, I took my training, the x-ray training in Knoxville. So then I went to work in Oak Ridge. And the war had just ended, and it was a military hospital still. So all the doctors were officers, and I went to work for a very wonderful x-ray technician--doctor. He was from San Diego, originally, but he was working there. He was just a wonderful guy. But he got mustered out. And they started to fill in the places in Oak Ridge Hospital there with civilian people. So, a civilian doctor who came to work for us, and he was setting up an office of his own in Knoxville. Well, they had two x-ray departments there. One an in-patient, and the other a regular out-patient one. So I was sent in the outpatient one. Well, there was a young man, an x-ray technician who had been in the service, and the two of us were working in this outpatient place. Well, he came to me one day, this young man, and he said, I don’t know what to do, he says. This doctor, radiologist, everyday is asking me to take some very important attachments for the x-ray machine out and put it in his car. So we decided what he was doing was he was furnishing his office in Knoxville with the equipment ther ein the place. Well, that was--he was stealing government equipment. So, he said, I don’t know what to do. And I said, well, you’re married and have children, and I’m single. I said, I’ll go report him. So I did. And somhow or other, he got word, and fired me. And so there I was, at the ripe old age of 23, being fired from my job. So my next-door neighbor was head of personnel. And he said, well, are you going to contest it? And I said, why? I don’t want to work for him. And he doesn’t want me! And he said, well, are you goigng to fill out some papers to send somewhere that you’re loking for a job? And I said, no. I don’t think at this point, I don’t even know whether I want to stay in x-ray or not. But unbeknownst to me, he borught a couple of folders over and filled them out with my help. That’s when I saw them. So I went home to my home in Virginia and sort of though, well, what am I going to do here? And lo and behold, he had filled a couple out and sent them off, and I had an offer for a job in Texas. So I called the number and they said, yes, they’d love to have me. And so I thought, well, fine. But then I didn’t hear anything more from them. And so in the meantime, I got an offer for a job out in Oak Ridge--I mean, excuse me, hold up a minute--out in Washington State. So I wrote back and said, well, yes, I would be interested in your job. And they wrote and said, well, we’d like to have you. So, I got the job here. And I wrote and said, well--it said Richland on the thing. So I went and wrote out there and said, well, where do I come in to? And I can’t find Richland on the map. So they said, well, come in to Pasco. So in due time, I got on a train and three days later, I came to Pasco. Well, to digress a little bit, I had met a woman in Chicago and she happened to ride out with me. Her family was meeting her, and I was supposed to have had a guy--it was the train came in at midnight. I was supposed to have had a driver to take me to a hotel. I didn’t have any--and I called--it was called transient quarter. And I said, do you have a room for Marjorie Hyatt to night? And they siad, no, we don’t have any record of it. And there I was at midnight in Pasco, no driver, no place to stay. Which is--well, where do I go from here? But her lady that I had ridden out with, her family was meeting her. And she realized that something was happening. So she said, let’s hold off a little bit. And when I called and they didn’t have any rooms, they said I could have a room for one night. So they brought me in to Richland and I had my one night at this estate. I was a little confused about that time. I didn’t know whether I wanted to work for these people called General Electric. Was that right, GE, General Electric? And got up the next morning and looked out the window, and they said, there’s a big river, and tehy told me this was a desert! So I went down and I said, is there somewhere here I could eat? And they said, well, across the way, there’s a big cafeteria. You can get breakfast. So I was all dressed up, you know, and I started across this big lot of grass. I’d never seen one of these watering things that turns and sprays. And one of them sprayed me and got me just soaked. Well, that was the end of the line for me. I thought, well, I’ll go back. I’m dying to get back home. And when I opened the door to the TQ, they said, are you Miss Hyatt? And he says, they’re out there looking all over for you. He said, he found the notice this morning that you were supposed to have come in last night and have a room. And they didn’t know where I was. So that was my entry into Richland. But everything was straightened out and I joined the--I got my job and I joined a group called Dorm Club. It was a single club for all the people who-- Franklin: The Dorm Club? McCormack: It was called the Dorm Club. Franklin: And what year did you come out? McCormack: 1947. Franklin: Okay. McCormack: And from then on, I loved it. Franklin: Oh, okay. How did you get involved in x-ray? McCormack: Well, I went to college to be a lab technician, and then I went into Knoxville to go and they had a hospital there. They had an opening for an x-ray technician and a lab technician. And they said, would you mind switching from lab to x-ray first? We have an opening there now. And I siad, well, I’ll give it a try. And I hadn’t been in x-ray three days till I knew that that was what I wanted to do, and I never did do the lab. Franklin: Oh, wow. So did you spend the war, then, in college? McCormack: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And wehre did you go to college? McCormack: Mary Washington College. It was a division of the University of Virginia. It was in Fredericksburg. Franklin: Okay. And so you got here in ‘47 and you, besdies having kind of a rough first day, you--so can you tell me a little bit more about the Dorm Club, this kind of singles club, and what single life would’ve been like in the rough-and-tumble town. McCormack: Let me get a drink here. Franklin: Oh, sure. McCormack: Well, when I came here, all the single people lived in dorms. You had to be married to get a house. But they had a lot of dorms. They had, at one end of town, had women’s dorms, and the other end had dorms for the men. And the Dorm Club was just a reason for all the single people to get together. Franklin: Okay. Was wanting to get out of the dorms, you think, kind of a motivator for some people to get together? McCormack: Well, we were having so much fun--[LAUGHTER]--that I never heard any complaints that way. The single people just didn’t get rooms. At that time I came, they weren’t sure that Richland was still going to be there, you know, and there was a time where they thought we’d be folding all up. And then the--what was the name of the war about that time? Franlkin: Korean War? McCormack: No. [camera man]: Second World War. McCormack: So, about that time, the war had fracas with Russia. Franklin: Oh, the Cold War. McCormack: Cold War, that’s what I’m looking for, was the Cold War came along and all the sudden, things boomed again. And I was here, came here in 1947 in April, and that summer, they hired 100 new tech grads. And, boy, was that fun. 99 of them were single. [LAUGHTER] And there was all these dorms. And that sort of what spurred things on in the area. The Dorm Club is where we got together, once a week. It was on Mondays. The boys, as I say, lived in the dorms at one end, and we in the other. But there was something going on all the time in the Dorm Club. Every Sunday night, there was a dance. Different places around town, there was two places that had a dance floor and a music nickelodeon or something like that. So that’s where we had the dances. And after a while, we started organizing a few things. LIke there wa s acamera club, and there was a bridge club. There was different kind of organizations. So there wasn’t any reason for anyone to sit around and mope; there was plenty of things to do. The war was still--you know, just finished. The men didn’t have any cars. But as time went on, the fellas started getting cars. And a lot of them were second-hand cars, not what you called the fancy cars, but they had wheels. So that’s when we started doing a few things out of town, like going hiking and camping in the summer. We tried to go to the city when something music or something was being shown, either Portland or Seattle. So we’d go--what’s that? Franklin: Can you describe an average--or can you describe the room in the dorm for me? What did the rooms look like? McCormack: Oh! They had singles and doubles. I was never in the men’s dorm, believe it or not. But it was single rooms, and it was a good-sized double room. And it had two beds, windows in the front. We each had a desk and a closet, a chair, and all the linens were furnished, and we had daily--somebody came in every day and made the beds and everything. We had it pretty easy that way. We were comfortable. And I happened to be in a dorm with this big cafeteria, just like walking across this room. So taht’s where you went to eat. Franklin: For your three meals? McCormack: Uh-huh. Three meals, yeah. It was a big huge cafeteria. Well, the building’s still there. Franklin: Oh, really? McCormack: Yeah! Franklin: Which building is it? McCormack: It’s changed into several things, but the main building is still there. Frankin: ANd the women’s dorms were kind of down by where Albertsons was-- McCormack: Mm-hmm. Franklin: --right, off of Lee? Kind of around that area? McCormack: Mm-hmm, Lee Street. In fact, it was Albertsons I think that they tore down and put some of the buildings. Franklin: Oh, interesting. And so what was--you started work at Kadlec, right, Kadlec Hospital. So I’m wondering if you could tell me kind of about an average day at work? Kind of what your duties were and how you McCormack: Well, I went to work at 8:00. Eight to five everyday. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the original hospital there. It was one long building with wings. Government issue. And we had a very nice x-ray department with two rooms, two different x-ray machines, and a portable facility. It was for the workers and for the civilians. Once in a while, something would come up and we’d have a busy day of 100 patients, government ones. Others, it was just the regular people around town, like any other town that needed x-ray business. Good equipment. Fraknlin: What was it like to--what was recreation like in Richland at the time? Was the Uptown mall here when you moved here? Or was that constructed later? McCormack: It was a very small town. That’s why the Dorm Club was so busy. There wasn’t much to do. We had two theaters, which the buildings are still there. There is one of them original, the theater group bought the building. Franklin: Oh, the Richland Players, right? McCormack: Uh-huh, bought the building and it’s still in use. And the other one just lasted until not too many years ago, and it was torn down. And that’s along George Washington Way, pretty close to where the--I keep forgetting. The big hotel. [LAUGHTER] Franlkin: OH, yeah, yeah. McCormack: I was trying to think of the name. Franklin: No, that’s okay. Yeah, is it the Red LIon, is that the one you’re thinking of? McCormacK: Yeah. It was pretty close to that. Franklin: Yeah. And so how long did you work at Kadlec for? McCormack: I worked at Kadlec nine years. Franklin: Okay. And did your duties change at all during that time, or were you still a technician for the whole time? McCormack: I was x-ray tehcnician the whole time. Franklin: How was it, being so far away from your fmaily? And kind of being single and alone, kind of by yourself in Richland? McCormack: Well, I was so disillusioned when I left Oak Ridge, and I got out here, and I just felt like I was in another world. ANd I was, really. And I put Oak Ridge behind me and just had a wonderful time here. I actually--you talk about taking somehting out of your brain. I actually forgot the name of that doctor, because he was such a scoundrel. I digress a little bit. They didn’t even wait to get a replacement for him; they fired him. Which was pretty unusual then. So I just couldn’t remember his name. Franklin: Sure. McCormack: I didn’t want to think about him. Franklin: Did you go back home--did you go back to the east coast at all to visit your family the first few years you were here? McCormack: I went back just about every second or third year until my mother died and until I got married and had three little kids. I didn’t travel so much then. Franklin: Sure, sure. And I heard that you--one of the people that you knew from when you first moved here was Steve Buckingham, right? McCormack: Oh, yes. [LAUGHTER] Franlkin: And how did you meet Steve Buckingham? McCormack: At the Dorm Club. Franklin: At the Dorm Club. So he was also living in the dorms, too, right? McCormack: Mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: And you’re still friends with Steve, right? McCormack: Still friend.s We dated for two or three years. He wa sa great guy, because he’s a local--that being Washington State. We had a good time together, but we just never got married, and drifted away. My birthday--I am one week older than Steve. ANd we used to have birthday parties together. We were good friends, but it just wasn’t meant to be married. Franklin: Sure, and that happens. Well, that’s realy sweet. So you met your husband, Jerry. How did you meet? McCormack: By the time he came along, I had moved into a prefab here--I digress again. For a very short time, when I came here, they thought they wren’t going to be here, so they started letting a few places out to single people. So there was a few prefabs. And there was one that had three girls in it. When one of those girls left, a friend of mine took her place. ANd when somebody in the house left, another one took their place. And finally one day, they called and said--me, I’m still in the dorm--would you like to move in with us? So I moved into a three-bedroom prefab. They only had about three of them left, because things had picked up here in this Cold War, and housing was short by then. So I was lucky to be in one. Franklin: And how was that different from living in the dorm? McCormack: Well, we could do what we wanted to. We had the house, and it was completely furnished. The dorm was a dorm, you know, with all those people. We had our own ways of doing things. I guess the interesting thing was, it became this social house for a lot of our friends, because they would come to the house. We couldn’t do the dorm. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, you didn’t have the space to have people over, right? McCormack: I’m sorry? Franklin: In the house, you had space to have people over and the yard-- McCormack: Yeah, it was just a normal three-bedroom house. It wasn’t a huge thing. But the boys in the dorms loved to come, because they were in the dormitory, too, and just had a room. But it actually was a lot of fun there. We had a lot of good times there in the prefab. We could--no overnights, though. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, of course. When you moved in, did it still have most of the original furniture and fixtures that it had come with? McCormack: If you didn’t have it, it was furnished. All the furniture was furnished in this, even to the linens. The oly thing we had to furnish ourselves was our pots and pans and dishes. We sent the laundry out when we wanted; they came and picked it up, no charge. Franklin: Really? McCormack: Well, yeah. They paid for things back then. We paid $35 a month for the prefab. And that was for all three of us. Franklin: Wow. McCormack: Yeah. And any time anything went wrong, the stove wasn’t working, the lights, we called the number and they came and fixed it, no charge. [LAUGHTER] It was pretty cheap living there. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that sounds kind of nice. I don’t get that kind of service from my landlord. McCormack: No. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Franklin: So then in ‘56, you met your husband. Right, 1956? McCormack: No. I met him in 1950. I was here in ‘47 and he came in ‘50. Franklin: Oh, okay, sorry. You were married in ‘56. McCormack: ‘56, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did he also live in the dorms as well when you first got here? McCormack: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did you guys also meet in the Dorm Club? McCormack: Wel, that’s an interesting story, too. One night one of the fellas I knew called and said could we bring a fella up tonight? It’s his birthday. And I said, oh, sure. So in due time, three or four fellas went and rang the doorbell and marched in. Each one of them had a six-pack of beer on their shoulder. And so I didn’t drink beer, but the fellas did. And so one of them said, Jerry, show us how you can stand on your head on a beer can. And guess what? He did. [LAUGHTER] And then they left. And I never did really know who this guy was. He was just the guy that had the birthday. About, oh, gosh, it must’ve been a year or so later, another friend said, would you like to go skiing with us this weekend? And I said, sure, I’d like to. And we went out to Stevens Pass and we rented a cottage. It was one of those that had the real steep roof and the snow was up to here. So the guy said, let’s go tobogganing off the roof of the chalet or whatever you call it. We’d stand like we were on a big sled, and then somebody would give us a push. Well, I happened to be the one across the top. This guy came leaping up, and he missed with his foot and he hit me in the back of the head like this. Franklin: Oh, jeez. McCormack: Well, that was my husband. I knew who he was that time. [LAUGHTER] So that’s how we really met. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right. Oh, that’s funny. And Jerry was a chemical engineer? Right? McCormack: Yes, chemical. Franklin: So when you got married, then, you stopped working at Kadlec and-- McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: And became a full-time-- McCormack: Full-time. Franklin: Full-time mother and housekeeper, everything. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: And so then I must imagine you must’ve moved out of the prefab. And where did you--so this would’ve been ‘56, so you would’ve gone to another government-run house. McCormack: Yes, we did. We went to [unknown] house. It was clear across town from where I lived in the prefab. And we stayed there until, oh, about three or four years. And then moved into a--here again I forget its name. And then we decided--our third child was on the way by then, and we decided it was time to buy a house. There wasn’t much choice. We were looking for a special--Jerry wanted a basement and one other thing. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, there were very few houses on the market, but we finally found one that we liked that had what he wanted on it, honestly. He wanted a basement and four bedrooms. That was what it was. Franklin: Four bedrooms. And what was--the house you finally purchased, was it an Alphabet house, or was it newer construction? McCormack: It was a D house. Franklin: Oh, a D house. McCormack: Uh-huh. And they only made about six or seven of them. Franklin: Yeah, that’s not a very common one. McCormack: So that was why it was nice, because it had space and it was a prefab--it wasn’t a prefab, I mean. It was a government house, but it was bigger and a little bit better-built, I think. And we’re still in it. Franklin: Oh, wow. That’s great. I wondered if oyu could talk about the experience of going through the privatization of Richland, when the governement sold off Richland in ‘58, and how richland changed from being a government town to being a private town. McCormack: Well, you know, it happened gradually. The houses were sold, and I don’t know that there was a great deal of difference in the town, really, except that people were in the homes. Most of them who had bought the homes, they owned them istead. But then there was a lot of remodeling started, because you couldn’t do that until the house was in your own hands. But there was quite a bit of remodeling. In fact, the prefabs, it’s hard to find a prefab that hasn’t been remodeled. You know, there was 1, 2, 3, you know that. And it was hard to find just a little old one-bedroom one, like there were any of the prefabs. Franklin: Oh, sure, yeah, I live in a two-bedroom prefab, and it’s been extensively remodeled. Which makes sense. Jillian, who you met earlier, she lives in one that has been much less remodeled. It’s probably not original, but it’s much closer. And it’s very different. It feels like two totally different houses, even though they’re exactly the same size. From the outside, they look almost exactly the same. McCormack: Well, you understood why, when we got one, and only three or four single gals who had one, how much it meant to all the fellas to have a house to go to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, yeah, I lived in dorms in college, and I imagine, gathered from your experience, sounds like the dorms here must’ve been a bit like college dorms. McCormacK: That’s an interesting, because my husband says, being in the dorms was like being in college with classes and with money. Franklin: I was going to say--because everybody has a job, so you can actually afford the beer. McCormack: Yeah. No classes and money. Franklin: Taht’s interesting. LIke grown-up dorms. For-- McCormack: Well, they still had rules and regulations, like no gals on the second floor, I guess. Franklin: Oh, sure. McCormack: I was going to say, I never was in one of them, but boys, as soon as they could, they got out and bought--or got into a prefab or something like that. By that time, they were starting to make a few buildings. A single man could get that. A single wouldn’t couldn’t, but they allowed to single men to get in. And if you had two men. And that was the first time for the fellas getting out of the dorms. Franklin: Yeah, it’s really interesting to hear at that time about a group fo single women living together, because the image of Richland then is such a family town, or of single people living in dorms. But three single women living together, do you know, did that ever cause a stir, or was anybody ever concerned about your safety or anything liek that? McCormack: well, it was a pretty safe town. [LAUGHTER] It really was. Yeah, pretty safe town. But there were some people--I know one couple got married and they couldn’t get a house and she came to me and said, why don’t you girls move back to the dorm and let us have the house? And I just looked at her. Are you kidding? But she was serious. Franklin: I bet she was, I bet she was. And so you raised three children in Richland. And what was that--do you think their childhood was different from your own, or--I mean, because Richland’s kind of a unique town in its--everybody kind of works in the same place and many of the houses are very similar, and I’m wondering if you could kind of contrast that with your own McCormack: Well, see, I--living here with three boys was--I don’t think there was anything really too different from, like, if I had my three kids in Virginia. They went to school a block away, and the church was not too far. It had a lot of advantages, really. You know, I’ve never thought about it that way. But they’re good kids, so I guess we raised them okay. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure, yeah. Yeah. And so they all went to the local schools and everything, Columbia High--? McCormack: Yup. Yeah, we live right by, a block away from Jefferson. And tehy went there and then they went over to--what’s the one across the--junior high, and then Hanford. In fact, our oldest son was the second graduating class from Hanford. Franklin: Oh, from Hanford Hihg. Oh, so right over here by where we are today. McCormack: Yeah. But it was sixth grade and then two or three grades. I don’t know why I can’t remember. And then Hanford High. Franklni: Sure. Did Hanford’s role--because you knew what was being produced at Hanford when you came out to work for GE, right? McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Was its role in the Cold War ever--how did you feel about that, and did it ever concern you, having a family here, for your own safety, being so close to not only an area that produced plutonium, but also what might have been a target in case of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union? McCormack: Well, things were still pretty secret when I first came here. Of course I was at Oak Ridge, see, for a while. And the day I hired in was the day that peace was decided. So it was still pretty army-like. You had to get--are you familiar with Oak Ridge? Franklin: Not very. McCormack: Well, the whole area, the town and everything, is enclosed down there. And you had to go through a gate and show your pass, even for housewives. Well, here, it was different. Here the town was wide open. They couldn’t--you had to work for somebody here, but you weren’t enclosed in a fence or anything. Franklin: Sure, people from Kennewick could drive in and visit somebody from Richland and vice versa without having to go through anything. You couldn’t get out to the Site without-- McCormack: No, uh-unh. Franklin: --you had to have a bus. McCormack: You had to have the bus--the pass and everything to get out there. Franklin: Sure. Do you remember anything, any kind of civil defense measures, or did you ever have to practice evacuations or duck-and-cover, things like that? McCormack: Well, every now and then, the whistle would blow. But we never had to evacuate or do anything. BUt still, every now and then, they still ring that whistle on a certain day. Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember President Kennedy’s visit in 1963? To dedicate the N Reactor? McCormack: Yes. Franklin: Did you go out to see him? McCormack: No, I didn’t get to. I had to stay with home with the three kids, and my neighbor went. Franklin: Oh, okay. McCormack: Yeah, I missed that. Franklin: Oh, sure. Were ther eany other events or incidents that happened at Hanford or in the Tri-Cities that stand out to you? McCormack: When they stold the houses, that was a big event? Franklin: Yeah? And you guys weren’t in your house long enough--were you on the priority list for the house that you lived in at that point? McCormack: The house we bought? Franklin: No, in 1958 when they sold the houses, were you the resident that could buy that house? McCormack: They had just said they were up for sale, and the people went over to see it were ready to sell it. By that time, they must’ve bought it themselves. And they were ready to sell it. They were moving on to another place. By that time, they were building houses out north, and they were building a new house out north. And we bought the house from them. Franklin: I’m wondering if--could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work at Kadlec? McCormack: Well, didn’t bother me, because I had a pass to go out there. But that was the only way I had one is because I had the [unknown] business. But you just didn’t go out there. You could go as far as the fence around ther,e but unless you had a pass, you just didn’t go. Franklin: Sure. McCormack: Like, there was one special time they opened it up for a day and the wife could go out to the Area. That’s the only time in all the years my husband worked that I was ever in his office. Franlkin: Really? McCormack: Mm-hmm, closed. Franklin: Yeah, sure. And do you remember when that was? McCormack: Give me a clue. [LAUGHTER] Jerry McCormack: I’m not sure. Around--maybe in the ‘80s. I don’t remember. Franklin: Oh, so much, much later. Jerry McCormack: Much later, yeah. Franklin: Okay, that’s really interesting. McCormack: But things were still tight that way. Franklin: Sure. Wow. That must’ve been interesting to see, finally, kind of where--to go out there and see where he’d been working for all those years. McCoramck: IT was. Yeah, it really was. I finally got there one time. Franklin: One time. Even though you had been here longer than he had. McCormack: Yeah. Well, I didn’t have any reason to be in his--that way. Franklin: Sure, oh yeah, of course. McCormack: So then they just made this very special day for the, whoever they wanted to to go out, and that was it. Franklin: Sure. Any other major events in Tri-Cities’ history, like some of the plants shutting down and kind of--do you remember that time as well from kind of the concern over what would happen in the late ‘80s when they shut N Reactor down? McCoramck: Well, I don’t think it was like ti was when I first came here. They really thought that this whole plant was just going to quit. When I got there, DuPont had been from the beginning was here, and it was so soon after that that we were still using some of DuPont’s stationery and stuff. I mean, that’s how close it was. They hadn’t even--General Electric hadn’t even been there long enough to get some paper in from us. So it was pretty early in the game when I came here. But I don’t remember any big catastrophic things happening. You think I’d remmeber these things, I suppose, because I’ve been here 70 years this month. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, tha’ts quite an anniversary. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Well, great, my last question is just what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? McCormack: What I would like for them to know? That we were concerned. Everybody was concerned. But we coped. Everything geared up. When I first came here, we’d have maybe, I don’t know, I’d say an average day of maybe 30 to 40 patients. Then all of the sudden, there was streams of men going out, lined up to get into x-ray. They were hiring as fast as they could. That was, I think, the big change. That was pretty soon after I came here. But since then--well, the talent’s grown so much, too. It’s hard for me to realize how small a town was when I first came here, because it’s grown so gradually over the years. We had, maybe, one or two grocery stoes, and one dress shop, and one barber shop and a couple other things, and that was it. If you wanted to go anywhere, you went to Pasco. Kennewick was only about--in fact, Richland was a little bit bigger than Kennewick. So that was where we went to shop, was Pasco. Franklin: Right, right. Because Pasco was the oldest town. McCormack: Yeah, and it was the big town. [LAUGHTER] Franklin; The big town. That’s so different. I guess now, they’re each so large that you wouldn’t really need to go to the other for any-- McCormack: No, each one has plenty of everything now. Franklin: Yeah. That’s really itneresting. I’ve only been here for a little bit, so I-- McCormack: How long? Franklin: Just about a year-and-a-half. McCormack: Well, you’ve got still a lot of things to learn around here, haven’t you? Franklin: Yeah, I do. McCormack: IT’s growing so fast, this town, that it’s just hard for me to realize it was this little three towns that I caem to 70 years ago. Franklin: Right. McCormack: That’s a long time. Franklin: Yeah, I bet, I mean, just the roads and everything are different. So, Margie, is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t covered today? McCormack: Well, let’s see. The Dorm Club is what was probably the nicest thing that could’ve happened to us bunch of single people. Because we all got together and we partied and we went to plays, and we went all over. We were all pretty much the same age. And we all became friends, and a lot of us ended up marrying each other. I don’t know, I think I’d say, my life here, that little dorm club is the thing that made me want to stay here. Franklin: Kind of like a family away from home. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Because most of the people in that--almost everyone in tat club was not from the area, right? You were all from all over the country. McCormack: Well, he--my husband--being the Washingtonian was the odd one. Everybody else was from somewhere else. Franklin: Right, kind of scattered across the US. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. That sounds--especially, too, in a town where there weren’t--no one had any grandparents or any real relatives here to speak of, right? Even just the families had their own family unit. McCormack: Well, you had to--they just didn’t allow anybody in. And I supposed if you had a house, married and had a house, and had a mother to come live here, but that was different. But we single people, we were here on our own. Franklin: Right. So the Dorm Club really kind of would’ve een your lifeline. McCormack: Yeah. Franklin: You know, to some kind of normal life. McCormack: Well, I loved the West. I grew up in the mountains, and I loved the wide open spaces. And that and the Dorm Club were what kept me here. Franklin: Interesting. Well, great, Margie, it’s been really wonderful to talk to you and hear your story, your experiences. I just want to thank you for coming out here and talking to us today. McCormack: Well, I appreciate the offer and I enjoyed it, too. And hope I gave you a few little insights as to what our life was like here in the big city of Richland. Franklni: The big city of Richland. Yeah, I think, just hearing about being a single person and a single woman in Richland is really interesting and kind of a differetn stories than a lot of the other oral histories. McCormack: Yeah, well, you know if I’d gone to the place in Texas was a city, it woudl’ve taken me forever to make the friends I made here overnight. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, that close proximity and that close--well, that’s great. Well, Margie, thank you so very much. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:44:23 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Kadlec Dorm Club N Reactor General Electric Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 77 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Marjorie Ann McCormack Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Margie talks about her involvement with Atomic Energy / National Labs, and Kadlec. She fondly remembers the Dorm Club. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/27/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. atomic energy dorm club GE kadlec N Reactor https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F42af466f014b615aae8ad77bcb4e6927.JPG 697aa5d799157fbcf33e7ff2b8b8cab9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Carlos Leon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right, red light’s on. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Carlos Leon on October 5, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Carlos about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Carlos Leon: Carlos Leon. That’s my full name; never got a middle name. C-A-R-L-O-S L-E-O-N. Franklin: So, Carlos, when and where were you born? Leon: I was born in 1953 in Toppenish. Toppenish Memorial Hospital. Franklin: And what had brought your family to Toppenish? Leon: Oh, golly. My grandparents were all born in Mexico. My dad in Texas; my mom in Kansas. And then my ma’s parents moved to Toppenish early ‘40s. Then my dad’s parents moved while my dad was in the service. When he moved back, he moved back to Toppenish. Then making a long story short, that’s where they met. Franklin: And were both of those families in agriculture? Leon: Yeah, they worked the fields. They worked the fields. My grandparents, my parents and stuff, they worked the field. My dad had a trucking firm that, you know, so we hauled potatoes and peas and all kinds of produce. And that was our summer job, working out in the fields, or in the orchards and stuff with my mom or something like that. So we were always--we were always busy. So a lot of the times, really, though--like when you worked, like the potatoes. It’s hot, middle of the summer, and you’d work basically as soon as the sun rose till 10:00 in the morning. All these rows of sacks of potatoes up and down the rows and stuff and everything else. And they’d put them on the trucks, and that’d be the end of the workday. But it was a long and hot workday type of thing. So we got the afternoon as kids to really actually be kids, too, at the same time. Franklin: And is fieldwork what brought your grandparents out of Mexico? Leon: Well, my-- Franklin; Did they ever talk about it? Leon: Well, my grandfather on my dad’s side worked in the salt mines in Kansas. You’ve heard of the famous salt mines of Kansas, Lands, Kansas. And then my grandfather on my dad’s--my grandfather, my dad’s father worked the railroads in Texas. So my dad grew up in Georgetown, Texas. So that was--yeah, so, he has a couple sisters, so they eventually moved to I think Montana it was, and then eventually back to Toppenish, Washington. Franklin: What was it about Toppenish that drew your family there? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, agriculture, really. My mom’s family settled in, I guess, migrant cabins at the Golding farms in Yakima. It was the biggest hop ranch in the world at one time. I don’t know if it still is or not. So they had cabins and stuff there and eventually they had to sell the house about four blocks away. I didn’t know my grandfather. I was three years old when he died. But my grandmother, his mom, lived with us and nine kids and then my other grandparents lived only like four or five blocks away. So we were very close and they all knew each other real well. All my aunts and uncles, actually, from both sides of the family know each other. Yeah, it’s really seamless in a lot of ways. So we had a big family and so, yeah, I was very fortunate. We didn’t have much, but we had a lot at the same time. Franklin: Mm-hmm, a lot of family members and family gatherings, relationships. Leon: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. And it was Mexican culture, also. So you know, my grandparents didn’t speak any English, so. Hence you heard me speaking Spanish at the Sacajawea thing, Heritage Days. Franklin: Oh, that was really wonderful. The kids were like-- Leon: Oh, I enjoy that tremendously. Franklin: They really dug that. Leon: I give credit to my parents on all that. My parents were very outgoing and they stressed education and they stressed making people comfortable. That was the biggest thing, really. Franklin: Did they--did your parents want you--I know a lot of times with immigrant families, the children are often not taught their parents’ language; they want them to learn the language of their adopted country. Leon; Well, no, you know, my parents never really said one way or another. My older brother and my younger brother, Rudi, after me, like the first three boys, we kept it fairly, whatever. But the thing is, we were never educated in it. We didn’t read it; we didn’t write it. We spoke to our grandparents with it, and it was all around us with our extended family and stuff, people that visited my parents and that type of thing. So, you learn the, what do you call it, the morays, the norms, of the culture. With the fiestas and that type of thing. And I grew up with the food and when I went to college, I told people, I had to learn how to use a fork. I really did. Because it was just tortillas. And to this day, gimme a tortilla and beans and some rice, and I’m happy. You know, in a way, with my kids and stuff, I see them eat kind of like--cool, watching them eat with their hands and stuff. So there’s part of that there. They aren’t going to have the full meal deal that I had growing up, but with my aunts and uncles are still around and my brothers and sisters, they impart quite a bit. And I’m really proud of that. I’m really really proud of that. Franklin: Was there already a--how large was the Latino community, or was there already a Latino community when both sides of your family moved up to Toppenish? Leon: There was quite the Latino community. But really nothing like it is nowadays. You know, now it seemed like 75% of the town is Hispanic. Up and down the Yakima Valley. Or something like that. There was a large community, but it wasn’t like the influential that you have now, it seemed like. When I went to--when I graduated from high school, a handful of Hispanics that graduated with me. And I think two, maybe three--I’m just thinking--African Americans and that was really the--that was it back then. I graduated in 1971. But that was it. I never felt like I wasn’t part of the town. Franklin: Right. And you said you went to college. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And where did you go? Leon: Oh, for--[LAUGHTER] that’s a long story. But to make it short, when I graduated from high school, I went to Eastern in Cheney, and got tired of school after about three years. Kind of like basically, when you go to college, you meet the world. You meet kids that have a lot of money, or kids that don’t have much. Kids that want to be away from home, kids that are longing to be back home, and have a different kind of relationship with their parents. To me, it was all normal. I just kind of like--anyway, but living on a shoestring, kind of like eventually on your own kind of gets to you a little bit. So after three years and stuff, that’s where, ad in the paper, reactor operator? Sure, why not? Franklin: Really? You answered an ad in the paper. Leon: Ad in the paper. Franklin: Do you remember--a paper in Cheney? Leon: No, no, I was actually, during the summer, it was a Tri-City paper. I think it was my uncle that called and said, hey, there’s an ad in the paper for--and I saw it. I think it was in the Yakima Herald also. Kind of blurry about that. And interviewed with Paul Vinther. I don’t know if you’ve met-- Franklin: Really? Leon: Uh-huh. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I’m very--yeah, he has the Hanford Retirees. Leon: Paul, oh, yeah. Franklin: And he trained reactor operators. Leon: A long time ago. He’s a physicist by trade. Anyway, it’s funny, in talking with him--very, oh, man, talk about a larger-than-life personality. I mean, here, look, here I am, a 21-year-old kid, look at how small I am. I mean, barely weighed 120 pounds, maybe, at that time. I’m a lot heavier now, type of thing, but think about that. And, you know, he’s a big man. So he had this big, booming voice, great personality, just kind of like--and, heck, I can’t even remember the questions he asked and stuff. It wasn’t very long after that that they gave me the job offer. And so-- Franklin: What did you know about Hanford when you took that interview? Leon: Oh, golly. Well, I guess a couple things. You know, I remember the Kennedy thing, because that was covered; that was in the news. That was everywhere. I mean, eastern Washington, are you kidding? I mean, the President of the United States?! I know the Herald and the Tri-City really covered it at that time. But also the Yakima paper, Toppenish--that’s what we got, the Yakima Herald, all the time. And I remember that. And then driving truck for my dad in potatoes, like going to Othello, we’d be driving out 240. And so you’d see these stacks. You’d see these buildings, see the vapor coming out. And it was just kind of like--you know, now, you’re thinking about it, as I’m looking out. And I know the area so well that I was actually looking, at actually B Reacotr, you know, the one that was the closest to see that. But going on up, you’d see the processing coming out of the 200 West. And I know the story on when I’m on the bus is kind of like, back in those days and stuff, if you pulled over like for a flat tire or something like that, the Hanford Patrol would be right there, almost immediately, seeing what--if there’s something wrong somewhere, hurry up and fix your tire and move on. Because it was really, really secret, still. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, I mean, highly sensitive and all that stuff. So that as my--and then I knew a lot of smart people worked there, I guess. I mean, that’s what it comes down to because all these scientists and all that type of thing. They used to have a school day when they’d have, you know, two or three kids from each school from all over the areas would go and tour Hanford, and they’d show them all that type of thing. So I had a couple friends that did that, and whatever, I wasn’t one of the smart kids. So they went and they’d tell, whatever, that they were picked and all that stuff. Franklin: But then here you are, 21, you got a job offer as a reactor operator. Leon: And I had no idea what I was getting into. Franklin: Well, what did you get into? Leon: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What was that like? Leon: Well, come down to it, first thing was that they, you know, saw how much they were going to pay me. $184.84 a week was my--and I’m going, whoa. I mean, nobody’d ever paid me that much for anything, whatever. Franklin: What kind of wages were your parents earning, or what would’ve been the prevailing wage in like driving truck at that time? Leon: my dad didn’t pay me. Franklin: Oh, sure. Leon: My dad didn’t--his trucks and I got room and board. Put gas in and paid insurance for my car and that type of thing. Franklin: Sure, I mean, how did that compare to what you might have earned back in Toppenish if you were working? Leon: Oh, heck, I’d’ve be a millionaire almost type of thing. Oh, I’m not kidding! That was--$184, that’s like $4.50 an hour in 1974. And, really, when I first came here, my brother had already started to work out here, my older brother. And so we found a place in Pasco, like an old hotel set up to stay there until I found something, whatever, until we found something. And just a block of I guess would be south of the Uptown, there were some apartments, and I found them-- Franklin: Those little one-story apartments? Leon: Yeah, the one-story, the Anthony Apartments it’s called, whatever? Franklin: The what apartments? Leon: I lived 1209. 1209 George Washington Way. Franklin: Oh. What did you call them? Leon: Anthony Apartments, they were called at the time. And I don’t know who--I can’t remember the owner’s name. But anyway, so we stayed there, lived there for actually the whole four years that I actually worked as an operator at N. So me and my brother moved in there, $200 a month. And so he covered the first month, because he’d been working and he had money, and I hadn’t gotten paid nothing yet. And then eventually--but no cable, no phone, you know, any of that type of thing. Because we--you know. I got in trouble with the no phone business with work. My shift manager--I got sick, and I didn’t call. And this was at the, oh, probably been working three or four months or something like that. So, I was gone--I was not at work for a couple, two days. And I got on the bus, and got to work a couple days later. He was really mad at me because I didn’t call. Well, I don’t have a phone, Cliff. And he said, well, go to a payphone, whatever, that type of thing. And at that time, I didn’t have--I’m trying to remember the phone number of the control room or his number, just kind of like--that was like--but whatever. It was a year before I got a phone. You know, really. Franklin: Wow. What did your older brother do? Leon: He worked, actually, just with finance. That’s what he wanted to do and stuff, so he worked in the finance part. He never went into the reactors or nothing like that. Franklin: What was your first impression when you showed up for your first day? Do you remember? Leon: Oh, I remember my first day. My first day? My first bus ride. Remember, you caught the things, so they’d give you the instructions on how to catch the bus. I didn’t know about the shuttles at the time. I ended up catching the bus right across the street on George Washington Way, eventually, when I got on shift. But I ended up on the bus ride and we were just passing--just before we were going to pass the 200 East Area. Of course, I didn’t know the 200 East Area, but I know now, that’s just why I’m telling you. Anyway, passing 200 East Area. The bus was pulling over. And I was kind of like, oh, this must be the reactor or something like that. But there was some commotion and stuff Well, there was a guy three or four seats in front of me, because I was close to the back, he was having a heart attack. I’d never seen anything like this. So they escorted him off and a patrolman came on out and stuff. So they left and then the bus drove off. They left him standing there with the patrolman and they took care of him or whatever. But it was nothing like nowadays with the EMTs and all that type of stuff. It’s totally different. And kind of like, okay. It was just--and then I, you know, like showed up in front of the admin building and I got off. I didn’t know anybody. And walked in, and there was the admin building, and they had told me just to go up the stairs and the corner office and there was Dottie, Vinther’s secretary. Big old smile on her face and everything. You know, so welcomed me and every thing, and talked about her guys, because she just loved the operators. And then eventually got escorted into the 105 Building. And the 105 Building for N is huge. Huge, compared to, you know, the B and the rest of the other reactors. Got introduced to whatever shift manager of the shift that was on at the time and everything, and all the various other people. It’s kind of like, lost. And then Larry Haler came on, too, the same date that I did. Franklin: Same exact day? Leon: Yeah, same day. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so we kind of hung around together and asked--gave each other a lot of blank looks a lot. You’ll have to ask Larry what he remembers. But it was a blur, basically, it’s what a blur was. And we were basically assigned to work back in the fuels area to package fuel and that type of thing. That’d be our first thing of learning being a reactor operator. Franklin: So it was all on-the-job training. Leon: Ohm es, I did not take one single classroom. It was just, this is the books, read the books. And it had all the systems and all that type of stuff. And then--I was--to go forward a little bit, eventually I was assigned to shift. And I was, looking back on it, I was very fortunate to be put on the shift that I was on, B shift, is the shift I was on. Got A, B, C, and D. Franklin: And why was that so fortunate? Leon: Ah, because of the individuals. And I guess, I guess, maybe if I would’ve been on A shift, C or D, I would’ve--but I got to meet other guys on the other shift and got to know them, too, don’t get me wrong there. But B shift was just the characters that were there, but at the same time, the character that they gave me, I guess that’s--and I was telling Tom earlier, it was kind of like, those guys helped me grow up. I was 21 years old, and I was bulletproof. And the next youngest guy on my shift was 45 years old. Franklin: Oh, wow. So they were, a lot of them were kind of like father figures almost? Leon: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They had kids like me and older, type of thing. And so--yeah, I guess you could say, they probably knew me much better than I knew myself in a lot of ways. But it was--they really wanted me to learn, and learn right. That was the one thing that I’m very, very thankful for. Because, boy, I tell you, if you did anything wrong, if you went one way or--against what you should actually be doing, it’s just kind of like, you don’t put your finger into a socket for electricity. Well, you don’t walk into a radiation area unless you know what you’re going to face. And it’s that type of thing. And they’re very, very, very good--not the operators; the HP techs--we called them RMs at the time, radiation monitors; we didn’t call them HP techs--all the shift managers, the guys in maintenance. On and on, I mean, I could name them. I tell everybody, like the last scene of the Titanic, you know, where the camera’s going, you see the barnacled ship and then eventually it gets into its glory, the grand staircase. I can close my eyes and walk in to the 105-N. And there, Duke Anthony’s in there, you know, Granva Philips’ office, there’s Bob White’s in there, and there’s Cliff Young, shift managers’ offices, right off the back, you walk through. And then the INC shop over here, the entrance into the N, and then walk over here, walk in and stuff, closing my eyes. And I see Bob Stees, my first control room supervisor, Dale Tahyer, my other one. Oh, golly. Then all of the various operators: Ralph Hagensic or Nels Kass. Chet Regal, Claire Miller. Howard Sidig. I mean, just--you know, it’s just so clear. Right now as I’m talking to you, I can see their faces. I can recognize their voices. Even--that was my crew. That was my crew. And in the back, Nellie and Kenny and John. And then these--you know, the mechanics would come in. And the INC techs, the electricians, Jack Black--no, Jack White, Mike Black. Rodney Brown. All these different people that would come in. Harold Petty, the 105 supervisor in the power side and stuff. And Harold would always make, on the last night in graveyard, would always make us breakfast. Just give him a couple bucks and big old pancakes and bacon, it was kind of like--I mean, for a kid that never had had that type of stuff before, it was just kind of like, wow! This is amazing to me. It just, you know, all the various foods, stuff that people brought for lunch. We had this great big, actually, big kitchen at 105-N. And gas stoves. This was before microwaves and that type of thing. So they had these big gas stoves and stuff, and people would cook and bring their lunches and stuff, and see what the heck, all the various sandwiches and stuff. I was really fascinated by egg salad. I’d never had egg salad and someone gave me half of an egg salad sandwich. I was going, wow, this is really amazing. And then, you know, on a break, here’s a guy that was--looked like an apple, you know, he’s cutting it and eating it type of thing. And I’m like, what’s that, Cecil? Kohlrabi’. Kohlrabi is the way you see it now. And he said, you’ve never had it? I said, no. How would I know? So he cut off a piece and gave it to me. Took a bite of it, tasted like a dirty radish. But I like radishes and dirt don’t bother me any, so. So every once in a while, I--whenever I see kohlrabi I think of this guy, Cecil Moss. Really, a good guy. Really a good guy. Like I said, I had a really good time with all of these different people and stuff like that. I’m rambling, aren’t I? Franklin: No, it’s great. Did you work when you first started, did you work with anybody from the Manhattan Project days? Were any of your coworkers-- Leon: Oh, yes. Franklin: From-- Leon: Oh, yes, in fact, oh, yes, in fact, a physicist at B, but my first visit to B was a guy--again, all the reactors were shut down. So all the keys to all the reactors were hung in the control room in a little cabinet in B and stuff. One of the older gentlemen that was there, one of the guys that helped do the training or went along with it was Ralph Wallen. He actually has a narration on that, it’s W-A-H-L-E-N. Anyway, so, he has like a story that he’s written that you can actually get online. They actually have it. And he talks about that. Anyway, so, one time when I was the extra man on shift and that type of thing, he said, you wanna go over to B? I said, sure! So, again, this was, had to have been, I’d had been there at least a year then. It had to have been ‘75. Got flashlights and stuff and got in the car and drove on over to B. He unlocked the gates and everything. So we went into the, down the hall. No power anymore. I think I remember it being cool. And shined a light on the front face and stuff. Whoa. I said, that’s more tubes than N. You know, by that time I knew what--but, looked a lot, looked very, very similar. Said, is that the C elevator there? Yeah, that’s the C elevator. I mean, so all of these different things there, they were very, very similar. And I think one of the ways he really wanted me to see this, because I could go in there and not worry about any kind of exposure. And learn about it. And not too years later that I really realized that that’s what he was doing. Because I’d see something and I’d explain to him. The ball hoppers, even up on top and that type of thing. And then went into the control room, and how much smaller it was. Then we actually walked across the slats in the fuel pool. It was dusty, and everything, so I don’t ever remember--and I know we didn’t survey ourselves. Nothing to survey--supposedly. Like it is now, I tell you. But that was my first experience with somebody that really actually told me. But then Howard Sidig who was on my shift, he was only on my shift for about a year-and-a-half. He was getting to be retirement age. But he used to be an operator, and he was one of the original operators for B. He’s long dead now and stuff, but he is a good father for me. I got to know him outside of work and stuff through the church and everything. And him and his family and his wife, Rosemary. Very, very--oh, just endearing, endearing people. So he actually showed me--you know the certificate at the tour center that shows that people were part of the war effort, that they gave to various operators, I guess? Or to whoever--whatever. I was visiting Howard and he went on up to--he said, I gotta show you something. And beaming, he has this certificate. I’d never seen it before. I read it and stuff, helping out the war effort, blah, blah, blah. His name was on it. He was very, very proud of it, you know? That was the mentality. Well, yeah! You know? And they helped end a very cruel part of our history. So he was very, very proud of that. And I looked at it and said, whoa. He said, there aren’t very many of these. Okay. Apparently there aren’t. To have--I don’t know how many were handed out during--and that type of thing. And then there was also another individual--well, actually two. Archie Stark, who was in the fuel-handling in the back, and then George Madison, who was actually a supervisor, and both of them were B Reactor people. But again, I’d ask them questions, but I forget half the answers about that type of thing. But, you know the biggest thing that they would say is, ah, you wouldn’t have existed, you couldn’t have handled all that hard work back then. Oh, you know. They would always kid me with that. But growing up in the family that I did, you know, helped me. Like I told you about my parents, to treat people with respect and that type of thing. But I have a thick skin. You know, when you grow up with nine kids, seven boys, especially, you do. And so, man, they want to banter? Okay, here I am! I banter right back. And just, yeah, whatever, I just loved it. I loved it. Growing up with it all. So, I don’t know, you want me to show you some things or whatever? I brought something with me. We’re not at that point in our conversation? Franklin: Why don’t you show me at the end? Leon: Okay. Franklin: Then we can get like a stand or something to put it on. We could then do that--that way the camera doesn’t have to refocus. Could you describe a typical work day as a reactor operator? Leon: A typical work day. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, I can tell you a typical work day, maybe about three or four different typical work days, if you get down to it, because there was lots of aspects to it. One o the--probably the first aspect was, if you’re like in the back, in the fuel pool and you’re actually packaging fuel. Or you’re actually part of the refuel process. In, you know, when they were pushing the fuel out, you could either be on the discharge or the charging elevator. Or you could be out back in the fuel pool. We actually had three positions. Or I was never--they would never let me operate the charge machine; you need some experience in that. But other than that-- Franklin: Is that what pushes the fuel through? Leon: Pushes the fuel through. It’s a great, big, you know, 55, 60-foot long elevator on steel platforms that they had that actually would get--and we’d make charges already. And that’s another story. When it comes to a typical day, it really is hard for me to tell you what a typical day was, because so much changed. And then it depended what shift you were on, if you were on graveyard, swing or days. All of those things made a difference as far as what a typical day was. But to really get down to it, you know, like if you were a fuel handler, you were in the back. You are actually packaging the fuel and putting them into canisters and the canisters, you’d be putting them in order in the fuel, in those canisters and then lowering them into the pool. When you discharged the fuel, you’re seeing the images of the fuel coming out and hitting the trampoline and into the carts. They actually had track--they had carts where you’d get, I think, three tubes in each cart. And then travel on out, and then come on out and they’d dump it into baskets. So everything would be into the baskets. So then you’d eventually, when everything started up and stuff, well, you had all these baskets of fuel. You actually had to let them cool a little bit longer than--you know, you don’t start packaging them right away. But you had to do rearranging. You had to make sure that everything was arranged and stuff, and if any pieces that fell out, you’re looking for them. It’s an accountability issue, make sure that we had everything. So the fuel pool--and that was different, N Reactor’s was a really long fuel pool. It didn’t have a grate across it like ethe other reactors did. It was just a pool, and you actually had trolleys that traveled the length of the fuel pool. And, oh, that was a--oh, golly, talk about memory. That was a source of fun for me, let’s put it that way. They had no idea. They had these big old tongs and stuff that would hang to pick things up and that type of thing. And you’d bring it all the way up to the top and stuff. But it had a faster or slow motion going. I would hit the jog button, and I’d hit the travel button and that sucker would sped up. Not like it went really, really fast, but it would go a little bit faster to get to the other end. And then as soon as I’d hit that, I’m telling you, George Madison, who was my supervisor at the time, he’d be on one end, and, you know. I got this idea during graveyard and stuff, going really fast. Eeee. And it was in a big enclosure, and echoed like crazy if you really wanted to make it echo. Well, hey, here’s my chance. So I go in there and I hit it and I go, GEEEEEEOOOOORRRRRGGGE! And go running. And then I said, no, I’m going to say GEEEORRRRGE! It just echoed like crazy. And George was just doing this thing, whatever. So those types of things, just little by little, all of these various things. You know, it made it enjoyable. It made it enjoyable, a break in the monotony of a lot of the things. And you know, I was just a good target for them all. They would always say something or whatever like that. Especially because my age. More than anything else because my age. Because I’m kind of like-- Franklin: You were kind of young, young buck? Leon: Oh, golly. And then of course they wanted, when I was on long chains, we had four days off, four-and-a-half days off, whatever. I’d head to Portland or Seattle or Spokane, visit friends and this and that or whatever like that. 21, 22-year-old kid, coming back, like, oh, yeah, what’d you do? Oh. Franklin: Right-- Leon: Oh, I’d embellish a lot of the time, whatever. But it was. It was, in fact, especially from Portland or Seattle I’d stop by at home and say hi to the folks and stuff and then head back to Richland. But they just thought I just lived a wild life sometimes, kind of like--yeah, I guess I did. In some respects, I did. Franklin: Were your parents or family concerned about you working at Hanford? Leon: No. Not really. Not really. They were--I guess, you know, tell them, what do you do? Oh, I’m a reactor operator. I operate a nuclear reactor. When I first got here, it was like, I was driving a borrowed car. One of the guys from the reactor had a car that he wanted to sell. ‘68 Toyota Corolla. Franklin: Wow, that’s one of the first ones. Leon: I mean, a little box. A little box, yellow box, what it was. Franklin: Those are very collectible nowadays. Leon: Oh! You know. 500 bucks. And he said, you could probably go to HAPO and get a loan. You know, I mean, who’d give a kid a $500--so I went over to HAPO. You know, at the time, you could only be--since I was a union or whatever, hourly employee, I could only go to HAPO. GESA was for the managers and that type of thing. That’s the way it was divided. So I went on over there, and I got a $500 loan. And I had to--my payments were like $75 a month. So they worked it out so that I could pay my rent and still live and that type of thing. First time I drove it home, my mom was just beaming, really proud, kind of like, it’s just nice--I mean, you’ve got to think about it, as far as our upbringing not having much money and stuff. My parents, they just struggled to provide for us. And we, of course, you being a kid, you don’t really realize how much they’re struggling. And anyway so she was just beaming and happy and feeling it’s so nice to see that you have some money in your pocket now, mojo. And your car and on and on. Just--yeah, no, no, my parents weren’t really, say, like scared of, what, or apprehensive. What was apprehensive though was like I had my next-door neighbor there in Toppenish--because you know to get a clearance they filled out all this paperwork. So one of my neighbors said, in Spanish, you know, what kind of job do you have? I had some guy come talk to me and ask about you, type of thing. Don Santiago was his name. So it’s really kind of funny. There was nothing--it was a job, and it provided, and it provided very well. It provided very well. Franklin: Yeah. And how long did you--how long were you a reactor operator? Leon: I was a reactor operator for four years. I was certified for two-and-a-half during that time. Going back to your typical workday type of thing, The typical workday in the control room, it really--a reactor operator likes it boring. Franklin: Sure. Boring and predictable is good. Leon: Boring and predictable and everything steady state is a great thing. It’s a great thing to have, really, you know? It gets a little tiresome or whatever like that, especially during graveyard. But you know, like I said, there was always--we were always talking. We were always talking. Anyway, so a typical day, depending on whether you were at the nuclear console, whether you were at the A console where you had all the turbines and the steam generators or the BN console where you have your dunk condensers and your rad monitor thing and stuff. But you always had duties; you always had something that you were doing. So if you were the fourth person, you were on relief. So you had other surveillances to do and on and on and everything. But if you had an emergency, like a scram, or like I say, some abnormal happened, whatever. Temperature here too high or steam generator levels getting too high or whatever like that, you know, open up a blow-down valve, and how long, how’s the chemistry looking and that type of thing. All of these various things. So there was always something. There was always something. I love--at the same time, though, I love startups. Startups were fun. Yeah. I learned a lot. That’s where a lot of the guys, you know, when I was telling you about being hands-on. A lot of the guys would let me [LAUGHTER] manipulate, under instruction, bringing up the turbines to full speed from 1800 to 3600. And you know, pull rods in and out. One experience I had was putting on what’s called dump condensers, heating up dump condensers. Because the way N Reactor was designed was that it sent steam over to the Hanford Generating Plant, but it also had dump condensers so that if you had a load rejection where something happened to those turbines and stuff, N Reactor could take the steam and actually dump it and actually continue running. So you had raw water going through the tubes on those dump condensers. And they’re huge. Oh, heck, I’d say they’re like 15 feet across, 30 feet high, whatever like that, and hanging. It was--they’re massive. They were massive. But anyway, you have to open up a little bit of steam to heat up the tubes. I got a lesson in water hammer. Very classic thermodynamics thing. The power operator called my shift manager and said, hey, the control room is making the condensers move. Because you get the water hammer in those dump condensers, it would move. We were talking about two or three inches. And make noise and everything else. So Cliff, about 6-foot-4. Hey, saying, look who in the BN console, said, are you learning, Carlos? Yeah. I’ll put the steam on a little bit. Said, you know what water hammer is? Uh, no? [LAGUHTER] So, he sent me to the power side and went with and talked to the--Harley was the guy that was on the power side. And so he had one of the operators. So called on the radio, I’m standing by this dump condenser and stuff. Said, okay, open up the steam valve on it. He opened it up just a little bit more. Next thing I know, that dump condenser went fwrrrrr and really just sloshed and really just made this thunder sound. I learned about water hammer, and I respected water hammer, and I’m--I know now when I tell people and said, you don’t want to water hammer pipe. When I teach fundamentals and that type of thing. I mean, you--no. It’s not a--it scares you. It scares you to no end. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Leon: So those are the type of things that you kind of like, you--again, whether somebody would teach you that way now, I don’t know. But I doubt that was the way I was taught, you know? Like, even one other thing, I had quote-unquote the pleasure of seeing and experiencing was being on top of the reactor. And I was--we were getting to start the reactor again from a shutdown. So one of the things that we had wanted to do was check all of the ballhoppers to make sure they were all cocked and loaded. So we had a tool and stuff to cock it and load it and that type of thing. So I was up there doing that type of thing. Well, they had to a surveillance on the fog spray. On the fog spray, we had on each side, eight big risers which fed the reactor. And anyway, so these fog sprays were on top, on the top on the inside. In case there was an accident or a pipe break or something like that, the fog sprays would come on and actually rain down onto those pipe spaces, so none of the fission products would come out. And so they called and said, hey, we’ve got to test the west side fog spray. I never seen them before, type of thing. So they turned on two diesels to go into those sprays. Oh, golly. I jumped from one side to the other. It was so loud, and I thought I was going to get sucked in. Just because, you would drown. You would drown. When somebody says fog spray in a nuclear reactor, they mean fog spray. It’s not a mist. You know. It’s like a waterfall times ten. I mean, it was--and so, not only is it raining down like that right next to you, I was probably from here and that was five feet away. And you could just feel that, you know, air going that way. Oh, man. [LAUGHTER] And Ralph Hagin said, who happened to be the operator when they started it, I called him and I hear him over the phone saying, are they on? Yeah, Ralph, they’re on. Then next thing, you hear him just laughing and laughing and laughing. Okay. Oh, man. That scared the heck out of me, I tell ya. But those are the type of things that you--I guess, later on, it’s a story to tell, but at the same time, it’s also a lesson learned, because now I can tell. I can tell people. [LAUGHTER] When you hear this word in a nuclear reactor, fog spray, believe it. Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Leon: So those are the type of things that-- Franklin: What did you do after you were--what was next at Hanford for you after being a reactor operator? Leon: Oh, well. I actually wanted to go back to college. In 1976, they had a strike. So I spent all my money living off my savings and stuff to go back to school, so I didn’t. And then I ended up, then, in 1977, I actually took a trip around the world. I actually got a leave of absence, they actually gave me a leave of absence, to take a trip around the world. It took me ten weeks, and I was gone. I went with a singing group. And had a--well, the thing is, to be able to do this, it cost $3,400. So in February, when they found out about it, we were leaving in June which is when the thing was supposed to be going. It was a group that I had met through this other, another friend. So how am I going to get the money? Anyway, so, my friends on B deferred working overtime to let me work overtime. Franklin: Wow. You mean at N. Leon: At N. Franklin: Yeah, okay. Leon: They deferred. Because you were on a schedule type of thing, you know, you’d sign up for overtime. So they didn’t sign up and let me. So for my shift I got a chance to work a lot of overtime. When you work overtime, you come in ahead of shift. You got double time for the shift you came in on and your own shift. And I worked a lot of double-doubles. I--thinking about it nowadays, later on, I was very appreciative of it, but think about that, kind of like, you know, these guys wanted to work overtime, too. But at the same time, it’s kind of like, wow. Anyway, so guess what? Six weeks later, I had enough money. Franklin: Crazy. Leon: So yeah. It was $3,400 and it was well worth it, and it was well worth--because I’m saying, I can’t put a price on the friendships. At all. Oh, well, why was that story? But anyway, a story comes up. One of the guys in the back, Adolphus Nelson--we called him Nellie--he invited me and my brother to his house for dinner one evening. And, okay, never been to any place like this before, anybody to their home or whatever. He lived in Kennewick. Went over to his house, and wife made this real nice roast beef dinner with potatoes and stuff. We had good conversation and everything else. And then, you guys ready for dessert? Dessert? These are Okies, they’re from Oklahoma. Anyway, so, Fae was her name, brought out this pie. Sucker was this--it’s like, whoa! Banana cream pie. Got a slice. Oh, I thought I was in heaven. I’d never had banana cream pie before. I’d never had banana cream pie like that since. And it was just kind of like, aw, man. I just kind of like gushed over it. I told Nellie about it and stuff. And a couple weeks later, he said, hey, Carlos, got something for you at lunch time. Come on back. So I go back there. Guess what? A piece of banana cream pie. Oh! So yeah. I don’t know why I brought that up. Just kind of like it--it was just a story. Like I said, there’s stories like that. There’s lots of, yeah. There’s a lot of things that, oh, golly, my mind just races like crazy. Communications of things. There was a guy named Tommy van Lear that was--I knew him as our steward and then eventually he was a shift manager and stuff. Just the craziest guy. Just the craziest guy. He would--at that time, there were like, you could say, you could do a lot of things over what they called the announcement within the reactor. You could pick up the phone and dial--I don’t remember what it was, 7-1 or whatever. And then you paged somebody. And he would dial that and everything else when he’d come on shift. And this was on graveyard or--he was on graveyards when nobody was around, the management wasn’t around type of thing. And he’d go, no friggin’ in the riggin, no pokin’ in the passes. I just kind of went, oh. Tommy’s here, Tommy’s here. And the other thing that I remember was a guy named--oh, golly. Anyway, last name was Pease. He was what they called a chief. He worked in the power side in 184 Building. So they would always have diesel oil coming in. So you’d always hear him--he was just a Texan. Got a load of Texas tea coming in, a load of Texas tea. So everybody knew they had to go, whoever was assigned, to make sure that it was unloaded. Eventually, some manager didn’t like the way he was announcing that and stuff. Was kind of like, we’re more professional than that. So it just kind of like, took away that--Charlie Pease was his name. But anyway, those are the type of memories that still echo. And then--so you’re making me remember these things that I’ve forgotten. Oh, golly. I’m going to cry. Franklin: Aw. So how long did you work at N Reactor for? Leon: I worked at N Reactor for four-and-a-half--actually, five-and-a-half years total. Because after I--I went to college I went to Pacific University in Oregon and graduated with a degree in science. Plain science; a bachelor’s degree in science. Franklin: Just, science. Leon: Science. I got 30 hours of physics, math, chemistry and biology. Franklin; What were you studying when you were at Eastern? Leon: More the sciences, that’s where I had most of my credits. That’s where I had most of my credits, so when I transferred over and transferred my credits, those were ethe credits that stuck out. So I said, I’ll just do it that way. And having now, quote-unquote the background that I had, the work background that I had. But you know, in reality, you think about that--a lot of people think--I guess, whatever, I live two lives with work. Okay, I know the left brain stuff of reactor operating and thermodynamics and all those other things. But my other part of my life is kind of like I’m playing guitar and goofing off and doing all these other things that I like doing. Creative type of thing. I write songs and that type of thing. So, that’s what I bring to the--you’ve seen me with my tours and stuff. Franklin: Yeah, no, you’ve very-- Leon: But that’s what I like doing. Franklin: Did you come back to Hanford after you graduated? Leon: Yes, I did, uh-huh. I worked there for about a year-and-a-half in the training department and teaching new operators in fact that came on that are real good friends of mine, really, when it comes down to it. A lot of them that came afterwards. In fact, one of them is actually Mark Jensen. Franklin: Oh! I just saw Mark yesterday. Leon: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And so, it’s--and Larry Haler had gone into training. It was a natural fit, really. It was a real natural fit, because training had changed. Three Mile Island had happened. So that was during the time when things were actually changing in training, to the point that we’re where we are now, really. That was just the infancy part of it. Of course, with the opportunity, having the degree, and being at N, and then having, I guess, two things. Going back off to college, and then having that thing with the trip around the world just made that travel bug even bigger. There was--what do you call it? I can’t remember. Nuclear News magazine they used to have all the time, we used to get it. And it’d be in the shift manager’s office and stuff and I’d read it. There was an ad for General Electric for--and so I submitted an application with General Electric in nuclear. This was the same time that the first WPPSS plant was being built, Number 2. And that was a BWR, GE BWR. So one of the managers was visiting and stuff and called me and asked if I wanted to interview and stuff so I did. Lo and behold, guess what the question that he asked me about, just to see what my background was and stuff? He asked me a water hammer question. [LAUGHTER] Oh, that was easy. Kind of like-- Franklin: You were like, I got this. Leon: Oh, yeah. Right now. Golly, divine providence. There is a god! And that’s where I got on with General Electric. The thing that he promised me at that time--didn’t come to fruition--but to certify on their BWR6 line and then have like a two or three year assignment in Spain. And doing that in Spanish. Oh, boy, as soon as he said that. Oh, yeah. And then they ended up canceling the plant. That was during the time when--that’s when nuclear was out of vogue after that. So, yeah, but that came back in ‘89 at Columbia. Worked in the control room and did all kinds of things, corrective actions and stuff. Franklin: That would be Energy Northwest. Leon: Yeah, Energy Northwest. And then, now, I’m with the Vit Plant. You know, people still ask me, well, what do you do? I teach reactor operators. I teach people how to run nuclear reactors. Even though it’s not a nuclear reactor, it’s so much simpler just to say something like that than try to explain what I do. But being an instructor is--I’ve just gotten to enjoy it. Whether I know something about a certain subject or not, eventually I’m--I tell, like people at the Vit Plant, well the first time will be a little boring maybe a little bit more rough type of thing. But the second or third time, no prob. Because you do, you get more comfortable and you know the slides and you know the subject matter. And knowing your audience is probably the biggest thing. Franklin: Yeah. When you started at N, were there a lot of other--were there any other Hispanic/Latino workers? Leon: Oh! Golly. Let me tell--okay, well, now you really are going to make me cry. I was the first person in my family, anybody related to me, to get a college degree. I have cousins and stuff that, they have PhDs and masters and all that type of stuff. I’m very proud of them. But I was the first one. But well when I got on, you know, I didn’t really realize it, but one of the things that--this was at the very beginnings of equal opportunity, EEO. I really didn’t realize it until after I had been there maybe six months that they’re really pushing me to get certified. And they went out of their way a lot to make sure that I saw certain things on a startup, shutdown, and that type of thing, and make sure that I held over, or came out early, and all these different things. It was really kind of against what the union was--you know, the guys that are around, and other shifts. Again, this is where I was really fortunate with my crew. Because my crew, like, they knew me and they kind of like picked up on this. Without even saying certain things. They had a lot of--whatever, I just kind of like--so, in the last, I’d say month and a half before I actually did get certified, I was really actually working quite a bit to learn various aspects. To make a long story short, I was the first Hispanic ever to certify. Franklin: At N Reactor? Leon: At N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, wow. Leon: There was other Hispanic workers, but none in reactor operations. So, I didn’t try to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t know how to handle it, let’s put it that way. More than anything else, I didn’t know how to handle it. Would I handle it differently now? Probably, in a way. And then also, it was really unsaid. It was really unsaid in a lot of ways. But you could sense it. So when went through my--to get certified, you actually took a written test, very comprehensive. And then you had a walkaround and it’d be a full day type of thing, a shift. Walk you around and asking you how does this work, how does that work, can you put this on, can you shift this, can you do that, type of thing. Do you know what a water hammer is? And then be in front of an oral board of three people that would ask you all types of questions. Which was a piece of cake. When they asked me--when I went to the board, I was nervous. But at the same time, I was kind of like, they can’t ask me anything. I was that confident, by that time. And so the day that I got my certificate, a photographer came in and took pictures of me and my shift manager and my control room supervisor and another operator, me standing at the board. And I’ve got that picture. I’m going to show you later. Standing on the board and talking like I’m communicating somewhere. Yeah, it was a real proud day. It was a real proud day for me. Whatever, thinking about it. Like I say, I had no idea how to deal with it, because nobody--I had nobody to really I guess talk to about it, type of thing, really. Franklin: Right, you-- Leon: The only thing I was really being harassed about or people were talking about, the other guys on my shift that like a couple of electricians, hey, first time you sit on that nuclear console all by yourself, I bet you it scrams. [LAUGHTER] It shuts--it only took the second time for me to sit there that it scrammed, really. But the thing that really--other that the guys would say was now you’re really going to get paid. Because basically my pay went up almost $200 a week, just like that. Franklin: Wow. Leon: The following week. And that was just for getting certified. That was my incentive. You can talk about-- Franklin: That’s a good incentive. Leon: --incentive, you know, a spiritual incentive, a moral incentive, and all these different things, kind of like whatever. But for a poor kid from Toppenish, and going through the college things that I did? Boom. You know, all of a sudden, here I am, almost $400 a week, just like that. And it was just incredible. It was just incredible. So I mean, that’s why I look back in retrospect, you know, the guys, especially Cliff Younghands. I can’t catch him, you know? Golly. He was a great guy. Without him, I can really say--[EMOTIONAL]--without him, I wouldn’t be--I wouldn’t have learned like I learned. There’s no way. Franklin: That’s wonderful. Leon: I mean, all the other shift managers were great. And they probably had other guys under their wing and that type of thing. But there’s just something about Cliff that he took a real interest in me. He wouldn’t let me--he’d give me a little rein to goof off here or there, that type of thing. But he’d come in, and he’d quiz me. And he knew his prints forwards and backwards and inside out. There’s only about three or four other people that I knew at N Reactor that knew them like that. And that really taught me a lot. Taught me a lot of discipline. There’s a time for everything. He, Cliff, had the respect of all the other guys, too. And then later on when Cliff got off of shift and stuff and working in training and doing all these other things, he actually signed my certificate. And I’m proud that he had signed my certificate. Because he was--of all the individuals that I got to know--when it comes to operating and being disciplined for it, trying to encourage--I try to encourage a lot of other operators, like at the Vit Plant itself, you have new commissioning techs that are coming in, try to encourage them, and I think of Cliff while I’m doing it. Franklin; Yeah. He was like a real mentor to you. Leon: He very, very much was. Very, very much was. You know? And you know, over the lifetime, you can count how many people in your hand that really mentored you in some way. You know, whatever. When it comes to that discipline of bearing down and learning. You know, kind of like, do everything that you can. He turned his back on some of the things that I kind of liked that I shouldn’t have done to go into the reactor, to learn. Because I know with him I was learning and that type of thing. I don’t know if I should say in front of the camera or not. [LAUGHTER] But, you know, I have--I think my lifetime exposure was like--I’m kind of thinking like 14 or 15 R lifetime exposure in those short years that I worked. But I know that I probably had more. Because when we were shut down, and graveyard, I’d walk into the--I’d dress down and go into the zone. But I’d leave my dosimeter and stuff hanging in the lunch--and I’d spend two or three hours walking around, learning the reactor. Franklin: Wow. Leon: I mean--and I knew whatever, to stay away from certain things and that type of thing. But I didn’t want to--my exposure was when we were refueling and doing things and that type of thing. You know, what--nowadays, I’d be in trouble like crazy. Maybe I’m going to get in trouble saying this, I don’t know. Franklin: No, no, don’t worry. Leon: But those are the--that was what it was. That’s where that real concern. Like I say, that was just--it just started with Cliff, though. It just started with him. All of those other operators and stuff were--they were right there, making sure that I was learning things and being safe. And doing it correctly. From top to bottom. From top to bottom. And that’s why I said like, oh, boy, never in their wildest dreams would they ever think that B Reactor would be open the way it is for tourists. Franklin: Do you mean the--the guys that taught you were who were old timers? Leon: Yeah. And that’s what I say. Like I say, when I close my eyes and I see al these guys and I see their names and stuff, I’m just, yeah, I’m very, very proud. I’m very, very proud to have been a part of Hanford history. But more important, making friends with who I made friends with. The sad part is, I’ve gone to too many funerals. And memorial services and--but at the same time, that’s part of life, and that’s just something that--it’s my makeup now. It’s my makeup. And that’s part of my story and stuff. There’s a lot of things that happen, I mean, that will--that I won’t tell you. And they’re going to die with me. A lot of things died with them. And it’s not necessary. And that scares--that’s the way I look at it. You know, being a historian, you know, you want to get into all of the facts and that type of thing. And there’s a lot, yeah. Franklin: Well, that’s kind of a great segue way into my next question, which is, could you describe the ways in which security and secrecy at Hanford impacted your work there? Leon: [SIGH] Security and secrecy. Well, since it was my first job, really come down to it, besides driving truck, I just took it as the norm. I just took it as the norm. Being in the control room wasn’t so much secret or quote-unquote secure. Because you could just walk right--back then, you could just walk right in. You’d open up your lunch bag or your pack, whatever you’re--whatever, and look in, lunch, close it. Come through. You’d already gone through the Wye Barricade, so why--I guess. It was a different kind of security. And secrecy? The only real secret was held by the scientists or the plant manager or the guy who does the fuel calculations on how much plutonium was being generated. We all knew we were making plutonium. We all knew how much exposure everyone was getting, that type of thing. But how much was being processed and being shipped and that type of thing? That was really the only secret. The security of everything. But, no, I never really--the stories, the old stories about whispering and that type of thing? That was when they were building the B Reactor in the early days. By the time 1974 came along, it was a secure area, more than it was a quote-unquote secret area. That was all in the 200 Area with the plutonium finishing Plant and how much they were processing. That was really what, come down to it. We just made electricity and plutonium at N. Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Leon: The most rewarding? Franklin: And challenging. Leon: And challenging? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Well, the most challenging is actually learning how something so big works. All of the stuff that’s--all of the different things that make a reactor work: the water, the steam, the electricity, the design and on and on and on, I mean, it just kind of like--wow. Who put this thing together? That was--and challenging? That was challenging. Franklin: That was challenging. Leon: That was challenging. And what was the other? Franklin: Rewarding. Leon: Rewarding. [LAUGHTER] Ugh. I’m getting too old for this, Robert. Rewarding was, it was the friendships. Without a doubt, that is top to me. And hopefully, when I talk in front of the crowd, in front of the front face of the reactor, is that I’m talking for these guys, the people that came before me. That’s what I want to really--yeah, I talk about myself. But I want their personalities to come out. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: You know, some of the stories I say, and some of the voices I use in describing things, what would Ralph say? What would Nells say? And that type of thing. And that’s where, you know, whatever, that’s top. That’s really, really top for me, it’s that I--without a doubt. It afforded me to be able to have a quote-unquote good lifestyle I guess, too, because of the pay. So, yeah. Franklin: So my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Leon: [SIGH] Wow. Wow. Well, 1974, when I started, in July, Vietnam hadn’t been--the last troops to Vietnam hadn’t left yet. Nixon resigned a month after I started. And it was still the AEC. It wasn’t ERDA and it wasn’t Department of Energy yet. I guess in talking with the guy who’s in charge of fuels, the guy’s name Bob Firster, and he just died just a couple years ago in fact, and got really, really just the most nice, straightforward guy. He would talk about the fuel to an extent. Because he had the high clearance and all that stuff. And you’d talk to the guys in the control room, it’s kind of like, we had no idea how much nuclear arsenal, power, whatever that the Soviet Union had at the time. So it was kind of like a race of the two big bullies on the block. There was no backing down from any of the individuals, any of the guys in my control room, any of my crew, any of the other crews, kind of like we were there for national defense. Without a doubt. And that’s what I think kept this place going. They were very, very, very proud individuals. And so I guess that instilled--that’s what instilled in me, that type of thing. You know, like when I was growing up, Toppenish would play Richland High School in basketball. Because there weren’t very many communities. Richland had to play somebody. They had to beat up somebody; they might as well beat up Toppenish. They would put their green and gold bomb smackdab in the middle of our court. And they’d come. Yeah, but they were good. So I guess maybe when you talk about, when it comes to it, you know, eventually, you could see why they were so proud. They got their “proud of the cloud” type of thing. And it permeated. It permeated the whole Tri-City area. I think that’s probably what--the Cold War was something that I remember, you know, when I was in grade school and going through junior high and high school. I guess, just this just magnified it, my awareness of it. Because they were always experimenting and stuff. They had what’s called a subtle facility to irradiate different other things to see what they could produce and that type of thing. So it was a long, long, long line of history. I got to say that I am very, very proud to have been part of that. Good, bad, indifferent, it’s what it is. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Well, great, Carlos, thank you. Why don’t we take a couple minutes to look at the photos you brought? Leon: Okay. Sounds like a deal. [VIDEO CUTS] Leon: If I wasn’t the first, I’m pretty close to it. Franklin: Well, you’re definitely the face of a changing workforce. Leon: Well, yeah, and I could’ve talked about the women and stuff, too, back when they first came on. Because that’s when they came on, too. In fact, you should--have you ever interviewed any of the operator women? Franklin: A few, yeah. Leon: Martha Coop or Leslie Jensen? Franklin: Leslie--I think we’ve interviewed Leslie Jensen. Let me get those names from you, though and then we’ll-- Leon: Okay. Franklin: And then we’ll follow up with them. Because I’m always trying-- Tom Hungate: Okay, I’m just-- Franklin: Are we good? Leon: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Leon: I don’t know. Whatever. Hungate: So, tell us what we’re seeing. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: Oh, this was my second certificate--or, no, the original certificate when I got certified. Emil Leitz. Franklin: Oh, that’s Larry’s father-in-law. Leon: Larry’s father-in-law, uh-huh. Roy Dunn. Franklin: We’ve interviewed him. Leon: So this was the certificate that was hanging on the wall out there. So, yeah, it’s just something that just--that’s part of the picture that’s what’s called the BN console and as you go around, it’s the A console. And so, yeah, when I left, I made sur that I took it with me. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Leon: And then, this right here, they’re the pictures that I was saying on my--on the day that I got qualified, there’s Emil Leitz and Dave Ferguson, my shift manager, handed me my certificate. Franklin: Ah, yeah, that is solidly in the middle of the ‘70s, isn’t it? [LAUGHTER] Leon: Oh, you just love that, don’t you? Okay! And then there’s my--and this right here is-- Franklin: It’s nice to see you have good consistency with your look. [LAUGHTER] Leon: Yeah, yeah, that’s--yeah. And here I am at--and this is the nuclear console. There’s me and that’s operator, Claire Miller, and that’s Dave Ferguson in the back right there. Anyway, so, yeah, I mean, I could talk about all of these different--like the meters and stuff that you’re seeing But this is the picture that-- Franklin: Wow, look at that computer. Leon: Where I was sitting in front of the AA console. They had me pose like I’m talking. And I have this picture up in my wall at work with my certificate and stuff, my old certificate, I had them laminated. And so people walk into my office and they look at it, kind of like, is that you? Where is that? Is that B Reactor? Because they have a hard time equating that type of thing. Franklin: It’s so--I mean, I’ve only ever seen the B Reactor control room. That’s so much more involved. Leon; Oh, definitely, much more. Just because you had to have--you had recirculation pumps there. There’s a primary system and secondary system. Franklin; Right, it was much more complex. Leon: Oh, yeah. You’re talking 1600 pounds of pressure on the primary side. So, yeah, it was a whole different bag. And like I said, like, lo and behold, no way that I know they were going to set me up for life the way that I know it, as far as what I know, technically. Franklin: Right, right, yeah, a lot of technical knowledge. Leon: Anyway, so, I made a copy of this. I have a card at home somewhere. But anyway, this was just the membership card of the union that I belonged to, the Nucleonics Alliance. And if you look at it, this is a charter member card, when they actually, you know, formed that part of the union. Franklin: Oh, cool. Leon: It’s still kind of like ethe Hanford Works thing or whatever. But I was a charter member. Franklin: Wow. Leon: And this probably is something that--I wish I--I probably should’ve printed it color, but this was sat the Gaslight Tavern. Franklin: Yeah. Leon: ON George Washington way? Franklin: Yeah. Leon: every swing shift, the last night of swing shift, we’d get off and we’d show up. We’d call ahead of time, to the Gaslight. Every shift did this. Franklin: That was nice of you guys. Leon: Every shift did this. But we’d call in ahead of time, and say, well, 20 guys are going to show up at 1:00. They close at 2:00. So, wondering if we could get pizza. Of course, the kitchen was closed by the time we got there. But the cook, before he left, would make up, like ten pizzas or something like that. So, the bartender would then, you know, about 12:30 put them all in there. By the time we got there at 1:00, the pizzas were ready. And of course, the beer was cold. So this was part of the group that I took a picture of. And so in fact, a couple guys from the Hanford Generating Plant back there. This guy back there this is Billy Johnson. We used to call him Billy White shoes back then, whatever. Here’s a couple HP techs and stuff. Ben Garrity, he’s still around. Dale Thayer’s back there. There’s Walt Like, he’s a little German INC tech. But, oh, oh, golly, and talk about the end of shift, 1:00 in the morning, we had one hour. Not only did we consume all that pizza, boy, but I tell you we downed a lot--those guys taught me how to drink beer. I had no idea that you could drink that much beer! I mean, even in college. These guys were old hands. They were old hands. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Leon: Anyway, so that’s what I have. Franklin: Thank you, Carlos. Leon: That’s what I brought. Franklin: Oh, those were wonderful. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:30:12 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor B Reactor 200 East 105-N PFP Vit Plant Energy Northwest Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1953 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1974 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Carlos Leon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Carlos Leon talks about the hiring process, the friends and mentors he had while working in the N Reactor. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/05/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F634eff6a9b7e1a96710e2b8db34c897a.JPG 8f04c3d9db869862b8c052daad298c59 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb29d88f4fdd0a54ab37ae0ab13fc1325.mp4 2ab7a1d9b1c3cde0b5d45a67502f108c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Garrold Lyon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Garrold Lyon on August 30, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Garrold about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full legal name for us? Gerrold Lyon: It’s Garrold, G-A-double-R-O-L-D. I use F as in Frank as an initial. And Lyon last name, spelled like the cat except a Y instead of an I. Franklin: So L-Y-O-N? Lyon: Yes, sir. Franklin: Great. So, Garrold, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Lyon: Well, I was in service in Korea in ‘52 and ‘53. And I had two brothers out here when I got the release from active duty. Actually, I didn’t get a discharge until 1960. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: But I got released from active duty when I got home from Korea. Anyway, I had like brothers out here, so that’s why I come out here. Franklin: What brought your brothers out here? Lyon: Well, my older brother, he kind of worked in the fruit and stuff. But my younger brother, he’s nine years older than me, I come from a family of 13 and I’m the last boy. I have two sisters. Franklin: Wow. Lyon: But he was a tanker driver. I think he logged something like 2 million miles or whatever. Franklin: And did either of your brothers work out at Hanford? Lyon: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. And do you remember what year you came out here? Lyon: That was in ‘54. I come to work out at Hanford in ‘55 in March. Franklin: did you move out to Richland when you came to work at Hanford? Lyon: I did eventually, but at the time I got here, I think--anyway, I lived in my brother’s garage until I got a house. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What year did you move into Richland? Lyon: Well, it had to have been in ‘55, I guess. Franklin: Okay. So Richland was still a government-owned-- Lyon: Yes, right. Franklin: -town when you lived here. Lyon: Yes. I was patrol, and we patrolled Richland somewhat, too, you know. Franklin: And who did you come to work for? Lyon: GE. Franklin: What was it like living in--I wonder if you could describe living in Richland when it was managed by General Electric. Lyon: Well, I was impressed by the water running down the street. Didn’t seem to have any control, as far as watering your lawn or something like that. And then I think we had to pay for our electricity, but that was about the size of it, until they sold out the town. I could’ve went police force or stayed in the Area as a patrolman, which I did. I spent most of the time that I was with GE, I was a patrolman. And about ‘62, I think it was, I got the chance to get on as a utility operator. I had to pass just a test with the interviewer. I got experience as far as charge, discharge and everything-- Franklin: Sorry, I want to back up for a minute. What is a utility operator? Lyon: Utility operator is an understudy for a journeyman operator. Franklin: And what are you operating? Lyon: Well, actually, we would make metal for charge/discharge and we would actually charge it into the unit and as you charge in the unit, the exposed metal that they want drops out in the rear face and then into about 20 foot of water. Franklin: Just to clarify here, we’re talking about--the unit is the reactor? Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: And the charge/discharge is loading new fuel in and older fuel is coming out. Lyon: Right, right. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: Yeah, they had metal that they bring in and they make up the charge. The elevator is down on the floor and it goes clear to the top. So anyway you have a machine and you have like a carrier for one tube and you don’t carry it on your back; I forgot just how they did it. But they had them made up on poles, as far as they had a spacer there that they could only go so far back and then they’d shove the metal in and put a spacer on this side and cap it up. But you had a machine that charged it into the--you just-- Franklin: You mean that pushed the fuel and the spacers in? Lyon: yeah, as I recall, it had a cylinder that would push as you drop it over into it. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: Yeah, the charger that they had perfected enough they could use, anyway, at that time. Yeah. And it was a number of charges that when you go down with your unit, why, they would charge/discharge and then I guess they got a time to keep the unit where it’s activated they got to come up, you know, in a certain time. And the physicists, they figured that out, time-wise. Franklin: Right, they would be doing calculations to figure out which process tube to charge/discharge. Lyon: Right. Franklin: And how long did you do that work for? Lyon: Probably four years. And then I was on the supplemental crew and worked around the clock, you know, A, B, C, D. They were getting close to discharging there before I left. I figured that I better get out if I wanted to stay around. I had a chance to bid on radiation protection and which I got. And I spent 24 years as a radiation protection technologist. I took the national test for that, and passed it in ‘82. I had the book, but I got so rattled here thinking, I’m not going to get over there anyway, I left it in the truck out there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Lyon: But it does have my name in it. That’s the only book that I’ll probably ever have my name in. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So when you were working as a utility operator, which reactors did you work at? Lyon: I worked in most all of them. Because they would come--we were a crew that was coming in and helped the home team, if you will, for that particular reactor. We would do the work that they would normally have to do, I guess. But they always had help for charge/discharge, extra help. Franklin: How many men would it take to do a charge/discharge? Lyon: Well, I suppose two or three could do it. It would have to go in at different times and say--if they were going on charge/discharge, they would have to open the rear face, and they would have to take a monitor and probably three or four utility operators to actually do the work. And you had to suit up in rubber in the rear face. The dose rate was, most of the time, pretty high. You couldn’t--they’d burn you out before you got your job done, and they’d have to send somebody in to replace you. Franklin: How did they--what types of equipment did they use to monitor in the dose rate in the rear face? Lyon: Cutie pie. Franklin: Cutie pie. Did you wear personal dosimetry equipment as well? Lyon: yes, yes. Franklin: What kinds-- Lyon: Oh, it was your badge, and then they had, it’s a little piece of--I can’t describe it right now, but anyway they would run it through where they could expose it and tell about what I’d get. They’d have a source there that exposed, and then you would wear one on you when it was out here all the time, and you took it in the rear face, you just had it covered up so you wouldn’t get it contaminated, you know. Franklin: Yeah. So you said when you were in the rear face, you had to dress up, right? Lyon: Yeah, you had two pairs of whites and one rubber. Franklin: Wow. Could you describe the types of the whites and the rubbers? What types of clothing-- Lyon: Well, you’d put on kind of a white coverall, and they would tape your first pair of gloves on. Then you would put leggings over and tape them to the legs. But you had two pair of those. And your second pair, you’d have to tape your gloves and then you had a glove that was insoluble, if you will. Your first glove was kind of like a doctor’s glove or something, where you’d put them up and tape them. The main thing is you don’t want to come out of there all contaminated. So you’d put on about three pair and then you come out of the rear face and there’s a hamper there where you’d take your raingear off and drop it in there in the step-off pad. Then you’d take your first pair of whites off, and by the time you got the third step-off pad, well, you was pretty well down to your shorts and shirt. Franklin: I imagine all that clothing would be pretty uncomfortable to work in. Lyon: Well, the rear face, as I recall, there’s enough water there that it wasn’t too hot thermally. Franklin: Oh. Lyon: But you had to watch out if one of those slugs would accidentally hit the discharge and hit on the elevator, you’d have a few seconds to get out of there. Otherwise, you’d get a lethal dose. Franklin: Right, because those slugs would be screaming hot. Lyon: Yeah, maybe. Franklin: Radioactively like really, really hot. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: And I imagine that all of that clothing would kind of hurt your dexterity, too, right? Was it hard to move-- Lyon: I don’t remember being--we had wrenches that we had to open the back cap, if you will, and loose them, then you’d pull it out. And they would take the elevator up top before they discharged, of course, and let you out at the top, I believe. I’m not sure now. They may have let you out at the same level, but you had to get the elevator at the top before you started the process. You don’t want a whole lot of hot metal on the elevator. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah. Wow. Lyon: So they’d just drop over into the basin. Franklin: When they got pushed out. Lyon: When they got discharged, yes. Frankin: Was there ever a time where a slug got--you mentioned earlier--when it hit and got on the elevator, you’d only have a few seconds. Did that ever happen? Lyon: Not to my knowledge. Franklin: Okay. Were there any incidences that stand out, accidents or funny things or interesting things, when you were a utility operator? Lyon: Well, I remember the specialist, he would find maybe a spot that he would want to go in. I don’t quite understand why he would stop more or less just for one, but they called it a spline, and on the front, you could do that without your clothing, on the front face. They would run this spline, and as I understand, it was kind of an absorber if you will. I can’t think of the name right now. It would cool that spot that he wanted to. Boron, I think it was. But he would go in that rear face. I’m not clear, really, right now, how come he’d open that up. But it had to be done down where it wouldn’t come out. But I think we’d done that a few times. I remember going in there with him and he was kind of a character. When he went in the rear face--you’d have to wear a mask of course--and he’d have a cigar that he’d cut and put it in his mouth and chew that while he was in. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] What, so smoking a cigar while being in the-- Lyon: You don’t smoke it. He was chewing it. Franklin: Just chewing the cigar. Lyon: Mm-hmm. But he had a full mask and then he was all taped up and your mask is taped, too, so you won’t get any contamination. You have a hood over it. Franklin: Right. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: But he had a spot for the cigar. Lyon: No, he had it in his mouth chewing it. Just chewed it, yeah. Franklin: Interesting. Lyon: I can imagine me trying to chew a cigar for maybe a few minutes or whatever and swallow it. [LAUGHTER] Lyon: Oh, it was--anyway-- Franklin: That doesn’t sound like fun. Lyon: No. Franklin: Backing up a little bit, when you were a patrolman, what areas did you patrol? Lyon: I patrolled in all of them. I started out in B/C, but I was younger on the totem pole, and sometimes I would have to go into another area to relieve a man on vacation or something like that. But like I worked in K-E and K-W, H and F and D and DR, and B/C. I worked in all of them. Franklin: So you really got to go around the whole Site. Lyon: yeah. Franklin: Was there an area that was more difficult or better to patrol than the others? Lyon: I don’t think so. You had about the same routines. You had to patrol from the water facility--there was a tunnel there that goes from there underground over to the unit. One thing, there, in K area that was kind of amusing, especially for new men, they had a coffin and a dummy in it. But first time you seen it, you’re going through there with your flashlight and stuff, and there’s a coffin and stuff. You open it up and they get a good laugh when you get out of there. Franklin: Why was there a coffin? Lyon: I don’t’ know. It’s a prank, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Lyon: That was in K-E, I think it was, or K-W. Franklin: Wow. What was your uniform like as a patrolman? Lyon: Well, they were mainly like you would be on a civilian police force. I wore khakis in the summer, and it was kind of a Woolrich’s part in the winter. And you had a coat, of course, you know, for it. And a hat. Franklin: What kind of weapon did you carry? Lyon: A .38. .38 special, probably. Franklin: Any other interesting incidents that happened while you were on Patrol? Lyon: Well, in our cars, if I was on patrol on traffic or even on your fence car, you had a submachine gun and an M1 rifle in the trunk. And I had a shotgun right beside you there that would--you could unlock it as far as that, take it out. We’d get calls, mainly just for training. A captain would go out and give a location, and you had to see how quick--they clocked you and stuff when you answered to get to the stop that they wanted you to be there. Franklin: Cool. Let me go back to my questions here. And then after the reactors were shut down and you went-- Lyon: radiation protection. Franklin: Yeah, as an RPT, where did you work? Lyon: Well, I worked at D and DR, most of the time, probably. Franklin: Even after it shut down? Lyon: Yeah, you can--well, after it shut down, but--that was before it was shut down, particular--I don’t know, they hauled metal and of course kept security as far as that’s concerned. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: I can’t think of any incidents that happened there, really big, exciting, or anything. Franklin: Where else did you work as a radiation protection technician besides D and DR? Lyon: I worked over in 200 Area. They had kind of a decon thing going there and that was C Farm, I believe, in 200 West. We had pumps there--they had evaporators of course, that was trying to pump off the hotter tanks in the Tank Farm. And they would pump them out and then at a certain level they’d decide that that particular pump had to go. And they would physically go in there and they had to stretch out and they would put down paper and stuff to load that physically on that little boy. And they would kind of tape it up and everything to keep it from dripping. I know one particular one when I think it was B Farm, I’m not sure, but anyway you could track it with a GM from the time you left the gate clear down to the burial ground. We had some interesting work there to get that up and you know went in the burial ground. They tried to use road graders and stuff to get rid of it at first. They done stuff there that they had to go in, maybe, by men just to pick it up. You’d have to suit up to do that, of course. They maybe had to chip the asphalt where it would go down on the road from the evaporator to the burial grounds. Franklin: Oh, wow. Could you describe a typical work day? Lyon: Well, usually if you had a farm, why, you would suit up or you could--in one pair of whites, anyway, to go to the farm. You checked people out and you might have a crane come in to pull the cover off for, maybe PUREX was pumping stuff through there. And you’d have a crew there that would--operators and they would take care of whatever they was maybe wanting to flush or they could get back in operations and cover up the pit. I had one experience, I was at A Farm and we had a crew coming in to take filters from your stack, change them out, your HEPA filters. We would have a greenhouse there to get the people in there, and you had to wear a certain type of mask. Anyway, it was good for where you didn’t have air, fresh air. And you’d have it in a plastic kind of room, if you will. They would take the filter out and box it up and take it off and they’d put a new filter in. I remember getting--I didn’t have the masks with the chemical filter on it. And I tried to go in there and set the men up first. And what I remember, I got a real strong kind of a--anyway. Didn’t take your breath, but you were conscious of it, anyway. I asked the engineer about it, and he said, well, if you can stand it, it wouldn’t hurt you. So I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: If you can stand it, it won’t hurt you? Lyon: Well, I mean, without the mask, I got--it was like you’d maybe inhaled vinegar or something like that, you know? But that’s the only thing that I can remember that I was a little uneasy about, because I thought I probably got a good shot of contamination or--I do have asbestosis in my right lung. And I don’t know exactly where I got that, as far as that’s concerned. But down through the years, why, I helped to decon 222-S lab and we’d just go in there with a crew, like construction. They’d go in and take so much of a dose to clean up whatever they were trying to clean, and we would check them. We’d set dose rates for them to work and keep time. Usually they’d go in and maybe 50 was all they could take at the time. Franklin: 50--? Lyon: Mrem. Anyway, they had gamma pencils they would wear. And plus the badge. There was another badge that you could get, just for the job. We could read that ourselves rather than have to send it down to get it read. We used to ship out metal there that we’d load metal there from the pickup chutes to the storage area. They would out a bucket, say, of metal. They would have a railroad car come in, and you’d take them underwater back to where you could get it in there where you could put the lid on it, the lid was on the container under the water. Anyway, they had a crane there where you could lift it up and they would remove the lead from the train carrier and you’d use your hoist and go over and put it down in there, and they’d put lead on it and you’d have to smear it out after it got--well, when it was covered up, the radiation was pretty well stopped. But you didn’t want to send anything out that was contaminated, you know, going down the road, spreading your contamination where you went, railroad. Franklin: So you’re talking there about taking the fuel out of from underwater and loading them into the train car? Lyon: No, you’d take them out of the water, load them into a bucket-- Franklin: The cask? Lyon: Yeah, a cask, bucket. It’s approximately like this. It held, I think, 350 of the enriched, that’s slugs. And then your U-238, it’s a slug probably about like that. And the number was less because of space. But they shipped both of them. You didn’t pass anything over the enrichment with something that might react. Yeah. They had that pretty well figured out. We had pretty good supervision as far as that was concerned. The radiation protection was, well, you had authority to stop the job if you thought it was getting out of hand. Franklin: Did you ever have to do that? Lyon: I don’t remember any particular time, but we had, sometimes, especially with construction, they wanted to get the job done, sometimes they were reluctant to come out when their time was up. Franklin: Oh, you mean come out of a zone where they would be getting dose. Lyon: Yeah. As far as when you shipped those cans in the railroad car, well, they have enough metal or stuff that would stop anything from coming through the side to speak of anyway. And the lead would be--I think they had kind of a pressure--I mean, wrench that you could tighten up a bolt to the caps to hold them down. I don’t know how far those railroad cars went, as far as that’s concerned. I just--I personally loaded them and I don’t remember bringing them in. Most of their metal that they charged in was U-238, which you could handle with your hands, you know, before they put it into the unit. You had your enrichment in the core that would fission and start the process. Franklin: What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Lyon: Well, I worked at 233, and it was contaminated with alpha. We had to dress maybe two or three pair and come out the same way. You had to be careful, because it seemed like I had the pam, you know about that, that’s kind of just for an instrument--for alpha? And you’d have to check over them physically, you know, before they could come out and remove any clothing that was contaminated. If they were contaminated, you had to decon them. Franklin: What was the decon process like? Lyon: Well, they would send you to the shower, and if you could wash it off where it was nothing detectable with the pam, and your beta gamma, your GM, if those two contaminants, you didn’t detect on the person, well, you call them clean. If you couldn’t clean them, well, you send them downtown and they went through a process down there. Franklin: What about rewarding? What was the most rewarding aspect of your time at Hanford? Lyon: Well, I kind of liked it when I completed a job that was satisfactory. Believe it or not, I have had a few compliments anyway in my history of being a radiation monitor. I was a lead operator--lead monitor, rather--for probably about 12 years of my last years of service. I have relieved my supervisor when he went on vacation. That was in C Area. They were deconing kind of a silo, but it went down. We worked off of two-by-twelve, and they would try and decon the walls of the stuff there. I had a makeshift elevator that was like a two-by-twelve and they’d let you down, and you had a rope with a suit on in case you fell off of it, why, it wouldn’t let you go to the bottom. Franklin: Wow. Sorry. The bottom of what? Lyon: Well, it was kind of an inverted silo. Instead of going up, it was down. Franklin: Okay, got you. What are some of your memories of major events in the Tri-Cities’ history, such as plants shutting down or starting up? Lyon: I can’t remember any real problems. They had that pretty well--physicists figured out the time that they were coming up. When they were shutting down, they dropped the verticals and it would pull out part of your control rods. And when they’d put them in, rather, to shut down. Franklin: I guess the question is more orientated towards not the physical act of reactor shut down or startup, but when, in the late ‘60s, when the decision was made to actually permanently shut down and deactivate the reactors. I imagine, was that of concern in Richland and the community? Was there a worry about jobs? Lyon: I don’t think so. It seemed like they would lay off and then they would hire. I don’t know, it seemed like it was kind of up and down. Franklin: Yeah. When did you retire from Hanford? Lyon: I retired in ‘89 at 58. 58 years. I mean, I was 58 years old. Franklin: Years old, oh okay. So you retired, really, right when the production mission ended. Lyon: Yeah. Well, N Area was still running, and I think, maybe one of the Ks or both Ks ran for a while. But, like, B and C and D and DR and F, H, most of those were shut down. Franklin: Was there a big worry about when the Cold War ended about what would happen to Richland and Hanford? Lyon: I don’t know. I was looking for another job. And I found--I got on with radiation protection. So I had it there as long as I--had I wanted to stay, I could’ve stayed. But, in fact, I got called back when I was 80 years old to go out to HAMMER. I was changing irrigation, believe it or not, in the field, and the phone rang. The guy was on the phone, said he wanted to work out a salary or a number, anyway. And I’d checked with construction to see what they were paying. Anyway, I told him what I could get for construction, and it was more or less $33 an hour, with $3 going towards your insurance. And he said, well, how about $35? And I said, okay. But I got to thinking later, I could’ve probably got $40. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And what did you do at HAMMER? Lyon: In what? HAMMER? Franklin: What did you do at HAMMER? Lyon: Well, they have a mockup, you know, of like your hoods. It’s the next thing to being the actual thing, if you will. They got rooms there like where they have supposedly hot trash and hoods where they work in, too, in the labs. These are all clean, as far as that’s concerned. And you take people in there, make them dress up to a code, like they were actually going in and doing the job. And you go in and you give them a false reading, maybe. You know, because it’s clean. But you take your cutie pie in there and measure it and tell them like, it’s reading four or five rad or something like that. Anyway, you give them a talk-to first, and you try and impress them with the way they dress and the job that they’re doing. And then you take them through and let them do the job. And then you grade them. You can flunk them, or you can pass them. Franklin: So you were doing RPT training? Lyon: Yeah. Well, I was an RPT then. And I would just evaluate the people that come in. They have to pass a test, radiation, like a test for--to work out there. If they can’t pass that test, why, they have to give it another hitch, or else they probably have to move from their job. Franklin: What events or incidents happened at Hanford while you were working there that stand out to you? Lyon: Well, Dash-5 had their problem while I was out there. And they had a problem there at 222-S. They had contaminant in their pipe, their fresh air pipe became contaminated and some people got a dose there that they shouldn’t have. Franklin: Wow. Lyon: You can see the man on TV, I think, still show him. He could probably sit down and breathe on a GM or a pam or whatever and see the needle move by what he exhaled or whatever. Franklin: Do you remember the McCluskey incident? Lyon: That’s what I was talking about. Franklin: The Dash-5? Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: Were you near there when that happened? Lyon: No. What I heard is there was a burial there and it had a drip, drip, and it got so much, why, it would go critical. I think he was right there when it did. Franklin: What about when--did you go to see JFK when he came to visit in 1963? Lyon: I did not. I don’t know whether I was on shift at the time. I worked around the clock a lot of the times. I’d be on graveyard for seven days and then I would have--well, from Friday morning until Wednesday afternoon off. And then I would work swing for seven days. And then I would have two days off, and go on graveyard. That’s the way it went. Franklin: Wow. What was it like living in Richland in the 1950s when it was still a government town? Lyon: Well, I didn’t have any problems. I was a patrolman as far as that’s concerned. I done my job. We would patrol Richland, as far as that’s concerned. I could’ve stayed, had I wanted to become a policeman. But-- Franklin: What type of housing did you live in? Lyon: I lived in a prefab, two-bedroom prefab on 1613 Mahan. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember any particular community events? Lyon: Any ex-what? Franklin: Any particular community events? Lyon: Well, the thing that I remember is the pump that they pulled from the evaporator, they didn’t have it wrapped up good so it contaminated quite a bit of area there that we ended up digging up a little bit of blacktop before we could get it all cleared. Franklin: Okay. Lyon: But I think mainly it was fairly quiet. Franklin: Sure. [COUGH] Oh, excuse me. Could you describe the ways in which secrecy and security at Hanford impacted your work? Lyon: Well, when I was on patrol, you was always looking for something that, maybe they had left out on their desk. You went through the offices and if you found something that should’ve been secured, why, you called them and they either come out and took care of it or else we took it up to headquarters and they wrote it up. That’s about all I know about security, as far as that’s concerned. People were responsible for what they were working with, and they weren’t supposed to leave it laying out so somebody could just come along and look at it. And I wouldn’t have any idea what a lot of that was about, as far as that’s concerned. Just maybe concerned with the work or, I don’t kind of a secret that they had there. You just had to be careful what you talked about. Franklin: Did people talk about what they did? When you’d meet them, and you knew they worked at Hanford? Or were people secretive about their jobs, or were you secretive about your job? Lyon: Yeah, physically, I’d talk to, especially people that I worked with, you know. Most people in Richland were connected some way there, first off, anyway. Franklin: Did you ever talk about your job to your family? Lyon: Huh? Franklin: Did you ever talk about your job to your family or friends? Lyon: Oh, probably to my wife, yeah. But I don’t think I divulged any classified material-- Franklin: Sure, sure. I wasn’t implying that. Lyon: Oh. Franklin: So you recently took a B Reactor tour, right? Lyon: Yes. Franklin: What was it like to take a tour to B Reactor now that it’s a museum? Lyon: Well, I sat down in the chair and got my picture taken by--I had some people out here, relatives. I think I may have sat in that chair once. I was by no means a reactor operator, but I have sat at the board a little bit. But under supervision. Because you don’t go in there and just start operating; you have to take it slow and--same way with charge/discharge. You have to get the knack, otherwise you won’t drop that metal in, you’ll be doing more damage to the metal than you should. Franklin: What does it mean to you that B Reactor is now a national park? Lyon: I think it’s nice. They got it all cleaned up and they can see. As far as the lecture, they could be a little bit more amplified sound or something in there where you could hear better. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s a-- Lyon: I’m a little hard of hearing anyway. Franklin: That’s a common piece of feedback we get. We’re still working on it. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: So my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Lyon: Well, it was some of the best money that I made, so I really looked at it as a good deal for me. The only thing I was trying to keep myself clean and not get polluted, you know? That’s about the size of it. I enjoyed the money. As far as that’s concerned, it was a decent place to work, I thought. I have two boys, and my youngest boy is going to retire the 20th of next month. He has 40 years as an electrician out there. He’s going to go to HAMMER, if you will, and teach electrical, maybe three to five days a week, when he retires. He’s talking about just--he gets a wage for that, and then they don’t--well, I guess they can give him insurance, too, if they want him bad enough. But he went through a training there in Yakima where they have the training for electricians and stuff. Then he come out here and--it’s Garry Lyon, and he’s 60. Franklin: Oh, wow. How do you--sorry, I guess I have one more question that I just kind of thought of. How do you feel about your work contributing to the growth of nuclear weapons and proliferation of nuclear weapons of the Cold War? Lyon: Well, I think we had to do it. I still think we’re--well, politics there--but one of them sold Russia some of our stockpile of whatever, you know, uranium, whatever. And they need that, I guess, if they’re going to make bombs. I don’t know whether they’re so advanced now that--it was bombs that we dropped. By the way, did they have--I thought that was a Fat Man and a thin man, but there was a woman here the other day, said it was a Fat Man and a Little Boy. Franklin: That--yes, there was, apparently--it’s Fat Man and Little Boy. There was a Thin Man, which was a developmental plutonium gun weapon, but it didn’t work. Lyon: Oh, I see. Franklin: So they went with--because the uranium was a gun-type bomb. Adn then Fat Man was the plutonium implosion bomb. So there was a little bit--but it was just a development, and it never saw the light of day. Lyon: I see. Well, I disputed her a little bit. I said, I thought it was a Fat Man and a Thin Man, and I’d never heard about the Little Boy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: They’re all kind of funny names for the weapons. Well, Garrold, thank you so much for taking the time to come and interview with us today. Lyon: Okay. I have one more boy out there that, he’s an engineer for, well, trying to do the solidification, you know? Franklin: The vitrification. Lyon: Yeah. And he’s 62. Franklin: Wow. You’re kind of a Hanford family. Lyon: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Well, that’s great. Well, Garrold, thank you for taking the time to come in and interview with us. Lyon: You bet. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:46 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9986 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Patrol A Farm D DR K-E K-W C Farm B Farm 200 Area 200 West 222-S lab HAMMER Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1955 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Garrold Lyon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Garrold Lyon talks about his time working in Hanford Patrol and at various reactor sites and tank farms. He talks about his sons that still work at Hanford. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08/30/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9929b6d8d9a06ce53f2c9de05d80f158.JPG e9e0a5bfad333a32a583659be9800d7f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ffad5af57705d4852e40bd30af70ea14a.mp4 5b9fdfc06f213cf89162c1795cd0a77c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donna Whiteside Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: Ready? Tom Hungate: Yeah, we’re ready. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Donna Whiteside on April 25, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Donna about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Donna Whiteside: Donna Whiteside. D-O-N-N-A. W-H-I-T-E-S-I-D-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you very much, Donna. So tell me, when did you first come to the Hanford area? Whiteside: 1953. Franklin: Okay. And I know you weren’t working then. Whiteside: Uh, no. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. So can you tell me a little bit more about why you came to the Hanford area? 0:00:46 Whiteside: My dad had a brother-in-law who worked for DuPont, as a matter of fact. And he got him out here from eastern Montana. And Mom and three kids came later. We did not move into Richland right away, because we had to be put on a housing list. So we lived in three different places, as I remember, in West Richland. Franklin: Okay. Now, but your brother-in-law wouldn’t have worked for DuPont in ‘53. He probably worked for GE. Whiteside: Well, he came out with DuPont. But, yeah. Franklin: Came out with DuPont and then stayed during the Cold War expansion of the Site. And then eventually you moved into an A house, right? Whiteside: Yes. The summer before I started kindergarten. Franklin: Okay. And do you know what year that was? Whiteside: ‘53. Franklin: ‘53. Whiteside: It was ‘53, yes. Franklin: And how long did you live in the A house for? Whiteside: Until I was a senior in high school. Franklin: Okay, and what year was that? Whiteside: 1965. Franklin: So your family purchased the house. 0:01:43 Whiteside: Yeah, they were the senior renters, so they had the first opportunity to buy the A house, which they did. Franklin: Okay. Did they convert, or-- Whiteside: No. The A houses, one half had a full basement; one had a half basement. We had the half basement part. So the first thing my mom and dad did was dig out the rest of the basement, take out the coal furnace, and make a TV room and half bath downstairs. Franklin: Okay. And then what about the other half of the A house? Whiteside: We rented it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: We rented it. Franklin: And so tell me, what was it like growing up in a--what do you remember about growing up in a government town? 0:02:20 Whiteside: It was great. It was very, very safe. You could walk home alone after dark knowing nothing was ever going to happen to you. It was just, you know. Every so many blocks, there was a little park that you could go and play in. There was a grocery store, a drug store right at the end of this park. It was just fun! Franklin: Because these were designed to be very, almost utopian kind of communities by the architect, with those kinds of things in mind. Whiteside: Mm-hmm, it was, yeah. Franklin: The parks and the kind of decentralized shop—there were stores in each neighborhood and everything. And were your parents, overall, happy with the quality of the housing, or--? Whiteside: I think so. I think so. Franklin: So you said you lived in that house until you graduated. How long did your parents stay in the house? 0:03:12 Whiteside: We all moved when I was a senior in high school. My dad passed away when I was young. But we all moved out to north Richland the year I was a senior in high school. I didn’t graduate until ‘66. It was the first part of my senior year that we moved. Franklin: Oh, okay. And why did you move? Whiteside: Because my mother wanted to. And our house had been sold to a couple that lived across the street on the same street we did. And they did convert it into one house. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did you move into newer construction, then? Whiteside: Brand-new house. Franklin: In north Richland. Whiteside: Brand-new house. Franklin: Like a ranch style? Whiteside: Yeah, sort of. But it did have a basement. Franklin: Okay, okay. So you said your father passed away pretty early. Whiteside: He was 35. Franklin: Oh, wow! Can I ask how he-- Whiteside: He either had a fishbone or chicken bone get caught in his throat. Franklin: Oh, my. Sorry, I’m not laughing, that’s just such a-- Whiteside: No, no, no, no. I understand. He actually bled to death is what happened. Franklin: Wow. Was he alone when this happened, or--? Whiteside: He stayed home from work, which was very unusual for my dad to do. My mom did not work. So she was home with him. Franklin: Okay. 0:04:18 Whiteside: The weird part about this was I was coming home from school—I was at Carmichael at the time, which was then a junior high rather than a middle school. An ambulance came down the street and, I said to the gal that I was walking home with, my mom’s in that ambulance. And she was. And she stuck her head out the door and said what was going on. So I just continued on home. Franklin: Wow. What did your father do for General Electric? Whiteside: He was an assistant engineer. But what he did, I have no clue, because nobody what anybody did, you know? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And after your father passed away, did your mother go work as well, or--? Whiteside: Um. Yes, but not right away. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: She got Dad’s VA and his social security and all of that stuff. The VA is what put three kids through college. Franklin: Oh wow. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: So your father was in World War II then. Whiteside: Yes, he was. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: Yeah, he was. Franklin: And so, you left Richland, then, in the late ‘60s, mid-to-late-’60s? Whiteside: Yeah, I went to college. Franklin: And where’d you go to college? Whiteside: The first term, I went to Bellingham. Franklin: Western Washington? Whiteside: Yes, Western. Franklin: And then where? Whiteside: Then I came back and went to CBC, and then I graduated from Eastern in Cheney. Franklin: Okay. And you got your degree in social work. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Right, with a minor in psychology. And tell me how you came back to work for Hanford. 0:05:40 Whiteside: Well, I interviewed for several different jobs in the social work field. Besides wanting me to have a master’s degree, they wanted five years of experience. Well, I could’ve gone back to school and gotten the master’s degree, but I still would lack the five years of experience. I had an uncle on Patrol at the time, and he said, why don’t you send in your application or get ahold of—whoever, I don’t remember even who it was I needed to get ahold of. But that’s what I did. And at the time, they were hiring minorities, and they considered women minorities on Patrol. Franklin: Sure, because women would’ve probably been very underrepresented-- Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: --in the patrol force. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And so--okay. So you send in your resume, and can you walk me through the process as how you got on? 0:06:28 Whiteside: Well, I went down to have—I went down to the Federal Building, in the basement, because that’s where Patrol headquarters was at the time. I interviewed with the assistant chief, whose name was Paul Beardsley. Next thing I knew, I was on Hanford Patrol. I do have to tell you, though, at the same time I was also offered a job as a Sunnyside policeman. Franklin: And how come you chose Hanford Patrol? Whiteside: Well, I figured I would probably be safer than I would in Sunnyside. And the chief in Sunnyside had a few concerns about the fact that I was a female and that I’d have a male partner and things could get out of hand with his wife or whatever. You know. Just because we’d be on night shift together. So I said, okay, I’m just going to go to Hanford. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure. That’s—given the time, the era, that would be a possible--a concern that a male chief would have. I guess we’ll put it that way. So you came on in what year? Whiteside: January of ‘74. Franklin: Okay. and were there other women working at Patrol at that time? 0:07:37 Whiteside: I was like the fifth one hired. Franklin: Okay. Do you know around what time the first woman was hired for Patrol? Whiteside: I think they were hired just prior, like sometime in late ‘73. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Whiteside: Because we all had to go through x amount of training and some of them were still in training when I started. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so, describe working for Hanford Patrol. What were your expectations and did it meet them, and how was it—some of the challenges you might have faced? Whiteside: Well, the biggest challenge was being a female. Franklin: Okay. 0:08:12 Whiteside: They had to convert dressing rooms. They had to convert restrooms. They had to remodel men’s uniforms so women could wear them. Franklin: Was that already being done by the time that you came on? Whiteside: Yeah, it was, it was. Franklin: How were you received by your male colleagues and then the Hanford workers at large? Whiteside: Most—most of the patrolmen were fine with it. A few of them—you know, you don’t need to be here. You need to be at home. Franklin: Ah. Were they older patrolmen that had that--or was it just maybe-- Whiteside: Most of them were older. Franklin: --that’s just how they had been brought up? Whiteside: Most of them were older. A couple of them was due to their religion. Franklin: Ah. Whiteside: Enough said. [LAUGHTER] I mean! Franklin: Sure. No, that’s fine. Whiteside: Enough said. Franklin: Yeah, right. And what about the employees at large? Did you ever receive any kind of criticism or anything from them? Whiteside: No. No. Franklin: You were just another-- Whiteside: I was just there. Franklin: You were just there. 0:09:21 Whiteside: But I will tell you, I would meet some of them in public, and they’d look at me and they’d say, you look familiar. I should know you. And I’d say, yeah, and if I put on a uniform, then you’d know who I was, wouldn’t you? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And were you firearms trained? Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: You carried a gun? Whiteside: We carried .38s at the time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Whiteside: And we had to qualify with .38s, shotguns, and M-16s during the day and at night, at least once a year. Franklin: Wow, M-16s. Whiteside: Uh-huh, M-16s. Franklin: So fully automatic weapons. Whiteside: They were, but we didn’t shoot them fully automatic. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, that’s quite, that’s very--that’s impressive. Whiteside: And I was usually the last one to qualify. Franklin: Yeah? 0:10:05 Whiteside: Because my mindset was, we can’t use these until you’ve tried everything else in the world, you cannot draw a gun and use it. And it’s like, then why do I have to learn how to shoot these stupid things? But I did. Franklin: Okay, right, right. Yeah. But your service piece would’ve been a .38. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Right? Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: Where were you stationed out of for patrol? Whiteside: Mostly out in the outer areas. I was headquartered out of 2-East and that covered East Area and al the 100 Areas. Of course, all the reactors but N Reactor were down at the time. But there was still a few checks that we had to make on the back shifts. Franklin: On the what shifts? Whiteside: Back. Graveyard and swing. Franklin: Oh, graveyard and swing, okay. Whiteside: Yeah, and of course weekends. Franklin: Wow. Okay. And what were some of your regular duties, besides the checks? Did you-- Whiteside: We had to let people in and out the gates. We had to check classified files. There were various gates and things that we had to check. You know, just being alert. Franklin: Just being alert? Whiteside: Yeah. And that’s sometimes really hard on graveyard. Franklin: Oh, I imagine. I imagine so. Whiteside: There was a tower on the river at N Area that was manned also. Franklin: Did you ever man that? 0:11:18 Whiteside: Oh, yeah. Because you rotated. Most of the time you rotated every two hours, unless you were at a barricade, and then it was like four hours. Franklin: What was the most unusual thing that you saw working on patrol? Whiteside: I can’t say there anything very unusual. It was pretty—it was pretty much like night watchman work. Other than letting people in and out of the gates and checking the files and stuff, it was pretty much just routine. Franklin: I guess that’s good that—I guess unusual on patrol is probably a bad thing, usually, right? Whiteside: Yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Was there ever any kind of humorous or anecdotal incidents that you saw while doing these duties? Whiteside: Well, I can tell you what happened to me one time. Franklin: Okay. 0:12:00 Whiteside: Once I got my Q clearance, I had to go with various patrolmen—and it was usually on the backshifts, so I would know all the checks. Because being the youngest person, seniority-wise, I could be sent to 300 Area, to 400 Area, to the Federal Building, to 2-West or whatever, to cover for vacations. So I had to learn all of the outer area stuff. We went into a building in West Area, I think it was 222-S, I’m not sure. But it was an S building; that’s all I know. The file we had to check was in a zone where we had to put on a lab coat and shoe covers. So, I followed the patrolman into the change room. Well, it was the man’s change room. And somebody looked at me and said, you have awfully long hair to be a guy. And I said, well, I’m not a guy. And he said, well, then you’re in the wrong change room. Anyway. I continued with my lab coat and shoe covers and we went and checked the file and we came back out. The patrolman said, now, you go in there and you drop off your shoe covers and your lab coat and then meet me on the outside. So I went through the women’s change room on the way out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, thank you. And so how long did you work as the watchman, night thing--? Whiteside: I was on patrol for eleven-and-a-half years. And then I went to the PUREX building and helped with the special authorization badges and the security. Then I went back to 100-N. Franklin: So that whole first eleven-and-a-half year chunk, was it pretty much the same kind of duties? Whiteside: Yeah, it was. Franklin: Considering that you didn’t train for patrol work in college, was there anything about patrol work that surprised you or stuck out to you in any way? Whiteside: Not really. Franklin: No? Whiteside: Mm-mm. Franklin: Did you find it pretty satisfying to do, given that it wasn’t something that you had trained for initially? Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. And so then you said you went to PUREX. Whiteside: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And what did you do at PUREX? Was that work different from the-- 0:14:02 Whiteside: It was like clerk work, but they also had one section of the building, you had to have a special badge to get into. So all the people that wanted badges for that area, the paperwork was sent to me. Franklin: Okay, and then-- Whiteside: Then I sent it to the manager of that section for him to sign off on. Franklin: Okay. So it was much more of a cler--still security-related, but more-- Whiteside: Right, but more clerical. Franklin: More clerical. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: And did you enjoy that work more or was it nice to be in a single spot or-- Whiteside: Well, it was day shift. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Was-- Whiteside: It was day shift. Of course, on the last couple years of patrol, I was on days, too. But, yeah, it was just—you knew it was Monday through Friday and-- Franklin: No covering for vacations. Whiteside: No covering for vacations. [LAUGHTER] Any of that kind of stuff. Franklin: How many people worked at the PUREX facility at that time? Whiteside: You know, I really don’t know. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: I really do not know. Franklin: I guess, by that time, though, you had a pretty good idea of what was happening, what was going on at Hanford, what was being made, and why. 0:15:05 Whiteside: Yeah, I guess it got a lot more open, you know, than it had been when I was growing up. Franklin: Sure, sure. And how did you—did you feel safe working at Hanford? Whiteside: Oh, yeah. I mean, I grew up here. Didn’t bother me at all. Franklin: Okay. Even from the kind of--you know, because Hanford wasn’t isolated from political or international incidents. So did any of the events in the Cold War ever cause you to worry, you know, or did you ever sense a kind of heightened sense of anxiety? Whiteside: Mm-mm. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: Nope. Franklin: And so you said, after—how long did you work at PUREX for? Whiteside: You know, I don’t know for sure. Because the last five years was PUREX and then it was back to N Area. And I can’t tell you where the division came. Franklin: Oh, sure. By the time you worked at PUREX, were the attitudes towards female employees in security and patrol, had they largely changed by then? Do you think people were more used to seeing females in the-- Whiteside: Oh, yeah. They were. Franklin: --in those kinds of roles? Whiteside: Because we had female lieutenants and all of that by that time. Franklin: Do you ever think about it or does it ever surprise you how kind of quickly that change happened, from no women in that workforce to women being kind of commonplace or not out of the ordinary? Whiteside: Well, I guess, being there, it really didn’t. Franklin: And so you said for the last part, you went to work at N Reactor. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And what kind of job was that, what kind of duties? 0:16:34 Whiteside: Basically I worked for the security guy at N Area. I was in charge of all the keys for all the 100 Areas and for Rattlesnake Mountain. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: So if somebody needed a key, they had to come to me to check it out. Franklin: Did you approve those requests, or--what was that process like? Whiteside: Well, if they needed the key—I can’t remember exactly, but probably the guy or the woman that was ahead of that had said, okay, so-and-so needs a key to get in here. Of course, we’d have to call the locksmith if we were shorthanded on keys or whatever then. Franklin: What were the kinds of reasons that people would need keys, especially to go up to like Rattlesnake Mountain or into a reactor that had been shut down? Whiteside: Just for safety checks, more or less. Franklin: Safety checks. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Same with Rattlesnake? Because was that facility still active when you were doing patrol? Whiteside: No, it wasn’t. Franklin: Okay. 0:17:29 Whiteside: It was still there. And it could’ve been made active, but it wasn’t. But it’s quite a facility. Franklin: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about it. Whiteside: It had sleeping quarters; it had a kitchen; it had big meeting rooms. Because that was where all the important people would’ve gone, if something had happened at Hanford. Franklin: Right. Whiteside: They would’ve bussed them up there. But it was a neat building. It really was. Franklin: So you went inside of it? Whiteside: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Was that part of your patrol duties? Whiteside: Well, no, that was not. One of our checks, if you worked in the 300 Area was to go up there and check the gates. But since I had the keys, just before I quit--I got to retire when I was 42 years old--we, a bunch of us, decided we wanted to go up there. Because I had the keys, we got the okay to go. Franklin: Oh, okay. So this was kind of like before you retired kind of checking it out kind of thing. Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Did you socialize mostly with people from--that worked at Hanford? Whiteside: We did, because my husband and I were both on the same shift. Franklin: Oh, so did your husband work patrol as well? Whiteside: No, no. He ran N--he was one of the shift managers at N Reactor. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you kind of worked together for the last-- Whiteside: Well, we--no. When I went back to N, he’d retired. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. 0:18:49 Whiteside: Westinghouse was coming in and the benefits he would get from UNC were better than those he would’ve gotten from Westinghouse, and he was 62 years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. Whiteside: So it was an optimum time for him retire. Franklin: Sure, yeah, a little earlier retirement and-- Whiteside: Yeah. For the most part, we worked the same shift. So our family, essentially, was the shift you were on. Because you had long changes together, you had days off between swing and days together. So we did a lot of things with them. Franklin: You say your family, you mean like your work family? Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. So the people you socialized with were the people that were on the same shift. Whiteside: For the most part. Franklin: Would you say that was pretty common throughout-- Whiteside: I think it was. Franklin: --all the shift people, like graveyard people were associated with the graveyard people? 0:19:35 Whiteside: I think so. There were some straight day people that we did things with, too. But for the most part, if you wanted to do anything in the middle of the week, it was with the people that you were on that shift with, because we all had that day off. Franklin: Sure, sure. Whiteside: You know. Franklin: That makes sense. And did you meet your husband working out at the Hanford Site? Whiteside: I met my husband when his daughter and I started kindergarten at Spalding. Franklin: Oh, okay. So your husband was-- Whiteside: 23 years older than me. Franklin: Okay! And how did you become involved with your husband? Were you working out at the Site at the time? 0:20:04 Whiteside: yes, I was. I got my clearance, and the night that the patrolman took me to N Area to show me the checks, he told me that he thought Bob Whiteside was the shift manager. And I said, well, did he used to live in Richland and he’s got two kids and he moved back to Sunnyside and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? And of course, the patrolman didn’t know. So he went into his office and he was not there. So, another guy--I don’t remember who it was--took me around and showed me the various parts of N Area. When we got back to Bob’s office, he was there. And somebody had told him that I was looking for him. Of course, he admitted later, he had no clue who I was. To me, he looked the same as my friend’s dad, 20-some years before. But I didn’t look the same to him, of course. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you know? Franklin: Well, sure, yeah. So that’s when you kind of I guess reconnected with him. Whiteside: Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. Franklin: And then you guys started dating at some point. Whiteside: Mm-hm, yup. Franklin: Interesting. And so you retired when your husband did, right? Whiteside: No, I worked for three more years. Franklin: Oh, you worked for three more years. Whiteside: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. And that was that split-time between PUREX and N. Whiteside: And N, yeah. Franklin: So why did you choose to retire from Hanford? 0:21:28 Whiteside: He wanted to sell our house. We had an RV and he wanted to travel and see part of the country. And I was all for it. Franklin: Okay. Whiteside: So we did that. Our house sold and we moved into the RV and covered most everything on our side of the Mississippi. Franklin: Oh, wow. Did you live in an Alphabet—the house you sold, was it a newer construction? Whiteside: It was new. It was on Spengler, right across the street from the 7-Eleven that’s on Spengler. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Whiteside: And you know what used to be where the 7-Eleven is? A drive-in theater. Franklin: Oh, wow. Whiteside: Yeah. Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, kind of a shame that those went away. Whiteside: Yeah, they were fun. They were fun. Franklin: Yeah. I’ve heard. It’d be nice if they could come back. They’re almost extinct now. Whiteside: They are, yeah, and that’s too bad. Franklin: Yeah. And so eventually, though, you came back to the Tri-Cities, obviously. Whiteside: Yes. Franklin: And why did you choose to come back to the Tri-Cities? Whiteside: Bob always knew that eventually, I wanted to come home. Franklin: Okay. 0:22:26 Whiteside: And I wanted to come home with him, not after something happened to him. So in ‘05, well, can we move home now? And he was 80 years old at the time. He said, yeah, it’s time. He was from Sunnyside, so essentially he was home, too. So he said, okay, you better call a realtor. So I did. And we bought a house. Franklin: Okay. And did the rest of your family still live here in the area? Your mother and-- Whiteside: My mother did, yes. My sister and the oldest of my brothers were in Spokane. One was in Salem; one was in [UNKNOWN] California at the time. Franklin: Okay. And so is your husband still with us, or is he-- Whiteside: No, he passed away almost five years ago. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so what have you been doing since you came back? 0:23:13 Whiteside: I volunteer at the cancer center; I volunteer at the book room at the library. I do all the cards for the local Goldwing motorcycle chapter. I wear about three hats at church. I belong to the Cancer Guild. Franklin: So you’re keeping busy in retirement. Whiteside: I keep busy, yes, I do. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As just about every retired person I know seems to be more busy than when they worked. Whiteside: Oh, believe me, it’s true. It’s true. Franklin: Were you—I’m wondering, this is probably going back a ways, but do you remember when JFK came to dedicate N Reactor? Whiteside: I do. I do. Franklin: Did you go out-- 0:23:52 Whiteside: I was not let out of school. My parents didn’t want me to get out of school. But I knew he was here. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you have friends that went to see him? Whiteside: I probably did, but I can’t remember. Franklin: Okay. Were there any other events or incidents that happened in the Tri-Cities or Hanford that happened when you were a child or later on when you worked at Hanford? Whiteside: No. Just regular stuff. Franklin: Okay. What would you like future generations to know about living or working--living in the Tri-Cities and working at Hanford during the Cold War? 0:24:31 Whiteside: Well, I still think it was a very, very safe place. I think that perhaps, if it wasn’t DOE at the time, whatever it was, it would’ve been a little bit more open with what was going on. I think there would be not quite as many negative thoughts, ideas, whatever, about Hanford and Los Alamos and Oak Ridge and all of those. Franklin: So you’re saying, then, that that level of security is kind of—there’s been a legacy cost associated with that. Whiteside: I think so. I think so. Franklin: In terms of people’s maybe mistrust of nuclear. Whiteside: Well, you fear the unknown, and it was unknown. I mean it really was. Franklin: Sure, sure. And then when releases did happen, they were very hushed—you had to kind of pry that information out of them. Whiteside: Yeah, you did. Yeah. Franklin: The level of mistrust grows from the unknown, I guess. Whiteside: Yes, it does. Franklin: Well, Donna, is there anything else you’d like to mention before we close up today? Whiteside: I don’t think so. Franklin: Okay, well, thank you so much-- Whiteside: Thank you. Franklin: --for coming in and interviewing with us. Whiteside: You bet. Franklin: Okay. Great. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:25:39 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9980 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Patrol 2-East 100 Areas East Area 300 Area 400 Area Federal Building 2-West West Area 222-S PUREX 100-N N Reactor Rattlesnake Mountain Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 71 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 24 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donna Whiteside Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Donna Whiteside reflects on moving to Richland when her father moved the family from Montana. Donna worked as a patrolman working graveyard or swing before taking other security related positions until she retired and traveled for sometime in her RV. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F206452690c8885d2fd3e2569f534c285.JPG 466ec2396ffb6f5e3897b77412c7231f https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F05fbc818de7c9ff8a2d133d46e686b4d.mp4 1092ddd880390c6414afc6d74a7556c3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Betty Norton Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Betty Norton on August 28, 2017 The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-City. I’ll be talking with Betty about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Betty Norton: Betty, B-E-T-T-Y. My maiden name was Bell, B-E-L-L. And a lot of this is because of my dad. And last name is Norton, N-O-R-T-O-N. Franklin: Okay, great. Thanks, Betty. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area? Norton: Because my dad came. At the time, we were--well, we started out in Tennessee, and Dad was working for DuPont. Well, he got transferred to Kankakee Ordnance with DuPont in 1942 in October. So we were there about 18, 20 months or so. And then the guy kept telling Dad, you need to go out to Hanford. Well, he’d heard about that scary place out in the desert and everything. And, no, he wanted no part of it. We were from Tennessee and Kentucky and Arkansas. Beautiful country. And he wasn’t about to get that much farther away from family. So, the guy kept insisting, though, and he kept saying, Cecil, I think you need to. So finally my dad said to Mom, well, it sounds like he knows something that we don’t. So, maybe we’d better do it. So Dad got out here. 24 men. Reading my dad’s book, which is absolutely fascinating. He wrote some things--”The things I remember and some I don’t remember” by Cecil Bell. And I think part of it is probably things he didn’t remmeber. But anyway, he and 23 other men were in one sleeping car, coming from Kankakee out to here the first day or two of February of 1944. So they all ended up pretty much being very good friends over the years. One of the guys even was in the other half of our A house, which was on Stevens Drive. In fact, it’s the big one right now across from where the old Sacajawea School was. It now has the big six white pillars and the brick front. Franklni: Oh, yeah, I know that one, yeah. Norton: That’s now, the Catholic priest lives ther,e I believe. Or at least he did for years. So that’s the house, we moved into the south end of it. And Mom and I didn’t get there until June. And my two younger brothers and I, we spent probably a couple of months in a hotel in Kankakee because they took our furniture, but then it was stacked up so long that our furniture didn’t get there until June. So we spent all this time in a hotel. Mom and, I was the oldest at ten, and two younger brothers which was heartbreaking for Mom. So when she found out it was still going to be another month, probably in May, then we hopped on a bus and took off back to see, to Arkansas, to see her folks. I can remember, Mom was holding my little brother, and then my other brotehr and I took turns sitting on a suitcase in the aisle, and the other one got to sit in the seat next to Mom. So anyway, we got out here mid-June. And I was reading in Dad’s book, and I didn’t realize it, but they gave him a house plenty early, this big A house at 1221 Stevens. They came with a refrigerator and a stove. Nothing else. But they gave the men, there were three things: a bed, a chair, and a dresser. And that was the furniture he lived with from probably early in April or something like that, till we gt here in June. So, I had often wondered about that, and then I was going through my dad’s boko last night and I came across that. I’d always wondered, you know? Our furniture was sitting back there. But of course the trains were used for troop movement. So, got here, and of course there wasn’t a blade of grass or tree in sight. And of course we’re from that beautiful green country back there. And ther ewere no rugs on the stairs. There were three kids in our half of the A house with wooden stairs. And two, one of the men that came out, they were in the other half with two kids. ANd I thought, later, after having my own four kids, my mother must’ve cried a million tears back there with all of the dust, the sand, the noise, living in a house with somebody else with kids racing up and down stairs all the time. But they stuck it out and then lived here--he died in September of ‘88 and she followed him six months later in March of ‘89. But I stayed here, married a guy that was working out on the Project after he came back from the army. And we had four kids. Then they had five granddaughters. Ten great-grandkids and now I have four great-great-grandsons. So we’re all still here after--ever since June of ‘44. So I remember a lot about growing up but not too much. It was a fun time. You never had to worry about--well, we never even thought about worrying about bad goings-on or anything. I think we were probably in especially safe town, if nothing else. But I remember playing out from daylight to dark, never having to worry about going home. You went in if you got hungry. Other than that, you played outside all day. I remember the mosquito sprayers. And I read on--some gal, many years ago, probably 20 years or so ago, started something--I don’t know if you’ve heard of it from Col High--from Richland High--the Sandstorm? Franklin: Mm-hmm. Norton: Okay. About--that is an absolutely fantastic thing to have grown up with all these years. There is so much history brought through. The kids start one subject, and then everyone, from all over the world actually can chime in. And I just wish I had thought to find out just how many people she has on her list, because we get things from China, from Japan. In fact, I have a cousin teaching at a university in Japan. But her dad was hte one that laid out, according to this, Georgia Koda, laid out the Uptown area and then helped draw up the plans and build the Carmichael. And my brother was the first ASB president there, Cecil Bell, Jr. And then he went on to be ASB president at Col High--Richland High. Richland High, it’s a hard thing to break. Franklin: That’s okay. Norton: You knew who I was talking about. Franklin: Yeah. The first time I heard it, I was not familiar, but I’m a seasoned-- Norton: Right, but you’ve heard it a few times now in the years, I’m sure. Right. Uh-huh. So, you know, we ran in the mosquito sprayer. We didn’t know anything. We stayed out and played Annie Annover, throwing balls over houses. Loved going down to the park, to the little swimming pool. I could still remember how cold that Columbia River was, because they just piped that straight into the pool down at Howard Amon Park. ANd you got in line, and I think they blew a whistle when it was time for you to get out. So everybody got out of the pool, ran to the back of the line, visited, until they blew the whistle again, and then the next group of people--because you could spend your day just going in and out of the pool, freezing all the time when you were in it. That was one of my favorite things. You could ride the buses, go where you wanted to. We could ride bikes. It was just a fun time. Like I said, I’m sure Mom cried a million tears with all the dust and all of that. But we lived in that house, then, from June of ‘44. Then in ‘49, my dad was supervisor. He was in--it was a machinist. And he got all kinds of upgrades. Well, he was a backhills country boy, and his dad was a horseshoer. What’s that? Franklin: I thought they called it-- Norton: A blacksmith. A blacksmith. Franklin: yeah. Norton: Uh-huh. So Dad knew all that stuff. So when he came out here there were, even in Kankakee, there were a lot of things that he culd do because he knew tempering the fires and all that stuff. So he did real well there working on things that no one else was used to doing. When he came out here, it was the same kind of thing. In fact, it was funny, he came out here before they had any tool sofr him to be a machinist. So they had all these little whelels and wires and whatever they were, motors, that had to be fixed, but he didn’t have any tool.s So he wrote Mom a letter describig everything he needed and sent it to her with money. And then she went and bought it and mailed it back. So he was here working on the Project with tools sent from Kankakee, Illinois, because this big million dollars worth of Plant didn’t have the tool sfor him to work with for awhile. So I always thought that was one of the funny things that happened. But he was real good at inventing-type things. So he did really well. He was in the steam power plant down there, and he was head over that. He knew when they dug the streets and put in pipes, water pipes, he felt at the time, it was the wrong thing because they were only going to be here five years. So he said, oh, they didn’t have to put sand down for all these big pipes and everything. Well, of course they started wearing out. Well, then they would start having leaks, and the bills for people would go up in the air. And I remmeber reading one, well, what he would do is, he would hae a pretty good idea from seeing where the spike would be on the charts that they had, so they could go and dig down there. And he said eh usually could find the broken pipe, no more than two digs. One took him five digs before they could find it. And then the old hotel at the time, all of the sudden, the guy came comlaining--he was the manager--came complaining to Dad because his electric bill had just spiked all of a sudden. All of a sudden, just outrageously. So Dad went back and looked at all the charts to see, and it was about 2:00 in the morning every day, this thing would just jump skyhigh. So he said to the guy, I dont know what’s happening at 2:00 at your hotel, but something is. So the guy said, well, I’ll find out. He went down, and the guy that was supposed to be cleaning all the floors and stuff, mopping them, he found it was a lot easier to hook his one-inch pipe into the big 700 gallon tank that was for the whole hotel, because he’d been using the little 200 pipe that was meant for the kitchen. And so he was using the big one, that made it a lot faster, easier. So the hotel guy set him straight on that so he could no longer do that. He did that. He worked the steam plant for a long time. In fact, he was there-- Franklin: And this was like the steam plant for the City of Richland. Norton: Uh-huh, right. Blew the whistle everyday at noon. Was one of the things he got to do for many years. In fact, somewhere in this book, I should’ve written that down instead of marking it. But when the plant was finally torn down in ‘65 or--no, it must’ve been much earlier than that. So, anyway, he was doing that. So then after that went down, though, then he went out to stores. So then he spent the rest of his time out there. Franklin: When you say went out to stores, can you-- Norton: That was the big stores building out on, just as you’re coming out into the Project where they used to have all the buses around down there and everyhing, I think. Franklni: Okay. Norton: Yeah. So he was there until he retired in February of ‘75 when he turned--but he felt that when people needed something for something that broke down, they needed it immediately; they didn’t want to have to wait and get it on a list. And so Dad would let them come in with their list of what they needed, pick it up, get the order filled, and take it. Well, this went on for a few years. It wasn’t their rules, but the guys that were in charge never said anything because Dad got along so well with all thepeople and had no problems with them. Got everybody satisfied and happy about it. Well, then he mentioned a name, but I don’t remember it and I wouldn’t say it. But he was just a couple of months or few months or minutes or so before Dad retired in ‘75, a new guy came in and he was going to have it his way. People were going to have to send in an order and in three or four days, it woudl get to them. Well, Dad knew this would not work. So he finally told the guy--oh, and then they came in and took out--there were two telephones, so people could call right to the desk and get the things that they needed ordered and get them out. Well, then one day, some guys came in and started to take the phones out. And Dad said, you’re not going to take those phones out. And they said, well, it’s an order. ANd he says, no, you don’t. So anyway, I guess, he talked to Mr. Big and told him, said, you’re not taking those phones out until I leave in two more weeks. If you want to ruin it after that, you can ruin it. But this is what people need. And this guy says, that’s not according to the rules. And Dad says, well, you either leave those phones when I leave or you get rid of me at the same time. So, they left the phones in for the two weeks till Dad lft, and then after that, they went back to this where people had to send in their list they wanted, wait till it could be fixed up several days later. So he was glad to get out of there by that time. He was a very special person. I would say he’s probably one of the most-liked people here. He got along with people all the time from when he started. That was why he got his first job with DuPont. Because he was friendly with a little lady that ran a grocery store there, and she knew the big guys. Well, Dad and his brother-in-law had gone over there and visited in the store. And that’s when he met my mother. So, when they were just about to give up on ever finding a job, she said, well, you take this over to--and I think the name was Brown--over in employment. You come back tonight and you get the letter that I’m going to write you, and you take it to this guy and only this guy. And Dad worked from then, 1932 or so, until ‘75 without ever losing a day’s pay. And was liked by everybody. He really, like I said, he could fix anything. So he fixed little motors that nobody had been able to figure out. He could--there was one section in here on something when they needed something with a sharp point, well, the metal wasn’t--whatever they do with it, tempered right or something. Well, he knew how to temper it right because he’d been shoeing horses with his dad ever since he was ten years old or so. So he told the guy Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:55:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Steam Plant Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 80 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Betty Norton Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Betty reflects on moving to Richland from Tennessee when her father (Cecil Bell) moved from working with Kankakee Ordnance to Hanford in February 1944. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 8/28/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. hanford site steam plant https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5b83b94c68de50301b8e97b9e7e3f03f.jpg bc9fdbf398dab35f02e87bb819f53807 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa30711922620dbac020fc42a9e65de4f.mp4 240a25c48ff69ef6becf66f630e9f7b1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sandra Paine Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Tom Hungate: I’m ready. Robert Franklin: Ready? Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Sandra Paine on July 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Sandra about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Sandra Paine: Sandra Lee Paine. P-A-I-N-E. Sandra, S-A-N-D-R-A, Lee, L-E-E. Franklin: Great, thank you so much, Sandra. So tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work for the Hanford Site? Paine: Well, I was born and raised here, and I went out to CBC. When I was—after my three boys got into school age, and I knew they were going to be growing up and I’m going to be bored staying home. So I happened to go out and take a test and they sent me to school. Because I went out there and took the nuclear chemical operator classes. Franklin: Oh, really? Paine: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:01:11 Paine: And when I graduated from that, I turned in my resume, and I was hired right away. Franklin: Wow, and what was it about nuclear chemical operating that made you want to join that field? Paine: Well, my ex-husband worked out at Hanford. And he was a nuclear chemical operator at that time. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you figured if he could do it, you could do it? Paine: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m sure it probably pays-- Paine: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Were you supporting your three children on your own then? Paine: No. No. Not then. Franklin: Oh, okay. You were remarried. Paine: I was married at the time. Franklin: Oh, okay. And when you say you were born and raised here, where were you born? Paine: I was born right here in Pasco on North 8th and Sylvester Street. Franklin: Oh, okay. Paine: Second house in, big old square white house, two-story house. My mom ran kind of a boarding room upstairs; she rented out the rooms upstairs. Franklin: Oh, really? How long did she do that for? 0:02:13 Paine: Oh, god, quite a few years, till I was married and gone. I was adopted into the family, so I was adopted when I was two years old. Franklin: Oh, okay. Paine: To Virgil Lamb and Lara Lamb. They adopted me. Franklin: Okay. And did your mother run the boarding house--do you know what years or-- Paine: Oh, from the time I was about--well, when I was adopted in, she was running a boarding house upstairs. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you turned in your resume to Hanford, and which contractor did you end up working for? Paine: CH2M Hill. Franklin: CH2M Hill, okay. So you said you were hired right away. So where did you go to work, right off the bat? Paine: PUREX. Franklin: PUREX. What did you do at PUREX? 0:03:14 Paine: Well, I worked on the line and didn’t like that. So I got a chance to do surveillance in the building, going around checking all the fire extinguishers and checking out places that most people didn’t normally get to go. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Such as? Paine: As the tunnels. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay. You mean the tunnels that were recently in the news? Paine: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, wow. Paine: They were there then. Franklin: Yeah, because they were built in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Paine: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe what that was like to go in that abandoned tunnel, or that place. Paine: Well, it really wasn’t abandoned then. There was stuff going on in there. Franklin: Oh, so people were putting material in there? Paine: Yeah. Franklin: And what did it—were there lights in there, or how much room did you have to move around in those tunnels? 0:04:14 Paine: Well, you wore a headlight and carried a flashlight and stuff. There were lights in some areas. Franklin: What kind of protective gear did you wear to go inside the tunnel? Paine: Usually a pair of white coveralls and that’s it. Franklin: And that was it? Paine: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Wow. Paine: Back then, it wasn’t required to wear a mask or anything, till later. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what year did you start at PUREX? Paine: 1980. David Chambers: 1990. Paine: 1990, yeah, 1990. Franklin: 1990, okay. Great. So that sounds really, really interesting to kind of get to go around--so you said you kind of--sounds like you did some mundane things like check fire extinguishers, but you also--what other types of places did you get to go that other folks who worked out there may not have gotten into? 0:05:22 Paine: Well, I could go pretty much anywhere I wanted to. It depended on what kind of clearance you had, where you could go. Franklin: And what kind of clearance did you have? Paine: Well, I don’t know, it was, whatever was needed for the job. I can’t remember what they call them. Franklin: Sure, no, no, no, no problem. Paine: You get COPD, you get problems remembering. Franklin: Sure, no, I completely understand. How long did you do this kind of maintenance job out there? Paine: Well, I preferred doing that than working on the line, so I did surveillance all the time. Franklin: Okay. And then how many years did you do surveillance for? Paine: Oh. Chambers: Probably two or three, and then you went—you finally ended up at the Tank Farms. 0:06:21 Paine: Yeah, two or three and then went to Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, okay. Paine: Worked on the drill rigs. Franklin: Worked on what? Paine: Drill rigs, which we took 19-inch core samples out of all the waste tanks out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Can you describe how that was done? 0:06:37 Paine: Well, you had a big old truck that you backed up there that had a pipe going down, that just actually drilled down to the waste. But we sent a sampler down in there that it filled the sampler, and then we’d have to pull the sampler out and put it in a cask to be sent to the lab. Franklin: Okay. And so that was to test the different composition of the tanks? Paine: The type of waste that was in it, and that type of--yeah. How radioactive it was and how--because they put different layers of different waste in there. Franklin; Yes, yes, they did, yeah. What made you decide to go do that work? Paine: Well, I liked to be outside. I didn’t want to be closed up in a building. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess you would get plenty of outside. The tanks are all outside. Did--sorry, excuse me. Did you enjoy the Tank Farms work? Paine: Yeah, I liked working out there, yeah. Franklin: Yeah? Were there any challenges? Were there any tanks that were more challenging than others? 0:07:55 Paine: Oh, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah. Bringing up higher radioactive waste that you had to really be careful. Put lead blankets and stuff around to keep--so HPTs kept us on our toes while it was coming up. Franklin: Who did? Paine: HPTs. Franklin: What’s an HPT? Paine: Hazardous--monitors. People that monitored the waste, you know. The radioactivity. Chambers: That was a radiation monitor. Paine: Yeah, radiation monitors. Franklin: And what kind of protective gear did you wear when you were working out at the Tank Farms? 0:08:36 Paine: Well, depends on what type of job you were doing. Sometimes you were in one pair of whites, sometimes you were in two pairs of whites. Sometimes you were in plastic lead-lined clothing on. Franklin: Mm. Did you feel that out at the Tank Farms that the protection was adequate for the job you were being asked to do? Paine: Yeah. [UNKNOWN] It doesn’t matter if you’re even outside the Tank Farms then you’re going to get the radiation, you know? Whether you--just because you don’t get contaminated, the radiation still is-- Chambers: Let me make a comment for you here. Dave Flinger[?] is the one that come up with a really good one on this. Some of the people from the DOE were talking and they were asking about--she said, they said well, those areas are fenced off. And they said, well, yeah, you mean those magical chain link fences stop the fumes from coming through? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Very true. Paine: Magical chain link fence. Franklin: Yeah. What other types of challenges did you find at the Tank Farms? 0:10:19 Paine: Well, I enjoyed my job, so I really took it one step at a time and figured--try to do the best that I could, whatever challenges, it was up to my ability. Franklin: Sure. And how long did you work out at the Tank Farms for? David Chambers: You were there probably—probably about 15 years. Paine: 18 years. Chambers: 18 years total, about. Paine: 18 years, yeah. Chambers: At Tank Farms for 15 of it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Chambers: And she also--she didn’t tell you, she was responsible for driving the emergency evacuation bus, so she had to take that out every now and then and drive that so if we had an emergency, she’d fill it up and get it out of the Area. Franklin: Was that when you worked at the Tank Farms, or at PUREX? Paine: PUREX and I did have Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, okay. Was there ever a time when you had to drive the emergency evacuation bus for-- 0:11:07 Paine: Oh. No. We had to keep certified on it, so we had to go out and drive it. So we got to go drive around the Hanford Area, you know, where--we had to put so many hours in to keep your license up. Franklin: Sure, sure. But you never--there was never an emergency where you had to use the bus. Paine: No, no, never. Franklin: Well, that’s good. So, 18--so you retired--or you left the Tank Farms in 2008, then? Paine: Yeah, 2008-2009, yeah. Franklin: Wow, that’s quite a long time out there. Were there any major changes into the way that the work out there was approached when you started at the Tank Farms versus when you left? 0:12:02 Paine: Well, changes in amount of protection, clothing protection that you wore when they were beginning to get up on it a little bit. But I don’t know, I just enjoyed working out there, and didn’t really pay attention. [LAUGHTER] Chambers: The pay was good. Paine: Huh? Chambers: The pay was really good. Paine: Yeah, the pay was good. Not many women made 30 bucks an hour at that time. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, no, that’s very true. That’s very true. Was that one of the things that you enjoyed the most about working out there, was the compensation? 0:12:43 Paine: Well, no, I enjoyed the company and the people out there, you know, were really nice, and had a lot of good times, too. You know, that’s what—liking the people you work with and the thing you do helps you get up and go to the job every morning. Franklin: Yeah, it really does. It really does. Did you work with the same people day to day, usually? Paine: Pretty much. Franklin: You had kind of a crew that you knew well and depended on? Paine: Yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if there were any ways that security or secrecy at Hanford affected your work? 0:13:22 Paine: Well, I just never talked about what I did out there. I didn’t want to make a mistake and say something that I shouldn’t, so I just kept my mouth shut. You know? You never know. Might say something that somebody might want to find out more from you. Put you on a--[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Like some pushy history interviewer? Paine: No. [LAUGHTER] I don’t mind doing it to you now. Franklin: Oh, thank you. That’s great. So I guess as just a final question, the same reflective question I asked Dennis, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the--well, you didn’t work during the Cold War, but I wonder, how about working at Hanford, dealing with the legacy of the Cold War? Paine: Yeah, well, it’s a must, that must be done. And the future’s going to depend on it. Franklin: How so? 0:14:25 Paine: Because we have to keep up with the world, what the world’s doing. They’re developing nuclear stuff and we need more power plants and electricity’s getting higher and higher. You know? Franklin: I’m wondering, do you feel that we can manage the risks, the waste-- Paine: Yes. Franklin: --responsibly and effectively? Paine: I think we can, yes. Franklin: Yeah? Paine: Yeah. We need more places like Yucca Mountain. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Great. Yeah, because it’s not really doing too hot in the tanks, is it? Paine: Mm-mm. Franklin: Great. Well, Sandra, thank you so much for coming and talking with us today. It was really interesting to hear about your experiences. Paine: Well, I hope some of my information helps. Franklin: Yeah, no, it’s really great to hear about, you know, not only the work, but women doing this kind of work out in the workforce and being a real important part of--and showing that women are capable any job. Paine: Well, thank you, we had quite a few women on my crew of my graduating class that went to work out there. We worked, a lot of times, together. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Paine: So there were quite a few. Chambers: Sandra’s got quite bad COPD, too. She started her performance evaluation on June the 10th. And they’ll send her over to a little room to get on a bicycle, too. But the bicycle, evidently, from what I understand is broken. Maybe it’s fixed now. So, she’s waiting for the call to go over there and do that, you know. And then of course, she’s been on hers for four years now, too, to try to get everything resolved. Franklin: Wow. Well, I hope you get a quick resolution and just compensation. Paine: Thank you. Franklin: Okay, well. Thanks to both of you. I really appreciate it. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:16:19 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9980 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview CH2M Hill PUREX Tank Farms Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site Since birth Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 18 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Sandra Paine Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Sandra Paine talks about her time working in the Tank Farms as a Nuclear Chemical Operator. She reflects on the changes that have happened and the pleasant memories while working at the Hanford site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/05/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. ch2m hill Hanford nuclear chemical operator PUREX Tank Farms Woman Women https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8d98d6cd831eab3e0ea30e58a8baf8be.JPG 75a0accb0e39a4826303cbf0441b58c2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lito Ines Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Tom Hungate: Okay. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Joselito Ines on November 6, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I wil be talking with Lito about his experiences working for the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Lito Ines: Full name is Joselito Ines. J-O-S-E-L-I-T-O. Last name, Ines, I-N-E-S. And I go by Lito. Franklin: Great, thanks, Lito. So tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:35 Ines: well, it was my main background was hotel/motel management. A lot of my—that’s when I was pretty young, in my teens. I was approached by all my best friends to go and work at Hanford, because they said they pay more, and less hours. So I did. I signed up for the apprentice program for the operating engineers, local 370. That’s how I started with working out at Hanford at the 200 Area, as an apprentice heavy equipment operator. Franklin: Heavy equipment operator, okay. Did you need any particular background or training to do that? Or did they kind of just take you in the apprentice program at the ground level? 0:01:27 Ines: Yeah. The apprentice program is usually you have to take an aptitude test to make sure you know how to read, write, add, subtract. [LAUGHTER] You know, that kind of stuff. I mean, you just can’t get in there. And what I did is on that year, in ’79, early ’79, there was about 2,000 people that applied for this apprentice program, and there’s only ten people that’s going to make it. So I knew I didn’t have a chance, because my background is something else. And then I talked to everybody, and everybody was in construction and military and farm. Nothing. And for some reason, I got up in the top five, just on aptitude. Because military gets a discount. [LAUGHTER] And I didn’t have that either. But I made it to the top five. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. I want to rewind just a little bit. How did you come to the Tri-Cities area? When did you come to the area? Ines: To the area. Well, my grandfather started a farm here in Kennewick in 1950. So in 1950, my family was the first Filipino that settled here in the Tri-City area. Franklin: Wow. Ines: The farm that he had was in Kennewick. It’s called Canyon Lakes now. But that used to be our farm. My father decided to come because he passed away for a funeral. So when he came here in ’65, he decided he wants to stay here. And so two years later on—because he had to go on the immigration process and things like that—and two years we came in here, in ’67, and I was 15. Immigration there was pretty lax. So as soon as we got here, we got a green card right off the bat. 0:03:24 Franklin: So you came here from the Philippines. Ines: From Philippines, yup. Franlkin: Oh, okay, so your grandfather was already here, but your father and you were in the Philipines until 1967. Ines: Yeah, my grandfather actually came to the United States in 1923. Franklkni: Oh, wow. Ines: During the year where they took a lot of Asian, they took Japanese, Korean, I think even some Portuguese. The Chinese were already here because of the railroad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right. Ines: But these are all the agriculture because what they did is they—the United States figured out that this group of people are good in growing sugar cane and pineapple. That’s why they all went to Hawaii first. That’s how he got here. Franklin: Okay. Ines; And then of course, they were in Hawaii and then they went to California. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Ines: And then they started the revolution for the union workers. The Filipinos started that, not the Spanish people. And then from there he moved to Union Gap. Then he came here in 1950. Franklin: Oh, okay, cool. And then your family, you and your family were in the hotel business until ’75— Ines: No. Franklin: Oh, no? Ines: Just me. Franklin: Oh, just you. Ines: I was in the hotel—my dad was an architect here at Hanford. Franklin: Oh, really? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: When did your dad start working at Hanford? Ines: Well, when we became citizens. Because at that time you had to be a citizen to work at Hanford. So he tried and applied here before ’71. That’s when we got all our citizenship. And they all hired him, but then they found out he wasn’t a citizen. So we had to wait until ’71. So he became a citizen, all of us, in ’71, and that’s when he started. But I didn’t start till later on. Franklin: And what did your dad do for Hanford again? Ines: He was a senior architect here at Hanford. Franklin: Okay. So I assume he had gone to school for that back in the Philippines? Ines: Yes. He was a—actually had two things in the Philippines. He was an architect and a patent examiner. So he worked for the government up there for the patent office. Franklin: Okay. And what were some of your dad’s duties as senior architect at— Ines: Well, they just build all the structures here for the Hanford Project, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. And then you waited—it wasin ’79 then that you came to work at—and you worked for JA Jones? Ines: JA Jones was the first company I worked for at the 200 Area. Franklin: Right,a nd they were one of the major— Ines: At that time. Franklin: contractor—construction contractors, right? Ines: At that time, yes. Franklin: At that time. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: So kind of like walk me through a typical day for a heavy equipment operator. 0:06:15 Ines: Well, the first thing we’d do at Hanford, you know, as everybody knows, it’s probably the safest place to work when it comes to safety. Because that’s all they think about, is safety. So we have our safety meeting, usually consists of at least half-an-hour. Because at that time, we all meet together, all the different crafts. And all the different crafts have different duties and different tasks. SO we talked about everybody’s safety topic for that day, what they’re going to be doing and what kind of safety, or accident they could get into so we could talk about it before they get in there. And then after that, then they split us up and then the boss will tell us, this is where you’re going, this is what you’re going to run, and this is what we’re going to be doing. And you’re going to be working with this kind of craft. Because my craft at Hanford was just a support group. Because I normally worked for a certain craft. I used my machine to do the lifting, whatever it is, for them. Running cranes, I have to move things around for them and things like that. Franklin: Okay. And do you primarily worked—early on you worked in the 200 East and 200 West areas? Ines: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Did you know of any other Filipinos working for Hanford at the time? Or— Ines: No, just my family. Just like I said, we were the first Filipino family here in the Tri-Cities. [LAUGHTER] I mean, growing up, we were it. You know? So if you say, hey, do you know those Filipino family? That’s us! [LAUGHTER] Franklin; What other—you mentioned that the first thing you’d do would be the safety meeting with other crafts. What other kinds of crafts were represented? Ines: Well, they had plumbers, they had carpenters, they had laborers, they have ironworkers, sheet metal workers, insulators. I don’t know what else if I missed. Yeah, I think that’s— Franklin: And what kind of structures did you—do you have any examples of any specific structures that you helped put up or helped support the construction of? Ines: Well, a lot of the buildings we built was in support of the old buildings. You know, because in those years, all the reactors and all those other—it’s already built. So the only thing we were building is we were building sometimes more buildings for the new people, office people, engineers that come in so they have a place to work. Or laboratory for the scientists to work on. And a lot of the things I did, too, in those years was digging up the Tank Farms. Because in that years, we were building a lot of Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ines: So we were building a lot of—digging a lot of those, and that’s where we find a lot of old—[LAUGHTER]—old things that’s not in the record! Franklin: Oh, okay. I’m wondering if we could talk about—can we talk about that a little bit? Like, what kinds of— Ines: Well, sometimes we’d find like vaults or things. I mean, cans that’s not labeled and then we’d always have, we call it an RCT, someone to see if there’s any radi—and most of the time they go out there and the scale would just go, brr! [LAUGHTER] And we don’t know what it is. And then they’d look at their history, see if there’s anything written. Of course there’s none. And then what they do, is we can’t touch anything, so they’d have to call somebody, if they’re still alive, that worked in that area. And then they’d come down—[LAUGHTER] So all these 90-year-old people. [LAUGHTER] They all go in there, and they’re kind of like, yeah, I remember I dug that, and we buried this and that. But you know. That was it. [LAUGHTER] But we’d find all kinds of stuff. One time we were digging a big hole for the tank, and we had a clamdigger and my RCT was sitting on the bank. It was a deep hole. And I was down there, because one of my jobs was to make sure that the elevation was right, we don’t go too deep. And this clam bucket, it’s attached to an old—well, in those times, our machines were really old. [LAUGHTER] And it’s a clam bucket that opens up and then he drops that and then when he picks it up, it closes and brings out the dirt. It’s the old machine. Now they don’t—all, everything’s hydraulic. So one time I was standing there and all of the sudden he dropped that thing and he hit something solid, like dunk! [LAUGHTER] I looked, I go, ho, that thing go! And then I looked at that—the RCT was on the top of the slop. He stood up, he looked at his Geiger and he started running! And I said, hold it! What is this? Am I supposed to run, too? And I said, come on, you guys, let’s get out of here! Because I guess they buried it. And he was on top, and this was in the hole. And it buried his needle. So he said, go! And then of course he sounded the alarm and then of course all of this Hanford Patrol, I mean, everybody—the whole place was packed, and they shut the whole thing down. And just like I said, they don’t know what’s in there, because it’s supposed to be clean. That’s why we’re digging. So the same old scenario; they had to call somebody who’s about 90 years old and say do you remember what’s in there? And that’s the same thing it is. He’s in the thing, he goes, yeah, we dug that thing and we put something in there. But yeah it’s like a vault or something. But he doesn’t know what’s in it. Because most of the time the only one that knows is whoever the head dudes. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, the other guys would just bury the stuff. Ines: Yeah! They told them to bury that thing in there. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: There’s a lot of stuff out there. I worked at that 618-10. Franklin: I was just about to ask you aobut that, yeah. Ines: I mean, I knew that’s what they were dumping—they’re dumping that all over the place. Franklin: Right, and 618-10 was trying to take care of that stuff that had been left out there and not really well-documented. Ines: Yeah, they’re not documented. The thing I did there, the last project I did is I built an area where they can practice on how to dig these cans. The reason why is, if you open these cans accidentally, it explodes and it gives out gas, and it gives out flames. They don’t know what’s in those cans. That’s the worst part about it. They don’t know what emits. It could be deadly poison or just radioactive; they don’t have a clue. That’s what 618-10. But the other job that I just did out there was an experimental thing at 324 Building. If you guys have heard about it; it’s the most highly deadliest building out there at Hanford. Franklin: Yeah, and that’s just up here in the 300 Area. Ines: [LAUGHTER] Yeah! Not too far! Franklin: And that’s the one that’s still up, right? Because they haven’t— Ines: They can’t. Franklin: --figured out yet—yeah. Ines: Yeah, they can’t, bevause if you go in there, like, if you open the door, you’re probably dead. That’s how hot it is. They call it an IDLH building—immediate death to life and health. So if you open that, you’re dead. Franklin: Wow, I’ve never heard that acronym before. What is it, ID— Ines: LH. Franklin: IDLH. Okay. Ines: Immediate Death to Health. [LAUGHTER] 14:12 Franklin: Doesn’t sound good. Ines: Immediate Death to Life and Health, that’s what it was, yeah. Franklin: To life and health. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Wow. Ines: Yeah. And the thing of that, what we were doing is, we were doing the experimental stage of how to get to it, and eventually we’re going to do everything robotics. So that’s supposed to be a five-year job for us to experiment and do the, you know, everything in robotics with the screen andeverything. But everything failed. [LAUGHTER] All of our experiments failed. We were there for about six months, and of course, those were all engineering. See, everything at Hanford is budget-related, whether the government gave you, this is for this, and that for that. So the engineering budget was done, and they all failed. So they laid us off—[LAUGHTER]—because we had all the money to do the experiment for five years—and gave it back to engineering. But I think they just started. I think—yeah, I can’t remember who’s doing it. I think it’s Apollo and something. It was in the paper. Franklin: And they’re using robotics to go inside the building. Ines: Eventually, when we go, when we get there. Right now they’re just starting, just prepping the area. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah. That’s really interesting that you mentioned that they had kind of bring these older retired guys out to explain what’s in these stuff that you would find, because it kind of sounds like making them an ad hoc oral history with them of, like, what’d you do when you buried these things out here? Ines: Exactly. That’s basically what they asked. And of course, we had the Native Americans out there, too, so if we dig up any kind of bones or— Franklin: Did you witness that? Did that happen while you were working in heavy equipment? Ines: You know, I ran into one of them, but he was out at Hanford. He was just across the river. We were doing a bike path. [LAUGHTER] And all of the sudden, the skeletons started popping out. Of course, you know the American Indians used to bury their dead next to the river. Franklin: Right. Ines: So we couldn’t do an excavation because every time we’d do something, you know, they’re coming out. I think it’s from—I don’t know what the reason why. They’re just popping out. So finally they said, well, can’t dig anymore. What you’re going to have to do is you’re just going to have to go on top of them. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what we did! It’s amazing. I don’t know why they didn’t at least excavate it and move it or do something. But it’s Native American Indians; they have different things that they do. Franklin: Yeah. I imagine you would’ve had an archeologist on staff when you were doing a lot of these projects. Ines: Yes, always. We have an archeologist and—there’s another department up there, they just sit there. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what kind of job they have. They said, yeah, that’s our job! WE sit there and watch you guys, make sure you guys don’t dig out anything. And another one—oh, I think it’s environmentalist. We have another person usually that just stands there. Usually they use college kids. And they just sit there and they look for, like, even if you disturb like little birds, or little eggs. You can’t touch anything! [LAUGHTER] They look at all of those things, so once it’s there, it’s roped off. You can’t do anything. That’s why we don’t want to see those kind of stuff in there, because it’ll delay your job completely. THere's a lot a lot a lot of wild animals up there. One time I was walking from one trailer to one trailer, I almost got stampeded by elk. I mean, like, at least 100 of them. I go, where did they come from?! [LAUGHTER] I go, wow! But they know—they’re not scared of people up there, those animals, because they’re used to it. Sometimes we have like babies that will be up there. Baby elk, baby deer, will just be walking up there. Franklin: Right, because they’re all protected on the reservation. Ines: They’re protected. Franklin: They can’t be hunted there. Ines: Yeah, and for some reason, I think they know. [LAUGHTER] Like the elders tell them, oh, we’re okay here. [LAUGHTER] Go beg. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s always—I do tours with the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, and we’re out on Site, when we’re lucky, we see them, and if we’re really lucky, we get close. I think about people that go up to the mountains to hunt and pray that they get really close—you know, half as close to an elk as we do. Yeah, it’s really—Hanford’s kind of a—I think you alluded to it, it’s kind of a wildlife refuge in many ways, kind of accidentally. Because they never—it’s just the nature of taking all that land away for plutonium production that made it kind of a wildlife sanctuary. Ines: Yeah, well, you know, with this radioactive thing, you never know. I mean, they always say that this area might be clean. But wildlife, they fly in there. They eat the stuff, and they go everywhere. Franklin: Right, they’re not bounded by that invisible line on the map. Ines: Yeah. They don’t get a badge. They don’t get a dosimeter. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: You always had a dosimeter when you were out there, right? Ines: Yes. If you ever work—if you work in that type of environment, of course, you have to have one. It depends on the level of exposure you’re going to get; you have different types. Franklin: I wanted to ask you, how long were you in the apprentice program? How long of a program was that? Ines: Apprentice is usually about four years. Franklin: Four years. Ines: Kind of like going to college, but you get paid. [LAUGHTER] That’s another good thing about it. And you can make mistakes. Unless you kill somebody or something. [LAUGHTER] You’d probably get fired. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so. Where did you move next after you worked in the 200 East and West Areas? Ines: I just kind of, basically, I’m dispatched through my union. So after—in construction, you know, you start something, it’s eventually going to end. You’re going to finish. So after that ends, they usually move you to another area. Franklin: Right. So you were a project-based—I mean, as the needs of these different projects determined, that’s where you went. Ines: Yes. And then of course after we built Hanford 2, which is Energy Northwest, I think around that time, it’s all cleanup by then. But I remember when I used to see all those—they used to have like a helicopter and an armored truck. Every time they produced a plutonium, they’ll be out there in the 200 Area. Oh! They built some more! [LAUGHTER] Because they’re superly guarded with a helicopter and an armored guard and a caravan of security. Franklin: You’re talking about when they would ship out the finished product, the plutonium, the product. Ines: Yeah. Well, something—they moved them around. It depends on where, it’s either going to go to the finishing place, and then—I didn’t even know this until later on, but they have what they call a railroad building. There’s like, I think, four or maybe six buildings, and what it is is that’s where, after they produce some plutonium, and they’re in the railroad cars, and they store them there to cool down. I’ve never seen them, for years and years. Because they’ve got big mounds of dirt. I passed by them millions and millions of times, until I worked for a contractor, what we did is we had to re-roof all the old buildings here at Hanford. And so we had to re-roof these. And of course it was radioactive so we can’t get inside until everything is clean. But they were there. I mean, they even had a big—I didn’t even know, there’s a big, huge crane in there to lift up the—I don’t know what they’re lifting, but they’re usually in the cart. And what they do is after they build it is I guess they park the cart there and get it cooled. And then once it’s cold, they transport it to wherever they want it to go. Franklin: Wow. Ines: Yeah. That’s a lot of—and then you know, like I worked at the 100-K East and K West. They’re about a mile long, apart. I didn’t know there was a tunnel that goes from one end to the other end. That’s a mile long. There’s a lot of tunnels in there. [LAUGHTER] One time we had—they said they were going to blow up the elevator. This is when we were cleaning up at K East. They said, we’re not going to work that weekend, because they’re going to blow it up so they can eliminate it. And of course when you blow up things, you don’t want to—it has to be a controlled blast so it doesn’t affect the whole area. Well, you know, all of our reactors out there, they used to use asbestos shingles, because it was supposed to make it cooler, I don’t know what it is. But that’s what they used for the walls. So Monday we came back to work, right? [LAUGHTER] It was funny. We’re all—our eyes were that big. They said in the meeting, they said, the blast was—everything was safe, everything was good, nothing happened. And we kind of looked and said, well, how come the shingles are all over the place? And that’s asbestos. And just like that one thing that we cleaned, K East, the pond, because that’s where they used to cool all those spent fuel, they said, when they first detected it was leaking, I don’t remember exactly what the wording was, but the guy who was explaining it said, this is the wording, they never really claimed it. They said, it wasn’t enough leakage—they said something about the leakage was not enough to make it warrant to clean it. But then he told me, yeah, it was leaking like thousands of gallons per day. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what we’re doing, we’re cleaning the whole thing. It was pretty, pretty, pretty hot when we got down there because we had to dig next to the wall and it’s at least 900 millirems or something like that. But we still had to go there. What we did is we had a dozer, and what we did is, to get close to it, we built barriers, like dirt. I pushed it and then once I pushed, we can’t stay there. Then I have to back up all the way as fast as I can. Bcause before I Got there, there was another contractor that was there, and I noticed all their machines were all parked on the side. And they’re all contaminated. I mean, they had to get—you can’t clean them, once it’s penetrated, it’s history. And they said they have like five people that got burned out every year. I mean, their allowed radioactive exposure is gone for the whole year. So they have five. So when we got there, there was only two of us that went in. I said, how you guys going to do that? There’s only two of you. So that’s how we did it. We just went there and came out, and we put barriers, dirt barriers, so we’re always being shielded. And the only thing we got was three. Which is pretty good. Franklin: Three what? Ines: Millirem. Franklin: Oh, three millirem. Ines: Yeah, which is basically not much. Franklin: Yeah. How long did you work out at the K Basins for? 0:27:40 Ines: On and off. I think the first time I went p there is when I built a couple of buildings attached to, next to the ponds, so we can extract the old spent rods. So I built this building so they can transport it, you know. They bring the rod out—what year was that? I can’t remember. But they said that building can only be there for five years. So what it is is they extract that rod on the crane, because I had to build a crane, and then there’s a truck that comes in—this is inside the building—so everything is inside and then it loads up to thet ruck, and then it went up to the—I think they used to call it the smurf building, the blue building up there. You know, where they’d get sealed again or something like that. That was the first time I think I worked at K. But I worked at all of them. I worked at, you know, even D and DR. Franklin: And what did you do there? 0:28:49 Ines: I think that was during the cleanup already. We were cleaning things up. So I asked them, I said, how come there’s a D and a DR? And they said, this is called DR because it’s D Replacement. And I said, what happened to the D? Well, they had a meltdown. The D had a meltdown, so they had to—kind of like what happened to Japan. I don’t know if they realy controlled it. But most of them are cocooned nowadays. We all cocooned them. I even worked at—because my dad used to tell me, he used to go to, I think it was J or A? J? I can’t remember, where they have a lot of experimental stuff with animals. You know, they— Franklin: Oh, F. Ines: F. Is it F? Franklin: Yes. Ines: Yeah, they said, yeah, you should go there. They have all kinds of animals in there, and some of them are smoking weed, some of them are doing this, some of them are being injected by radioactive. And then I had to go clean that up. That was very interesting, because they buried a lot of stuff in there where it was supposed to be clean, and they buried stuff in there, like dead animals. Franklin: Right, the pigs, right? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: The pigs and the dogs. Ines: Yeah. And it stinks. Franklin: Yeah? Ines: Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t get rid of it properly, because when I was trying to clean that area, you know, make it—we’re supposed to bring it back to American Indians—Native Americans. And I started to vlean it and I was coming up with all of these vaults and tanks. And sometimes I’d open one of them, oh, it was terrible! So we’d always have to call somebody to check out what’s going on. But it’s different. Franklin: So basically the process that you were involved in for cleaning was really just removing the contaminated earth and then where did that go, and what did you replace it with? 0:30:52 Ines: Okay. Well, basically, what we’d do is when we’d—I think the big scenario when I did, they called it the Big Dig. They usually used me for—I’d do a lot of experimental stuff. I’d do the first thing. And so what we did is we had the Big Dig, and that was at B. The hole that I dug, there’s two of them. It’s like four football fields on the bottom. And it slopes out, so it’s a pretty good size. There’s two of them. Becaues by the time I—and what they do, is we separate—we have people that are checking which one is clean, which one is dirty. So we segregate them. So the one that’s dirty, it gets hauled out. And that’s where all of this trucks that you see that have linings and tarps, those are the contaminated ones. Usually the one that’s clean is usually what we put back to backfill. And then they find a place where they can get some more dirt that’s clean. There’s a lot of dirt out there. I even built what they called a mulai-mulai. Have you ever heard of mulai-mulai? Franklin: Yeah, the ridges. Ines: The ridges. Franklin: The upwellings. Ines: Yes. Franklin: They’re leavings of the Ice Age floods. Ines: So that was at N. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: And my job—are you ready for this?—is to rebuild the moolai-moolai that was taken up. Franklin: Really? Ines: Yeah! And I said, so—and the mulai-mulai is an Indian name. It’s an Indian name that means, god made this. So I had to rebuild this mulai-mulai. And the engineer got the design so I know where to start and the height and the dimension. So finally I told them, you know what? By the time I build this thing, it should be Lito-Lito, because I made it! [LAUGHTER] Not mulai-mulai. So everybody was laughing at me. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. I’ve never—how many did you build? Like, how—do you have an idea, an estimate— Ines: How many mulai-mulai I built? Franklin: Yeah, how long did you work on that? Ines: Well, I can build—you know, they’re not that big. They’re probably less than this building, I mean this studio. They’re not that big. Some of them are a little bigger. But they’re not—I’m guessing probably the highest is maybe ten feet. Franklin: did you have photos to work from or--? Ines: No. Franklin: How did you approach that? 0:33:38 Ines: What do you mean by photo? We have plans, you know, blueprints. Is that what you meant? Franklin: Yeah, I mean, I’m wondering— Ines: Yeah, it’s engineered. You know, it’s surveyed, the outline is surveyed, and then they give—it’s kind of like building a golf course. Have you seen a golf course? You know, they have like mounds. Same thing. Kind of like, if you want to make a nice garden in your yard, you know, you make like a pattern, that’s where you start and you build up. It’s the same thing. It’s surveyed. But nowadays everything is satellite surveyed. SO you just put your rod, and that’s how high it goes. Franklin: So were these mulai-mulai that had been taken away for the construction of N Reactor? Ines: Yes. Franklin: There are still some natural ones. Ines: Yes. There are some still in there. Franklin: That’s just so interesting that they would re-put that there, because now it’s a manmade mulai-mulai. Ines: Lito-Lito. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And you would know. It’s just fascinating to me, because you would know—I mean, you would’ve restored it, but you would know and it would also be—that’s really interesting. Ines: Yeah, isn’t that amazing? Well, you know, in the Philippines we have what we call a chocolate mountain. Have you ever heard of that? Franklin: No. Ines: Kind of a similar thing. There’s millions of them up there. But they call it chocolate mountain because of the Kisses. You remember the chocolate Kisses? That’s why they call it a chocolate mountain. Franklin: Oh, interesting. Ines: Yeah, very. Franklin: I want to go back to a couple things. So these railroad car areas, you mentioned where they would store the hot railroad cars. Ines: Yeah, the one they just— Franklin: Were these like large tunnels, or— Ines: Oh, no. Franklin: Especially if it had dirt on it— Ines: Well, no, the dirt is a barricade to hide those buildings. The buildings are pretty big. They’re probably the size of Floyd. Franklin: Okay. SO it was a building. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: But you couldn’t see it from the roadway— Ines: No. Franklin: --because it was obscured by a—and was it manmade dirt? Ines: Yes, yes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ines: It’s all manmade, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Wow. Ines: Yeah, they were hiding it. Franklin: And how many did you say there were? Ines: I think there were at least—I’m guessing—it’s been a while—either four or five, because, you know— Franklin: And what area were they in? Ines: They’re in between East and West, 200 East and West. Franklin: Okay. Ines: So that’s why—I’d never seen it! Because you go through, when we go to the H, it’s one way, and then the other way is you go to the West area. You pass by—it’s in between, it’s right over there. Franklin: Interesting. Right, because the cars would take the fuel from the reactors to the 200 Area, drop it off, processing, and then I guess, I’m assuming, that’s where then they would stage those rail cars to let them cool down. Ines: Yeah, that place used to be railings all over the place. Sometimes when I’m doing some cleaning up, I’d end up with, oh, there’s railroads here. And they’re all interconnected, all of those reactors. Franklin: Right. Ines: Yeah, rails was the form of transportation. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, for the fuel, yeah. I wanted to ask you about your time spent working at WPPS in the early—what was that like to work on a commercial—was working on a commercial reactor different than working— Ines: It was very, very different. Because, you know, it’s not really a—it’s not like the Hanford, the government job that we had, because it’s kind of outside of it. What it is is you had, oh, we had different contractors. There’s so many different contractors working on Hanford. You only had one. This was you’re working with like 12, 20 different contractors. So, everybody’s different. So like our meeting would be just on our company. And then our place—it was really, really different. Because that was the year when we had a lot of people that came form—I don’t know why, there were a lot from Texas. They were Texas—I mean, everywhere I looked, they were from Texas. And then of course like the parking lot is full of different trailers. But the one thing that really stuck to me when I was working there that was really, really different is they used to have portable brothel. Franklin: I’ve heard things of this nature about WPPSS construction. Ines: You’ve heard, and it was the truth. It was the truth. There were trailer—there were campers out there. And that was just so—oh. But I was young, plus I didn’t have enough money. [LAUGHTER] And those guys—I mean, a lot of them make—I mean, we make tons of money out there. But that was really something else. That they—ad then another thing they do, is they all have this gambling—everybody’s—each group has their own just gambling thing. Like in this one cuhte that goes from the bottom all the way to the top—because I run the cranes—and most of the time I’m not busy, I run the overhead cranes. One of our crane guys runs the chutes that goes from the bottom all the wy to the top, because there’s no crane there. So he has like a little portable crane. So I went to visit him, and then I looked in that chute, and I looked down there, there’s this big, huge circle. Kind of like a target. It had like different size rings in it. And in the middle is dirt, and I know there’s a lot of coins down there. And I go, what’s that for? He said, oh, yeah, you throw your coins in there and you put your name, and at the end of the week, whoever’s close to the center takes the whole pot. I said, you’re kidding me! [LAUGHTER] And then they even have contests of rolling your coins on the dirt and whoever gets the farthest wins the pot. And I’m not a gambler, and I don’t really play too many game cards or anything like that, card games. I learned a lot from that place. [LAUGHTER] And this is another thing. This is earlier. My first day there at work. In our building, I walked in there, it’s probably half the size of this. And as soon as I walked in the door, that whole wall, that whole ceiling was filled with penthouse pinups. I go, wow! You can’t do that anymore, because it’s illegal. Franklin: No, you couldn’t. Ines: [LAUGHTER] So, I walked in so I just kind of stood there because I’ve never seen some of them. So I was looking, and then finally the boss—what are you doing there? We’re having a meeting! I said, I was looking to see if my girlfriend’s in here. [LAUGHTER] It was different then. Franklin: Yeah, it really kind of sounds like the Wild West of construction. Ines: It was. As a matter of fact, sometimes when they’d tell me, well, I don’t have nothing to do. Yeah, you don’t have nothing to do? Just go walk around. What do you mean, walk around? Just walk around. Just explore. [LAUGHTER] Really. Yeah. But then one time, they told me, they said—just like I said, I run the overhead cranes, and one day they come up to me and said, we need somebody to do the crane test on tower something. And I was new, so I was just kind of looking around. And they said, nobody else volunteering, so I guess Lito’s going to do it because he’s different. So I said, okay, I guess. So I went. And I went in there, and as soon as I went in there, they got bleaches built on three sides. Now all of the sudden, it’s kind of like a boxing game or something. SO they all got filled up with all these people in suits. What’s going on? And then a camer shows up. Just like that. So it was a big thing. And then I have to deal with an ironworker, because they’re the ones that used to do the signals all the time for the cranes. So finally I looked at the thing and then there’s this big, huge obstacle in the middle that I know if I run the crane northeast, east, west and south, whatever, I’m going to have to cross that or go on top. Well, you know, you have the big hook, right? And I know I’m going to go in there and it’s going to crawl and drag on top of that. So I’m going, well, that looks unsafe. And so finally I said, no, I was going to go ask him, to make sure he checks it. So finally I got to the control and it was red-tagged. You know, the thing where they put tags if there’s something wrong with it. If it’s red-tagged, you can’t touch it. So I said, well, I can’t touch it. And the ironworker said, what do you mean, you can’t touch it? It’s red-tagged! That means there’s something wrong with it or whatever. You don’t know; I don’t know. And so he got mad at me, and he said, I’m going to talk to your boss. Blah, blah, blah, we’ve got all these people out here, these are all big dignitaries, they’re supposed to see both of us do the work. And I said, well, I’m not going to do it until you do that. He goes, oh, okay. And finally they got a superintendent—they called somebody, and he signed, and said, okay. So I finally got it started. And I said, now another thing you need to do is you need to check on top of that thing, make sure there’s nothing on top. So he got mad. You know hwo construction people, they cuss and they yell and they throw stuff. I said, I don’t care what you do, but check it. He said, argh! It’s clean. I said, okay. So of course, he’s the one that does the signaling. So he’s walking, he’s checking the thing, he’s giving me the signal, then final yit’s time to go and drag the big hook on top of the thing. Of course, I can’t see the other side. And I was doing it, and he keeps saying, yeah, keep going, keep going. He was on the other side. Guess what. There was something on top of that thing. And it fell, almost hit him. And I said, there you go. [LAUGHTER] He goes, argh! It didn’t hit me. [LAUGHTER] And there was all kinds of stuff in there. That’s amazing, though—and then, eventually after that thing was built, one of my high school friend that was in my wrestling team, he became a lawyer. Of course you know at Hanford when they were building that thing, a lot fo people were punching in at two, three different time clocks. They did that. And so this high school friend of mine—and that’s what he was—he just got out of college and he said, my company’s auditing the Hanford, Energy Northwest for what they did. So I told him, I said, it’s true. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. People are punching in at different times. I mean, it was just amazing what they did there. Franklin: You mean people were turning in like multiple—like claiming— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: --like that they’d worked different hours, or— Ines: No, no, not just—they were punching in on three different time clocks. Not just— Franklin: Not just the one, but— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: And then they would get paid for three times the— Ines: Yeah. I was there, too, when they did that. You know, when people were saying, they’re time-clocking in but they were saying that they worked—I was there, because I knew who they were. Franklin: Wow. Ewre you still with WPPSS when the default happened and the whole thing shut down? Ines: Oh, you mean the Hanford 1 and— Franklin: 1 and 4, yeah. Ines: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Were you there when— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: I wonder if you could describe that. How did people take it, and what happened to the work? Ines: Well, basically, all the people that was involved in it was devastated because they lost their job. I didn’t really care. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Why is that? Ines: I was just an apprentice. Because I know eventually I’m going to get a—what I did is they transferred me to build an airport, someplace out there by the dam? I think it was called Electric City. Franklin: Okay. Ines: So while they were hassling that problem, I was working someplace else. And I hate—I don’t travel. So that’s why I didn’t stay that long. I said, there’s nothing here! So I came back. Franklin: Okay. Ines: Yeah. Because the problem with working with unions, they send you this and that, and you have to take it. But now that I’m a little bit senior in the ladder, I can choose. And of course, I can hassle for my work. Because I have so much background; I’ve worked with this, this, this, this. I usually just call them up. Franklin: And so after you came back, you spent most of your time just working on cleanup. Ines: Cleanup. Franklin: Right? Ines: Yeah, after that, it was after the—when they were doing the Hanford 2. After that, it was—and it was tough security then. When ti was top secret. I mean, you can’t go—my first day at Hanford in the security at Wye Barricade, and I noticed, why is everybody leaving their key in the trunk? Well, because you’re supposed to open the trunk, they check all your lunch bag, they look underneath, they got the dog. You know, you have to—it was security. And I was wondering why they leave—all those people leaving their keys in their trunk. Then I finally realized, so they don’t have to go out. [LAUGHTER] Nowadays, you can just push a button. But I was wondering about that. I said, those guys are stupid, leaving their keys in there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m wondering if you can talk about the reaction to the shutdown in the late ‘80s when Hanford was told to stop producing. I’m wondering if you can talk about how that affected you or other workers in the community. Ines: It didn’t affect me at all. You know, because, like I said, they always sent me out—one of ym biggest job is, I was a tech engineer, so I usually do the layout, I do the surveying, that kind of stuff. So I’d do all of that kind of stuff. And that’s in demand. Everywhere you go, they always need somebody on that field. That’s why I kept doing that. Mots people don’t like that, because you’re responsible. [LAUGHTER] You’re the main dude. I mean, yeah, that’s where we start, that’s where we dig, and that’s where we put thigns. People didn’t like that. A lot of people that are in construction, that’s the reason that they’re in construction: they didn’t want to go to college. So the job I had was almost pretty safe at that time. They just want to run the machine. You don’t need to know how to add or subtract or some things like that. The people, I mean, in general, the Tri-City community was devastated because that’s when a lot of people moved out. That’s the best time to buy a hosue. That’s when I bought my first house, is that era. Because everything was cheap. The house that I bought was in the market for over two years. So I got it dirt-cheap. Franklin: Did you buy a house here in Richland? Ines: Kennewick. Franklin: Kennewick, okay. Ines: Yeah, I always lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Okay. What do you want to remember about the Chernobyl incient and how that affected Hanford and the Tri-Cities? Ines: Well, I think that was just kind of like a wakeup call for us here, because it can happen here. But most of the people will tell me, oh, Hanford is safe. They said, everything is—you know, they tell us everything is safe here. Everything is—but I’m sure Japan was the same way. But they brainwash you a little bit. Franklin: Yeah? Ines: Tell you, oh, it’s okay here. Just like, well, I was working at the Vit Plant. So you remember aobut the collapse of the tunnel? Franklin: Yeah, I was out onsite. Ines: Onsite? That was at 200 East. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: Well, the Vitrification Plant is just the other side of the fence. Well I was there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ines: So when it collapsed, I didn’t even know. I was there in my rig, and I said, why is everybody running? [LAUGHTER] You know, we always have false—we always have drills. So finally I said, is this a drill, or is it for real? So I called the radio, I said, for real! I said, oh! So you’re supposed to shut everything off and go to the nearest building, take cover. So I did. Which is close to the gate. Which is, where the tunnel is, you can see it from where I was. Well, I’m diabetic. And so I was there for over two hours. Because we stayed there for a long time. Of course, we have to turn off all the air conditioner. So I was hot. And of course, there’s no food. So it’s not good. SO finally somebody from our main building said, you know, if you guys have any diabetic people make sure you have him here because we have all the things you need, like water, whatever. So I said, well, I guess I’m going to go. And they let me go. Eventually, what, three weeks ago, a month ago, they said that there was contamination release. And they let me out. [LAUGHTER] To go to this other building. So now I’m having problem with my chest. I’ve been coughing lately. So I don’t know, hopefully there’s nothing. Franklin: Yeah. Wow. That’s a really— Ines: It’s really—I was at K—was it K? No, it was D. Could be N. [LAUGHTER] I’ve done all—but I was backfilling this trench that goes from what they call the dam that dumps off the cooled water—it’s supposed to be cooled and cleaned water—that dumps out into this trench into the river. It was like 40 feet deep. It’s deep. The concrete’s been gone. They took it off. So I was backfilling it. So I’ve got this big huge truck. You’ve seen those big trucks? With big, huge tires about the size of this building. And then they dump the dirt in front of me and then they push it towards this hole. So one time I was, in the morning, I had this guy that does the thing, I was helping him take out the ropes so nobody will go through there. We usually put a big berm at the end of my job so nobody will fall in. So I was helping him put the ropes. So he set his Geiger counter, and I was telling him, why don’t you guys once in a while survey that? Make sure what we’re doing—oh, it’s—they swear, it’s clean. It’s clean-clean. This guy looks at me and goes, yeah, see if you can just help me. So he puts his thing on the ground and then we were moving that and all of the sudden his machine went [TRILLING]. He looked at it, and he picked it up and said, you didn’t see that. Okay. [LAUGHTER] That’s a lot of stuff out there that’s really weird. Frankli: What would’ve happened had you had seen that? Would they have had to stop work? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: IS that, you think, the reason for some of that behavior? Ines. Yeah. Yep. The same thing out at Hanford, you know, besides Hanford. If you find a big dinosaur bone, it’ll shut the whole job. That’s your livelihood. That’s everybody’s livelihood. Franklin: Right. But it’s also—in the case of bones or burials or cultural sites, though, it’s also a resource that was just discovered, right? Ines: Yeah. Franklin: There’s value in that thing that was discovered. Ines: It’s a different industry. Franklin: There’s a real tension between— Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Right, the project—the construction forces and then the cultural forces. Did you ever see—were there ever any big disagreements—any real tensions that erupted in any of the jobs you were at, between like cultural people and like construction people or kind of— Ines: no. Franklin: No? Okay. Ines: Not really. I’m sure they—after they find out, they probably hash it out someplace and they probably yell at each other. [LAUGHTER] But they don’t show us that. Franklin: Sure. Let’s see here. And so, ah, so you’ve really just kind of been—and you’re still working. Like, you’re semi-retired? Ines: Semi, yeah. Franklin: Okay. What does that mean? Ines: That means I’m not working that much. Yeah. Franklin: Okay, but you still are like— Ines: I’m still—I can still go. Franklin: You’ve done some work on the 324 recently? Ines: 324—well, no, that was a couple years ago. Franklin: Oh, a couple years ago, okay. Where was the last place that you worked? Ines: The Vitrification Plant. Franklin: Oh, right. With the tunnel, earlier this year. Ines: The tunnel, yeah. Franklin: And what were you doing out there? Ines: At that time, I was running what you call a vacuum truck, because we can’t use big machinery to dig stuff and rip everything out, so we used this—that’s why just—why are we running this? This is a truck? It’s supposed to be Teamster. Look at it, it has a wheel. But we run it. And it’s pretty neat, because it sucks everything. It’s amazing at what it does, but it doesn’t ruin anything. Unless you keep jabbing on something. But it’ll even go through those what we call, kind of like a light concrete, it’ll penetrate it. Franklin: Wow. How many reactors did you work on cocooning? Do you remember? Ines: I think basically all of them. I did all of them, because— Franklin: What was the process for that? Ines: Well, the process, first you have to clean all around it. There’s a lot of contamination. You know, when they’re building—when they were doing the reactor itself, they used to be all kinds of chemicals. You know, like ammonia and all kinds of stuff. The process is you have to clean around it first. Then you had to do—that’s why we had that big rig, too, is we were looking for—I can’t remember what chemical that is—and it’s weird, I never seen it before-but if it gets contact with water, it turns green, like a lawn. It’s really—it’s bright green! That’s why sometimes when we’d get done, the next day we’d come back and say, ho, there’s green stuff in there! So at least we know where it’s at. Just like—they gave us a perimeter where to dig. When we start getting done, we saw this one area, the slope is still green. So it needs to go farther that way. There’s a lot of contamination. Because they used all kinds of defunct chemicals to supposedly clean those railroad carts and things like that. And they used all kinds of stuff. One time I was in B, I found a whole bunch of boron, boron balls. That’s what they used to clean the tubes for the reactor. I dug a bunch of those. And I go, ho, bowling balls! They’re nice, perfectly round, white—I mean, it’s white. It’s kind of—hey, there’s all kinds of stuff in there. Franklin: And then you would have to—when you went to do the cocooning, were all the support buildings still there? Ines: No. Franklin: Like power houses and— Ines: No. Franklin: Oh, okay, so those had been-- Ines: Yeah. You work out the perimeter first, and you take all of those things out. Franklin: All the support buildings. Ines: All the support buildings and all of the sudden it’s just the reactor tiself. Franklin: And then you kind of—and then what’s the next—do you remove the roof, or like, how do you get that—because now it kind of looks like a polygon. So how do you get from the big chunky reactor building down to that polygon? Ines: Well, that’s what they do. Just like I said, we start from the outside, we take all of the support building and part of the different building is part of the support building of that reactor. The only thing that’s left there is actually the casing of the reactor. And then, of course, that’s when they put the dome in there. I don’t know what—and they tarp it [MUMBLING] Franklin: Cool. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Just a couple more questions. Kind of larger-scale questions. I wanted to ask you, what were some of the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Ines: Hmm. To me, it’s probably getting all those reactors clean. That’s the biggest ting. Because that’s a big—that’s basically what our mission is, to clean everything. Franklin: Yeah. Ines: That’s our challenge, and we did it safely. We all went home everyday, none of us really got hurt. That was the most challenging things. And then fo course, the reward is I survived it. We all survived it. And then now we got all this monuments that we could show the people. Franklin: What do you mean, monumnets? Ines: Well, you know, the cocooned reactors. We could show the people the history of Hanford. Franklin: Right. Ines: Instead of just flattening everything out. Franklin: Yeah, and well, now there’s the B Reactor Museum, too— Ines: Yeah, I was there. Franklin: Part of the park. Ines: And we cleaned that. Hopefully they don’t say—kind of like, well, how the South are tearing down the monuments. I hope that doesn’t happen. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s always sbeen an interesting connection to me. I wanted to ask you if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Ines: A lot of secrecy. It’s basically a lot of paperwork. And just like what they said before, you can’t talk about your job up there. Franklin: Was that true even in the ‘80s and ‘90s? You felt like that in— Ines: Ah, it depends on where you’re at, see? I mean, if you’re working where they produced—because I remember it was just right here, 300 Area. I didn’t evne know—and that was late. And we had to clean a basement. And I walked in there, and it’s an old, old building. You know, those big, like semi-round buildings. And it’s a shop. It’s a machine shop. So I walk in there, and I go, this is where we’re going to be working at? Yeah! So I go walk in there, and then as soon as I walked in there, there’s a door, kind of like that. And I opened it. And as soon as I stepped in there, the whole place lit up. I said, whoa, what happened? What did we do? You know? They got sirens, they got all those rotating lights and then somebody came. And said, what are you doing here? And I said, well, I’m supposed to work here. And I told him what room. And of course, I don’t know where it’s at. He said, well, you can’t just be—you have to have a special badge. I said, oh. And so finally, I worked there for a whoel week and this always happens. You have to wait. And every time I go in there, I notice everybody—they have like desks and they have all kinds of stuff, and every time we go through there, they have this big canvas or cloth and they cover whatever they’re doing. And I go, hmm, that’s odd. And then it’s kind of weird, too, but by the time I got to the stairs, it was deep. It was at least 100 feet deep. My first day there, there was lockers, old army lockers, there’s lockers all the way around that thing. And I was curious, so I start opening those lockers, and they still have unifroms, but from the Army. That’s still in there. It was odd. And then, the only thing that bothers me is on the roof, you know, like Star Wars, they have that ray gun, that goes, bzzt. And once in a while it does that. It goes, brrrrt. And I go, what? Are we in an experiment or what? But I didn’t think anything about it. So my last day there and after I got done, we didn’t have to exit in the same place. We had to exit in a different place. So we had to wait. So finally, I asked the guy who was my escort, I said, you know, today’s my last day here. I just want to ask you something. What in the hell are you guys doing here? I said, what are you guys hiding? He said, well, you know, we’re with the defense department, US defense. I said, what are you guys doing? He said, we’re researching plutonium warheads. [LAUGHTER] I go, I thought you’re not supposed to be doing that anymore. [LAUGHTER] It’s an old building. Like I said, it doesn’t even look—it’s those—but, you know? And the front of it is a machine shop. So they’re still doing it, the last time I saw that. But most of the time, all of them are gone. Another thing, my first tme here, I used to see a lot of those silos. They have holes in the ground, they have rockets. And they told me about it, but since I run around with my machines, so I drove in there. Because, what they told me, usually, in the middle of the field, there’s a bunch of trees? Tha’ts where they’re at. It’s pretty obvious, because the whole place is desert and then you see these trees around it. And it’s like in a circle or rectangular thing or square. So I went in there, and there it is. There’s silos in there. Franklin: Right, yeah, I heard those used to be anti-aircraft batteries before they were—yeah, the Nikes, right? The Nike missile silos? Ines: yeah. Franklin: My last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Ines: We made good money. [LAUGHTER] WE made good, good money. We made good money working at Hanford. Because, you know. And everything is—and it was good. It made the Tri-Cities. Because without the Hanford Project, I don’t think the Tri-Cities would be this big. But I know the Hanford Project wasn’t the only industry here, ebcase one of the big things we have here is agriculture. Franklin: Sure, yeah. Huge agriculture. Ines: Yeah. And you know, without the Hanford, too, we couldn’t have gotten Battelle. Battelle is one of our biggest—my dad used to tell me, he said—because he’s the one that used to build the buildings here, and everything had to be approved. He said, you know about Battelle? If they want a building, they get it just like that. [LAUGHTER] The other corporations, no. It has to go through the proves. Battelle, yeah, if they want something, they’re going to get it. Bcause that’s where all the research was at that time. Franklin: Yeah, that makes sense. Ines: Yeah. Franklin: Well, Lito, thank you so much— Ines: Thank you. Franklin: --for coming and talking with us. I really enjoyed your stories. They were great. Grade A. Ines: Different, huh? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Colorful is the word I would use. Ines: IT’s not like working in Disneyland. nd. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Washington State University Tri-Cities Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:08:02 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area 300 Area Hanford 2 Energy Northwest 100-K East K West Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 57 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 45 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Joselito Ines Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Lito Ines started as an apprentice operating engineer for the local 370 working as a heavy equipment operator. He immigrated from the Philippines at age 15 in 1967. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11/6/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46718f8d2b200c1c3b4ec42c71009a29.JPG 7f4ae434c4a7a90a4a89297e7d171285 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Cliff Groff Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Cliff Groff on August 10, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Cliff about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Cliff Groff: G-R-O-F-F as in Frank is the last name. Franklin: Okay. And your first name? Groff: C-L-I-F-F as in Frank. Franklin: Okay, great, thanks, Cliff. So, tell me, how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:38 Groff: Well, I came to the area because I came to work for the newspaper here. I came here in 1966. And I worked for the paper for approximately nine years. Franklin: And which paper was that? Groff: The Tri-City Herald. Franklin: Okay, great. Groff: But don’t hold that against me, please. People don’t like the Herald for different reasons. But I did work on it. I was hired as the Sunday editor of the paper. So it means I worked on the news desk all those years. In fact, we moved here from Santa Maria, California, where I was the news editor of that paper. That’s why I got hired. Franklin: Okay. 0:01:26 Groff: For a couple of years, I did some odd jobs. Principally in PR, public relations. And then in 1977, I got hired by Arco to work out at Hanford as a specialist to write operating procedures. That’s what I did. During that 17 years there, I became not only a writer of them; I became a manager of them. When I retired, I was a senior engineering writer, that’s what I was. Franklin: Okay. And so what kind of procedures did these cover? 0:02:21 Groff: Well, what we worked with—we were hired—I was hired in 1977, a year after McCluskey got injured in the Dash-4 project, when he had the americium and acid explosion. And everything was shut down, and they determined that the operating procedures were not—that the engineers couldn’t write them very well. And they wanted to hire people with a background in journalism and English, which I have. So that’s why I was hired. In the job, we would interview operators, process engineers, and supervisors, and we converted standard operating procedures into what were called job performance aids—JPAs. This was based on human factors engineering, which came out of what the Air Force did with their training of their pilots. So I learned a lot about human factor engineering and actually took a lot of classes later on that the company had me do. 0:03:48 Franklin: Okay. So basically, if I can summarize this right, your job was to kind of translate what the engineers—how the engineers felt the process should be done to the process that would actually do the process, because there was kind of a breakdown in communication before, between the engineers and the technical employees. Groff: That’s right. The engineer would write long, essay-type instructions. My job was to convert and write in short declarative sentences, called command language. We had to use very few verbs—we had a verb list. So that’s what we had to instruct the operators to know what we were talking about. And it worked. We converted thousands of SOPs into JPAs. And then they found that the—we had illustrations, very extensive. So then we converted the JPAs into P-O-Ps, POPs, plant operating procedures. So that’s what we were doing when I retired back in 2000. I don’t know what they’re doing now. Franklin: Do you have an example of a successful SOP to JPA that stands out in your mind? 0:05:17 Groff: You know, I worked at all the Tank Farms and I managed a group of engineering writers. We probably did thousands of them. We had to deal with—I worked at PUREX, for example, at the head end control. We had to deal with the panels, that’s what we did. We had to instruct the operators into what the buttons and the bells and whistles meant. Tank Farms, same thing. Also we did the—I worked also at the processes where they converted—well, let me see. At this point, I’m confused, so do you want to stop the camera for a minute? And I can remember something here. Isn’t that awful? I can’t remember. I worked at all the plants; that’s all I can tell you about. Franklin: Sure, sure, that’s fine. Are we ready to roll again? Groff: Oh, is it stopped? Oh, that’s good. Hungate: [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: We’re good. We can edit that out; don’t worry. So in doing this, did you have any background in the technical knowledge behind these processes? How— 0:06:45 Groff: Well, I had to learn on the job. I did a lot of studying. Well, in high school and college I took a lot of science. I wasn’t a science major. I took additional classes at CBC. I took classes in pre-calculus math, chemistry, so I could understand the processes. And I knew how to read blueprints which I had to read a lot of those to understand the processes. So it was, for me—besides I was training other people, I was learning myself about it. Franklin: Oh, wow. Groff: You know, one interesting thing, I was thinking about something. You know we got this eclipse coming up? Franklin: Yeah. 0:07:40 Groff: Everybody knows about that. Well, there was one, I think, in 1975 or ’76, somewhere, we had an eclipse. And this very good friend of mine who worked for me, we walked out on the coal pile to watch the eclipse that was then. So I think that’s one interesting thing that we did. My office was very near the coal plant. I know that there were coal-fired plants at both East and West. My office was located in East. Franklin: Oh, wow. And how big was this division that you were in? Groff: The division? Franklin: Yeah, or your group, the people that-- 0:08:29 Groff: Well, we were highly—there was a lot of, oh, what I call—stop again. Bureaucracy. Very bureaucracy. And I was in research and engineering division, and that was broken down into different process engineers that worked at the different plants. My group, basically, was about 40 people. We consisted of engineering writers, illustrators, secretaries, and the clerk that took care of that. Once we wrote them, we had to have them test it, called user tests. We had to have all sorts of sign-offs, quality assurance, as I recall. The plant manager has to sign off on our procedures. They could not be issued without half-a-dozen signatures on that, including mine, as the engineering writer. 0:09:45 Franklin: What was the most challenging aspect of this work? Groff: Well, we had to know from—the Department of Energy had massive volumes of information and one of the things that we had to study was the SARPs. These were when we had to ship information, these were special—damn. I didn’t know you were going to ask that. Franklin: You said they were SARPs? Groff: Yeah, there were SARs and SARPs and we had to learn what those meant. They were rules written by the Department of Energy, and we had to incorporate our knowledge of SARPs into operating procedures when we were going to ship them. So that was the most challenging for me, was learning the bureaucratic system of the Department of Energy. Franklin: Right. Yeah, I bet. 0:10:54 Groff: And our operating procedures, we had guidebooks that told us how to prepare them, all the different parts of it. The introductions—we had to incorporate safety features into it for the operators. There was a lot of training we had to do that had to be trained as we did in radiation and criticality and alarms. We had to know how to suit up to go into rad zones. I did, I knew how to do that. That was a long time ago. We had to learn how to put on the suits, especially to go into the canyon building upstairs. We had to have a mask on us, gloves. And that was a very challenging thing, too, because I had to go up and observe things so I could write my operating procedures. That was just one aspect of it. 0:11:59 Franklin: Were you allowed to take recording instruments in, like a tape recorder or a pencil and paper? Groff: Well, paper and pencil is just about the main thing I had to do. Because you had to worry about if something got radiated, you’d have to lose it. One of the things you didn’t want to do is wear your wedding ring. Because if it got radiated, it’s goodbye wedding ring. They’d get rid of it, being low level waste then. Franklin: Did that happen enough that that was a real worry for people? 0:12:35 Groff: Well, it must’ve been, because they talked about it. But it’s been a while since I thought about suiting up. We were trained every year on how to do that, how to suit up to go into a rad zone. And going into the Tank Farms, we had to wear things over our shoes and laboratory coats, and as I recall we wore things over our hair. It was very interesting, all those—we had to suit up for the different process buildings. And I worked at all of them. And all the Tank Farms. 0:13:22 Franklin: Wow. So you really got to travel pretty much all over the Site. Groff: In my job, yes, I was everywhere on the Plant. Franklin: What kind of clearance did you have? 0:13:33 Groff: Ultimately, I had a Q clearance, was the high level one. That helped me get into a couple of buildings. One of the plants, we stored plutonium. I had to go in there to do some assessments and I had to go in and I had an armed guard with me. I had radiation protection people, and other managers. I had to go in there and it took about nine or ten people to escort me. And, we had what I call Z Plant, Plutonium Finishing Plant. I had to have a clearance to go in there and observe and study the gloveboxes which is where they did the plutonium work. Now, these plants I think are mostly torn down now, decommissioned. But when I worked there, we were actually producing plutonium. PUREX was actually working. So it was interesting work for me. 0:14:45 Franklin: Great. Are there any other ways in which security or secrecy impacted your work? Groff: No. Franklin: Okay. Groff: No. I was examined—well, when I first went there I had to fill out a personnel security form, a PSQ, for the FBI to investigate my life. And they had to check my life all the way back to when I was in college. And when I was in service, which I did for two years, active duty. I had to remember where my duty stations were and my eight years in reserve. So they had to check everything. Plus, I had to name my relatives, my family members to check into, including my mother-in-law and my father-in-law. So it was very extensive. But I was proud to get that FBI clearance. 0:15:45 Franklin: I would imagine so. I want to move, now, to—and thank you for sharing so much about your work. I want to move to something that I think is really interesting, and that’s the creation of the Hanford Family and your involvement. And I’m wondering if we could start from the beginning of that. How did—what was the Hanford family and how was it started, why was it started? Groff: Well, we started because there was an awful lot of activity against us. Organizations like HEAL out of Spokane and of course in Seattle they had the organization that Gerald Pollet had, America Northwest or something. They were always pounding on us. And we wanted some recognition that what we were doing was good for the country. And that’s why we organized it. I think we felt that we were besieged. I know I felt that way. And I felt we should fight back. And for about five years, that’s what we did. We organized and our leader was Mike Fox, who was an incredible engineer. We had a lot of other help; Larry Haler, for example; Bob Drake, who’s a county commissioner; me; Ruth Nelson managed our office. And we just sort of grew and we just sort of started, we sold caps that said Proud of Hanford and our bumper strips and things. 0:17:41 Franklin: What were the ways that these groups like HEAL, which stands for Hanford Environmental Action League, right? Is that— Groff: That’s exactly what it was. Franklin: What were the ways that HEAL and Gerald Pollet’s group that you felt— Groff: Heart of America Northwest. Franklin: Heart of America Northwest, that’s right. 0:18:03 Groff: Well, they would constantly get in the media and write stories about us. So what we felt was, we were going to have to get in the media and rebut or refute what they were saying, and that’s what we did. I remember one time we went to Spokane and Wanda Munn, who was interviewed by—well, I forget which—it was one of the channels up there. We were there to support her in a debate. And then a bunch of us went to Seattle to also go to a debate. There was always movements to close us down. That’s what they wanted to do. Shut everything down, oppose the Hanford Project. And like I say, we felt that we were under siege. We only lasted for about five years, but we did communicate our message a lot, wrote letters to the editors, raised money, we had rallies. A couple times we went to the state capitol and had a rally there, and I was proud to be the master of ceremonies and introduce everybody. And we did get in, I think we did get in to see Booth Gardner, who was the governor at that time. And we were always going—people that opposed us—Wyden, Representative Wyden of Oregon, did not like us, was always coming out against the Hanford Project for something. And Brock Adams was the senator as I recall at that time. We tried to get these people to support us instead of constantly opposing us. So that’s why we got organized. 0:20:10 It was five years of pretty exciting times, being able to speak in favor of things like PUREX, the N Reactor, which we thought was a valuable resource, dual action, dual purpose. N Reactor produced plutonium and power. Which was your pictures—President Kennedy was here when that was operating. He was here to speak on that. So we were proud of what we were doing, and that’s why we say we are proud of Hanford. Of course, now everything’s gone out there, and that’s the way it—you know. As I have always known, all good things have to come to an end. And that did. 0:21:03 Franklin: What did you feel that you accomplished with the Hanford Family? Groff: Well, I think we accomplished giving our message out. And a couple other things follow after that. Ray Isaacson and I organized the Energy Communities Alliance, which is still in effect. We got together, we met in Denver with people from Denver. There was a nuclear project there. North Carolina. Franklin: Denver is Rocky Flats, right? Groff: Rocky Flats. We met with people from there and organized that, the ECA. And I was proud to be one of the first vice presidents of it. 0:21:49 Franklin: And what did the ECA do? What was its mission and what did it— Groff: Again, it was to get the message out that energy—that the cities can defend themselves. That’s essentially what we did. and we organized Benton County and Kennewick, Richland, was in that, as I recalled. Benton City. And that’s what we did, was to organize a group. We were advocating for nuclear power. That’s what we did. And we were different cities that were part of the Manhattan Project originally. We felt that was an important message to keep going with. So that’s what we did. Franklin: And how long were you involved with the ECA? 0:22:46 Groff: Oh, just a couple of more years. I was on the Kennewick City Council when I went back there. Ray Isaacson was on the Benton County Commission and he represented Benton County. I basically represented the cities when we organized the ECA. And I understand they’re still in effect today even. Franklin: Yeah, they’re actually meeting in Richland later this month. Groff: Yeah, I heard that. I’m very pleased with that. Franklin: Yeah, I think a lot of the attention now has shifted to the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and how the cities— Groff: Yeah, the B Reactor. Part of that. Franklin: Yeah, and how the cities can support that. 0:23:27 Groff: But I think that’s what we did. That was what we were trying to do was say, we did something for this country. And we’re proud of that. We used to argue with people about World War II and the bomb. You know, well, in my case, personally, it saved my dad’s life. He was in the Air Force, and a lot of men had to go from Europe to fight in the Pacific. And I think it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and Japanese. We used to debate that with people on the peace—the people who were, what I call a peacenik. I don’t mean to be insulting. Franklin: No, no, that’s fine. Groff: Anyway, that was my personal opinion. 0:24:18 Franklin: Sure. Sorry, excuse me. In your opinion, what do you think—why do you think people misunderstood Hanford? Groff: Well, I think it was a lot of things. 12 Island—things happening at the other reactors, like 12-mile Island, which my understanding is that it simply proved the backup systems worked. And Chernobyl. Well, I read a lot about that. And my understanding is that Russian engineers took out the backup systems and they were testing something when that happened. I am a retired member of the American Nuclear Society, and that’s where I got a lot of information on the technical side. I’m not an engineer. I was a journalist, a writer. I knew how to do good English. I can string words together. One of the things I said, the most difficult thing is, people have trouble just producing a simple, declarative sentence. And that’s what we had to do in our operating procedures. Anyway, I think we did good things. Franklin: Do you think those skills helped you in your work with the Hanford Family? Your journalistic skills and— 0:25:50 Groff: Oh, I think so. That, and I was apolitical science minor. And of course, later on, some things happened. We organized, we were part of the organizing of the Hanford Speakers Bureau. Mike Fox was a big part of that. I was in that. I had to have extra training to be a part of it, and I would actually go out on behalf of Hanford, the Project, to talk about radiation, waste management. I was proud of the things that we did. I think back on it, and I think we did good things. Of course, Hanford is gone. And that’s, like I said, all good things come to an end. Franklin: Was there ever any points of agreement that you had, that Hanford Family had with groups like HEAL or Heart of America Northwest? 0:26:54 Groff: I don’t think so. I think we fundamentally disagreed with them. They didn’t like what we were doing. We felt like we were doing the right thing. When I think about it, I know the newspaper in Spokane always supported HEAL’s comments. The newspapers in Seattle were always working with Gerald Pollet’s organization. Of course, now he’s in the legislature, as is Larry Haler, which I think is interesting. Franklin: Yeah. Groff: Both Haler and I ran for the city council in Richland in 1989. He won in Richland; I won in Kennewick. I served two terms and I’m pleased with that. It was on the basis of my work in Kennewick that I helped to organize the ECA. Franklin: Oh, shoot, I had a question and just slipped out of my mind. Groff: I hope I’m making some sense. 0:28:03 Franklin: Oh, yeah, very much so. When did the Hanford Family—well, actually, before I ask about the end, you mentioned earlier that you did fundraising. What did you use those funds for? Groff: Well, we had an office that we opened up on George Washington Way. We bought office equipment. We had to have a telephone line; we had to pay for that. And that’s where much of the money went for. And of course we would buy caps, have caps produced. We’d sell that to raise more money. At the end of it, we gave money—we gave furnishings to an organization known as the Columbia Basin Shrine Club. And I believe that much of the money, I think, went to the American Nuclear Society, the local chapter. To the best of my memory; that’s what I recall. Franklin: Sure. Were you supported at all by the government—by the Hanford contractors? Groff: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you know how they felt about the Hanford Family? Formally or informally? Groff: I don’t think they cared one way or the other about what we were doing. Or if they did, they didn’t tell us. 0:29:34 Franklin: How did the Hanford Family come to an end? Groff: Well, we just sort of ended. We just sorted of stopped. We didn’t do anything else. For a couple of years, a bunch of us, we’d get together who were left, we’d get together for lunch. Everybody now has pretty much passed away. Like Mike’s gone. And people like Ruth Nelson, who was a key player in this when she ran the office. She was there every day, managing the office. Franklin: Mm-hmm. You kept working at Hanford after the Hanford Family kind of stopped being active, right? And so you worked, during the ‘90s, during that—right after the Tri-Party Agreement was signed, and the focus on Hanford shifted. Groff: That was one thing. We were asked to support the Tri-Party Agreement, which we did. In fact, I recall a few of us did drive to Pendleton, Oregon and there was a meeting there and we did support that. We did ask to support that. Yeah. 0:30:58 Franklin: How did your work change after the Tri-Party Agreement, your Site work? Groff: Well, for me, nothing. Franklin: Really? Groff: No. I did the same thing. I started writing operating procedures, creating manuals, information manuals. And that’s what I ended up doing through three different contractors. Arco and Rockwell and Westinghouse. And also, one thing I was thinking about, when I was at Hanford, I was on the safety commission that we had. I was chairman of it, and I produced some interesting safety films for video tape, which I enjoyed doing. I got to do a lot of stuff. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Groff: With my acting ability. I was in the Richland Players at that time. I was on the council. And was very active just being—doing a lot of stuff, getting to perform. Franklin: You said training films. These were for the contractors? Training films for— Groff: Yes it was. I did three of them that were all safety-oriented. I naturally performed in all three of them. And they were produced at Battelle. Franklin: Okay. 0:32:28 Groff: The company gave me some money, about, oh, $8,000 to $10,000. That’s what it cost to do. And I wrote the scripts, and we went out, picked locations, and filmed them. So I wish I had copies of those left, but I don’t. I enjoy watching me in them. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I think we—I’ll have to check our collection for those. It’d be fun to see if I can spot you. Groff: Yeah, there were three safety films. What I was in was the accident prevention council, the APC. I was a member and then I was promoted to chairman of it. And as part of that, I actually attended safety meetings with the president of the company. At that time, it was Paul Lorenzini, was our president. And I really liked him. He was—In one film, if I can retain this, the first one I did, I did a pratfall. Which I was stage trained to do. We filmed that at the Federal Building. And when we showed him, his safety people, he said, well, weren’t you injured doing that? I said, no, sir, I enjoyed doing it. Didn’t hurt me a bit. Well, I think he thought I was a little wacky, but that’s—being a little actor like that, a ham, he enjoyed that. So they had me do two more of those. 0:34:10 Franklin: Oh, that’s great. How did the mood of the community change when the production was shut down at Hanford and it moved to cleanup? Groff: Well, I honestly don’t—I don’t know if I can answer that. Franklin: Okay. Groff: I guess the people just accepted that’s what was going to happen. We were decommissioning and things. I felt bad about it. I thought we should’ve been doing more. 0:34:46 Franklin: When you were on the Kennewick City Council, and you served two terms, you engaged in a fight over wind turbines. Groff: Oh, yes, I did. That was something that—some of the money that we had helped fund that. It was about—there was a proposal to put wind turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. That annoyed me, because I thought wind turbines were just totally ugly. And I did a lot of research calling—there were several sites in California: Altamont Pass, Tehachapi. And I would talk to people. I got a whole bunch of information, technical information, on why we shouldn’t have wind turbines. And I was in debates around the city and I won that one. I went, that’s one thing I’m proud of. We did stop the installation of wind turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. Now I understand that the Indian tribes are dealing with that now. I guess they feel—it’s a good place for them. But I used to look up there at that mountain, you know, the highest—3,000 feet, the highest point without vegetation. I thought that was kind of interesting. And why ruin it with wind turbines? So I did, I led that fight. 0:36:19 Franklin: Great. And you retired, you said, in 1999, 2000? Somewhere in there. Groff: 2000, yeah. I worked 17 years there. Franklin: Great, well, we’ve covered just about everything. I just wanted to ask you just a couple more questions. So Chernobyl, obviously, was a major event worldwide but it also had some pretty big ramifications here in Tri-Cities. Groff: Well, they tried to compare it to the N Reactor. That’s one of the things that were used against N Reactor, and 12-Mile Island. 0:37:05 Franklin: And how did you—how did the Hanford Family and others deal with that? I’m wondering if you could kind of describe the dialogue or the kind of battle? Groff: Well, actually, we dealt with it—we were members of the American Nuclear Society. All of us were, kind of had dual memberships. We felt that the ANS did come out with a lot of good information on what actually occurred at Chernobyl and 12-Mile Island. Those were major, major events. I think it hurt this area. Franklin: Did you find the public to be pretty accepting of that information? 0:37:48 Groff: I think so. I think the Tri-Cities, we were in a lot of newspaper stories here and in Seattle, Spokane. And we were on TV a lot, too. Larry and I and Mike were interviewed a lot, talking about our side of it. So I think—and I think we had community support. They’re the ones who would come out to the rallies. Once we got people who came out to the rally when we had it. I think we actually had two of them when we went to the state capitol in Olympia. Well, we had to get some busses, three buses. And that’s where a lot of the money went, to hire the buses. We had a lot of—it was excitement for people. It was for me. I’ll admit it. I was excited. I felt like we were doing something. We were part of something. An important part of something. 0:39:57 Franklin: Yeah. I kind of—off that statement, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Groff: Well, I think we did our duty. I think we were important to the country. I think that’s the main thing. Hanford contributed in history as part of the Manhattan Project, and I think people should realize that what we did was vital to the nation, to the nation’s security. I think that’s the important thing. We were important to the security. And that’s why I was proud to work there. 0:39:46 Franklin: Yeah. Well, Cliff, thank you so much for coming and sharing about your career and your work with the Hanford Family. I really appreciate it. Groff: Well, thank you for the opportunity to do that. Franklin: Yeah. Groff: Like I said, I hope I made sense. Franklin: Yeah, no, you have. It’s been a really wonderful interview. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we conclude? Groff: No, I can’t—all I can say is thank you, and thank Wazzu for doing this. Well, I think I mentioned, I was an on-air talent a long time ago for fundraising for Washington State University, and I’m proud of that. Very proud. Franklin: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re generously funded by the Department of Energy through MSA. So, I want to thank them too. Groff: Okay. Franklin: Well, great. [VIDEO CUTS] 0:40:45 Groff: SAR is safety analysis report. We had to incorporate those into our procedures. Franklin: And what was that you were saying earlier about the evaporator crystals? Groff: Yeah, we had evaporator crystallizers. It was some of the last projects that I recall working on. There was one in East, one in West. Yeah, evaporator crystallizers, that was— Franklin: And how did you help with those? Groff: Writing procedures for the operators. I remember going out and climbing up the stairs. They were—the stairs were these three where you looked through like grates. You know what a grate is? Franklin: Mm-hmm. 0:41:39 Groff: You look down. Me with my agoraphobia, I did that, climbing around those buildings. You know those process buildings were 1250 feet long, about five stories deep, and I could walk up and down those stairs and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. Franklin: Wow. And just a minute earlier off-camera, you mentioned that you were the only non-engineer at that time to pass the engineering test. 0:42:13 Groff: Yeah. That was—in our group, the process control engineers, all of us had to take Phase I. Phase II was they had to study a plant that they’re working at, like B Plant was just where I worked out, WESF, PUREX, C Plant, T Plant, U Plant. The test was on all the aspects of that plant. And I picked that for B Plant WESF and passed it. And I got a certificate, I’m the only one—the only engineering writer that did that, that actually studied enough about it to know what went into that plant. Franklin: Wow. That’s really impressive. Groff: It was impressive and I—my manager at that time, Blaine Barton, who was the group manager, he told the guys, he said, you know, here I am a journalism guy, and I did that. And he thought it was quite an impressive achievement. And I didn’t mention it, but she did. But at home, I still got the certificate. It’s been framed. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Well, Tom, thank you for that question. Hungate: Yeah. Franklin: That was a good one. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:43:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview The Tri-City Herald ARCO Tank Farms PUREX Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 58 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Cliff Groff Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Cliff Groff was a reporter for the Tri-City Herald before becoming a writer for the Hanford Site. He started writing as an operations procedure specialist and retired as the senior engineering writer. In addition to working as a writer for the Hanford Site Mr. Groff also served two terms on the Kennewick City Council and was a member of the Richland Players. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 08/10/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F5e9efc1b839b0942a2fc6c28de0572a1.JPG e51ba630a75d56cfe24750c1cb18284e https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0a6a3259a499c7fe1121af655576364b.mp4 dda71579ddc44f30b311d45592186704 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Peggy Gardner Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: I have a little bit of boilerplate to begin with. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Peggy Gardner on May 2, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Peggy about her experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Peggy Gardner: Peggy Gardner. P-E-G-G-Y. G-A-R-D-N-E-R. Franklin: Great, thanks, Peggy. Tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work at the Hanford Site? 0:00:36 Gardner: My father was a real estate agent in the state of Indiana where we were born and raised. And his cousin lived here in Richland, Washington. And he said their real estate market’s doing wonderful. So my father took a leap of faith. And he was not a man of adventure. So he left my mother for a year and came out here, got his real estate license, and that’s the rest of the story, basically. They moved here, and I followed three years later. 0:01:07 Franklin: And how old were you when you moved here? Gardner: 23. Franklin: 23, oh, okay. So you were in Indiana while your parents relocated here, and then you moved to be closer to them? Gardner: Yes, I did. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:01:22 Gardner: My father took me on a statewide vacation with my mom and showed me the area, trying to convince me to live here. Franklin: And it seems like he was successful. Gardner: Oh, yes. And I never regretted it. Franklin: Really? What kind of attractions did the Hanford area have over Indiana? 0:01:42 Gardner: Well, not in particular the Hanford area at the time, because I wasn’t that familiar with it. But the state offered a lot more mountains and lakes and fishing and boating and just a lot of things I enjoyed doing. Plus the fact that where we live, the humidity’s so low. And where I’m from in Indiana, there’s very high humidity. So it was a big difference in the weather. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. It’s the hardest part about going east, back east, for me in the summer is the humidity. So how did you begin—well, so you moved when you were 23. Did you go to college? Gardner: I did, and I quit. Franklin: Okay. 0:02:23 Gardner: And when I quit, I got a job as a gas station attendant for Marathon Oil, and became a minor tune-up mechanic and drove the wrecker for three years. So that was where I got my mechanical aptitude, was within that job. But I guess I’ve had it all my life, because I’ve always— Franklin: So you were doing that in your teens and 20s then? Gardner: 19. Franklin: Okay. Driving a wreck—like a tow truck and--? 0:02:51 Gardner: Yes! A brand-new 1976 Chevy. And it had dollies on it. So, yeah, that was kind of fun. Franklin: Did you work with mostly men in that industry, I gather? Gardner: Mm-hmm. 0:03:02 Franklin: Did you find kind of ready acceptance by your male colleagues, or did you—you know, how was it being a woman in a what I think people still today think of as a predominantly male job? Gardner: Yeah. I don’t remember any challenges. I grew up with brothers and grew up as an athlete, so I spent a lot of time around a lot of men, and was very comfortable and confident in that environment. Franklin: So did you find—you said you had this aptitude all your life. Did you find a real kind of calling in mechanics? Gardner: Mm-hmm. 0:03:36 Franklin: And so how did you—you were working for Marathon Oil. How did you—when you moved here, did you go to work right away for Hanford, or how did you get involved out on the Site? Gardner: I wanted to have a career with a job that had paid for me to be able to enjoy life. And I applied at an apprenticeship program. That program then got me into Westinghouse. Because I was accepted in September of 1978, and it was a machinist program that I went into. So that’s when I began. And they accepted me, because they saw the aptitude that I had for that field. 0:04:23 Franklin: Okay. And was that kind of like a technical school kind of apprenticeship, or like on-the-job training? Were you immediately in the job, or was there like classroom training and things that went along with that? Gardner: It was both. It was a state-approved apprenticeship program. Instructed by a couple of supervisors and an estimator. They taught the classes right onsite, and we would go work eight hours and then go to class right there at the building. So that was real convenient. 0:04:59 Franklin: How long would the class be each day? Gardner: Probably two to three hours; I don’t quite recall. But there were three different subjects, ongoing that we were— Franklin: So you were pulling some pretty long days then. Gardner: Well, when you’re young, you don’t see it that way. [LAUGHTER] 0:05:15 Franklin: Right, right. Were there any other women in the program with you? Gardner: Not in the program, but prior to me, there was two other women. They both had quit and moved on to different positions. Then another lady was hired on when I was there and there were probably 35 men and then the two of us. So, yeah. Franklin: So still in a predominantly male workforce. Gardner: Yes. 0:05:44 Franklin: Did you find ready acceptance by your male colleagues there? Were there any struggles or issues that you had to deal with, being one of the only women in this field? Gardner: Yes, there were. It was kind of during the time when equal rights and the women’s movement and “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” was out. And there was a lot of resistancy by some of the older craftsmen. But on the other hand, I feel like I assimilated pretty well. And you learn to know who feels that way about you and just be thoughtful about that. Franklin: Sure. Are there any incidences that kind of ring out in your mind? Any experiences that you care to elaborate on? 0:06:35 Gardner: I’ll say two I have, just right off the top of my head. The first week I hired in, the lunchroom, we had union breaks. I went in and sat down, not thinking each chair was sacred, like in church when you go to church, you know people sit in their own pew or whatever. I sat down in a chair, and a gentleman came in and took me by the scruff of my coveralls and literally raised me up out of my chair and moved me over. And I thought, well, I guess I shouldn’t sit here! [LAUGHTER] But he was a real crotchety old fart, but I loved him to pieces. So we gained a really close friendship. But that was my first week. 0:07:19 Another interesting part of my career was, I was working on a project that another fellow machinist had been working on. And the setup was rather slow. So I was given an overtime job to continue on with his job. And I changed the setup and actually was able to complete the parts a lot quicker. And I got written up for it. For not going to my manager and asking to do that. So that was kind of hard. It hurt. And I didn’t make a stand for myself back then. I probably would now that I’m older. So that was an interesting situation. 0:08:07 Franklin: Yeah. I know in the early days of desegregating some of these jobs that bathroom access was often an issue for women. Were there fully functional women’s bathrooms at the time that you started, or were they still kind of figuring that out in the buildings? Gardner: Well, they did have restrooms. I mean, it had office space in the front of the machine shop, so there were restrooms for women. But they didn’t have the shower facilities. So for the first couple years, I’d shower in the men’s shower. The guys would just, one guy would stand outside the door and I would go in and shower. That’s sort of how we did it. But then the company built me my own shower, so that was nice to have, and not have to be in the men’s restroom. Franklin: With a guard. Yeah, I imagine, that must’ve been quite an interesting experience. So you said there was kind of the offices in the front of the house. Were the offices mostly staffed by stereotypical secretary positions—is that where most of the women were, was in the front offices of the buildings? 0:09:20 Gardner: The building itself housed different occupations, unrelated to the machine shop, but yet related to safety and the estimators and the purchasers. Yeah, so it was a combination of men and women; it wasn’t just administrative. Franklin: Did you hang out or kind of form friendships with the men you worked with that carried on after—like, did you hang out primarily with machinists, or were your friends not working at Hanford? Gardner: Not working at Hanford. I had a few friends that I would do things with. And coworkers also. But when you talk about my core group of friends, it would probably be I had maybe a couple, three that I was very close to throughout my career. And others that I was close to but wouldn’t see on a regular basis outside of the job. 0:10:20 Franklin: Okay. I guess, describe for me the day, a day in a machinist—what types of things would you be machining, what kind of tasks would you be asked to do, and what kinds of operations would you be supporting? Gardner: When I first hired in, the FFTF was being built. So we did a lot of support for that. Really interesting work. We worked a lot with stainless steel. The machine shop itself had full heat treat capabilities and also a grinding room, which was rather unique, from the standpoint, a lot of machine shops may just have machining of the parts. This machine shop had the full spectrum. Which, also the apprenticeship was—I was very blessed to be a part of that, to have such a large amount of knowledge within the trade that some people don’t get. But working for the FFTF and that project and the completion of that was very unique for me, being the only breeder reactor in the United States and being a part of that. 0:11:27 Franklin: Oh, wow. And you brought something that you made on your first day, correct? Gardner: Yeah, I did. My boss said, let’s take you to a machine—which I’d never been on any—and this was on a lathe. And he just gave me a blueprint, and was able to give me the tooling and tell me how to operate the machine. He walked away, and I did this little part. It’s just a practice piece; it doesn’t have any application to it. Franklin: Oh, okay. And how long would it take to construct something like that? Gardner: Oh, maybe an hour. Franklin: And would you start from a solid piece and then machine it down? Gardner: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gardner: Yeah. 0:12:13 Franklin: So what kind of parts were you making for the FFTF, what kinds of things did the machine shop create for the FFTF? Gardner: They have fuel pins within the FFTF and they would be bundled in these great big stainless tubes. So we would machine these stainless tubes. I don’t know how long they were, but maybe over six feet. Maybe less than that. And then inside would be small quarter-inch pins that would run the length of these inside. They would have several bundles inside this but also several parts inside the reactor. Yeah, that was just one piece, though. I mean, one part of it. We machined other things. I don’t have a good recall for all that. But it was very exciting to be a part of that. 0:13:06 Franklin: Did you need a special clearance to work in the machine shop or to be kind of manufacturing these reactor components? Gardner: Depended upon what we were machining. Some of the machinists had what’s called a Q clearance. That allowed them to be exposed to different information that we weren’t allowed to as just the regular clearance. So there were some that were able to machine more confidential things. But in general, on a day, we had a lot of certifications to the metal that went into the nuclear reactors for the fact that it had to have provisions, knowing that the metal needed to be a certain quality. So that was something that we would keep record of when we were given a job. We would document things and make sure it had the proper certifications from the manufacturer of the metal. 0:14:05 Franklin: Did that require you to test the metals at all for strength and for the amounts of various—if it was a composite, the amounts of its components? Gardner: Well, there was metal testing onsite. There were places that we could take metal for its tensile strength. And to make sure, if it didn’t have any stamped certification on it, we could use some chemicals to find out exactly what’s in it, and to know that the material is what we wanted. 0:14:38 Franklin: Interesting. And so eventually, the FFTF kind of was sidelined, right, as—and so I assume that you weren’t then working on fuel pins or the bundles anymore. So what did you do after the FFTF had ceased operations? Gardner: Well, when we moved from the nuclear to the cleanup mission, we supported that in different ways. But they actually closed our machine shop down and moved the machine shop out to the 200 Area. Franklin: Sorry, so where was the machine shop before that? 0:15:18 Gardner: In the 300 Area. Franklin: 300 Area, okay. Gardner: 328 Building. So, I’m going to guess, for 14 years I was there. And then the company—that was during the time when there were many contractors bidding for the job, so instead of it just being Westinghouse, there were three main contractors. UNC was another one; Rockwell. Then they started having more people come in and the contracting work out became a popular thing, the transition in our way of doing business. Not just with Hanford, but throughout the United States. So we moved to the 200 Area and Kaiser took over part of that. I was only out there for two years supporting the cleanup mission, but this is when the tanks were being discovered that some weren’t even marked where they were on the ground. I really don’t have a lot of knowledge about what all went on, other than they were digging up a lot of things, finding ways to pay for the area. 0:16:28 Franklin: Right, yeah, finding some history. Nice. I’m wondering if you could share your opinion on what that was like, to go from a single contractor to multi-contractor, and if you saw that as a beneficial change for Hanford operations, or—basically, how that affected you and how that affected worker morale and the scope of work that you were being asked to do. 0:16:55 Gardner: I just really have one thought on that when you asked me, and that is, because the history and the value of the employees that were there, some, not from conception, but there for a very long time that had a lot more knowledge—once they were bringing several contractors in, people would come in without any history or background knowledge. I felt that was a real critical part or piece that needed to stay consistent for the continuity of understanding the dangers or the concerns. It was taken more serious, from my standpoint, of those that had been there for a long time or had more history with the Area. So contracting work out and bringing new contractors or several contractors in, I felt, was a safety issue. 0:17:45 Franklin: Oh, interesting. Okay. That’s a really interesting point. Did you find that each contractor had its own kind of culture or corporate culture? And was it easy for employees of different contractors to work together? Gardner: There was some competition, I think, when I initially hired in between the contractors. But there were only three at that time. I guess not. I didn’t pay that close attention. 0:18:16 Franklin: Okay. And so when you got moved out to the 200 Area, what kinds of—you’re obviously not going to be manufacturing fuel pellets—or fuel rods and things. So what kind of work were you doing out there to support cleanup? Like, what kinds of things were you machining out there? Gardner: There would be tools that needed to be made, specific tools, that were unique to cleanup. So we would be manufacturing those. Franklin: Can you give me an example of a tool that’s unique to cleanup? Gardner: I can’t. [LAUGHTER] I can’t even remember those things. 0: 18:50 Franklin: Oh, okay. And how long did you stay out in the 200 Area? Gardner: Probably a year-and-a-half. Franklin: Okay. And was it the same kind of atmosphere in the 200 Area that you’d had in the 300 Area? Or was it changed? 0:19:08 Gardner: Well, the R&D world that we were in with the nuclear industry—it was just a lot different in the culture and the different things we fabricated. So when we changed out to the 200 Area, it was a big shock of having to do different types of work. Probably less R&D than it was when I worked in the 300 Area. R&D is research and development, where sometimes we do one or two things, or sometimes we just manufacture something or fabricate something to see if it’s going to work, just as a test piece. Franklin: A little more experimental. Gardner: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Franklin: Like, intuitive than— 0:19:59 Gardner: But the culture was very different out in the 200 Area. The buildings were old. The building I moved into was not insulated. I had to wear—they gave us all Carhartts to wear in the wintertime. Pipes froze in the restroom. And snakes—I had a snake pass me in the building. Mice were in my coverall bag. So it just really wasn’t an environment I wanted to continue my work in. So I ended up quitting and moving over to Battelle. That was one of the best moves. I absolutely loved Westinghouse, but when they moved us out in the 200 Area, I felt like I could make a better change. So I quit and went to Battelle and worked in the environmental industry there. Franklin: Okay, and what kinds of work did you—were you still a machinist then in the environmental— Gardner: Mm-hmm, yes. Franklin: And how would you support—that seems like kind of a different mission change from what you’d be machining. So how did you support the environmental research group? 0:21:04 Gardner: I’ll just give you one example of some parts that I was working on. Battelle is worldwide in how they work with the business. There was a job that I was working on that was going to go on an airplane, filtering the air in the atmosphere in Mexico. Because the pollution was so bad there. So that was interesting to know, you know, that this job I was working on was going to be attached to an airplane that was going to be flying around Mexico. I think Mexico City, actually. We also did animal research. One example of that is when the checks that we write, everyday checks from our checkbook that has the carbon copy, when we would utilize those carbon copies—when they first were manufactured, the workers that were making these pieces of paper, or making the paper to go in our checkbooks were getting ill. So they exposed laboratory animals to this paper until they were healthy; they were not having any side effects from being around any of the particulates caused from the manufacturing. So that was one of the first projects that I worked on. I literally made, they’re called plethysmographs. They were Plexiglas tubes where they housed the mice to expose them to these things. It was hard for me, because I’m an animal lover. So that was a hard job, but it was interesting to see the application of it for the health of the people in the industry. 0:22:51 Franklin: Mm. Do you know what kinds of data was gathered from that research? Did there end up being a link between the illness and the carbon paper? Gardner: Yes, well, they already knew there was an illness just from the people that were manufacturing it originally. So all I know is they decided to change whatever went into the paper, and that did have a good impact. 0:23:15 Franklin: Oh, that’s good. So how long did you work for Battelle in the environmental research group? Gardner: For 16 years. Franklin: Oh, for 16 years. And so from—you said you went out there in ’95, and then 16 years, so 2011, or about 2010? And did you retire then— Gardner: Mm-hmm, I did. 0:23:40 Franklin: Okay. And what have you been doing—have you still been involved in the machinist industry since retirement, or how have you been keeping busy? Gardner: Well, I pretty much put my tools away. But I’m still a handywoman; I like to do projects around the house and help people with projects that need some repairs. My first year, I just enjoyed. I took a job out at Canyon Lakes golf course and worked as just a helper at a catering business there. A few times, drove the beverage cart which was lots of fun. I was raised as a golfer. That was fun for me. So just enjoying my life and making it a choice every day to explore something that I haven’t done and wasn’t able to do since I had a full-time job. 0:24:32 Franklin: Sure. Now, your bio here that Jillian took says that you went to HAMMER and were a teacher for trainings on MSDS work conditions safety and health concerns? Gardner: Yeah, for a short time, a couple years. So maybe two or three times a year, I would work at HAMMER for a week at a time. Franklin: Was that after you retired? Gardner: No, it was during the time. Franklin: Oh, okay. 0:24:57 Gardner: I actually was working at Westinghouse, and I think I continued HAMMER once, maybe, when I was at Battelle; I can’t really recall if I did or not. But it was before the new facility was built, so we were over on George Washington Way. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. That makes sense. Well, that’s great. I just have a couple more questions. Are there any ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work as a machinist? Gardner: In what way? 0:25:37 Franklin: Oh, well, I don’t know. Is there any times in which, say, an element of security or secrecy stopped you from working on a project, or you could only work on specific pieces on it because of not enough clearance or something like that? Did you ever work on a project that was very secret or kind of a need-to-know basis? Gardner: I didn’t, but there were machinists that did. You’re right, it is called a need-to-know. I remember one time they put big barriers up around the Project just so it was in compliance for the security of machining it. So, yeah, that has been a part of my career. But I wasn’t a person on the job. 0:26:27 Franklin: Okay. And was it challenging to—because you moved here during the Cold War and then—although it seems that most of your machine work was for peaceful reactors, you know, the majority of reactors at Hanford were producing plutonium which was being used for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. Did you ever feel unsure or unsafe about working at Hanford, either in a safety sense or in a larger, kind of geopolitical sense, especially as tensions were heating up in the 1980s? 0:27:10 Gardner: Not in the geopolitical sense, but as far as some of the chemicals and materials that I machined, a few years after becoming a machinist, they became classified as carcinogens. The PPE, the protective equipment that we wore, would be required or some of the chemicals were actually pulled off the shelf. So, yeah, that was a concern, because I think the invincible feeling of being young, you know. You think everything’s going to be safe working for large companies like that, and they wouldn’t expose us to things that are unsafe. But that’s not true. They did the best they could, and as things progressed and our health concerns were addressed, then, you know, they would see that some of those things needed to be looked at differently. So the government was able to classify things as carcinogens. And companies could no longer use those. Franklin: Interesting. And did that impact your work in any way? Or did you feel pretty comfortable with the measures that were addressed? 0:28:21 Gardner: I think there was resistancy because some of the materials we could only machine well with certain chemicals. When they pulled those off, we had to really be creative to find something that was just as good or settle for something that wasn’t as good and try to make the parts as well as we could. But I knew that there were health effects, even throughout my career, in my own body that I had to address from being exposed to things. And I was able to, and got it taken care of. Franklin: Oh, that’s good. So kind of a balance, then, between doing a job in the most effective way, but also making sure that it’s safe in terms of having your worker safety protected. Gardner: Mm-hmm. 0:29:15 Franklin: Well, great, and my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War and afterwards during cleanup? Gardner: I feel that our government was doing a wonderful job keeping our nation safe, and that was their priority in creating Hanford, protecting us. The residual, while being, it is very nasty and the ramifications of all the buried things is a very difficult piece, the reasons behind it were very genuine and ultimately for our country. Franklin: Hmm. Okay, great. Did you want to show any of the things that you brought with you? Gardner: I don’t. Franklin: Okay, not a problem. Well, maybe if they’re—if you wouldn’t mind, maybe we could take them and digitize some of them and then we’ll put them with your interview when it goes online and post the pictures. Gardner: Yes, I brought newspapers that would come out monthly. I’m not certain if it was monthly or weekly, from Westinghouse. And they’re fun to look back, probably more for me. But, on the other hand, yes, that’d be great if you could digitize it. Franklin: Great, well, thank you so much, Peggy, I really appreciate it. Gardner: Oh, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:30:42 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9982kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Westinghouse 200 Area Battelle HAMMER Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 26 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Peggy Gardner Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Peggy Gardner relocated to the Hanford area when she followed her parents and started out working as a gas station attendant/mechanic/wrecker driver before accepting a machinist position with Westinghouse. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/02/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F39d03f0487c714c2a40d8c325d3d92b7.JPG 66034390ea94cc8b347e1ed88f62672f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John G. Garcia Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John Garcia on May 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with John about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? 0:00:19 John Garcia: John G. Garcia. J-O-H-N. G. G-A-R-C-I-A. Franklin: Okay, great. So, John, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. 0:00:34 Garcia: A friend of mine that I met in Fort Knox, Kentucky, he and his wife moved back out here. They were originally from the Sunnyside area. And he got a job at Hanford, more or less following in his mom’s and dad’s footsteps. He was a welder. So he told me they were going to restart PUREX and PFP and he got me in that good old-fashioned paper application. So I filled it out and mailed it in, and then I drove out here all by myself in August of 1982. I wasn’t here long, and I called the employment office. In the meantime, I found—I had a job picking grapes for Welch’s grape juice and other more or less temporary jobs. 0:01:26 Then they decided to hire people for the restart of PUREX and PFP. It was about 60 or 70 men and women. According to my tribal knowledge, it was the biggest hire of women and minorities in the history of Hanford. They trained us, you know, more or less from the ground up. There were people that were college graduates, there were people that were high school dropouts, and everything in between. So they taught us about safety, about radiological safety, criticality safety, and how to work the process. When our clearances came in—you had to have either an L or a Q, Q being the highest, to work at PFP or at PUREX. When they came in, then you got to go into the building. You had somebody that mentored you for a while. 0:02:33 In December of ’83, that’s when they started the Plutonium Finishing Plant up for real. We were using real life plutonium. What the idea was was extract plutonium from waste products or from the processed fuel rods that came from the reactors, primarily N. And then they would take that to PUREX, separate out some of the uranium from the plutonium and it would go over to PFP and get concentrated. They would make hockey-puck-sized—what we called buttons. It would fit inside of a tuna fish can. About two-thirds of the nuclear arsenal came through PFP in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. 0:03:29 So most of us had no clue how it worked. But we learned it. We made lots of mistakes. It was sometimes chaotic. [LAUGHTER] But we got through it. 0:03:34 Franklin: How old were you when you came out? Garcia: I was 30. Franklin: What had you been doing before? 0:03:51 Garcia: Back in Kentucky where I met my friends, I worked at like a grocery store for the military. They called them commissaries. Franklin: Yeah, like a PX. Garcia: Yeah. Well, a commissary is like the foodstuff. PX is like the hardwares and jewelry. So his wife was in the Army, so they invited me to come out here. I lived with them in Sunnyside for eight or nine months. Then I got the Hanford job and moved to Richland. 0:04:24 Franklin: Where were you from originally? Garcia: Kentucky. Fort Knox, Kentucky. I grew up all over the country, and a few places in Europe. So moving around was no big deal to me. Franklin: Were you a military— Garcia: Brat, yeah. Franklin: A military brat. 0:04:41 Garcia: I tried to join the Army—that’s another story. I tried to join the Army and the Air Force during the Vietnam War. And I couldn’t see the eye chart well enough to pass the physical. So I decided, go to Plan B, and that was to make nuclear weapons. [LAUGHTER] Garcia: As it turned out. 0:05:02 Franklin: Yeah. What did you know about Hanford before you drove out here? Garcia: Just from what my friends told me and a small article in the World Book Encyclopedia, that it was a World War II project, and that’s pretty much all the article said in the encyclopedia. And what my friends told me is, yeah, this is where they make plutonium. Plutonium! And so they’re going to start it up again and they’re going to hire a lot of people. Not a whole lot. I learned a lot on the fly. 0:05:37 That was the—I wasn’t a science major or any—in school. I never went to college much. But history was my thing. So here we are, surrounded by history at Hanford. All those old buildings. I was looking for an apartment in Richland, and I drove through there, and it was like E.T. Home, home! Because it looked like military housing. So I felt more comfortable there and I never looked in Kennewick or Pasco. It was Richland. And they had a bus system that would get you there no matter what. Rain or shine, sleet or snow. I lived in Richland about 35 years. Just recently moved to Pasco after I retired. 0:06:23 There’s a picture of N that they took when it was running in 1944 that’s got some steam plumes and all the buildings that are there. That was in the article in the World Book Encyclopedia. It was only a paragraph or two about it. It was still running; it was still secret. So they couldn’t say much. 0:06:50 Franklin: Right. Let’s see here. What were your first impressions of the area when you came? Garcia: Of Hanford? Franklin: Yeah, of Tri-Cities and Hanford. 0:07:00 Garcia: I drove with some friends from Tacoma to Pullman. We came down that hill. There used to be a restaurant, the Silver Dollar, and there’s a long stretch of road that comes out of Moxee and Yakima, and it was all lit up. It was at night. I said, what is that? Oh, that’s Hanford. And that’s about all they would say. So little did I know, that would be my future. Like I said, it was that history from World War II and the Cold War. And I knew this area—I’d been through here before—was desert. There was dry, sagebrush, cheatgrass. It wasn’t the spectacular part of the Evergreen State, the green part. I knew it was dry and barren. But I was impressed by the Columbia River going through all of this and it was dry almost right up to the shore. 0:08:00 Franklin: Where all onsite did you work? Garcia: Let’s see. I worked for 20 years at PFP. I worked about a year or so at PUREX. Worked a few months at Tank Farms, one of the Tank Farms. I worked a little while, a few long months, at what they called True Retrieval. They were digging up waste drums and solid, big, giant boxes full of waste. Franklin: Was that at one of the burial grounds? 0:08:34 Garcia: Yeah. That’s where they would go and dig up stuff out of the burial grounds and then reprocess it and store it in all those big barns across the street from it. And then my last seven or eight years was with MSA, or its forerunner, doing a lot of things. They’re like the—they take care of the electrical grid, they take care of the cranes that work in the Tank Farms, mostly, surveying offices, roads, vegetation, animals. I did a lot of that at the end. That was a nice job. I had a nice little cubicle all my own and worked at my own pace. It was a good job. 0:09:19 Franklin: Oh, wow. So you started as a nuclear process operator. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: Right? At PFP. Garcia: Yes. 0:09:24 Franklin: And can you describe a typical work day as a nuclear process operator? Garcia: Well, not long after they started up, we went to shift. X, Y, Z: days, swings and graveyard. So that was something new to me, although I’d worked nights on the grape harvest. We’d come in and we’d get put on our, what we call SWPs, the white cotton clothes. We’d tape on booties and surgeon’s gloves, two pair. Put on a pair of canvas gloves, and we’d go to our office—or the control room. The manager would tell us, this is what we’re going to do today. This is where you’re assigned. It wasn’t exactly a pre-job, which in later years, really took hold. It was more just the assignments. That was pretty much how they did it every day. 0:10:20 The first part of the PFP experience was the solvent extraction part. Getting the plutonium in nitrate solution concentrated to about 300 grams per liter. Then they would store that. After they got enough of it made, then that’s what they would use to make the buttons. So that was a different thing. They shut down the solvent extraction then we’d concentrate and get some training on the button production. We could make about, on a good shift, about six or eight buttons a shift. If things went wrong, not so many. 0:11:00 But I changed. The first buttons we made, I reached into the glovebox and looked at it. They were about the size of the palm of your hand. They’re a gun metal gray, and they’re warm to the touch. Because there’s so much activity. It’s about 99.9% plutonium, which is what they want. And then eventually they would use that to hone the spheres that went into the weapons. And I looked at this button, and I thought, what have I done? I have sold my soul to the devil. Because this thing could kill millions and billions of people. I put it down. 0:11:41 Then I started looking for another angle. That’s when I got into health physics protection. It’s had a number of different names, but it’s pretty much the same job, setting radiation dose rates for workers, contamination checks, and a million other things. So the snarky answer I made up for my relatives and other people is, I protect workers, the environment, and the public from the detrimental effects of ionizing radiation. Because people asked me what I did, and it could take a long time to explain it without giving away too many secrets. So that was the nutshell answer I came up with. Franklin: That’s pretty good. 0:12:29 Garcia: Thank you. And then later on, they stole my idea and I read that in a textbook. At first, we were radiation monitors, then we were RPTs, radiation protection technologists. Then we got into health physics technologists. 0:12:43 Franklin: Yeah. And that was your way of kind of distancing yourself from directly participating in the production of the weapons-grade— 0:12:55 Garcia: Yeah. I knew I needed a job that paid well and had benefits. And I took less money to do it. I wasn’t married, so I had nobody to account for. So it fit my political philosophy a lot more. And it wasn’t unheard of for somebody to get out of operations and get into radiation protection. But it wasn’t common. But yeah. I was glad I did it. I felt a lot better. And my radiation exposure went down to next to nothing. Franklin: Right. 0:13:34 Garcia: The first two-and-a-half years or so, you know, my exposure was—you know, not life-threatening, but enough to—yeah. And we would have a meeting and the boss would say, well, if we don’t stop doing this, and if we don’t get this done, we’re all going down the road. But I think what he meant was, he was going down the road. So we’d do better, and still make mistakes. And I just got tired of hearing it. It didn’t motivate me. So I said, well, I’m going to find a job I could maybe take elsewhere. 0:14:08 But working at a reactor, a power reactor, like Energy Northwest or somewhere else, that’s a different ballgame. It’s way different. They’re a lot more educated, they’re a lot more talented, and they’re a lot more independent. We were just sort of side-by-side with the operators. At first, in the old days, they looked to the RMs for guidance and protection. But later on, operations sort of ruled the roost. They weren’t interested, so much, in what you had to say. But still it was important what dose rates you were having or the contamination you might encounter. 0:14:53 Franklin: When you said you could produce—was it six to eight buttons a shift— Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: --if things went right; you said, fewer if things could go wrong. What kind of things would complicate the process? 0:15:08 Garcia: Valve leaks, pipe leaks, just like counting leaks, like, were we supposed to have this much material? We only have that much, and then they’d have to look for it. Just breakdowns, mostly mechanical breakdowns. Sometimes in the room, there were the constant air monitors. They were sampling the air, and it had an alarm set point. It had a detector inside of it, and if enough plutonium got on the air sample filter, it would alarm. It would be a red flashing light and a ringing bell. It got your attention. 0:15:45 So you’d have to evacuate the room, because nine times out of ten, you weren’t wearing a respirator. So you had to go out of the room, and then go back—make a plan, and go back on respiratory protection and clean it up. Plutonium oxide is real flighty. It’s almost like alive. You’d have a little bit here and you’d wipe it up, and some of it would go over there. So you were chasing it down. And multiply that by a big room. So that was one of the problems. As well as an internal deposition problem. So that was probably the biggest hold up, was if there was a leak in a glovebox or a bag, then they would seal the material out in like an industrial-strength seal-a-meal. If it sprung a leak, then you’d have to clean it up. Because you couldn’t work effectively with a respirator on. You couldn’t see as well, and it’s a real stressor on the human body. 0:16:42 Franklin: Right, and very hot, too. Garcia: Yeah, you’d sweat up a storm, break your seal and, yeah. You had to pass a physical every year. Part of it was you’d put on a respirator and you had some sensing tubes in it coming out of it. You’d do, turn your head around, read catchy phrases that’d move all the muscles around in your face, to make sure you were getting an adequate seal. And they had you know, just like canisters that would, the particulates, then they had fresh air, then they had SCBA. And the more of that, was more protection. Franklin: What’s the SCBA? Garcia: It’s S—well, that’s what we called it. It was like, on your back like you would wear for scuba diving. Franklin: Oh, right, right. 0:17:33 Garcia: Yeah. That afforded you a lot of protection, but more mobility. The other type was the fresh air, and that was on a hose that connected to your mask. But you know, you had the risk of breaking the connection in the hose, or somebody would step on the hose and things like. And you’d be dragging this hose around wherever you went. So the SCUBA, I don’t know if you could maybe get 45, 50 minutes out of it. But you had mobility. But when the alarm went off, it was time to go and probably get another bottle. But I’d say probably 80% of my time was on the canister. In the old days, they had a single canister, looked like a World War I gas mask. And then later on they got more modern. But it wasn’t the place to—I thought I was bulletproof. Come to find out, I wasn’t bulletproof. 0:18:30 Franklin: So after the being a nuclear process operator at PFP, you moved into being a health physics tech. Garcia: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Right? And that was mostly at PUREX? Or no, PFP. Garcia: Most of it was at PFP. PUREX, Tank Farms, and the other MSA job, the True Retrieval. 0:18:52 Franklin: Could you describe a typical work day as an HPT? Garcia: Just depending on what you were assigned to. You could be assigned to covering the crane maintenance people. You know, those big giant things, that lift up cover blocks that weighed tons or moving equipment around. You had a lot of independence with that. Your boss wasn’t looking over your shoulder all the time. And he would go meet with like the crane operators, and so, what are you guys doing? Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. So it was different enough everyday but it was similar everyday not to be taken by surprise all the time. 0:19:36 The first thing you would do is you’d come in and you’d set up your instruments. You’d make sure they were in calibration, you made sure they worked right. And you would do a source check with radioactive disks and you’d make sure that you were in your parameters for your instrumentation. Because that’s what it was all about. You were nothing without your instruments. My first mentor, he said, John, don’t go anywhere, in a building or anywhere, without some kind of instrument. Because then what good are you? You might as well be a fencepost. So I always, whatever I did, wherever—I always had instruments, then backups to the instruments. Because you could get pretty far afield and you’d break one or it’d go bad somehow and you would, instead of driving ten miles to go get another one, you’d better have another one in your truck. 0:20:31 Franklin: What kinds of instruments would you use for monitoring? Garcia: There was a homemade invention developed at Hanford called a CP. Franklin: A cutie pie. 0:20:43 Garcia: A cutie pie. A lot of the nomenclature for the instruments and almost everything else was secrecy. The CP was pretty much, looked the same from when they invented it. They modified some. It had a cylinder about maybe four or five inches in diameter, about four inches, five inches long. And the radiation would go into the cylinder and it would ionize the air in the cylinder, then it would move a needle. Franklin: Right, you’d kind of point it at like— Garcia: Yeah, or do it from the side, yeah. Franklin: From the side. 0:21:16 Garcia: It had two different kinds, for beta and for gamma, you could take this window off. It made of some plastic-y looking material. Then underneath that was Mylar, it looked a lot like real thin aluminum foil. Then that was for radiation. There were other kinds for that. Then there was what we call a poppy, for alpha. Then there was a GM, a Geiger Mueller. That was for beta-gamma. It looked like a lollipop, only bigger. And it had a screen and the radiation would go through— Franklin: Right, it had a probe. Garcia: Right, a probe. Franklin: We have examples of all of these in our collection. Garcia: Okay. 0:21:58 Franklin: And so the alpha was used—the poppies were primarily to monitor plutonium. Garcia: Mm-hmm. 0:22:05 Franklin: Right? What’s the difference between the CP and the GM? Why would one—you know, they both measure beta-gamma. What was each one good at? Garcia: The saturation point for a GM was pretty low. You could peg it and it wasn’t good anymore to you. It wasn’t made for setting a dose rate; it was to find contamination. Franklin: I see. 0:22:28 Garcia: The CP was for dose rates. And all the dose rates you set and the contamination found was a legal record. We’d have to write what we call a survey report, after every job or after every day. And the dose rates you wrote down, and you signed your name to it. They’re still on file somewhere, probably in a cold storage place in Seattle. All that stuff is a legal record and it’s been used in litigation. So they really—as time went on, you had to write your survey report correctly, because it had ramifications beyond just that day’s work. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. 0:23:11 Garcia: One of the—the coolest job I had was for about six years I surveyed tumbleweeds all over the Site. From Yakima to the Wye Barricade and everywhere in between. Because they would go—the taproot can go about 20 feet, and they would get into contamination, being a very primitive plant. They’re looking for calcium. So cesium and strontium, yeah, that’s just as good to the tumbleweed. And they would soak it up. Because they only live about a year, they would get into the root primarily, and they would break off and roll around. So we would survey the root, the stem, and if they were contaminated—and maybe 3% were—we’d put that in a special truck and then they would take that to ERDF and bury those. 0:24:02 But the rest of them, they would put in a regular old white garbage truck-looking thing and take that to a pit. After they got enough of them, they would burn them. And you’ve never seen a fire till you’ve seen a tumbleweed fire. You could be 100 yards away and still feel the heat. They get pretty hot. I thought maybe they could make starter sticks out of them for campers. They never found anything useful for a tumbleweed. 0:24:32 That was a good job. I got to see a lot of stuff. Especially as an HPT. And in that particular assignment, a lot of places that other people never went to, didn’t have a chance to go to. Because they were stuck in their little facility and couldn’t get out. Franklin: So you’d kind of go out into the natural environment. Garcia: Yeah. 0:24:53 Franklin: Did you ever find much evidence, artifacts from the pre-Manhattan Project settlers-- Garcia: Well— Franklin: --that were evicted? 0:25:00 Garcia: Well, yeah. Yeah. But pretty much that had been cleaned up, and we knew better than to mess with it. We just left it in place. We might tell our manager, he might tell somebody, you know, they found this, this tool or coin or something. But most of it was pretty gone. We never went much into the old town site. A few times, but mostly the tumbleweed search was around Tank Farms. Because they didn’t want contaminated tumbleweeds blowing into the Tank Farms and creating a problem. But yeah we went to a lot of places. 0:25:38 Franklin: What was the most challenging aspect of your work at Hanford? Garcia: Probably convincing workers that I was there for their best interest. Sometimes they would disagree or want to fight or just were stubborn. And their managers, besides. Because it was production versus safety. Even though they may preach and talk, yeah, safety over production, that wasn’t always the case. They were under pressure to produce the plutonium or to get so much stuff cleaned up or whatever. I could see their point, but at the same time, I never had to put myself between them and harm’s way to protect them. But that was probably the biggest challenge. 0:26:33 Being an introvert, for the most part, I had to have a different personality at Hanford than I did at home or anywhere else. And it was exhausting. I had to like, grr. Some people, it didn’t faze them because they were an extrovert all the time. We even had a few patrolmen, when they cut back on the number of patrolmen, who transferred into radiation protection. They had, for most of them, that worked perfectly, because they were used to chewing people out and trying to straighten people out. And I, you know, I would try to be diplomatic, if not polite, trying to tell people what kind of mistake or what ramifications it might have. Sometimes they would listen sometimes not. 0:27:21 So it was—because from what I understand, people that are from 18 to 25—don’t take this personally—they think they are bulletproof. That’s why a young man will get off a landing craft and run onto the beach in northern France. Because they don’t think anything’s going to happen to them. And peer pressure. And a lot of these guys I worked with, that was their age frame, and they thought they were bulletproof. They weren’t going to get contaminated, they weren’t going to get internal deposition. But a lot of them did. Franklin: Right, they just wanted to make some money. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: Right? 0:27:54 Garcia: They wanted to make money and they didn’t think there was anything to worry about. Franklin: Yeah. Garcia: Maybe that was a defense mechanism; I don’t know. But I had healthy respect for it. But then I was a little older. 0:28:04 Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. What was the most rewarding aspect of your work at Hanford? Garcia: Probably bailing people out of dicey situations. Decontaminating their skin. Checking their nose for contamination, and just occasionally pulling them out of the fire. Some of them thanked me, and some of them didn’t. I’d almost—I didn’t live for it, but I didn’t back away from it. Sometimes one of those cam alarms would go off and there’s a room full of people. Then you’ve really got a situation. And I liked doing it. I just wanted to help them out. I knew how they felt: it happened to me. I wanted to make sure that they went home in good shape. And I never had anybody get hurt or really get into a bad situation. 0:29:04 Franklin: Right on. What were some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history such as plants shutting down? Garcia: I think 100-N, when that shut down, it had a ripple effect. You could kind of tell things weren’t going to be the same. And then when they decided they couldn’t run the Plutonium Finishing Plant anymore, they had a lot of excess material that they needed to stabilize. The biggest problem was carbon tetrachloride. They couldn’t find a substitute for it that worked as well in their system. So they tried a number of things and when they came to the realization that they couldn’t do it again, then they shut PFP down. They stabilized the material as best they could, and then shut it down. But that took like about ten years to finally realize, yeah, this isn’t going to work anymore. Franklin: Ten years after--? Garcia: After the initial shutdown. After the Cold War shut down. Franklin: Oh, wow. 0:30:17 Garcia: I never thought it would happen. I thought, you know, the Soviet Union would exist forever, and we’d be making plutonium and nuclear weapons—forever. I read a book earlier this year by Daniel Ellsberg. When that movie came out about the Pentagon Papers? He was also a nuclear war planner. And not only did he steal the Pentagon Papers, he stole a lot of material about weapons and nuclear war. He said that this mutually assured destruction was the craziest idea in the history of the human race, because nobody was going to win. The planet would be destroyed. Every body and every thing would die. Because of the power of those weapons and everything, we would create the nuclear winter. It gave me another perspective. I’m like, God! I really sold my soul to the devil. And his dad was an engineer and a plant designer, and he helped design PUREX and a few of the other places. I never heard that till I read his book. Franklin: Huh. Garcia: So, yeah, that was quite an awakening, too. Franklin: Oh, I bet. Garcia: But I was retired, so I was innocent after that. No, I did my share. Franklin: Wow. 0:31:43 Garcia: But I would talk to people and said, hey, what do you think of this? Don’t you think this is bad? And I would pick my subjects very carefully. Because you didn’t know. There were still, you know—secrecy; the FBI would send you questionnaires and things like that. And it got worse as time went on. And most people said, yeah, there’s a thousand other people that would take my job tomorrow. So it doesn’t matter that I’m doing it, because somebody else will do it. So I pretty much left it at that. I only tried that question two or three times. 0:32:22 The secrecy got changed. At first it was like, you didn’t say a word. The old days, you didn’t tell your wife and kids or relatives what you did. And that pretty much stayed the same until the Cold War had been over for a little while. After some time, they had another level of security and you had to take a psychological test on paper and on a computer and fill out more forms and answer more questions. You know, you had to live pretty much a boy scout lifestyle. But the Tri-Cities always had this squeaky-clean reputation to some people. But underneath the surface. [LAUGHTER] Not so much. There’s a lot of stuff going on. So that was at my time at PFP. 0:33:22 Then when I left that, I got out of that program. Where I worked wasn’t as secure. I didn’t have gates to go through. You had the Wye or the Yakima gate. And then there was another gate, closer in 200-West, 200-East and they would search your trunk, open up your glovebox—or from Idaho, jockey box. You couldn’t say, no. Because otherwise, adios. And that died off. They got rid of those 2-East and 2-West gates and it was just the one, and that was mostly a guy looking at your badge and waving you through. Franklin: Yeah, looking at your badge and then— Garcia: Yeah. 0:34:00 Franklin: Yeah, yeah, because when I go on Site to do artifact evaluations, it’s always—I think that’s a lot of security, but I mean, I wasn’t here in the Cold War days, you know. Because also to get into PFP there was also security at the entrance, too, right? Garcia: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Where they checked your bags, you had to go through like a metal detector and everything. Garcia: Yup. Franklin: So there were several layers. And PFP was also surrounded by, like, anti-tank, there were some anti-tank things and like guard shacks and things like that. 0:34:40 Garcia: Yeah. Yeah, I was going to get to that. Yeah, there were two fences, barbed wire. There were sensors on wires or in the ground. And then the rooms were locked. You couldn’t just go in because you wanted to, in most areas. You had to have somebody open the combination or with a key, and most often you had to have another person with you. You had to have a reason to be there, and you had to have your badge on. Once in a while you’d find somebody that left it behind somewhere. And there were cameras on the outside and on the inside. And PUREX was pretty much the same way. You know, the fences and the guards and the cameras. So yeah. The other places, not so much. 0:35:27 Franklin: It’s funny you mentioned that question that you asked, that kind of tricky question. It’s a question I myself wrestle with. I’m also not from here, and I’ve always—it’s a question I’m always very interested to ask but don’t ask very often. You know? But I’m curious to ask you later about it, if you want to answer it. Garcia: Okay. No problem. I haven’t asked anyone that question in a long time. 0:35:58 Franklin: I bet. I bet not. I mean, my last question I ask is, what do you want future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? And usually the answer I get is about World War II, the bomb won the war. I didn’t ask them about World War II. I’ve always found that was a very interesting way of viewing the Cold War through the lens of the “good” war. But anyway. So I guess that gives you a little time to think about how you want to answer that question, too. I’ll ask that one later; I like to conclude with that. Garcia: Okay, cool. Franklin: I’m just foreshadowing, I guess, for you now. Garcia: All right. I’ll use part of my brain to think about that. 0:36:45 Franklin: I wanted to ask you about, so you had been working out at PFP during the Chernobyl incident. Garcia: Oh, I was at PUREX then. Franklin: PUREX, sorry, okay. Garcia: Which has its own story. Franklin: You were out on Site. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: How did that affect Hanford, and how did that affect the community? 0:37:04 Garcia: That was one factor in the shutting down N. Because they were similar, but not identical. Though, somehow, I understand that the Russians would pull the fuel from the top. [LAUGHTER] Maybe I’m wrong. But at B and all the other reactors, N, they would push the fuel out the back. It would fall in a big water basin. So, when that problem erupted, literally, they said, well, you know, these are too similar. They had shut it down to do some maintenance—long-term maintenance, and then they never started it up again. That was a ripple effect from Chernobyl. 0:37:47 When I was at PUREX, we had these about half-a-meter square tables. They were about a meter off the ground and had plastic coating on them. There were a couple dozen of those. So we would take a technical smear that was on this funny paper. And then you would check it with your instrument. And my manager said, well, when you’re outside doing that routine, be sure you check all those tables, because Chernobyl fallout is predicted to come this way. I never found any. The tables were really there for stuff coming out of the PUREX stack. But I never found anything from Chernobyl. That only lasted a few weeks, and then we never did that again. 0:38:37 Franklin: Was it a flashpoint in how people viewed Hanford? Garcia: Not that I recall. Most people were there to do their job, and they just wanted to get through the day, through the year, through their career. It never—there may have been other parts of the community that really got excited about Chernobyl and how Hanford was similar, but not to my knowledge. Franklin: Hmm. Were there any events or incidences that happened at Hanford while you were working out there that stand out to you? Garcia: Hanford-wise? Franklin: Yeah. 0:39:26 Garcia: There were so many. Where to—[LAUGHTER] What to choose? Not so much. I think one—it wasn’t Hanford-related but it was another turning point. When the Russians shot down that Korean airplane that had wandered into their airspace. That gave me a little more resolve and understanding why all of this had to be, like it or not. I guess, just shutting down PFP, shutting down PUREX and the last reactor, N. Those were big dominoes that fell. But I knew, being higher on the seniority list and having a job that was pretty necessary that it wasn’t going to affect me. Franklin: What—oh, sorry. 0:40:25 Garcia: Oh, when people would get laid off from other crafts, it did bother me. You know, people that you knew or just remotely knew. I knew that their lives were going to be turned upside-down. And it bothered me. Franklin: Was there a general feeling of anxiety during the shut down or the change, the switch from production to clean up? 0:40:49 Garcia: Yeah, because you didn’t know what to expect. When it was in production days, you know, you had this goal to make as much plutonium as you could. But after that was over, the clean up days, it was a rollercoaster. You didn’t know what to expect from one day, one month, one year to the next. And maybe they didn’t either. If the funding was different from year to year. You just didn’t exactly know what to do or what they expected. So, yeah, that was—there was a change. And I used to tell people, you know, it was more fun making bombs than it was cleaning up. Because the regs were all different, the goals were all different. But you knew in the button production days that, yeah, that was what you were here for, whether you agreed or disagreed or not. Franklin: Right, it’s kind of like, where to start? Right? Like, where do you—spent 40 years making this big mess. Garcia: Yeah. Franklin: 45 years. 0:42:02 Garcia: They’ve still got a ways to go. I’m not sure how the Vit Plant’s going to turn out. I mean, there’s three or four big, huge buildings, 88 feet tall, 90 feet long, four, five feet of concrete where the chemical separations was done. Like PUREX, B and T Plant. Good luck! Franklin: Well, and you heard about the recent teardown of PFP, right? A building you worked at, where they found contamination well outside—not high levels—but contamination well outside the projected footprint of where it would be. 0:42:46 Garcia: I was a little angry and a little disappointed, and I just couldn’t understand why they could take down a plutonium facility out in the open air. Maybe they could’ve put a big tent over it or something. Whoever sees this, yeah. [LAUGHTER] You’re crazy! You know, they did the best they could, I guess. They would put blue goo on it to hold the contamination down. They would use big water cannons to water it down. And it just got away from them because of production and money pressure, in my way of thinking. When they first started tearing it down, I was long gone, because I could see the handwriting n the wall. They thought they could turn it into another Rocky Flats. And that’s pretty much how they did Rocky Flats, which-- Franklin: What would that involve? Sorry, I’m not— 0:43:47 Garcia: You know, the blue goo, the water cannons, and just a big crane with a great big chomping device. Chomp down the walls, the pipes, anything inside, and then put it in these big, long semi, like a semi trailer-size containers, and then take that to the ERDF place and put it in the ground. And I think they pretty much did something similar at Rocky Flats, and that was a real small facility compared to Hanford. I think Rocky Flats was about the size of the 300 Area. They got that done quickly but maybe not so successfully. So a lot of those guys, managers and workers, came to Hanford from Rocky when the things wound down, and they thought they could do the same thing here as they did there. And it was just a different way of thinking. Everything was just too different to fit into their mold. So yeah. 0:44:55 It was not a good idea. It really makes me sad. Especially for those workers that inhaled it. My goal always was on any job, that was a failure point to me, if anyone got internal deposition. It happened a couple times and I felt awful for months. It does damage to your body. There’s ways to get it out, but I just didn’t want to look that person in the eye and say, I’m sorry, but— 0:45:27 There for a while, the training philosophy was a rem is a rem—a rem is a measurement of radiation. And whether it’s inside your body or goes through you, like an x-ray or a gamma ray or neutrons. Any body, having it in your body is a different mindset. Even though they can give you the DTPA shot and get most of it out of you, or you can drink a lot of beer and get a lot of it out of you. Just, that’s a different way of thinking. Franklin: Is there something special about beer? Or it’s just a fluid? Garcia: Diuretic. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah. 0:46:12 Garcia: When I first got to PFP as an HPT, we had a meeting with the dosimetry boss and he said, everybody in here has plutonium in them. Well, yeah, that’s the first name of the place, Plutonium Finishing Plant. So it wasn’t a surprise, but it was just another reality check. Because you know you go into a room, do a job, even if the cam didn’t go off, there’s still some in there. Your instruments are only so sensitive. Otherwise, you could make them more sensitive but they’d be useless. You might say something is clean, but it might be just below the threshold. So he told us different ways to avoid a problem. 0:47:01 But, yeah, I’m—They would give us a lung count, these sensitive devices, sensors on your chest or you’d lean up against the sensors. And then the real fun was your annual bioassay. [LAUGHTER] They’d drop this kit of five, six bottles, and you would urinate in them and turn them in in a few days. And if things really went bad, the fecal sample kit. I only had to do that a couple times. But, you know, they boil it down, cook it down, and then use really sensitive instruments to count how much you encountered. But, yeah. [LAUGHTER] I’d almost forgotten about those things! Franklin: We have a couple examples of those, unused in our collection. Garcia: Okay. Franklin: Yeah, when we do exhibitions or bring them out, they always get a—people will be like, oh yeah! I forgot about that thing. 0:48:00 Garcia: Yeah, I’m sure. You kind of have to delete some of your files. And then those people that had the problem at PFP, they had to do that. The urine and the fecal. But we’ll see, we’ll see, who reaps the whirlwind. That’s from some classic book. And I’m afraid some of the workers are going to pay the price. Because I’ve read articles and books about workers from Oak Ridge and other places. The guy’s got a table full of medicine, and most of it’s related to his work in the nuclear industry. So some of these guys, as bulletproof as they may think they are, they will, down the road, something’s going to give. And I feel bad about that. 0:48:54 Franklin: Yeah. Yes. Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Garcia: The rooms were locked up for the most part. You know, all the gates and fences and stuff, you had to fill out a questionnaire every five years or at random. They’d call your boss up, say, send so-and-so over. You had to give another drug screening sample. Or fill out the questionnaire, or just, if somebody had run into a security problem, they would ask you what kind of person is this? Has he ever said anything threatening to the country or to the plant? 0:49:42 And it wasn’t with the FBI, but I had some problems in my younger years and I sought counseling and I didn’t disclose that. Because I knew what they would do, what they would think. So somehow or another I thought they found out. [LAUGHTER] And they put me in this little room, and, yeah. That was another tough hour. But nothing came of it, but I told them, I said, I understand why you think this, but there’s a long line of people that have marital problems, psychological problems, drug and alcohol problems that you should worry about more than me. I was just, you know. I had some emotional issues. I never heard any more about it. After I signed the papers and got out of that little tiny room, I never heard any more about it. 0:50:41 But, yeah, the security was always on your mind. People, unless you were another Hanford person, you really didn’t talk to other people much about it. I know one of my first bosses when we first started up PFP, he said, don’t say anything. It was like the World War II days, almost. So I got on a bus to come to PFP, the whole bus was talking about it. That had just worn off; they didn’t understand the significance from the old days. So that was okay. 0:51:17 Franklin: Were there any old-timers there when you started work? Garcia: A few. A few that had worked at the reactors. I don’t think anybody from the World War II days was still around. They’d either retired or died. But I had a couple guys I worked with that were pretty close to retirement that had worked at the other reactors in the Cold War days. They had some stories. And if they had a story to tell, I wanted to listen to it. Because they had a vast amount of experience and knowledge. And even if I’d heard the story before, I wanted to hear it again. But for the most part, they kept us away from the old-timers, because they didn’t want us to learn their tricks and their bad habits. They wanted us to be a new generation that followed the procedures, did what our managers said, and weren’t going too cowboy. Later on, we did. But at first they didn’t want their bad habits to rub off on us. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s funny, because I’ve heard a lot of stories, too. I mean, that’s the nature of doing oral history, but, yeah. 0:52:25 Garcia: Did anyone ever tell you about this guy named Don, who was a control room operator at PFP? And a DOE tour came. So Don is sitting there at the console with his feet up, reading the newspaper, which was a no-no, twice. So his manager was leading the tour and he said, Don, what are you doing? Shouldn’t you be paying attention? And he said, you know, if I’m up here calling down valve changes to the floors below in the gloveboxes and the dials are going crazy, you’re losing money. But when things are calm and running smooth and I can read my newspaper, you’re making money. [LAUGHTER] And they left him alone. He was one of those guys, you could call up in the dead of night and say, Don, this is doing that, and that’s doing this, what do we do? And he would know. He probably should’ve been something more than just a nuclear process operator, but he had years of experience and he knew what it was all about. So, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Garcia: He was pretty cool. Franklin: That’s crazy. That’s a good story. So we’re at the last question now. Garcia: Okay. 0:53:36 Franklin: And that is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Garcia: [SIGH] That it was a dangerous job, a crazy job, but a job that could be done safely. For whatever detrimental effects it was to the workers and obviously to the environment. I’m sorry. But I think Hanford was run better than maybe in North Korea or in the Soviet Union. They respected the life and the health and the skills of the workers at Hanford more than at other places. Places, not ever having seen or encountered anybody; I just have that notion. And the legacy that Hanford has left, in terms of all the nuclear weapons, all the contaminated ground and water. I’m sorry it happened, but it had to be done for its own reasons and in its own way. 0:54:45 But I didn’t feel any more patriotic when I was doing it and I don’t feel anymore patriotic about it now. But, yeah, the men and women that worked out there, a lot of them I still remember, still talk to, and they worked hard. It was a dangerous, sometimes crazy job. I don’t want any flowers or trumpets; it was just a job and everybody tried to do it—well, almost everybody tried to do it well and safely. And if we’ve left some problems behind, well, sorry, good luck. That’ll be your thing to handle. Franklin: Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to come and interview with us today. I really enjoyed your very thoughtful responses. Garcia: Well, thank you. Franklin: Is there anything else you’d like to say before we turn the camera off? Garcia: No. I think I’ve about said it all. I gave this—I even had some time to give it a lot of thought, and I’ve pretty much said everything I thought of. Franklin: Great. Awesome. Well, thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:56:00 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9987kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Site Plutonium Finishing Plant PUREX Tank Farms Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 42 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 21 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Garcia Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource John Garcia's career at the Hanford Site spanned over 20 years, primarily working as a nuclear process operator at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) and as a health physics technician (HPT) at various facilities like PUREX, Tank Farms, and the True Retrieval project. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/22/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd9b5b13dffbede93df7368c37e2ebad4.JPG 54583d7039ab0df30eab83cbf73dff85 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jack Fix Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready, Jack? Jack Fix: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jack Fix on March 30, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jack about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Fix: Well, my full name is John James Fix. That’s J-O-H-N. J-A-M-E-S. And then F-I-X. Franklin: Okay. Great. But you prefer to go by Jack, correct? Fix: Yes. My dad’s name was John, so I’m a Jack. Franklin: Okay, to alleviate confusion? Fix: Yeah. Franklin: Right, okay. Great. Well, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Fix: Well, I first came here as part of a—well, as a little bit of background, I was very fortunate to get a—when I graduated out of college, I was extremely fortunate to receive one of the Atomic Energy Commission fellowships. So I had to take the Graduate Record Exam advanced test, which I took in physics, and then get three professors—they willingly sent in these letters. Just remarkably, it was a gift of a lifetime to receive one of these fellowships. As part of that fellowship, there were various institutions throughout the United States that supported these fellowships. In the Northwest, the only one was University of Washington. Oregon State didn’t have it at that time, or I would’ve gone there. But anyway, I went to University of Washington and sat—in the summer after I finished my first year of grad school, we had to go to a national lab. And I chose Hanford. So I came here as a summer, I guess, intern, if you would call it that, in 1969. Franklin: And why did you choose Hanford? Fix: Well, because I was born and raised in Pendleton, Oregon and that was close to home. And, you know, there were lots of reasons to stay as close to home as you could if you didn’t have a lot of money. That’s also why I chose University of Washington, because it was the closest university to Pendleton, basically. Franklin: Okay. And what did this AEC fellowship cover? Fix: Well, it covered everything. They paid—it was a full ride fellowship. They paid all your tuition, they gave you a stipend. I mean, it was really a—it’s hard to imagine how much of a gift that really was. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. And this was for graduate school. Fix: That was for graduate school, right. This is called the Atomic Energy Commission fellowships, and they were certainly very valuable. Franklin: Right, I bet that looks pretty good, too, on a CV after graduating. Fix: Well, yeah, except intriguingly, most people don’t realize, but after the United States landed a person on the moon, they didn’t have that need for all those high PhD physicists anymore, so many of those people got laid off and they all went back and were retraining into like medical radiation physics and things, which is actually where I got my degree, is in medical radiation physics. So things ebb and flow. So when I graduated with my master’s degree in medical radiation physics, it was still very challenging to get a position. I was fortunate that I had worked two years at the University of Washington as a— You know, I don’t want to get too detailed here, but my graduating class from college was the first graduating class that would no longer have student deferments for graduate school because of the Vietnam War. Those were all—that was the very first year. So it affected many people. And then later they introduced the lottery system. So I had a low number. So I actually had to stop my graduate studies. And I was very lucky to get a position at the University of Washington, because I was going to be drafted. There was really no opportunity for me to go into the service to get more training or what-have-you. So anyway, it was just a point of history that affected a lot of people. I don’t know how many people, and I don’t know how many people are familiar with that. Hopefully it’s never repeated. Franklin: Yeah, that would be nice. Is medical radiation physics similar to health physics? Fix: Yeah, it’s very—it’s excellent, yeah, medical is really all part of radiological sciences. It all deals with radiation, it all deals with—radiological science is actually a very broad field, really. It can go from, you know, cosmic radiation to what heats the core of the Earth, to the various types of uses of medical isotopes in medicine. So it’s a very broad field. Franklin: Sure, sure. What did you do that first time at Hanford Lab in the late ‘60s? Fix: Well, in ’69, when I was here as an intern? We, first of all, there was dedicated people on the staff here that supported things, so we had a lead scientist that I reported to. Actually, I reported to Ron Kathren, who many of the people know here locally. Franklin: I know Ron very well. Fix: Yes. Well, Ron Kathren was my sponsor. He sponsored me and another student from the east—from the Tennessee area. So we did all various types of educational things, such as—I don’t recall now—but we did a little bit of work with tritium, as I recall. We were doing things with an area called thermoluminescent dosimetry, which is a little special types of salt crystals which will luminesce when they’re irradiated with different types of radiation. Franklin: Is that the type of stuff that’s in a scintillator? Is that what it’s called? Fix: Well, a scintillator—scintillation is used in like, sodium iodide detectors for radiation and that. It’s very similar. One’s luminescence and one’s scintillation. It’s both emitting light that’s counted by a photo tube and you can relate that to the amount of radiation and the type of radiation. But the right type-- Franklin: What was the—oh, sorry. Fix: Well, it just depends on the instrumentation, that’s all. Franklin: What’s the impetus to develop that type of counter? Fix: Well, you’re always trying to be able to do things more precisely, at greater sensitivity. So, there’s always been impetus to have better detectors, more sensitive, better resolution. It goes on even to the current time. That’s one reason why they maybe use liquid nitrogen to cool the crystals down, so that there’s less entrancing noise. So it all has to do with the improved capabilities. Franklin: Interesting. And what was tritium used for? Fix: Well, tritium is very widely used. First of all, it is an isotope of water. So tritium is extensively used, especially in medical research, because most/many organic molecules include tritium—include, not tritium, excuse me—include hydrogen. So you can have like tritiated label thymidine, all the different amino acids for the DNA. Many. There’s so many uses it’s hard to describe them all, in terms of medical research. Franklin: Okay. Would that be for like marking DNA so that it would be visible? Fix: Well, actually, if you wanted to label an organic compound that’s used in some type of, say, like a hormone or an enzyme that’s used in the body, you could potentially use this to label it. I mean, other nuclides that were widely used were iodine and carbon. There was many, many applications for these. Franklin: What was tritium being studied for at Hanford labs? Fix: Well, another use of hydrogen and tritium—I wouldn’t say that these were studied at Hanford labs, per se. I was taking that as a general question. At Hanford another significant use of tritium was in thermonuclear weapons. The fusion device utilizes tritium. As a matter of fact, all of our nuclear armaments to this day have to be maintained to keep the supply of the use of tritium in those devices, which has a half-life of about 12.5 years, to be adequate for their intended use. Franklin: Okay. And so what were you doing in regards to tritium? Fix: Well, we were, with Ron, we were just studying. I forget what we were doing now. I mean, it’s—this was 40 years ago. Franklin: Sure, sure. Fix: First of all, tritium is a relatively—one thing in the use of a student is, tritium is relatively non-hazardous. It’s a very low-emitting beta emitter. Very low. So it’s relatively—it’s not very hazardous. So if you’re teaching students, that might be attractive. It’s also easily available. And so. Franklin: You said easily available, so it was being produced at Hanford, then, for research use, or where did the tritium come from? Fix: Well, I’m not sure where the—certainly, there was a lot of tritium available at Hanford; there’s no question about that. Whether it was being purified and isolated for use by others, I’m not sure right now. I’d have to think about that. Franklin: Sure, sure, and— Fix: Tritium— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Fix: Undoubtedly, tritium was everywhere at Hanford, as you know. The groundwater plume has tritium in it. It was an isotope that’s widely available. Also, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the history of nuclear atmospheric testing and nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, but there was tritium all over the world caused by nuclear weapon testing in the atmosphere. Franklin: Right. And that’s one of the things that health physicists or others, medical researchers could use to monitor people, because everyone of a certain generation had so much tritium in them, right? Fix: Yeah, I wouldn’t use the words “so much,” but they certainly—since it was not a relatively hazardous nuclide, but everybody had, certainly, measurable quantities. Franklin: Yeah, sorry, I guess I meant so much as to be measured. Fix: Yeah. And interestingly, later on, I’ll describe, but when I eventually became an employee at Hanford, we documented—since when I came here in 19—let’s see, I came here—after I graduated from the University of Washington, I actually went to work for AEC, Atomic Energy Commission, at the national reactor testing station in Idaho. Franklin: Okay. Fix: And there, I was responsible for the environmental surveillance program in the context of analyzing—looking after, gathering the data, which was—these were well-established programs that every major DOE site had—at that time AEC site. So I was just one person in a series of people that had these responsibilities. But my position was responsible for analyzing all the data and writing the annual report. So we wrote these reports and distributed to all the state and representatives and different AEC sites. These were required; there was a DOE order that specified what had to be included, so we did that. And also, when I was at Idaho, we had NOAA was responsible for atmospheric dispersion—the National Oceanographic and Aeronautics Agency. And they also had the USGS, the United States Geological Service, responsible for the geohydrology of the Idaho site. So a couple years later, I came to Hanford and basically assumed the same responsibilities. I came here to do the site wide environmental surveillance program for the surface. And basically at that time, because many of the Hanford facilities had been shut down, the once-through reactors were closed down in the late, like ’68 or so. And worldwide fallout had, by that time, an international pact to stop the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. So you could see in the environment, very quickly, this decrease in radioactivity, primarily from fallout. Franklin: Right. Fix: But near a site like Hanford, there was also the Hanford contribution. Because there’s quite a difference in the nuclide mix between weapons and at Hanford, which involved reactor effluence. So when we came here, the environmental data, meaning foodstuffs, air, water, you know, wildlife, anything that you could measure that might have importance to people was monitored, had been monitored for years. And has continued to be monitored for years since then. But anyway, when I came here the environmental measurements had gotten to the point where you really couldn’t measure much in the environment. So when I came here, I kind of adopted the techniques that were used at Idaho in which everything was calculated. You would take the effluent data and you’d take dispersion models and calculate what the off-site impact might be. And then you would verify that with the environmental data. So if you calculated minimal impact and then you didn’t see anything with the environmental program, then you felt very comfortable. But, so anyway, Hanford researchers that had these capabilities for using dispersion models, models, et cetera. So we wrote a series of reports, how the radioactivity in foodstuffs, wildlife, the river, how all that varied with time, and how it was declining. And one of the examples was tritium in the river. We wrote a report showing how that had changed since they had all this data. So we wrote a series of historical reports. Franklin: How were these reports received by both inside the kind of DOE/AEC complex, but also outside? Fix: I think they’re fine. I think everybody really appreciated it. I think, for one thing, it was very instructive to see how quickly it had changed. Franklin: You mean, quickly from the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty to— Fix: , Yeah, right. Franklin: Okay. Fix: Yeah. It was very—and I think it was—there are lots of very interesting things in this data. I guess, being a technocrat, we like data. We love to analyze data. But most people don’t realize, for example, that, say, milk from the western side of the state, Seattle area, had twice the levels of strontium-90, as, say, this area, even though we had Hanford. Franklin: And why is that? Fix: And the reason is because worldwide fallout was predominantly following the pattern of rainfall. So the areas that had more rainfall had more radioactive—had more nuclides from worldwide fallout. And the same thing was true of cesium-137, say, in deer meat, or cattle, what-have-you. But their levels of cesium from worldwide fallout was higher where there was more rainfall. So, anyway, the data that Hanford collected, the contractors at Hanford collected for the AEC, included all of this information. So we included in some of our reports, but it was just a snapshot. What we did was kind of interesting, because things were changing. Everything was going down. And there was some new techniques of analyzing data that we found very—we really wanted to apply this data where we were looking at everything in terms of distribution, statistical distributions. Because you would expect, say, like, particle size of dust particles in the atmosphere would follow a certain distribution. So you can use this method of analysis to see, maybe, what type of—how much of, say, like, a particular nuclide that might exist in the atmosphere and in the environment from different sources, how much might be due to worldwide fallout, how much might be due to Hanford. It was particularly useful for data that might have significant amount of information below detection level. So we were applying these methods and the reports are publicly available and we enjoyed writing them. Franklin: So would you say, then, that for the west side, or for people in areas of high rainfall, would you say, then, that the threat that they faced from radioactive isotopes was more from the testing than from the Hanford production from effluent going into the Columbia River? Fix: Well, I wouldn’t want to characterize it in terms of threat or risk, because, you know, the evidence is that low levels of radiation may not be hazardous. That’s a very—that’s an open— Franklin: Are you talking about, like, Tony Brooks’— Fix: Well, Tony Brooks, but, I mean, in general, the evidence is that, for example, when you go to the dentist to get your dental x-rays, do you worry about the radiation you’re getting? Or if you’re taking a trip to Europe on an airplane, are you worried about a small amount of dose? Franklin: Well, no, of course, but a nuclear reactor represents, you know, I think, a sociocultural fear factor there. Fix: Well, I think that’s true, a social fear factor. I agree with you; there’s a lot of fear. I guess, in my mind, I’m always focused on how much dose is involved, because— Franklin: Sure, because that’s the measurable quantity, right, it’s not—the fear— Fix: Yeah. And actually, that’s why the amount of radionuclides that were becoming prevalent in the environment, it’s why there was worldwide outcries about continuing the nuclear weapon testing in the atmosphere and what led to the worldwide ban on atmospheric testing. Even after they had the testing agreement, there still continued to be some testing in the atmosphere by certain nations. Franklin: Right, more of rogue nations. Fix: Yeah. Well, rogue and even some very—yes. For a long time. And actually in the environmental programs, one of the interesting sidelights or aspects of these environmental programs, whenever there was a test in the atmosphere, we could pick it up very quickly. That was another use of this type of analysis we were talking about. We could pick it up very quickly, and actually at that point, those particular data we would kind of go on to a different program, because people wanted to know what we were seeing. And I don’t think it constituted a hazard or anything per se, but it was meaningful to—it was meaningful information. Franklin: Sure, sure. And it’s an important point you bring up that people are exposed in many everyday, what we think of as kind of everyday activities. Fix: Yes. Franklin: And that we not to worry about those, because I think we’ve categorized those as necessities, you know. And this is, we view, I think, weapons production maybe in a different light. Fix: Well, I think we all agree that we don’t want to take unnecessary risks. But interestingly, like, probably the nuclide that contributes more dose, significant dose to humans from all is potassium-40. You know, that’s a primordial radioactive nuclide that’s been there since the beginning of the Earth—or, time, I should say. And it has a very energetic gamma radiation of 1.46 MeVs. It’s very, very penetrating. And yet it’s unavoidable. Anytime you have a banana, there’s no way to avoid the potassium-40. That is a part of the potassium that we all take in. So there’s no way to avoid it. Franklin: Unless you stop eating bananas. Fix: Well, I think, yeah, but I think the amount of potassium in your body is primarily regulated by the body. If you get too much potassium, it gets eliminated. If you don’t get enough, it starts taking more of it, absorbing more of it. So, potassium, you can’t live without potassium. Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. I was also being facetious. Fix: Well, you know, but these are the games that—I don’t know, “games,” but the perspectives that you have to weigh in. Franklin: Sure. Well, I want to go back a little bit earlier, when you said that when you first got to Hanford, you couldn’t measure much of the environment? And why was that? I’m wondering if you could discuss that challenge. Fix: Well, because all of the reactors at that time, once-through reactors, were closed down in the late ‘60s. The reprocessing facility was, I think, PUREX was—I forget its exact operating history, but it was being phased out. So it just wasn’t that many releases from Hanford. We certainly could measure some of the residual. The design of these surveillance programs was always to compare near versus far, upriver versus downriver, to do all sorts of sensible things, to try to see what impact there could be on the environment. Franklin: And where things were going— Fix: Yes. Franklin: --from, once they were created. Fix: Yeah. And for example, there was, of course, the history of the deposition of nuclides in the Columbia River, say, in the sediment behind McNary Dam. So we were always—at that time we were always trying to develop more sensitive methods, since things were—since you don’t really want to have data that has below detection level. That really is not—that’s really very difficult data to analyze. Franklin: Sorry, so, I’m a historian, not a—my last science class was a little bit ago. How do you have data “below detection level”? Fix: Well, if you can’t measure it with your method of analysis, then we just call it below detection level. Everything has a noise level, and if you just can’t discern a signal, you just call it below detection level. You can define what the detection level is. Franklin: So you’re saying that if you know that there is a very small amount of that element there, but you can’t detect it because of background radiation or something, then you would just say— Fix: Or noise in the instrumentation. You know, things are not perfect. Typically, if you, say, take a measurement, and you didn’t put any sample in there, you would have a reading. And historically, yeah, a person might say, the detection level is twice the variability of background that you get in the instrument with nothing in there. Franklin: Okay. Fix: So you might say, well, I can’t detect anything below that, because that’s just background. Franklin: So unlike a scale, you can’t just tare it out to zero and get a clean reading every time. Fix: Right, that’s right. Franklin: It’s always—okay. Fix: Everything has tradeoffs. So what you try to do is you try to either concentrate the material, or you try to combine samples. Like if we’re measuring levels of radionuclide in the air using air filters, they have a certain efficiency. What you might do is start to combine—this actually was done at Hanford, where, like, you’d have the routine samples for every month, for example, or in some cases every week, and then you might take all of them for a whole quadrant that you want to and ash them all on a quarterly basis so you get more information— Franklin: More data into it. Fix: More data, or more if you were collecting a certain isotope, you’d get more of that isotope and so you’d have to—then that would enhance your detection level. Because detection level, at least, would typically be measured on how much air you sampled, versus how much radioactivity you counted. Franklin: So you might need to add multiple samples up in order to get something— Fix: Right, and that actually was commonly done to get to greater detection levels. Like, say you wanted to measure plutonium in the atmosphere, for example, which does exist. So there were always techniques. Or using totally different technologies. Like, we went to filter resin sampling of the Columbia River water, because it was a much more efficient method of analyzing. You could analyze a lot more water with it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Fix: So I used all sorts of techniques to try to get positive data. But at some point, you have to weigh, what is the underlying risk in the first place? Franklin: Sure. What other kinds of challenges did you face in gathering this data and writing reports about it? Fix: Well, in those—I think—well, the primary challenge is you want to be sure that your surveillance program doesn’t have any—is not possible to miss anything. That’s probably the first and foremost. But I had joined a very mature program here that they had been conducting this program for many years, and I was just one person in a line of people that had these responsibilities. You had to be sure that you interpreted the data accurately, as well. Franklin: Sure. Fix: So I think it was a very well-run program and everything went together very smoothly. Every site had these programs. So I did that for several years, and then I was transferred to the dosimetry program. Franklin: Was there a lot of communication between sites in these programs? Fix: Oh, sure, yeah. A tremendous amount. Yeah, all throughout all my years of these—that’s one of the most enjoyable things about these programs, is since they were programs that were run to meet AEC or DOE orders, they had to be done by a certain time. They had to cover certain subjects. But, yes, we communicated with other colleagues at other sites all the time. Franklin: Great. One last question about the surface environmental program. Were you, and if so, how, were you impacted by the growing environmental movement in the United States from the creation of the EPA and that kind of growing environmental concern in the general public? Fix: Well, I would say—I wouldn’t call us being impacted, I’m thinking most of all my colleagues were highly supportive. I mean, we all really wanted the data and certainly, I don’t think anyone was in favor of nuclear testing in the atmosphere. But I mean it’s all really—I mean, that’s way before EPA. I don’t—I guess I never really thought about it, because so much of EPA’s focus has nothing to do with radioactivity. So we’re kind of a small aspect of that. Franklin: Or, I guess, were you impacted by the growing anti-nuclear movement? Fix: Oh sure. Sure. Oh, sure. I was impacted, you know, employment-wise. You always wondered why, say, nuclear power couldn’t have been more, as a technology, couldn’t have been more fault-free, let’s say. It just had a few accidents, but the accidents were so significant. Because basically all you’re doing is using the nuclear to heat the water that goes, and the steam drives a turbine. Same thing you do with coal or natural gas or what-have-you. So, like, when I was at the national reactor testing station, we had many reactors there. Because, say, like the Army wanted to have small portable or remote reactors, because you could fuel them, put them in, say, the Arctic Circle, they’d run for years and years, and could be maintained by just a couple people. Franklin: Right, you wouldn’t have to keep trucking in fuel. Fix: Right, you wouldn’t have to ship in, wouldn’t have to have—yeah. It’s totally different dynamics, in terms of the tactical aspects of maintaining the facility. The same reason, or similar reason why you have the nuclear submarines. Franklin: Right. Fix: Nuclear-powered submarines. Franklin: So tell me about the occupational external dosimetry program. Fix: Well, after I had spent about five years in the environmental program here, then it was common practice there of my management to transfer professionals to other disciplines. So I think in about December of ’79 or so, I started here in ’74, and then ’79 I was transferred to the site-wide personnel dosimetry program. And that was very interesting, because, whereas the environmental surveillance program is kind of somewhat removed from operations, we kind of always gathering data, even though we write the official reports of the impact and everything, it’s kind of like after-the-fact. When I went to the external dosimetry program, we were really a part of the operation. We were a part of what would happen with, you know, doses where people actually working, say, yesterday, if we had a significant job, versus— And even though there I was primarily responsible for the dosimetry that would determine the official dose of record. We were responsible for the nuclear accident of personnel dosimetry. And actually interestingly we did the environmental dosimetry as well at that time. Because it was all part of the same type of technology. Franklin: And was this site-wide? Fix: Yes, site-wide. Franklin: Okay, so for every Hanford employee. Fix: Every Hanford employee. Everybody, both employees and visitors to the Site, all were required to wear dosimetry, and it served everybody. This is a program that, of course, had started with the very beginning of Hanford operations in the ‘40s, ’43, ’44 or whatever it was. And through time, there had been technological changes. So when I came here, it was common practice for every site to have designed its own dosimeters and its own technology reader systems to process these dosimeters. Because there really was no commercial source of equipment that could be used for this. Franklin: What types did Hanford have? Fix: What’s that? I’m sorry. Franklin: What types did Hanford have? Of dosimeter and reading? Fix: Well, they had actually, they had—about ’71, they introduced a new type of dosimetry called the thermoluminescent dosimeter. Again, this was a small crystals of salt that had the capability of responding to radiation, storing the signal, and then upon heating, would give off a light, give off a signal, in the form of light that could be measured that was indicative of the amount of radiation received. Franklin: And was that part of what you were working on as an intern? Fix: Well, that’s a great—you mean as a graduate student? Yeah. This thermoluminescent dosimetry was being used everywhere. At University of Washington, we used it also. Everybody used it. It was the replacement to film dosimetry. You know, you had these little crystals of salt that you could use that were just very handy. There’s quite a bit of physics that went into using these properly. But fundamentally it was sort of the latest technology at that time. Franklin: Okay. And what other kinds of equipment did Hanford—did you use to monitor? Because you mentioned Hanford had its own dosimeters and dosimeter process equipment. So what other types of equipment? Fix: Well, first of all, the dosimeters are really the after—they provide the official dose of record, but that’s really after-the-fact. When people go into the workplace, you’re not depending on a dosimeter to keep them safe. They go in with instruments, primarily instruments. People have knowledge of the work environment—typically they know what the hazards are. Now, as you probably know, that Hanford had a special workforce called the radiation protection monitors. Their whole job was to evaluate the work environment and accompany workers when they entered to make sure they were not taking undue risks using instruments. So instruments were always the number one thing. And one of the reasons this particular program involved working with this field was because you had to really make sure the dosimetry and the instrumentation were consistent. There’s a lot of science behind using the right instrument as well as using the right dosimetry. Because at Hanford we have many types of radiation. We have different types of radiation that have different energies. And they all may require different methods of measurement. So anyway, you know, maintaining this equipment and making sure it was accurate was my responsibility. And also we had the nuclear accident dosimetry. So I know, like, the first—I came to this program in December, and I had to spend two entire weekends out in December because there had been a situation where a worker reported that he had a high dose and saw a blue flash. So that involved a tremendous response by the contractors. I remember it happened on a Friday night. So we had the nuclear accident dosimeters at the facility. These are actually devices that are located at fixed positions in the facility. So we had to process all of those. And at that time we interfaced with the Site medical staff. So as soon as—actually, I should’ve said, the first clue on this was the dosimeter came in and was read very high. Not very—now, we don’t want to say very high, but certainly very unusually high; it wasn’t a normal dose. Franklin: Sure. It was above the— Fix: Above the action level. We had all sorts-- Franklin: Above the dose of record. Fix: Well, not the dose of record. Franklin: Oh, sorry. Fix: It was above the—we have all sorts of action levels. Certainly, we have the legal allowable, then below that then you have where you have to take action, et cetera. But anyway, this was unusually high. Wasn’t like, life threatening, but it was—so we immediately, you know, the Site response took over, and probably took him to, I’m sure we probably took him to the medical staff, had some blood drawn. You could take blood and have it analyzed, at that time, at Oak Ridge. But anyway, to make a long story short, none of this happened. I mean, it did—the person reported that there was a blue flash and that he had this high dose. But it turned out that the worker, after investigating and the contractor working all weekend, trying to resolve this situation, the person apparently—all the evidence was that he actually took his dosimeter and put it in like a baggie, dropped it down into the spent fuel pool to expose it either—I don’t know if he wanted to get some time off for New Year’s or—because this was happening at Christmas time. Anyway, I don’t think he had any idea what was going to happen, but sadly, we had all sorts of bits of information. This was very much like forensic science, because with this radiation, we knew what type of radionuclides were in the spent fuel, we knew what type of residual contaminants had gotten onto the exterior of the dosimeter. We could tell, essentially, almost exactly what this person had done. And of course once it was all put together, sadly, you know, he lost his job. Franklin: Sure. Fix: Anytime anybody did anything with the dosimetry to—anyway, that was an employment-ending activity. So, anyway, we worked all weekend on that, sadly. But that was, in the long-run that was good, because that was one of my responsibilities. It didn’t happen very often but we had to process those dosimeters. The physics of criticality in particular is very, very complicated. So you really have to make sure that the system works properly and you get the type of data you needed. But anyway, at the same time, we had an effort going on to adopt performance standards for dosimetry nationwide. It actually started years before, actually, decades earlier. But while I was—really become quite a common activity when I took this new position, and of course I was very supportive on performance standards as well. So, we worked on that. We actually made testimonies to Congress about—because there was complaints that if we enacted these performance standards, it put a lot of small processors out of business, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s always these tradeoffs between what was the better, greater good. But the performance standards were eventually adopted and they were quite rigorous in terms of their criteria and what was achievable. There were all sorts of tests done. So I eventually became chairman of the—so this involved a couple of activities. One was every two years you had to pass a performance test where they would take dosimeters that actually employers would wear, send them to a lab to expose to, say, three different type, four different—depends on how you add it up, but several different types of radiation at different does levels, totally blind to you. And then send them back in three rounds of testing, and you had to pass the performance test. Once you got the performance test results, if you passed, then you get an onsite programming appraisal, at least within the DOE system, by two technical experts. So then those results would then be sent to the oversight board to—I don’t know what all I have in here, but I mentioned this is my million-mile backpack from Delta for travel over the years. But I was basically they had the DOE lab accreditation program oversight board, so all the results then went to the board. And there was five of us. Then we would make recommendations whether to accredit them or not. It was a very important thing, because if you didn’t have an accredited program, you weren’t supposed to be able to do dosimetry. So it’s very significant. So anyway I got this nice plaque from the Department of Energy, this service award, because I was the very first chair of the DOELAP Oversight Board for personal dosimetry, which later became external. So I did that from ’86 to ’91. I was actually on the board for a lot longer. But I was just the chair for this particular time. So that was a particularly important award in my—or, recognition in my life from DOE Headquarters. So anyway, it was obviously a very relieved moment in my own personal history when the Hanford program achieved accreditation. Franklin: Sure. Fix: Because, you know, that was not a given. It was a very difficult test. Especially for a site like Hanford, because with plutonium, we had the low-energy photons from the plutonium and also the neutrons so it was not an easy test to pass. So anyway, that program involved a lot of challenges and so I eventually left that program. When I said at the beginning, we had to all maintain our own equipment, our own dosimeters, et cetera. Well, later in time, the commercial, and I guess partially because there was this performance standard, the commercial companies then had something to really focus on. And they eventually came up with technology and reader systems and dosimeter systems that were certainly, the performance was good enough to pass these standards and it was just much cheaper to buy a commercial system. So actually Hanford then implemented a commercially-based system in January of 1995. And at that time, I kind of had left—then I left the program at that point. Franklin: In 1995? Fix: Approximately. Because people were asking questions—were increasingly asking questions about the historical dosimetry at Hanford and elsewhere. I had—since I was responsible for the program, running the program, we were responsible for also going back and looking at the historical trends and patterns. The Hanford workers were an important component of the epidemiological study of the radiological effects on workers. The reason is because there was a lot of Hanford workers; they were employed early in the development of atomic energy; and Hanford had maintained excellent records. And the dosimetry seemed to always be of very good quality, historically. But there were still trends in data that looked kind of unusual where if you started looking at details of the dosimetry, there were some trends in that that people wanted some explanation of. They could be a lot of things. There could be a change in the technology of the dosimetry, or there could have been changes in calibrations, or they could’ve been changes in operations. You know, there could’ve been a cleanup operation or there could’ve been a reactor, could’ve been shut down or what-have-you. So myself and others got very involved in analyzing data, historical data, to provide to the epidemiological community who were evaluating the Hanford studies. So to make a long story short, I did a lot of the—quite a bit of this, partially while I was still a part of the dosimetry team. But then to support the Hanford worker epidemiological study, we did this. Then when that was—the people that were responsible for that program had done some of the epidemiological studies, then those studies were combined with other studies from other sites, like, notably in my case, Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats. So, because they had the problem of trying to—fundamentally, they were trying to determine was there an association with the rate of incidences with various types of cancer with radiation dose. And since, as you know, cancer occurs spontaneously, with or without Hanford. The question was, did Hanford increase the incidence of various types of cancers? And that was very difficult question to answer, epidemiologically. So there they were always trying to enhance their statistical precision, either in terms of trying to have, basically, in terms of trying to have more data. So Hanford, the studies at Hanford, the statistical precision wasn’t really quite adequate, wasn’t sufficient to detect that. So then they combined that with Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats. Still, there, they wanted more precision, so then that was eventually combined with what was called the Three Country Study, an international agency for research on cancer. That was combined with Canada and the United Kingdom. So I supported those studies. I was the—I don’t know what all I have in here, but I had—I was the chair of the international agency research on cancer dosimetry subcommittee at that time. And then we—did I mention then we took that study from the three countries and went on to do eleven countries in the world? Franklin: Oh, wow. Fix: Yeah, for the international study. So I was just the support, the dosimetry support. So the epidemiologists and biostatisticians from all these different residents from all these different countries and everybody would get this data. We would make judgments as to what dosimetry we thought had greater accuracy than others. For example, it was hard, historically, and it’s still hard even to this day to measure neutron radiation. While there’s many types of facilities that have no neutrons, Hanford—many facilities at Hanford did not have neutron radiation; some did. And so we got involved in supporting those studies. So that led—that’s probably why I got my million-mile thing, going—I got many trips to France and that, supporting these studies, which were widely published. Franklin: I see you have a nametag or a thing there with Cyrillic on it. Fix: Yeah, I haven’t gotten to that part. Well, actually, after—I’ll get to that right away. Franklin: Okay, sure, I was just curious. Fix: Yeah, well, actually, after I was doing this for the thing—for the epidemiologists and that, just trying to cover, quickly, my career. The first phase of my career really was the environmental part, which we talked about. The second part was really the Hanford Site dosimetry program, which we talked about. The third part of my career really had to do with sort of taking the data and applying it to different types of programs. One of those was the epidemiology studies, which I was involved in the Hanford program, then the three sites, then the three-country, and then the eleven-country for IRE. These were only kind of part-time efforts; these were not full-time efforts. And then I became involved—then I took over the role in the joint US-DOE/Russian Mayak worker study. Franklin: Okay. Fix: Which you’ve probably heard about? Franklin: I have. That’s going on today, right? Fix: Yes, it is. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve met—I don’t remember the gentleman’s name, but I— Fix: Yeah, Bruce Napier, probably. Franklin: Yes. Yeah. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. I met him over the USTUR. Fix: Yeah. Well, when Bruce—originally, he was primarily responsible for the environmental part, because they had a lot of effluent from the Mayak operation, which is very similar to Hanford in terms of its scope of— Franklin: But they had more releases. Fix: Well, they had more and also but they didn’t have a river like the Columbia. Franklin: Oh. Theirs was slower and— Fix: And also they reposited a lot of it to a lake. Franklin: Yeah, and I don’t know if this is going to be apropos to you, but most of what I know about this is what I read from Kate Brown’s book, Plutopia, which I know had mixed reception among some folks here. But it’s very interesting, her coverage of how different the environmental conditions were in Mayak that led to much greater contamination. Fix: Yes, right. Well, that’s right. You know, when you had eight single-pass reactors running at Hanford and they’re dumping it into—first of all, they went to pools to let some of the radioactivity decline. But then eventually when it went into that big river, and all got sent downstream. Franklin: Sure. Fix: And Russia didn’t have that. But anyway, my job was not the environment. My job was for the workers. Just like we had done the study for IRE for the workers. Because the context was there that the workers should have the very highest doses of all. They’re working in the facility, they live in the environment. And they’re monitored. If anybody should show an effect, you should be able to pick it up with these workers. So I took over the role as the technical lead for the external dosimetry part, working with my Russian colleagues. So that led us to many trips to Russia and many studies. This is actually my name in Russian. You know, my nametag. You know, so? Franklin: Right, no, I can read that. Yeah, Djon Fix. Fix: So, I don’t know why, this is just a collection of things in here. I did this for several years, until we had a major publication special edition of Health Physics devoted to this particular—results from this program. Franklin: The US-Russia— Fix: US-Russia collaboration, right, for studying the Mayak workers— Franklin: How did you find working with your Russian colleagues? Fix: Well, first of all, they were—we worked with them long enough that we really developed some real personal ties. I mean, for example, the interpreters were very nice people to deal with. They knew more about American culture than I did. I mean, they knew all about—their main source of information, I believe, was American movies and American music. So they could name—they were just remarkable in being able to know singers and songs and movies, much more capably than I could, and I lived here. Franklin: Right. Fix: [LAUGHTER] But we were there long enough to see them come in as young interpreters and then get married and then have babies and then have toddlers, you know? So it was quite a nice experience from the human aspect. As far as the Russians, it took us a while to—it took, I think, working with the same team on both sides for them to develop a level of comfort with, say, at least the American approach. Our American scientific approach is that everything is checked and double-checked, and there’s no—you shouldn’t really have any personal—you shouldn’t feel defensive if people are checking your work. What you really care about is that it’s accurate. And I think the Russians initially were not too inclined to have us checking their work, but that was our job, was to check everything. So after a few years, I think it all worked out really well. Our primary job—and actually, this was true throughout my career, my primary job was typically always writing everything up. Writing it up and letting other people check it. Anyway, for the Russians, we did the same thing. It was Russian workers, a Russian facility, and we were there just to mentor them and I guess to represent the DOE’s interest in this work. The reason that DOE was there is because, generally speaking, the impact on workers from American facilities was, at best, controversial. It was never a clear answer to that question. Well, the Russian workers could’ve gotten as much dose in one year as the American workers got in their entire lifetime. So you really were going to a situation where there ought to be some impacts. Not only did that, they had some accidents with workers. So that actually where they actually did have the medically-exhibited elements of radiation syndrome. So most of those were removed from our—from the epidemiologic study, because they’re really more like an accident evaluation. Franklin: Right, you were looking at the dose that someone would get from normal work in Russia. Fix: That’s right, that’s right. Which—that’s correct. Interestingly, the Russians—because we had what were called these hidden cities. So we would go to the hidden city where Mayak was located. These are interesting experiences, because when you enter these towns, you need to only—you can only enter by imitation. Because you go through a—they know how to really have a fence or a border. Because you go through an outer one, and you sit between two barbed wire—you know, with razor wire on the top, with guards walking back and forth with AK-47s. Nobody’s cracking any jokes. So anyway, but the city inside that, they had records for everything. All your family, all your medical exposures, any medical abnormalities you may have will be part of your personal record, as well as all the occupational information. So it’s really a goldmine; it doesn’t really exist, probably, maybe outside, in another country, outside of that type—where you have a captive city, all these records, all the records are maintained, and it be available for study. So we worked with the Mayak facility there as well as what was called the Southern Urals Biophysical Institute, to come up with these studies. Franklin: Is that another secret city? In the Southern Urals— Fix: No, that’s the institute inside, that was located within the—at the hidden city. They’re no longer hidden now, but at one time. Meaning that they would never show them on maps of the area. Franklin: Right, and you couldn’t get in without a really good reason for being there. Fix: Well, we had to be invited by the Russian—it had to be approved by the Russian government. And actually because of politics going back and forth between the United States and Russia, we weren’t always allowed to go into the city. Sometimes we had to—our team had to stay outside of the city, and then they would come out and meet with us scientifically, for the scientific work. But anyway, that’s just part of international politics, I guess. But anyway—let’s see, where was I? So we went on that, and when I eventually left that program when we achieved all these major publications. Because I was getting a little bit further along in my career at that time, and that’s a lot of work to go to Russia. When we land in Moscow, we have to—Russia is a very big country; it has eleven time zones. So once we landed in—we usually landed at Frankfurt, and then at Frankfurt, then you have essentially the same remaining flight that’s going across the United States, four more time zones. There, we had four more time zones from Frankfurt. And then we had to get on a bus and ride for two hours. So it was—you know, you were very tired by the time you got to these facilities. So it was nice working with the Russians. They really developed—you had to be there long enough, I think they initially were very suspicious of you, but I wouldn’t say that that’s any different, you know, if you go and investigate—if you go there like as part of this DOELAP program I was talking about, basically site experts like say the Hanford Site expert and Los Alamos Site expert would go to Oak Ridge to evaluate the Oak Ridge program, there’s plenty of opportunity there for sensitivity. But it all went very smoothly because I think everybody believed in the benefits of the program. Franklin: Right, Well, I mean, it kind of makes sense with the Russians, right? I mean, we were enemies for 40 years and we created all these weapons out of fear of each other, and I guess—I mean, it seems like it’s not hard to imagine, if the roles were reversed, Russian scientists—Americans being very defensive about Russians questioning their research method or their research. Or at least that kind of, that initial— Fix: Well, no, I agree with you, Robert. Even—there’s a little bit even more there to that, I think. First of all, the Russians were in a communist society, and where being a member of the communist party was really a very important thing. They couldn’t always trust their neighbors, let alone trust a foreigner. And the other thing is, is interestingly, where we used to go to work near, Yekaterinburg was the main city where we flew to, that’s where Gary Powers was shot down. In the U-2 plane. I’ve always wondered how would Americans feel if there was a high-flying Russian airplane flying over the United States? I mean, we have—I mean, this is just a question of opinion, because I’m sure we would say we have good reasons to be looking at—they’re not an open society; we’re an open society. Russians can live here. We can’t really live there in Russia. So this is a very complicated thing, but you can certainly understand some sensitivity. But anyway, they handled it very well, and amazingly we were in Russia at this—we used to go there and basically stay at what’s called a danya dacha. It’s a dacha, it’s like a country estate. Franklin: Yeah. Fix: Type of thing. Really was not that nice, but it was comparatively a good place to be. But anyway, when the United States invaded Iraq, we were actually in Russia. Franklin: You mean the ’91 invasion? Fix: Yeah. No— Franklin: Okay, the first Gulf War. Fix: The one where we invaded—no, not the first one. The second—not from—the younger Bush invasion. Franklin: Oh, the second Gulf War. Fix: The second one, yeah. We were actually there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Fix: And on the Russian TV, we could see all of this going on, but we couldn’t understand what was happening. The Russians would very politely not really say—they could only really ask the interpreters. But I was very impressed with how much many of the Russian scientists how much they could do in English. Because we certainly weren’t talking in Russian. We always had to have interpreters. Anyway, it was a good experience overall. You know, initially, it was kind of stressful, because we really had a mission which was we wanted to get the study done, we wanted to verify that the methods were methods that we would agree with. And so we eventually were able to achieve all those things. But it was a challenge. Franklin: So that leads me to a couple questions. You mentioned that in America, the link between workers and cancer was—what did you call it? You didn’t say ambiguous, but you said it was— Fix: Controversial. Franklin: Controversial. What did you find in Russia in regards— Fix: Well, those studies are still being put together and published. First of all, you’ve got to gather the datasets; you’ve got to validate the dosimetry; you have to decide if you want to use all of the population or a subset. You know, like I mentioned these workers that were exposed to very high levels, you may not want to include those. You may want to put them in a separate study. The other thing is, is some of the epidemiological studies, at least historically, really used the recorded dose of record being the dosimeter. Because, like for example at Hanford, everybody had a dosimeter. You had a measurement for everybody. You had people had very little dose, and you had people that had a lot more dose, depending on what their jobs were. But within that population of people, you also had some workers that were exposed to, that had intakes of plutonium or other nuclides. Really those people are actually, maybe should be in another category, because not only did they have external radiation, they have internal radiation. So there’s many ways to slice this data, trying to figure out what data is best to use. And then there’s those that have the neutron radiation. Certainly some workers, like the plutonium workers have neutrons, they have intakes—some have intakes—and they also have external. So that was our role; that was kind of my role as a dosimetrist supporting these epidemiologists to say, well, you know, I really wouldn’t put a lot of—as far as identifying what was the higher quality data, I might pick people that only worked at reactors, for example. They only get exposed primarily to high energy gamma radiation. They’re in this facility, it’s a huge facility with all this shielding. Anything that can get through that shielding, the dosimeter’s going to measure relatively very accurately. So we would go through and analyze various scenarios as to what would be the better data. But to answer your question, I don’t think those data have been published fully yet. Franklin: Okay, so it’s still ongoing. Fix: Yeah, yeah, the study’s still ongoing. Franklin: How did the Russian program differ—dosimetry program differ from the American dosimetry program, if at all? Fix: Well, I’m trying to remember exactly. Well, first of all, they’re always behind us a little bit as far as like, they used film dosimetry for a very long time. A lot longer than we did. I’m not sure if there was any thermoluminescent dosimetry data in what we analyzed. It was all—there’s nothing really wrong with film, but it is—in some ways, film can actually be superior, but it does have—in general, it’s not as good for broad, like if you’re exposed to many different types of radiation. It has challenges with neutron dosimetry, for example. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Fix: So it has a special different type of film that’s used for neutrons. It’s called neutron track emulsion. So I would say that the data was—I think the record keeping and the use of the dosimetry was well done, but as far as the technology, it was probably—they were just getting, I think, getting to the point of implementing thermoluminescent dosimetry when we were there, I think, as I recall. Franklin: Oh, okay, so in that regard, then, they were a couple decades behind. Fix: I would say so, yes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Interesting. So-- Fix: I wouldn’t say “behind”; I would say using different, older technology. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay, sure, sure, yeah. Sorry, I didn’t want to—I know phrasing’s important, so I appreciate that. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: So when did you—so what was next, after the Russian dosimetry program? Fix: Well, actually, I was getting to be about 66 or so, and I know I decided that I’d had it with the Russians because one day—I’d suffered from arrhythmias. You know, I got a pacemaker when I was about 45. So I was pulling my suitcase at 2:30 in the morning through the snow in Russia to the Yekaterinburg airport. And I was kind of falling behind the other three or four members of our team, and I was—because you kind of get kind of tired if you have the arrhythmia problem. So I thought, jeez, this is ridiculous, I’m going to have to quit this and I’m kind of at a good place to quit. So I decided there that was my last trip to Russia. Fortunately, we’d already had these publications and there were people to take on whatever my responsibilities were. So I left it at that point. And then I went on, as you may know, around 2000, Congress—another role that I had was Congress, you know, passed the DOE Worker’s Compensation Act? The Energy Employees’ Occupational Illness Act? Franklin: The EEOICPA? Fix: Yeah. That one. Well, I was very involved in that, because I’d been doing this work on dosimetry construction for the epidemiologists and we’d been publishing documents on how to dosimetry construction for—and how to— Franklin: Yeah. [UNKNOWN] Fix: And how to take in considerations of energy and angular dependence because, you know, in a dosimetry program, you had the measurement—you really only know what did the dosimeter get. Because that’s what you’re measuring it with. You really don’t know what the body’s getting. So since cancer is organ-dependent, typically—I mean, you have particular types of cancer, usually it’s organ-dependent. Like leukemia, it would be bone marrow, et cetera, et cetera. So we’d done a variety of work to try to take into consideration the energy and the angular dependence on the dosimetry to come up with better estimates of organ dose, because that’s really what epidemiologists needed. And when they came out with the energy workers’ employment compensation act, which it’s been called, I guess, some of our publications they thought, well, this is a way we can measure organ doses. Because we’re talking about cancer for the workers, we can use these methods to estimate organ doses for the workers in different ways. So at least our stuff got of interest to NIOSH who was responsible for dosimetry construction and also in 1995 the Congress had mandated that DOE transfer their epidemiologic studies to NIOSH. So I’d already had a relationship with NIOSH, even on like the IRAC studies, later. Initially it was DOE then it transferred to NIOSH. So I got very involved in the NIOSH-DOE worker. And when I left Battelle, when I reached 60 I left Battelle and went to work for Dade Moeller and Associates— Franklin: An NV5— Fix: Huh? Franklin: An NV5 company, right? Fix: Now it is, yeah. But at that time, it was Dade Moeller and Associates. So I went to work for them. And even when I was still doing the DOE program. So there I became the principal external dosimetrist for the NIOSH for external dosimetry, but working with many other people and it was the NIOSH researchers. I must say, all throughout my career, you know, I was just one person that—we always had small teams, we were always working together, everybody—my job, usually, typically, was writing it up. And then everybody else would tear it part. And I’d write it up again. And go through a few cycles and then we had something everybody felt good about. So I did that for several years. And there I got to travel to many DOE sites, because every site needed a technical basis document to do dosimetry construction. So I got to travel to, you know, many DOE sites throughout the nation and prepare these documents. So anyway, that was kind of the end of my career after a while. The NIOSH program was a friend, colleague of mine. I went to part-time status in 2011 and in March of 2013, a colleague of mine that I worked with for a long time, you know, there was some kind of cutback, some reduction in funding for that particular project, as I recall. And he decided that he’d just as soon retire and leave the money, whatever money that was available, make sure it was available for younger people. And I thought, well, I’d do the same thing, and we both left. Cleaned out our offices and went on to different things. Franklin: Finally retired? Fix: Yeah. And I had to finish a paper that I was—for the national—well, it used to be the National Commission on Radiological Protection in the United Kingdom. They changed their name to something. Anyway, the same group though. But they wanted the paper written on their epidemiologic study on their recommendation then. I didn’t want to do it but eventually I did do it. Because all the people that could’ve done it better than me seemed to be occupied doing other things and they weren’t able to do it. So once I finished that document, then that’s when I was totally done. Franklin: Okay. Fix: That happened in March of 2013, and then that was the end of my career. Franklin: I’m sure you’re still keeping busy. Fix: Oh, yeah, now. I’m really not doing anything professionally but I’m certainly doing a lot as far as taking care of my body and exercising and going to the local Fun, Fit and Over Fifty club, which is a great club. Doing yoga. So kind of a different perspective. Franklin: Great. I just have one last kind of closing question. Fix: Uh-huh. Franklin: And that’s, what would you—I have one last closing question, then I guess we could show, if you want to show any of the plaques, we could do that and you could talk about those. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: My one last closing question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War? And after. Fix: Well, I think I would stress being a student of science. Science is just so remarkable, and Hanford’s just one particular aspect of science that had to do with nuclear energy or nuclear—I say it had to do with nuclear, radiological sciences. But that’s such a broad thing, I mean, you can talk about the stars, cosmic radiation, terrestrial radiation, studying the functions of the human body and medical research. My whole life has just been so amazing, because of the technology. I would just encourage anybody who loves science—I mean, you can always question maybe the politics, but the science is universal. So it’s just been a great career. Franklin: Great. Fix: Really. Franklin: Well, thanks, thank you, Jack. So the best way—so, if we could show them, we need to get the camera here. Fix: Well, this is my one for the DOE-Russian study. I didn’t know which ones I had here, but— Franklin: What we’ll do is we’ll move this. Okay. Fix: This is my role on the Russian as US team lead for the Russian program. I don’t know if the reflections is— Franklin: That’s not too bad. No, that’s okay. Victor Vargas: There’s a shadow. Fix: I guess you can’t really see that very well. Yeah. Franklin: US Team Leader for External Dosimetry. Fix: Yeah. Franklin: September 2007. Great. Fix: Yeah, I got that from them. It was very nice of them to do that. Franklin: Yeah. Fix: And I think you already have the other ones I have. Franklin: Is that from the Health Physics Society? Fix: Yeah, well, I have a bunch—actually, I was chair of the other role I forgot to mention was I was chair of the Health Physics Society standards committee. I mentioned my commitment to standards, like the standards for that, but I actually worked for, I think I was, for eight years, I was on the committee and then I became chair of the committee. So then I was the committee chair. Then after this, actually, near the end of my career, I actually went out to the international standards organization. Franklin: Oh, wow. Fix: Yeah, so I went to meetings in Paris and Vienna, representing the DOE interest in radiation protection for what’s called Technical Committee 85 Scientific Committee 2, which means nothing, but anyway, it has to do with this one small area. International standards are something that’s very important to all of the world, probably other than the United States. We’re kind of sitting over here and the rest of the world really relies on these international standards. And so do we. If we want to market goods, internationally. Franklin: Sure, sure. Did you have anything—any other— Fix: Well, no, I don’t want to bore people with all of these. I’ve shown those particular ones. I do have a number of health physics-related. Franklin: Like your Herbert M. Parker award. Fix: Yeah, I was very fortunate to receive that and as you know, Herb Parker is, you know— Franklin: Kind of a legend in the health physics world. Fix: He’s a legend and a person that really understood the importance of dosimetry and record keeping. So I was very fortunate to receive that from my colleagues. Franklin: We actually have a painting of Herb Parker in our office, framed, that was given to us. But it’s good. He sits over our coffee pot and watches over us. Fix: Yeah, I’ve only—I don’t think the rest of them are really—they just have to do with— Franklin: It’s totally your choice. Fix: Yeah, I don’t think the rest of them are really worth—I don’t know where my—oh, this is my certification one. This shows a very old person, these are all my recertifications as a health physicist. Franklin: And when do all those start, from-- Fix: 1977, I think. Franklin: Oh, founded 1960. Fix: No, these are all my accreditations. I can’t really function as a certified health physicist without being recertified every four years. Franklin: Oh, I see. Fix: So it shows a very old fellow. Franklin: You just put in your dues. Fix: Yup, that’s right. Franklin: Well, great, well, thank you so much, Jack. It was a really illuminating interview. Thank you for putting up with my limited knowledge of science and health physics. I think you did a great job explaining what it is that you did and the importance of it. So thank you. Fix: Yeah. Glad to be here. Thank you, Robert. Franklin: Yeah, thank you, okay. Yeah, that was really-- Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:23:21 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9985kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Hanford Lab Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 55 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 44 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jack Fix Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Jack came to the Hanford site in 1969 as an intern and built his career at Hanford labs. He received an AEC Fellowship and worked with thermoluminescent dosimetry. Ultimately expanded the field of Medical Radiation Physics. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03/30/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9448b8f1dd5c8a4e487f8847aea17e6b.jpg b3d590060b68612ff79f75d465e19241 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F73750084bb78927a601beb5277b58006.mp4 3c5558b62c1f91153fb057b87244818c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert Bown Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Man one: Are you-- Man two: Ready to go. Man one: Okay. Robert Bauman: You guys ready? Man one: We're rolling. Man two: We're rolling. Bauman: We're rolling? Okay. Great. Robert Bown: I'm supposed to smile a lot. Right? [LAUGHTER] Bauman: If you want to. Bown: Oh, okay. Bauman: All right. So I'm going to the official sort of business out of the way first. My name's Robert Bauman. I'm conducting an oral history interview with Robert Bown on June 17 of 2013. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University in Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Bown about his experiences working at the Hanford site. Okay? Bown: Yep. Bauman: Okay, great. So I'm just going to start by asking you if you could tell me how--why you first came to work at Hanford? Bown: Well, I graduated at the University of Colorado, and was looking for a job. And Norm Thompson from General Electric Company interviewed many people and we got together and I was hired. And I was--do you want to know why I was—okay, I'll--well, I was impressed with the idea that here is a new energy system. And I wanted to be part of it. So I was pretty excited about working in this industry. Bauman: And what was your degree in? Bown: Chemical engineering. But I consider myself, now, a nuclear engineer by experience. Bauman: And so what was your initial position? What was the initial job, then, that you had? Bown: Well, started out as a technical graduate, and spent some time in training. And actually I had to have a security clearance, so I was in a survey team laying out power lines, things like that, to begin with. Just to mark time. When the clearance came, well then the work started. And I went to--you want an experience? Bauman: Absolutely. Bown: As a technical graduate, I sort of made stops at several spots so that they could look at me and I could look at them. Went to separations and the reactors, and I chose the reactors and they concurred. And we lived happily for some time. Bauman: And so what year was this? What year did you start? Bown: I came here in 1948. And I left in 1971. In the meantime, I worked for General Electric, Douglas United Nuclear, the US--United States Research and--Energy Research and Development Administration, and then the Department of Energy. Bauman: Great. So how long for General Electric then? Bown: Well, until they left the project, whenever that was. I don't remember it precisely. Bauman: And so when you started at the reactors with your first job, were you at the B Reactor? Bown: I was at B Reactor. Bauman: What was your job there? What sort of things were you doing? Bown: Well, first of all, of course, it was in training on shift. Eventually I became a shift supervisor. And then an area supervisor—or operating supervisor, if you will. And then I went into—since that was shift work—went into a day job. And I was the in charge of scheduling and forecasting of the Hanford production and integration with the separations people and Federal Department or--yeah, the government until I actually went to work for the government. Bauman: So scheduling and forecasting, what--could you maybe explain that a little bit? What did that entail? Bown: Well, there were varying numbers of reactors. And I had worked at B and H, but in my day job I worked for all of them. I scheduled the outages, and took care of the accounting for the production of all the reactors, made the reports, and scheduled their outages. Because that takes a lot of people when they're shut down, so you only want one at a time. So you have to be governed partially by the need for discharging, refueling. So you get those variables, and you come up with a schedule that efficiently utilizes the force available. Bauman: And then--so after you did that, what was your next position then? Your next job? Bown: Well, I went to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Department of Energy there. Bauman: Oh, okay. Bown: And that's sort of a big blank period. I don't remember what I did. I must have worked hard, though. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] When you first came to the area then, where did you live? What sort of housing did you live in? And-- Bown: I lived in a ranch house. I was the prime--first occupant. So when the ranch houses were new, I got one. I lived in a little trailer in North Richland for a while. I lived in that house and ended up with two children and a lot of good memories. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: What was the area like when you first arrived here? Bown: What was the which like? Bauman: What was the area like? Richland as a place to live and-- Bown: The area was a mess. The big flood of 1978 had just occurred. Smell was not too good and roads were torn up. A fresh dyke had been built and it was not fully landscaped. And it was sort of a difficult time, but we survived. Bauman: And one of the things I like to ask people about is--Hanford was a very—a lot of security, right? Sort of a secret site, to a certain extent. Wonder if you could talk about that at all? What did that mean for you in terms of your work, in terms of security? Could you drive your car to work? Did you have to-- Bown: What was that last point? Bauman: Could you drive a car to work, or did you have to take the bus? Or how did that-- Bown: Well, either one. I preferred to take the bus and let somebody else do the driving, because the areas were quite distant. But you could drive, and I would drive when necessary. And since I didn't always get my work done in the total allotted time, I'd have to get there on my own to catch up. Bauman: And were there any other—any security issues at all? Did you--I know you had to get a special clearance to work-- Bown: Had to have a what? Bauman: Get a special clearance to work on the site? Bown: Oh, yes. Q clearance. Well, in the security situation, you don't talk too much about work away from work. But Richland—you weren't very far from work, and everybody else was in the same boat, so we could talk shop some, since they were cleared, too. Bauman: Right, yeah. So you worked--what various places on the site did you work then? You worked at the B Reactor, you mentioned. Bown: B Reactor and H Reactor. I think I spent some time at F Reactor also. And then in town for when I was scheduling and forecasting. Bauman: Okay. At the Federal Building in town? Bown: The what? Bauman: At the Federal Building? Or-- Bown: 703. Bauman: Okay. Do you remember any--were there any events that really stand out to you? Any strange happenings or memorable events that took place during your years working at Hanford? Things that really stand out to you? Bown: Well, there was always something happening, and usually it was bad. And you spent a lot of time recovering from incidents, or radiation problems, or fuel element failures--for which becoming quite common when power levels were raised up to very high levels and quality of the fuel wasn't. Incidentally, I spent a year or two in fuel production, too--fuel fabrication in the 300 Area. I think between the time that I was a shift supervisor and the time I became an operating supervisor, I spent a year or two building—making fuel elements as a foreman for the crew of people working with the bare uranium. Bauman: When you worked at B Reactor and you said H Reactor also, how large of number of employees generally were there? Bown: Well, we had--the crew was generally an operating supervisor, called an area supervisor, a shift supervisor, a chief operator, four pile operators, and a couple of the next level down--whatever that was. Utility operators, I guess they were called. And then we had side groups that didn't report to me, but were helpful. Health monitoring--or HI--health, whatever it is, and the maintenance people, we would work with. So just a general plant operation. Bauman: Yeah. Okay. One quick thing I want to ask about was President Kennedy came to the Hanford site in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor-- Bown: Yes. Bauman: --and I wanted to know--ask if you were there? Were you at the event? Any memories you have about that? Bown: About when the President was there? Bauman: Yeah. Bown: Well, I wasn't personally involved with--I was just doing my job. I was impressed, of course, with the President, and the notoriety or fame that we enjoyed. Bauman: Did you and your family go out to watch him do the dedication at all? Bown: I think we did, yes. And my daughter says, okay. She was there. Bauman: Yeah. Must have been a pretty interesting—I mean it sounds--as I talk to other people they said that it was sort of one of the first times they really opened up the site to let family members come on to the site, to see the President. Bown: Well, it was just a big holiday. And I think they were impressed with the operation. And I hope they are again today. It's still there, but not operating. Bauman: Yeah. So you worked at Hanford from 1948 to 1971, you said. Bown: Yes. Bauman: Of course much of that, the height of the Cold War. Did you have a sense of sort of the important work you were doing? I mean what did you--what of your, sort of, thinking about—the Cold War would have been-- Bown: As I mentioned earlier, I was pleased to be associated with a new energy at nearly the ground level. It had been going for a while before I got there. And I enjoyed working there. I took a part in community functions, too. Elected to City Council and my wife was elected to be one of the freeholders--20 freeholders--that wrote the--whatever it's called. Wrote the charter-- Bauman: The charter-- Bown: Charter, yes. Bauman: For—the City of Richland Charter? Bown: Yes. So we were involved, both of us--myself and my wife--in the founding of the city itself. It was a going operation before that, but under government control. Bauman: Can you talk about that a little more? When were you elected to the City Council? And what made you decide to run for a seat on the City Council? Bown: Well, I can't remember the exact date, but I was sort of encouraged to participate by an old friend, Fred Clagett, who has better credentials as an old timer. And he kind of encouraged me to work there—or to work in the community. And I served on the Planning Commission, things like that. Bauman: So you were very involved in-- Bown: I was quite active. Bauman: --city government-- Bown: City government, yes. Bauman: --in an early period. And you said your wife was involved in the-- Bown: Yes, freeholder operation. Bauman: Yeah. Why did--do you know why she chose to get involved in that? Why you thought it was important? I know you said Richland initially was a federal city under federal government control. Why you thought it was important to move to becoming a sort of independent city? Bown: Well, you like to be independent of the government control. But since they're picking up the tab, you have to listen to them and accept their advice, usually. And still remain your own person. We tried not to be a servant of the Atomic Energy Commission, whom I generally ended up working for. But we cooperated quite nicely. We worked together. I think it was a fruitful situation where we-- Bauman: So what happened then when the transfer happened from federal government control to becoming an independent city? In terms of the homes, for instance? Were people able to purchase their own homes? How did that-- Bown: Well, they sold the homes to us at a bargain rate. It was 75% of assessed valuation, I think. So we got a good deal. And we were proud to be property owners. Real citizens of a free city--atomic city--famous. Bauman: Were there any--in those early years in Richland, any community events, special celebrations, or community events that were important to the city early on? Bown: Well, nothing really stands out. We had the general celebrations. And it was just normal--a normal city. And we had a good time living it. Bauman: You know, what would you like future generations—maybe somebody will watch this video 20 years from now, or 50 years from now. What would you like people in the future, who might see your interview, or watch part of it, or listen to it--what would you like them to know about working at Hanford? Bown: About what? Bauman: About working at Hanford? And what that was like. Bown: Oh, working at Hanford. Bauman: And what it was like to work at Hanford? And/or living in Richland during that-- Bown: Yeah. Well, since it was my first job, I didn't have an awful lot of experience. Well, I'd worked construction jobs, and things like that, but it was--I was proud to work for General Electric. I didn't have an emblem tattooed on me or anything, but I was a faithful cheerleader for them. And I still like General Electric. I still like the federal government. And they were good to me, and I think I gave them a good--my best. Bauman: And how long--you mentioned that you worked at Hanford from 1948 to 1971, how long did you live in Richland? Did you move at that point? Or-- Bown: I left Richland in 1971 for a job in Washington, D.C. with the Atomic Energy Commission. Bauman: And how long were you there? Bown: Until 1986. Through several employers--General Electric, and Douglas United Nuclear, Energy Research and Development. It seems like there's one--Was there another one in there? Two? Then the—yeah, Energy Research and Development. Well, ended up with the Department of Energy, anyway. Bauman: And when you were in D.C., what sort of work were you doing in D.C.? What was your job there? Bown: Bureaucrat. [LAUGHTER] Well, it's hard to tell you my actual responsibilities, but--because they kept varying. But I don't know. I kept busy. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And then I'm going to go back now to when you first came to Hanford, you said something about sort of being a mess because of the flood that year. And I know some people who came here in the '40s talked about the termination winds, you know-- Bown: Yes. Bauman: --when the dust would blow and a lot of people would leave. Bown: The winds blew. They still blew. And the dust blew. But I didn't terminate. Bauman: [LAUGHTER] Bown: I was from a dry Midwestern situation, so the desert wasn't too serious a problem. Bauman: It wasn't too unusual for you. Bown: No. During the Depression and drought, the wind blew and the tumbleweeds collected in the fences, and the dust drifted like snow and you could walk over the fences. So I'd had experience. It wasn't too different from the Hanford-- Bauman: Right. Bown: --situation. It wasn't—it did rain a little more, but not much. Bauman: In your various positions working at Hanford, I was going to ask you a question about unions. Were there unions on the campus? Bown: Well, there were not, to begin with. And they were organized. And I was not involved in the bargaining unit, but I had to learn to work with a union as well as the people. No problem. Bauman: Did you have a favorite part—what was your favorite part of working at the Hanford site? Do you have something that you really enjoyed doing during your time here that--of the various things you had to work on? Bown: Well, the scheduling and forecasting was pretty interesting. I started out just scheduling. And then they cut the number of reactors and I also took over the forecasting operations, and some inter-site work--the shipping off of a special products that you made at the reactors. I handled those. And it was a varied job, and quite interesting. I enjoyed it. Bauman: Clearly, yeah. Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you would like to talk about? Anything about your experiences either working at Hanford or living in Richland? Any special memories or things you'd like to share that you haven't had a chance to talk about? Bown: Well, I got myself a ski-boat and we whizzed up and down the river quite a bit. And we spent time with our family in the Portland area, so we weren't too far from friends--from old friends and family. Climbed a few mountains. Travelled a lot--Europe, Alaska. We had a pretty full life there. Bauman: It sounds like a good place for recreational activities. Bown: Yes, and for growing a family it was real good. Bauman: And you said you had two children? Bown: Two children, daughters, are both here. Bauman: And they both grew up in Richland? Went to high school and so forth in Richland? Bown: Let's see. Where did you go to high school? Daughter: We moved when I was in 9th grade. Bown: Oh, okay. We moved east. So they ended up in Maryland for high school--most of high school. Robin went to the University of Montana, and Karen, the younger one, went to Evergreen State College. Bauman: Well, thank you very much. Again, is there anything else that you want to talk about? Or memories you have from working that I haven't asked you about? Bown: Well, you've asked all the right questions. I hope I gave the right answers. Bauman: Well, thanks again, very much. I really-- Bown: Sure. Bauman: --appreciate you coming in and sharing your stories and memories. Bown: Thank you for the opportunity. Bauman: Thank you. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:27:07 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 7999kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor H Reactor 703 300 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site at least 23 years Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 23 Years Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Norm Thompson Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert Bown Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Robert Brown started at the Hanford Site from 1948-1971. Robert worked for B Reactor and H Reactor, 300 area, 703, and was an elected member of the Richland City Council. He worked for General Electric, Douglas United Nuclear, and Energy Research and Development. 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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/17/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. forecasting Hanford hanford site reactor scheduling https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F329749fd42c233cf6cd2c02dc34e1314.JPG 98d42c9d88f2243abec0c2b50adc08dd https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F41556d64837fd14beb77a5c103e2ec43.mp4 d7ae61c1201c7caca4f3f86fbd36c455 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Larry Gabaldon Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Larry Gabaldon on July 11, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Larry about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Larry Gabaldon: Larry Gabaldon. G-A-B-A-L-D-O-N. Franklin: And L-A-R-R-Y? Gabaldon: Larry? Yes. Franklin: Okay. So, Larry, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Or, are you from the area? Gabaldon: No, I’m from, originally from New Mexico. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: And I went in the service for four years, and I had a brother-in-law that worked up here in farming and chicken, or egg producing field. And he says, when you get out of the service, if you need a job, come on up. So I came up to work for him, and within six months or so, people told me, you should go out and work in the Area and make big money. And I—what area? I had no clue. So I looked into it and I joined the electrical union and within 11 months or so I was out there working. Franklin: What year was it that you— Gabaldon: 1977. Franklin: Okay. So did you have electrician training in the service then, or how did you get into that field? Gabaldon: No, other than—this sounds crazy, but wiring chicken houses. But these are huge, you know, they’re 80,000 chickens per house. So they’re huge commercial operation. And the processing plants and stuff. So I was an electrician there and I learned a lot in a hurry and was running crews and stuff like that. And I’m bilingual so that helped a lot. So anyway, I didn’t know anybody in the electrical field, you know, out here where a lot of people, you either need to have a relative or a friend or somebody that could help you get in. Like I said, I was only here for about 11 months. Anyway, they hired me. Franklin: And what was the first job you had out on the Site? Gabaldon: The 300 Area, as an electrician—electrician apprentice. I tried to drive right onto the 300 Area, it’d be the north gate. And got stopped. [LAUGHTER] And a superintendent was coming out at the same time. He says, oh, you must be the new electrician apprentice. So he kind of escorted me over to the electrical trailer. Franklin: So were there still the buses in those days, or--? Gabaldon: Yes, yeah there was. Franklin: Oh, okay. But you didn’t know about the buses, or—did you not— Gabaldon: No, they said report out to the 300 Area and I drove right out there. Yeah, I didn’t—it was all new to me. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Did you know right away what was being made at Hanford, or did you just know it was a good-paying job? Gabaldon: As I started, you know, getting closer and closer, I was learning more and more about it. I was asking a lot of questions. Of course, as soon as I went out there, they’re telling me to put these coveralls on and all this plastic stuff. And, why? [LAUGHTER] There’s a lot of people that just didn’t want to do it. They’d just quit. As soon as they’d tell them they had to put all this PPE, they’d just, nope, I’ll go somewhere else and work. But it was interesting. And you understand it. It made sense then, anyway. Franklin: What do you mean? Gabaldon: As far as, you know, protecting yourself from contamination. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Did you find it challenging to run electrical lines and do electrician work in the PPE? Gabaldon: Sure, sure. It was hotter. It was probably the worst thing about it. You know, it was a lot of time consuming. Things go at a slow pace out there. By the time you get dressed and get in and get out, there’s a lot to it. Franklin: Did you work with guys who were around your age, or were there some senior guys in the— Gabaldon: I would say most of them were senior. They’d been around there for a while. And then there was a few newcomers like me. But, yeah, most of them were senior. Franklin: What types of buildings did you work out and support out at the 300 Area? Gabaldon: Well, just pretty much all of them. I mean, 300 Area had a pretty diverse type of buildings. There was—I’m trying to remember the buildings, but 305, 308, some of the things that stuck out were the labs—not labs, the cells down there. I’m not sure what they call them now. The lead cells with these big windows, lead windows. I mean, it was a big operation to penetrate those for a conduit or for electrical wires. You know, they had manipulators that went in and out, and we actually used the manipulators to help if we could. Franklin: Oh, really? Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. To pull wire. I mean, you feed it in from the outside. And I’ve been in the cells. I had to dress up. And those cells are only probably eight by eight, if that. And then they’re full of junk, full of piping. Once they put it in there, they don’t take it out. So it just keeps getting cluttered. And then now you’re dressed up with a full two pair of coveralls and plastics and usually fresh air. And gloves, you’ve got three pairs of gloves on. Franklin: I imagine that gets really—I mean not only does that decrease your manual dexterity, but I imagine that gets unbearably hot. Gabaldon: Sure, that’s what I mean. Franklin: How would you guys deal with that? Especially in the summertime. Gabaldon: Well, there was—not so much—time was a big thing. Just limit your time in there. And then radiation limited your time quite a bit, too. But out in 100-N, we’d go out there for outages, and they actually had icepacks. A vest that they’d keep in the freezers, and they’d put these icepacks on you. They’d last, you know, an hour. Of course, now, they’re heavy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I was going to say, that seems— Gabaldon: So they’d melt and now you’re carrying this water around. Franklin: Wow, that sounds—I mean, I guess you’d appreciate that inside, but that sounds really uncomfortable at first. Gabaldon: Mm-hmm. And then fresh air—there’s a purge system on those things that blows air, and you could keep somewhat fresh air blowing on your face at least. Franklin: And was that a tank that—or was it a hose—would you carry the fresh air in with you, or was it a hose that— Gabaldon: Both. It’s both. We carried tanks on our backs, if it was too far in, too remote. But if it was within, I think, I can’t remember, 300 feet or better—about 300 feet, I think, was the max, you could run the hoses. Franklin: Wow. Gabaldon: Hoses, of course, were unlimited. You could stay a little bit longer and, like I say, use lots of air. Where the tanks, they would run out. Franklin: Right, yeah, and you don’t want to run out. Gabaldon: No. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: In one of those cells. So you started as an apprentice. And how long did it take for you to become a full electrician? Gabaldon: Four years. Four years, at least. Franklin: Is that pretty standard? Gabaldon: It’s five years now. Yeah. But I got in just right before that. Franklin: Oh, okay. Kind of got grandfathered in. Gabaldon: Yeah. Franklin: What were some of the unique challenges, in your mind, to working at a place like Hanford, versus a more commercial building? Gabaldon: Well, I guess that, the radiation was probably one of the biggest. Having to dress up and having to do things in a way that you can pull wire in, you can’t pull it out. Everything goes into a cell or into a contaminated area, but very little comes out. Franklin: Yeah, what would you do if you had to change wiring or run—you know, you had old wiring in the way. What would you do in that case? Gabaldon: Well, like I said, you would pull it, but you can’t—it might be easy to pull it out, but you can’t. You’ve got to pull it in. Contamination, you don’t want to be spreading it. So it would all go in. Once it was in, it was trash. It was contaminated trash. So it had to be disposed of a particular way. So once it was trash, we didn’t deal with it. Laborers would come in and dispose of it some way. Franklin: Oh, okay. So it wouldn’t—all of it wouldn’t accumulate but maybe certain types of things would. Gabaldon: Sure. Depending on how contaminated it was. So, you know, the HPTs or the techs there would determine that. Franklin: What was the most I guess frustrating space that you ever had to work in as an electrician, or job that presented the most challenges to you, onsite? Gabaldon: Well, those cells come to mind. It’s in the 300 Area there, but there’s a place where railroad cars back in there and they fill them with waste of who-knows-what. But we were just working on the building and the heaters and the lights and stuff like that. We’re in a man lift, a JLG, I don’t know what they call them, but anyway, a basket. We were trying to keep the machine from getting contaminated, so they’re trying to protect the tires and stuff. And then it extends out above this train and the closer you got to this train car, the more the radiation, the dose rate was higher. So you were always worried about that dose rate. But they had all kinds of gizmos and gadgets for timers and all these pencils. So they were keeping pretty good track of you. Franklin: The pencil dosimeters? Gabaldon: That’s a dosimeter you carry all the time. But when it was a higher dose, they gave you, I want to say a patty. But it was a timer and it measured radiation, and you were allowed so many, you know, I think it was 300 millirem a week? I forget what the doses were. But anyway they would set it 20-30% lower than that, so as soon as that went off, you had to come out. And that was frustrating, as to—you’re just about done, and it goes, beep, beep, beep, you’ve got to get out! Franklin: Wow. Gabaldon: And so you come out. And then you may not be able to go back in, so somebody else has to go in. So you’ve got to explain everything to them and what you did and how to finish it. Franklin: Did that happen— Gabaldon: Oh, constantly. Franklin: Constantly? Gabaldon: Yeah. And out in the outer areas, 100-N especially, they called them burn outs, where they would take us in on a Friday afternoon and we would work for maybe two hours and we would get burned out for that week. Which, like I say, if it was 300, we would get up there about 280 or so in the dose rate. So we’re done for the week. Well, the new week started at 4:30, whenever we got off work. So they’d pay us overtime, and now we’re on the next week, so they would send us in for another two hours, and they’d burn us out for the next week. So now we’re no good for two weeks—or at least for another week. So they’d send us back here to the 300 Area. Franklin: Oh, wow. Gabaldon: So they’d rotate all the people out there. But you’d only get it to go in there for maybe an hour or two hours. Not a whole lot you can do. And then like I said, you’re done; somebody else is going to take over. Franklin: That sounds like that would be really complicated to do a large project in that kind of— Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. Franklin: --situation. Gabaldon: The pipefitters, I’ve seen where they were running in, making three or four turns on a wrench or a pipe wrench and right back out. And then here comes another guy right behind him, doing the same thing until they would tighten a fitting or a bolt or whatever they’re doing. But it may take four or five people to do one bolt or one fitting. Just because they can only be in there two or three minutes. Franklin: Right. Gabaldon: So I never had to get real close to that, thank God. Franklin: Yeah, that sounds like that’s pretty—you would be working in a pretty hot area. Gabaldon: Yeah, real hot areas. Franklin: Wow. What was the most challenge—I already asked you that one. What was the most rewarding job that you—or project you supported in your time onsite? Gabaldon: Wow, there’s quite a few. I’m trying to remember some of them, but a lot of them—there’s the 331 Building, where they had a lot of animals. They were doing all kinds of studies on them. We would watch the progression of them, you know, the animals, some animals had been there for years, and others were just coming in. We would set up whatever they needed as far as electrical support. So we would be able to watch something from the start and right through the end, we could see the whole thing. Even if we were finished with that, we’d be on another project right next to it or close by. So we could see the finished product, I guess. Where a lot of places, you know, you go in and they tell you pull wire from A to B, and you do that, and that’s your job and that’s all you know. But what did the wire do, what’s it for? And the same thing, another crew went in and said, run conduit from A to B and had no idea what. The 300 Area, we got to do everything. We ran the conduit, ran the wire, hooked it up, and turned it on and tested it. So you know, we’d walk away when it’s complete. Franklin: Right. But certainly—if I get what you’re saying, there was a greater level of detailed completeness at Hanford because you were— Gabaldon: Well, the 300 Area. Franklin: 300 Area. Gabaldon: Yes. Speaking of which, where I—I started in the 300 Area. Eventually I ended up at some of the bigger plants: Hanford 1 and 4, Hanford 2. Anyway, they were big jobs. And I got into a little bit of that where you have a print that only shows this part of the building, and it says run from here to here. You have no idea why. And you’ll never see the end of it; you’ll never see the finished product. It was not as—you went home whether you did something or not, it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t have any meaning to it. Where, here, you know, you looked forward to, we’re almost done, we’re going to finish this, we’re going to make it work. Franklin: So you liked the kind of—sounds like it was more of like a collegiate or community at 300. Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Because of—maybe you’re saying because of the smaller buildings or the—kind of how things were, there were a lot of different small projects in 300 Area, versus really large ones. Gabaldon: Yes. And they were all smaller projects. There was a few larger projects where—not very many buildings went up, but—where you might work on the same project for a couple, three months. But usually it was smaller stuff. Just building a greenhouse around a building so that they can open up hatches into a hot area. Of course we’d have to put in ventilation and lighting and maybe heating. Just creature— Franklin: Why would they need to do that? Gabaldon: Where are they? There’s pits, they’re, I want to say, valve pits. So the fitters need to go in there and change valves, replace valves or fix valves, whatever. But these pits are—you know, they’re fenced off, and then you go in closer and they’re concrete pits and they’ve got big, concrete lids. Those are all sealed up. I don’t know what—they’re obviously pumping something contaminated or hot. So they go in and build a greenhouse, encase, enclose it. And of course now they need lights. But then they need ventilation to change the air out. Then they come in with a crane and pull these big concrete lids and expose it. So everything’s got to be contained. And there may be some electrical work in there, too. Franklin: So it sounds like it’s a pretty big greenhouse, then, if it can accommodate a crane. Gabaldon: Well, no, the crane—they would open up a small opening, just for the cable. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Gabaldon: Yeah, big crane sitting outside somewhere. And then as soon as it’s done, they kind of—and there you go again with the contamination. That cable, they’re doing everything they can to keep the part of the cable that comes in the greenhouse covered. They cover it with plastic or something, and they’re checking it as it comes out. I hear about locomotives and bulldozers and everything else being buried out there because they’re contaminated. Rather than trying to clean them up, they just bury them. Franklin: Yeah, that’s—a lot of what’s in that tunnel that collapsed recently is material of that nature. Gabaldon: They don’t know what— Franklin: A guy described it to me as contaminated solids—solid equipment. It’s not waste as we think about waste, but, yeah, containing liquid and it was too costly or impractical to decontaminate. Gabaldon: Right, right. Franklin: So how long did you work in the 300 Area for? Gabaldon: Off and on for 23 or 24 years, 25 years, I suppose. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Gabaldon: I worked a total of 27 years, but the last, oh, I’d say, in that total time, maybe three or four years, I worked, oh, in town here locally. And then some of the bigger projects. But, like I said, I didn’t care for the kind of work. As soon as I had a chance to go back to the 300 Area, I was ecstatic when I got to go back there. Franklin: Yeah? What other projects did you—you said you did shutdown out at N Reactor. Gabaldon: 100-N, yes. Franklin: Right? And how long did you do that for? Gabaldon: I did quite a few of the burnouts I was telling you about. We’d go out there for maybe a week or two at a time. And it was still kind of a loan basis, where, maybe low on work where we were, and they needed help out there, so we’d go out there and work for them. Franklin: And also maybe low on exposure, too. Gabaldon: Well, that was where the burnouts were, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, right, right. So they could take you and kind of send you back to the 300 Area. Gabaldon: We would get small doses in the 300 Area, and sporadically here and there. But out there, you definitely got a big dose. Franklin: In these burnouts, what kind of work exactly—to get that amount of dose in a couple hours, you must’ve been working kind of near the core, or--? Gabaldon: Well, we were supporting pipefitters, most of the time. And I just remember big tanks and having to crawl under these tanks to get on the other side of them—that’s the only way you could access—and set up lighting for whatever their project was. So we had to drag cords and these quartz lights. Franklin: How much space did you have to go under these tanks? Gabaldon: Oh. I would say less than two feet. Probably 18 or—very little. Franklin: And you were in PPE? Gabaldon: Two pair of coveralls and plastic and then, I believe, fresh air. Fresh air with a hose. Franklin: Wow, and dragging equipment. Gabaldon: Oh yeah. Franklin: There was no other way to get to the other side of these— Gabaldon: No. I got contaminated in that instance there. I got contaminated. There was—like I say, they told me to go in, and there was a ladder. Go down the ladder, under these tanks and set up lighting. So with these masks, you have these big canisters and your field of vision is pretty limited. So when you—to look at something, you can’t just look at it; you’ve got to turn your head. So, anyway, I had to back down this ladder and I’m trying to get all these hoses to give enough slack. And the ladder stuck up—but it wasn’t a ladder, it was just a, I want to say homemade, but it was made with steel, and it must’ve been longer but the cut it off with a torch. So it had really rough, sharp edges on top. I’m looking at the ladder, and I turned around to go down the ladder backwards, and when I did, when I backed up, it poked me in the back of my leg. And I’m like, oh, there it is, okay, so I moved over, and okay now I’ve got ahold of both ladders and I slowly went down the ladder. And then I crawled under these tanks. Well, it’s wet down there, very wet. That’s why we were wearing plastic. And I had a hole in the plastic that I didn’t know about. So anyway I got some moisture in there. When we came out, they—you walk in with your arms spread and laborers that are cutting tape and cutting plastic and taking it off away from you to keep you clean. And then you go to the next step-off pad and they take your first layer of coveralls off. And they kind of check you real quick. Anyway, I was screaming on the back of my leg. So anyway, they kind of set me off aside. They did go back and find my coveralls and find my plastics and they found where it was torn and they found the wet spot on the coveralls. Whatever liquid it was, it was contaminated. So I had to take probably four showers, scrubbing with Tide detergent laundry soap, scrubbing my leg, trying to— Franklin: Your bare leg. Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: Oh, wow. Gabaldon: Just about my butt, really. But the upper leg. But I was just about raw by the time—and it was still—it was 200 counts or less, but they could still read something there. But they said if they could get it down to 200 or less they’d let me go. Franklin: Okay. And they finally did? Gabaldon: They finally did. They kept my underwear. Franklin: What’s that? Gabaldon: They kept my underwear. Franklin: Kept your underwear? [LAUGHTER] Never got that back? Gabaldon: Nope. Franklin: Probably for the best. Was there any follow-up examination? Gabaldon: No, no. Franklin: And has that spot ever given you any trouble? Gabaldon: No. Not as far as I know. Franklin: Well, that’s good. Good to have caught it so quickly. I guess maybe it being wet down there may have— Gabaldon: Well, that’s what spread it, I’m sure. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. But I guess that’s also—you’d know real quick if you had a hole in your PPE if there was moisture. Gabaldon: Well, I didn’t feel it. But they sure caught it real quick. Franklin: Wow. Well, that’s good. I mean, that’s good for the safety aspect. Gabaldon: Yeah, I guess so. Franklin: That sounds like a very challenging job, you know, to crawl under tanks with all that equipment. Gabaldon: Yeah, it is, and you—yeah, I was young then, and it wasn’t a big deal. But I think about some of the older guys that are having to do that. It’s claustrophobic and it’s hard to breathe in those masks. And then you start exerting yourself, you can get overheated pretty quick. Franklin: I bet. And there’s no way to take that stuff off and get some fresh air. Gabaldon: No. Well, the thing to do is to come out. You’ve just got to come out. Franklin: Wow. And so you said you worked out at 100-N. Did you work out at any other— Gabaldon: The Tank Farms, sure. I worked at the Tank Farms for I think a year or so. Franklin: Oh, and what did you do at the Tank Farms? Gabaldon: The Tank Farms, you know, they call them farms, they’re just fenced-in areas above tanks. And all the piping that goes in and out of the tanks is there. They’re either—whatever they’re—who knows what they’re doing. But mostly, when I was there, it was mostly trying to figure out how to clean these tanks up or how to pump them out or how to examine them. So just a lot of sensors, a lot of—oh, gosh, I don’t know. Valves, electric valves, stuff like that. But same thing, you’re dressed in quite a bit of clothing, coveralls. If there was going to be any moisture at all, you’d be in plastic. There was a lot of scares, a lot of vapors and stuff that people were either getting sick or getting—smelling something. So it got to the point where it was required to have fresh air when you’d go into these areas. Of course, it kind of funny that a little chain, or a ribbon—on one side you had to have a mask and fresh air, and right on the other side of it, you’re okay. [LAUGHTER] Wide open. Franklin: Seems kind of arbitrary. Gabaldon: Yeah, so. I don’t know. It’s hard to—you know, you did what they told you to do. And I guess you had to trust and go on their, on all these machines that, the sensors that are trying to detect all this stuff. Franklin: Yeah, I guess that would need a lot of electrical support. Make sure those sensors are constantly running. Gabaldon: And all that. Yeah, it was important. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. You also worked in the 400 Area, too, right? Gabaldon: Oh, yeah, yeah. Franklin: At FFTF? Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: FFTF, was that still operational when you worked— Gabaldon: It was just—it was operational at first, but then they went through the whole phase where they shut it down, and they tried to keep it up and they tried to maintain it. I remember changing batteries out for—not sure—some kind of a backup system in there. And then there’s some kind of heaters on the sodium loop that we worked on quite a bit. Franklin: Oh, to keep the sodium— Gabaldon: Keep the sodium liquid. And that was a big deal when they finally shut the power down to that, where that sodium solidified and there was no going back after that, I guess. Franklin: Yeah. Gabaldon: But the building right next to it, MASF. I started on that from the ground up. Franklin: And what is MASF? Gabaldon: Maintenance and Storage Facility for FFTF. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gabaldon: It’s a square building right next to the dome. Franklin: Yeah, okay. Yes. Yeah, our project I work on, our collection of historic objects and archives used to be right in the 400 Area, right across the street from that building. We were in a warehouse out there. Gabaldon: Okay. Franklin: So that’s the only site I’ve really been to with any real frequency. Gabaldon: Oh, yeah? Franklin: And I guess it’s one of the few that’s still mostly intact, too. Everything is original— Gabaldon: Yeah, I’m not sure what—I haven’t followed it, but FFTF is just sitting there— Franklin: Yeah, it’s kind of eerie that you drive up and the old guard shack is still there, you know, and the parking lots are starting to get overgrown with weeds. There’s still a few people that are staged out there. But it’s mostly, they just use most of the warehouses for storage now, and no one’s really in the facility, except to monitor. Gabaldon: Yeah. In that building, there’s a huge crane— Franklin: In MASF? Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: And what was that for? Gabaldon: Well, just moving stuff around in there. It had a huge garage door on one end where they could bring in—just huge tanks. I want to say railroad tracks went in there. Franklin: Mm. And what kind of work was involved constructing a facility from the waist—heh, from the waist up—from the ground up, at Hanford? Gabaldon: Well, obviously, a lot of big power to go into that building. So all the main power coming in, huge conduit, six-inch conduits, in the ground and ditches. Like I say, it was just a big hole in the ground when I started. So we ran all the power in there and stubbed it up where it needed to come up. And then we watched it slowly coming up. Then they started pouring concrete, and then they started building the steel structure. I remember—this is how far back it was—running conduit on the steel structure, I could walk on an eight-inch beam, 40 feet on the air, and sit on it and hang underneath it and put a piece of conduit on, and stand up and walk another ten feet and do it again. Anymore, you’ve got to be tied off. Franklin: Oh, so you were just up there. Gabaldon: Well, the ironworkers were doing it, and I thought, well, I’ve got to get out there, too. I wasn’t afraid of it; it didn’t bother me or anything. But it makes me laugh kind of. The things that we would’ve gone through if we tried to do it now, with all the safety and stuff involved. Franklin: Yeah, wow. What other types of equipment went into MASF that you helped install? Gabaldon: Like I say, when we did it, it was brand-new. I mean, it was big, wide, open space. There was very little in there. We went back, from the 300 Area, we would support that whenever they needed something. But there wasn’t a whole lot except for a little maintenance here and there. But just, it seemed like a big, open area. It’s so big that one little project was over here in the corner, and some other little project over here. But as far as what they were, I have no idea. Like I say, we just supported the building. Franklin: And you also worked in the emergency response center at what’s known as WPPSS? Gabaldon: Yes, okay. Franklin: Yeah, and what did you do there? Gabaldon: That was just pretty much a big office building, a few, I don’t want to say labs. But nothing out of the ordinary, just brand-new, and hundreds and hundreds of lights, hundreds and hundreds of plugs and receptacles and, you know what I mean? So just real basic mundane electrical work. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you weren’t called out to do electrical stuff from there, you were supporting that— Gabaldon: We built the building. Franklin: You built the building with all the lights and switches and everything had to go. Gabaldon: Yeah, the actual construction of the building. Franklin: I imagine an office takes probably a bit more—it’s probably a bit more repetitive, mundane and— Gabaldon: Yeah, a lot of—that’s what I say, a lot of repetitive, office after, one after another, everything the same over and over again. It got to be a race. How many offices can we do in one day? Or how many, whatever. You put up 100 lights today instead of, you know. Yesterday we only got 80, today we got 100. Franklin: Right, kind of challenging yourself. Gabaldon: That was the only challenge we—you know? Franklin: Yeah, the challenge wasn’t like, how do we run this wire through here in this one-of-a-kind installation? Gabaldon: No. No, it wasn’t. Now maybe at the big sites. The cooling towers, 1 and 4, I believe—or maybe it was Hanford 2. But I remember, the huge wire. Are you familiar with wire, 500mcm? Franklin: I’m not. Gabaldon: 500 millimeters—million centimeters—mcm, I’m not sure what that standards for. Anyway, it’s huge wire. It’s almost an inch in diameter. And then they’d run, there’s three legs for three-phase power. So they’d run three for A face, three for B face, three for—so there’d be nine wires plus grounds and stuff. So there’s a bundle of wire that’s huge. Pulling that wire, I mean, normally, you use some kind of a machine to pull it. It’s just, physically, it’s too much to handle. And the requirements were no mechanically—cannot be pulled mechanically. It’s got to be pulled by hand. So that was, you know, there’d be 30 or 40 of us. It’s like a team of horses—a team of people. You’d just line up, and when it was time to do that, you would bring the whole crew and they’d literally pull it by hand because they weren’t allowed to pull it with a machine. Franklin: How come they weren’t allowed to pull it with a machine? Gabaldon: Some silly spec that said that. You know, I guess not to hurt the wire. With a machine you can nick the wires or damage them in some way. Either way, it takes x amount of force to pull this wire. Whether it’s manmade force, horses, or a machine, you still have to pull that hard. But they made us do it by hand, so. I kind of—I just—you know—questioned it, but I mean, what do you? You just do what you want them to do. Franklin: Right, if that’s the spec, that’s the spec. Gabaldon: Yeah. The control room in Hanford 2, they were just getting ready to start it up. So it was just in the finishing phases, just the last things getting done. I was working in the control room, and I went out there. They hired me, and I went right directly to the control room, I remember. And they said—they gave us all kinds of brushes and dusters, like them plumes, like peacock feathers, I think they are? Some kind of a feather, brushes, you name it. There was cabinets, they kind of went around in circles somewhat, and there was just rows and rows and rows of them. And there was just millions of terminations in there, wire terminations. Our job was to dust these terminations. And I was surprised because they’re live electrical terminations; I don’t know how much voltage was in there. But we had to go in there and with a little brush dust them. And—okay. So you’d open up a cabinet and you’d start at the top and work your way down and dust all the way down. There was two of us, I believe. And it took us three days, I believe, to get through that whole control room. And, okay, we’re done. We came back and said, okay, what do you want us to do now? And he says, you got that done? Yeah, we got it. And he says, well, do it again. [LAUGHTER] I thought, again? Didn’t take long to figure out they’re basically killing time. They just wanted us to be busy there, waiting for, I guess something else to come up. They wanted to keep us entertained or busy. So we dusted them again! [LAUGHTER] But one job I’d like to have seen—once they started, everybody had to come out of there, so. But we were close to when it started, when Hanford 2 started production. Anyway. Franklin: Yeah. And so later, the 300 Area began to close down, right? So you were moved out of there. And where did you go to? Gabaldon: Oh, wow. I believe the Tank Farms. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: I think the Tank Farms is where I went. I spent a couple years—a year or two, maybe a year-and-a-half there. And then I went out to, it’s called East and West. There’s that two— Franklin: 200. Gabaldon: They’re two identical reactors? Franklin: Separations facilities, processing. Gabaldon: Okay. So I was there for you know four or five months. Then I went out to somewhere out there. Oh, gosh, it’s one of the most, the highest security jobs. Franklin: PFP? 234-5? Gabaldon: Dash-5, Dash-5. And like I said, I wasn’t even there long enough to, oh, get to know the place. I just remember lots of high security. We’d have to drive our service trucks in there, and they’d have to be searched everyday. We actually built an exercise room for the security officers. Franklin: Oh, so the— Gabaldon: Inside there. So that they wouldn’t have to come out to exercise; they could just go to work and stay in there, and just exercise and work out. Franklin: Boy, that sounds kind of nice. Gabaldon: Yeah, it was. Franklin: An exercise room when you’re— Gabaldon: It was a nice room. Franklin: You mentioned they searched your truck. Gabaldon: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Did you get searched personally as well, or--? Gabaldon: We had to go through a metal detector. And of course show our badges and stuff. So you’d park the truck, and walk back through and go through metal detectors and then walk back around, get in the truck and drive in. Franklin: How else did security impact your work while you were there? Did they monitor—were they monitoring you, or--? Gabaldon: Well there were places there that there was security all the time. They were, I don’t want to say watching you every second, but they were real close by. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Was that level of security different to you than the other places you had worked out on Site? Gabaldon: It seemed higher, a little bit higher, but not a whole lot. Franklin: You were pretty used to that routine? Gabaldon: Yes. Yeah, just whatever they want, you know? You can’t—you’re not going to bunk the system, you know. Why are you doing that? Don’t ask questions. Or you know, they might tell us, you can’t go in there today. Okay. Find something else to do, because you just weren’t going to go in there until whatever was wrong was cleared. So there was a lot of that. Franklin: How far up—did you end up leading your own crew at one point at Hanford? Or where’d you work your way up your organizational structure? Gabaldon: Well, I don’t know if I worked my way up too far, I mean, as an electrician, a journeyman, and then a foreman. But that’s about as far as I went. Franklin: Did you go to foreman? Gabaldon: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: And that changed—when we had lots of people working, when we had a big project, they’d say, okay, Larry, you’re, you know, going to be a foreman over this. Then we would get down to, I believe, four to six men, so there was only one foreman, so the rest of us were workers. So they would kind of cut us back. Then as soon as we’d get more work where they needed more, we would bring in travelers or temporary-type help, okay, to do bigger jobs. So that’s when— We had a few outages while we were changing out the services in some of the buildings out there in 300 Area. I’m trying to remember the names of the buildings. As you drove in the—what is this south, the G-Way, if you go straight in, is that the south gate? Franklin: Yeah, I think so. Gabaldon: As you go right into the gate, there was a library on the left side? Franklin: Yeah, the technical library. Gabaldon: Okay. And then right across the street, right across the road on the right-hand side, what’s the first big building? Franklin: Oh, I don’t remember. Gabaldon: 324? Or 328, maybe? I can’t remember. But it was a, you know, three or four story building, and a huge electrical service to it. It had been there for years. So we had to literally take all that out and put all new stuff in, and then hook up all the old wiring back to it, and do that in two days. Franklin: Oh, wow. Gabaldon: So there was a lot of pre-preparing. You had to find every conduit coming into it, identify it, identify what’s in it, where it goes, what it feeds, and label it. And then the new equipment, you know, that’s going to sit on that, you have to have it set up to feed all these things. And then everything got upgraded. Pumps and motors and stuff had to be protected a certain way. So it’d take me a couple months to lead up to that, to prepare for it. And then we’d start on a Friday night, start tearing out the old stuff—and they would shut it down, of course—and Saturday and Sunday. We had to have it running by Monday, so. Franklin: Did you end up working a lot of weekends or varied hours? Gabaldon: More than I wanted, but yeah. A lot of the guys that, oh, they were kind of off-and-on work, they loved the overtime. You know, they were in it to make money. I was there pretty steady, so I would rather have a steady paycheck than a big chunk here and there. So I wasn’t crazy about overtime. But when you’re the foreman, you gotta be there. Franklin: Sure. Did things change for you when the different contractors would come and go? Gabaldon: Yeah, slowly. Nothing real major. I can’t even remember all the contractors, but it started out with, I think, JA Jones. And it went to—oh, gosh, I can’t even think of the names of them. But they must’ve changed names, three or four, five times? Franklin: Yeah Gabaldon: But everything pretty much stayed the same. You know, there’d be a big scare. They’re going to lay you all off and then they’re going to hire you back, or they’re going to lay you off and hire somebody else back. It all worked out. I don’t know. A lot of political stuff, but everything, just basically the names changed. Franklin: But the scope of your work didn’t change. Gabaldon: Yeah, the scope of the work stayed pretty much the same. Franklin: I mean, it doesn’t really make sense to fire everybody and not hire them back when they’re the ones that knew how to do the job in the first place. Gabaldon: Right, right. But on the other hand, through the electrical unions, the hiring procedures were what they were kind of was opposing them. You know, the union says, if you don’t have work, you lay them off. And when you have work, you hire from the top of the list. You can’t—the people that were working and got laid off go to the bottom of the list. So you know, you want to rotate the other people. Franklin: And you’re not allowed to bring in—you can’t hire outside. Gabaldon: Well, they’ve got stipulations where you could hire a foreman, call him out by name, basically. So there was loopholes where they could do that. Franklin: And you were a member of the union? Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: What was your take on the union? Did you find it served you well, protected you? Gabaldon: It served me very well and they protect me very well. When there was concerns about contamination, working around the radiation. If we had an issue, we would take it back and the union would fight for us and make sure that we were protected adequately. So, yeah. Tickled to death with them. Franklin: What’s that? Gabaldon: Oh, I’m really glad that I got into the union. Franklin: Oh, good, good. That’s good to hear. Do you have any—is there any interesting or funny/amusing or compelling stories or anecdotes that got to you when you were— Gabaldon: There’s actually quite a few, but I’ll tell you afterward. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay, all right, all right. Understandable. Not camera-worthy, huh? Gabaldon: I’m kidding. Franklin: So you mentioned earlier that you were bilingual. Gabaldon: Yes. Franklin: And you said that kind of served you well when you were doing chicken houses, because I guess you would’ve been working with a lot of people of—who probably spoke Spanish— Gabaldon: Yes. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: --as a primary language. So did you grow up in a bilingual household then? Gabaldon: Yes, yes, I did. Franklin: Okay. Gabaldon: Actually grew up speaking Spanish until I went to school, I started learning English. Franklin: So you’re Hispanic by— Gabaldon: Hispanic. Franklin: Did you get a chance to use that much out at Hanford? Were there a lot of other— Gabaldon: Very little. Very little out there. No. Like I say, working with the chicken ranch, I used it quite a bit. But out at Hanford, very little. Franklin: Did you find there was any prejudice against you as a Spanish speaker? Gabaldon: No. No, not at all. No. There was—I don’t want to call it prejudice, but more segregation, as far as—not unions, but crafts, I guess. Between the different crafts, and then between construction and maintenance, and supervision, I guess. So there’s—oh, everybody was—hey, that’s my job, no, that’s maintenance, and no, that’s construction. And then you’ve got supervision trying to just get it done, whoever’s—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Whoever needs to do it. Gabaldon: But other, as far as any other, no, there was not an issue at all. Franklin: Oh, well, that’s good. So you eventually retired from Hanford. Gabaldon: Yes, I did. Franklin: And when did you retire? Gabaldon: Well, officially, about two years ago. But I quit work, let’s see, 11 years ago. When was that? Franklin: 2006? Gabaldon: Yup, right about there. 2006. So I just—it got frustrating out there, you know, the kind of work, like I said, in the 300 Area, I was content and I had plenty to do, we could work as much as we wanted. You know, there was nobody telling you slow down, or stop, or don’t do this. We could get something done. There wasn’t the red tape involved. They would say, get this building done and whatever it took within reason. But when I went out there in the further areas, I mean, they were, oh, watching every little move you made. And just seemed like they were just trying to stop you from working. There was more people stopping you from working than people trying to get you to do anything. And it’s just not the way I like to work. So I just basically played their little game. But I was trying to do stuff on the side. I got rental houses that I started putting together, and then I finally got to the point where I thought, okay, I can do this, I can wean myself off of this working. I was skeptical, but I knew I wasn’t going to get rich working out there. I was making a good living and comfortable but I was always answering to somebody. So I basically went to work for myself and had a lot more free time, and didn’t have to answer to anybody. Franklin: Sure, you could work at your own pace. Sounds like the 300 Area was really kind of the place where you found the most— Gabaldon: Oh, satisfaction. Franklin: Satisfaction, in your career. Gabaldon: Now, the 3000 Area, I worked there for probably two years. Franklin: And that’s in— Gabaldon: Where are we? We’re almost in it. Franklin: Yeah, we’re right next to PNNL. Gabaldon: So, it was the old JA Jones fabrication shop. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gabaldon: They had pipefitters, boilermakers, electricians, fitters, just about a little of everything, carpenters, painters. So they had pretty much everything right there. We were like a two-man crew, maybe three-man crew there. There was a foreman and one other guy and I was an apprentice. Oh, I learned to weld; I learned all kinds of stuff there. But we were making jumpers. They call them jumpers, but they’re a mechanical thing that hooks up to a valve fitting here and it’s got to go up and around all this other junk, and plug into a valve over here. Well, in our case it was electrical fittings. So these big heads had contacts in them. And you’d have to wire them up, run wire through this conduit, and you had to support this conduit so it would stay rigid and stay in that configuration. And it had to be a balanced point, so they’d pick it up with a crane, so it balanced perfectly level. And they could drop it into this thing and it was done remotely. They were made for some kind of radiation-type pits or— Franklin: Yup, yup. We have some of those in our collection. Maybe you made them, I don’t know. Gabaldon: I don’t know; could be. Franklin: Yeah, they would use them in the separations facilities where it was too hot. Gabaldon: Right. Franklin: Where they would operate everything remotely. One of the guys out there told me that every—all the electrical, any of the plumbing, like it all had to go through jumpers, because it would all have to go through this solid wall. Because they really couldn’t service it on the other side or ever go—So, yeah, I did know that they— Gabaldon: So anyway those-- Franklin: --used first— Gabaldon: They’re very interesting. And real complicated. So it was a real challenge to—because the foreman would take a piece of—oh, like a coat hanger—a welding rod and a piece of wire. He would scale it to the scale of the drawings, but he would bend it at a certain angle, and then he’d bend it the other way a certain angle. So here’s this piece of wire that’s got 12 or 14 different angles in it. And the finished product is the wire sticking out here and here, and that’s where these heads went. The heads had a big nut on the back of them and when you’d run that nut in and out, these fingers would come around and grab and then suck it in which would make contact. So if you loosened it, you know. And they had a big, I want to say pneumatic, kind of like an impact wrench that would run that. And that was run remotely, too, with a crane. But they would run that on there and grab onto that nut, and spin it, and this thing would let go and open up and then it would come off. So we would put the female end, or the opposite end, and weld it to a table. And then over here, 20 feet away, we would weld another one so they’re permanently mounted. Now we’ve got to connect those two with all these angles in it and make it work. So when the finished product was, we could pick it up with a crane and hook it up to those. Franklin: And it would be level. It wouldn’t— Gabaldon: Oh, yeah, it had to be level this way, but also the way—we’d have to put counterweights or you know, things to balance it, just to make it hang perfectly level. Franklin: That sounds really complicated. Gabaldon: It was. It was a real challenge. It was fun! It was really fun. Franklin: I bet. I mean, that’s really, yeah, tat’s something that gives you a great sense of accomplishment, getting those in. Gabaldon: Well, we never got to—we got to make them work there in the shop, and we were confident that they were going to work, but we never saw them work in the field. We’d make them, once they were finished and done, they’d ship them out. I don’t know where they’d go. Franklin: Into some places you don’t want to go. Gabaldon: Right, right. Franklin: Well, great, Larry. I just have a couple other—so you moved to Richland in the late ‘70s, pretty—it had not been a government town for a while, but was Richland different from what you were used to? Was there anything unique about Richland when you moved here? Gabaldon: I moved to Pasco. Franklin: Oh, okay. Gabaldon: But, no. It was actually kind of like a little farming town, and where I was was out in the farming community there, Glade North Road in Pasco. So it’s actually halfway to—what’s it called, Eltopia? Franklin: Oh, okay, on the— Gabaldon: About ten miles out of Pasco. Franklin: Oh, okay, so you lived there for most of your time? Gabaldon: Well, I lived in town. You know, I lived in Pasco and Kennewick. But working out there for the first year, I was driving out there. Franklin: Oh, yeah, out with chicken coops and stuff. Gabaldon: Yeah. So that, yeah— Franklin: And then you eventually moved to West Richland where you live now? Gabaldon: Yes, yes. Franklin: Oh, okay. So I already asked you about secrecy and security. Well, I guess my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Gabaldon: Wow. [LAUGHTER] What would I want them to know? Franklin: Yeah. Gabaldon: Well, that’s a good question. But now everything seems to be going to cleanup, to how are they going to clean this mess up? [SIGH] Protect yourself, I guess. [LAUGHTER] There’s a lot of stuff out there, unknown stuff. Whatever they did back in the day when there was no restrictions or no—everything was new, and now we’re paying for it. I feel like my lungs aren’t quite like they used to be, and I don’t know if it was—between asbestos and beryllium and radiation, I don’t know. I’m sure it didn’t help any. So. Franklin: Were there ever any larger worries about working at a defense, you know, a plant, an area that produced nuclear weapons material during the Cold War? Were there ever any worries for you about that? Gabaldon: No, not at all. I mean, it’s funny to—I saw a lot of people come and go. People from all over the country would come here to work on a temporary basis. You know, the things—you know how Hanford is. Anyway, so they’d come from all over the place. I saw a lot of worry, a lot of people really concerned about radiation, and then about attacks. About, if whoever, some of the big powers, wanted to retaliate against the United States, that this would be a target. Well, I don’t know, I never did worry about that. But they were always talking about, Hanford 2, the way it was built would withstand an airplane hitting it. You know, I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I was wondering, who would ever fly an airplane into that? And then sure enough, they did it to the towers. So I guess it’s possible. But other than that, no, no worries. The river, I guess. The one in Grand Coulee, I heard people talking about the possibility of that breaking. If that broke, it would wash away Hanford. I don’t know how true that would be, but I’m sure there’d be a lot of water there. Franklin: Yeah, there sure would. It probably would do a bunch of damage all over the place, everywhere downstream. Gabaldon: Well, it would just compound down the river as it—I think if one dam broke, it would break the rest of them. Franklin: Yeah, sounds like it would be pretty—I don’t know what you would— Gabaldon: But, no, that’s never been a big concern of mine. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s good. Well, Larry, thank you so much for coming— Gabaldon: Oh, you’re welcome. Franklin: --and taking the time to talk with us today about your work. I really appreciate it. Gabaldon: No, no problem. I hope I helped some. I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, no, you did. It was really good. It was good to hear about your perspective on being out in 300 and especially some of that outage work, what it took to get the job done in terms of the PPE and kind of the— Gabaldon: Yeah, it’s—I’m sure they still do it even more. They’re more, what do I want to say? Well, let’s just put it this way. In the 100 areas, when you came out, you were in your skivvies, your underwear. And there’s 20 guys lined up, standing in their underwear, and there’s gals surveying them, every little nook and cranny of their body. Nowadays, they have, I guess modesty clothing or whatever you call it. So it’s come a long way from there. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Gabaldon: You know, back, it was a big deal. But then as soon as you went into a radiation zone, you know, forget all that modesty stuff. Franklin: Right, yeah, you’ve got to take care of yourself. Gabaldon: Yup. Franklin: Modesty be darned. Great, well, Larry, thank you so much. Gabaldon: You’re welcome. Franklin: Watch your head there when you stand up. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:07:17 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 9983KBPS Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 100-N (N Reactor) FFTF 305 Building 308 Building Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 40 years Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 29 years Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Larry Gabaldon Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Larry Gabaldon moved to Washington in 1977 to work at the Hanford Site. Larry spent time in the 300 Area as an electrician, and also assisted at 100-N (N Reactor), Tank Farms, and the FFTF. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/11/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8cb143e89916aa0afa68367bf91d52fd.JPG e123c8b06a200ffab7c43b07f6e8ec39 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9dd90cc6aac4bf4dd9bf4487c9e1bdc7.mp4 83fffa719d331b65d485ff782228aed4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John McFadden Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right, my name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John McFadden on September 20, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with John about his father’s experiences and his own experiences living at the towns, the town of Hanford, and then the Manhattan Project and afterward. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? John McFadden: Yes, my name is John McFadden. J-O-H-N. M-C-capital-F-A-D-D-E-N. Franklin: So, let’s start talking about your father. Tell me, where and when was he born? McFadden: My dad was born in 1911 in Ellensburg, Washington. Franklin: Oh, so kind of already a local guy? McFadden: Absolutely. He was--his father-in-law was the sheriff of Kittitas County, and original or very original member of Roslyn, back before Washington was a state. And he was--his father-in-law was actually the sheriff and a judge and a mayor, and all kinds of things in Roslyn. Then after it became a state, he got Roslyn involved in statehood as well as--then he ran as the sheriff of Kittitas County. And he became the sheriff of Kittitas County, and his daughter then married my grandfather, and my father was a product of grandfather and my grandmother. Franklin: Right. Do you remember the gentleman’s name who was the sheriff? McFadden: I certainly do. Isaac Brown. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: He came over from England and started as a miner and became a pretty, kind of a big shot in Roslyn, back in the day. Franklin: Yeah, the history of Roslyn is really, really quite an interesting history in Washington State. McFadden: Yes, yes. Franklin: So, your dad was born in Ellensburg. McFadden: Correct. Franklin: And how does he find his way down to the town of Hanford? McFadden: Oh! Well, okay. His father, my grandfather, was a senior engineer on the Northern Pacific Railroad. And so, he was--he went to work for the Northern Pacific in 1901, as I found out, after starting his career in Mexico. History had it that he went there and worked for Pancho Villa. I’ve since proven, no, that’s just another McFadden lore. Anyway, he came to Ellensburg with the Northern Pacific Railway, met and married my grandmother, and then was transferred to Pasco. So, he was a railroader in Pasco from about 1914 or so, till his death in 1942. Franklin: Wow. McFadden: So that’s how Dad got there. Franklin: Down to the Tri-Cities area. McFadden: Yes, yes, to Pasco. And Dad went, then, to Washington State College and graduated in 1936 with a degree in education. Went to work as a high school teacher, history teacher and coach and principal of Hover High School in the old town of Hover. Franklin: Oh! Yeah, kind of south of Finley. McFadden: Hover-Finley, yup. Franklin: We actually, I think a year ago, we interviewed a group of brothers in their 90s who grew up in Hover. Because, you know, you probably know, Hover was covered by the dam, by either McNary or Ice Harbor, it covered--oh, that’s really interesting, neat. McFadden: Yeah, correct. Franklin: Okay, so he’s down in Hover. McFadden: Right. And then in 1940, he had an opportunity to go to Hanford and he became what I have heard; I can’t--who knows?--the youngest superintendent in the state of Washington. I believe it was 26, if I remember correctly. So, he was then superintendent of schools at Hover from 1940 through ‘42 or ‘43. I’m-- Franklin: Sorry, Hover or Hanford? McFadden: Oh, Hanford. I’m sorry, yes, Hanford. Yeah, I get all the Hs mixed up. Franklin: No, its no problem. They’re pretty close geographically-- McFadden. And historically. None of them are there. So yeah that’s how he got there. Franklin: Did your father ever talk about life at Hanford and what it was like and what kind of town? McFadden: No. Not really. Mom talked every now and then. Franklin: Oh, yeah, sorry, let’s go back. When did your father marry your mother? McFadden: I believe that was 1937. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: She was a graduate of Central--no, that would be--yeah, Central Washington Normal Teachers College. Franklin: Teachers College, yup. And she’s from Ellensburg as well? McFadden: No. She’s from Walla Walla. Franklin: Oh, okay. McFadden: Yeah. And her father was the resident manager of Pacific Power and Light Company in Walla Walla. And Dad courted her on a friend’s motorcycle. Franklin: Oh, wow. McFadden: Which didn’t go over well with the country club head of Pacific Power and Light, you know. When a railroad engineer’s son would call on his daughter on a motorcycle. Franklin: Yeah, I bet not. McFadden: [LAUGHTER] Anyway, so-- Franklin: So, she moved, then, with him to Hover and then to Hanford. McFadden: Yes. Franklin: But so she expressed history or-- McFadden: Yes. Franklin: Can you kind of relate some of that to us? McFadden: She loved it there. Had lots of friends in the grange. Was not able to continue teaching because it would take away a teaching job from a man. And her job was to stay home and have kids, I guess. But, yeah, she loved the friendship of the community. Everybody was involved. I have--she saved--Dad saved very little--but she saved like programs and so on that they’d put on in the high school or the grange, and this group would sing, and Mrs. So-and-so would bring cookies and they’d--yeah, it was that kind of a community, White Bluffs and Hanford and so on. As I understand from Mom, yes. Yeah. Franklin: And--oh, shoot. I just lost my question. Keep going and hopefully my question will-- McFadden: Oh. So, yeah, and there of course was no doctor in Hanford. So, I was born in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, which was exactly two blocks from my father’s home that he grew up in Pasco. And I think the total--well, I still have the total bill. It was like $6.96 for the room and my--all of those things. So, I wasn’t actually technically born in the town of Hanford, but everybody in the town of Hanford thought I was, because there weren’t-- Franklin: Well, I mean--yeah. McFadden: Yeah. But they spoke a lot of the camaraderie, and I saw that in later years when I would find, after my dad moved on from that and all of those places, that there would be people who were working for his school district who had been residents in White Bluffs or at Hanford or, in other words, still a community connection, still. Franklin: Where was your parents’ house in the town of Hanford? Do you know? Have you ever bene out to see it, or do you know where it is on the map? McFadden: I have found it on the map, because of the grange insurance always put coordinates on the map. I have all of the grange information that my mother collected. So I actually had the coordinates, so I went into the old declassified maps of Hanford-White Bluffs and that entire reservation area, and was actually able to find my mother and father’s name and where it was. And then using the coordinates, came close. But you know, some of the coordinates are different today than they were at that time. Franklin: Sure. What were your mother and father’s names? McFadden: Oh. My father was Charles B. McFadden. He went by CB. And my mother was Eileen McFadden. Yeah. Franklin: And so then, the big defining event of Hanford, of the whole site, is the eviction. McFadden: Correct. Franklin: Did your parents--what do you know about the eviction on you and your parents? McFadden: Well, my father really never spoke about it. My mother told stories of, they were given like two weeks or three weeks of a notice and had to pack up and leave. That’s my childhood recollection of what she said. Dad--you know, it’s very interesting, he talked a lot about Hover and before. And he talked a lot about Hanford until. And it was like, we don’t talk about that, because--I just don’t know. Franklin: Sure. Do you think that it affected him? You know, emotionally, or--? McFadden: Yes. Yes, I--yes, I do. It was something he loved, being in that community. And he loved his job there. And he was working very hard to get the high school and the Hanford schools accredited. He wrote letters to Pearl Wanamaker, who was the superintendent of public instruction at the time. I have letters going from my father to her and then back from her to my father, saying, there isn’t enough population and student numbers to accredit your schools at this time. But keep trying. By the way, you’ve got a tremendous library and history program there. But it never came to fruition in my dad’s time, and I have a feeling that that bothered him till the end of his days. Franklin: What was so important about getting the schools accredited? Do you know? McFadden: I believe that it had to do with federal monies, that if your school was accredited, then you could get more matching funds from the state to improve programs and to do those. And I believe that was his driving force. Later on, that became an important part of the next phase of his life after that. Franklin: And when were you born? McFadden: I was born in 1942. Franklin; What day and-- McFadden: Well, I’m old. Okay, no. April the 11th, 1942. Yeah. Franklin: So you were pretty eleven--sorry, I’m writing the word eleven--the number eleven while I’m trying to talk. So, you were pretty young. McFadden: Yeah, absolutely. I have no personal memories at all of Hanford. I have pictures of where we lived at the time when we came back, and Dad worked for DuPont in the Hanford Project. Franklin: Yes, so let’s talk about that, because I’ve heard of employees--I’ve heard of former residents going back for DuPont, and I just--it’s hard to imagine how different that must’ve been for people that lived out there to watch that transformation, and to play a part in its transformation. McFadden: Yeah, I always had the feeling that Dad did that as his part of the war effort. You know, they were at war and for some medical reasons and also because of his size, he kept being turned down for service. Franklin: Too small? Too tall? McFadden: No, he was six-six and weighed about 240 pounds. Franklin; Oh, wow, that is tall. McFadden: So, they couldn’t fit him into a uniform. They said, oh, wow. Well. And it really bothered him. As a matter of fact, later on, when I went into the service, he pulled me aside and he said, I’m really proud. You’re doing something that I wasn’t able to do, son. So, I took it, that moment, that that bothered him big time. So, he went back to do, I think--I feel--his part for the defense of our country. Franklin: And what was his job at Hanford? McFadden: The best I can--well, I know for a fact, he was an investigator. Franklin: For DuPont. McFadden: For DuPont. He went to work for DuPont in, that would’ve been June of 1943. And he worked for them through September of 1944 when he went to Moses Lake, population 360, to become superintendent of schools there. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, before the Cold War, Moses Lake was a pretty sparsely-- McFadden: I do have memories of that. Franklin: Wow. I was just there at a conference last summer, and, yeah, it’s an interesting little spot. What was he investigating? People? Like a police investigator? McFadden: No, from what I’ve been able to ascertain, first off, he never talked about it. Ever. Sworn to secrecy. That’s, oh! Franklin: Right. Classified. McFadden: Oh! You don’t talk about that, son. But he’d tell me something that was really interesting. He said, well, I’ll just put it this way. Spies don’t work a 40-hour week, so neither does your father. [LAUGHTER] Okay? Okay? Franklin: That’s a really great quote. McFadden: Yeah. That’s what I was told. So I take that to mean he was checking on employees, investigating, are you talking on the side, do you---those kind of things. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where did your family live during this time where your father worked for DuPont? McFadden: We lived in Riverview Homes in Pasco. It was commonly known, the housing project. Franklin: Oh! That’s right. Before the camera started, you mentioned that your father was involved in trying to get the Pasco Naval training at the town of Hanford. McFadden: Correct. Franklin: Right? I’d like to hear more about that. McFadden: Oh! Well, I discovered letters--as I mentioned before, my mother never threw anything away. She used mucilage glue and glued everything to pages. Franklin: Well, as an archivist I love the first part of that, and hate the second part of that. McFadden: Yeah, well, you should try to tear some of them out. Franklin: We just don’t--yeah, it’s the worst stuff and it browns stuff. McFadden: Yeah. Franklin: Well, that’s how we learn. McFadden: Yeah, no, that’s true. And gotta love my mother, you know? Franklin: She was here. McFadden; Well, no, that’s true. Yes, he was involved at writing to the naval reserve in Seattle, to try to arrange to set up a pilot training program in and around Hanford and White Bluffs, because of the terrain and the masses of--there was a lot of land and very few population centers and so on. So I have correspondence back and forth between them, and the last one stating that, while there are other things involved--this is the one that I’d mentioned earlier. So he was always concerned about helping his high school students get careers and gainful employment whether during the war years or even till he passed on. Franklin: Right, I mean, that would bring a lot of jobs. Because you would not only have the jobs but also the economy service built around that. McFadden: And there might have been an ulterior motive to get more students into his high schools and schools so that they could get accredited. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sadly, the military had bigger designs. But Pasco, though, if memory serves me right, Pasco did become a major naval training center-- McFadden: They did. Franklin: --for the Pacific and one of the largest railroad depots in the United States. McFadden: That is correct. I have lots of great childhood memories going down to the roundhouse in Pasco and all those kinds of things with Grandpa and with--yeah, anyway. Franklin: What did your mother do during the war? McFadden: Ah, well, okay. She was a housewife. She also would substitute teach in the schools. She was very involved in the Eastern Star and the grange. Whatever there was to do, my mother had to, apparently, have a finger in it. Franklin: Really? McFadden: Yup. [female off-camera] She watched airplanes constantly. McFadden: Oh, yeah. She did, yes. Okay. Franklin: Oh, okay. Thank you. McFadden: Our little time in Acosta, she would take me down to the beach, and she was a spotter for the government. So she would sit in a spotting shack with me and look at airplanes. And she had--I still have somewhere; I can’t find them--all of the silhouettes of the airplanes that she would have to-- Franklin: Right, the Japanese bombers and-- McFadden: Correct, correct. Franklin: Wow. McFadden: So, she did that for--yeah. Franklin: Oh, that’s really cool. So, you lived in the Riverview Homes in Pasco until ‘44 when your family moved up to Moses Lake. McFadden: Moses Lake, yes. Franklin: So, what do you--I mean, you were really young, but what do you--what are your memories of wartime Pasco, if any? Because I imagine that must’ve been a bustling, bustling place. McFadden: Well, what I remember is that for the most part, my great-uncle John and my uncle Norm involved all of the little boy cousins at going to the roundhouse and talking to all the people coming in. I do remember trains coming into the Pasco station and going down with Mom in my little buggy. We’d watch, like, workers come in. I don’t know if that had anything to do with my dad’s job. I don’t know that. But they would bring them in by the trainload and then of course, bus them or whatever they did, to--yeah. But other than that, no. My memories really start in Moses Lake. Franklin: Sure, I mean, that makes sense, time-wise. McFadden: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: So how long did your family stay in Moses Lake? McFadden: We moved there in 1944 and we moved out in 1956. Franklin: Oh okay. McFadden: So Dad was superintendent of schools there from 1944 through 1956. Franklin: That, I imagine--was that a major period of change for Moses Lake? McFadden: Yes. Franklin: Because when was--the air base was constructed somewhere-- McFadden: Well, yeah, the air base was there, I know for a fact, in 1942. It stayed there--I don’t recall. We were gone when it was finally shut. But it was at first, Moses Lake Army Airfield. I do remember that. And then there was the Ephrata Army Airfield. Yeah, when we moved to Moses Lake, I know there were 360 people. And it had just been changed, the town’s name, from Nepal or Neppel to Moses Lake. And when we moved from Moses Lake in 1956, there were 12,900 people there. And that didn’t include the air base. Franklin: Wow. McFadden: So when we moved there, there was one school for the grade school and high school. When we left, there were all kinds of junior highs and new high schools and all kinds of things. Franklin: Must’ve been pretty exciting for your father to try to just keep things going. Or you know. During that period of growth like that. McFadden: Yes, yes, yes. And that’s also where I learned that the Japanese internment camps, during World War II? Not all Japanese went to internment camps. Franklin: Yeah. McFadden: There were many who came to Moses Lake, Quincy. So, I’m from Bainbridge Island and so forth. And they could work on the farms in the agriculture there. So yeah. Franklin: Yeah, actually, earlier this week, we interviewed the Yamauchi family, who is from Pasco. The Columbia River was the dividing line for Executive Order 9066. Part of the family was interned, but part of the family was allowed to stay in Pasco. Which is really something. Just an amazing history. McFadden: Yeah. I have found some correspondence between Japanese students that my father had in Moses Lake. Where they, after the war was over, they sent greetings to my father and my mother for all of the--for being congenial and friends and so on during that time. And I’m trying to contact those families and make sure they get the actual letters. Because I think that’s important. It’s a fond memory for me, but it’s personal for them. So, I’m in the process of trying to do that. Franklin: Oh, that’s really wonderful. How old were you when you first remember learning about Hanford and what your father had been a part of? McFadden: Well, what my father had been a part of, probably 60 years old. What my father was a part of. My mother’s tales started at early childhood. Yes, yeah. But what my father actually did--he always spoke highly of Hanford, Hanford High School, all of those parts. But he never said anything about DuPont and those times. Franklin: Well, how old were you when you found out about the Hanford Engineering Works and the atomic bomb--that your father was connected with the work to build the bomb? McFadden: Well, I think, by inference, I was probably in my 40s. Franklin: Oh, okay. McFadden: Okay? As far as knowing for real, my research that I’ve done lately. We always knew that Hanford--I mean, I always had the information that that’s what they were doing there, building that bomb, making those things. So I knew that he had to have something to do with it somehow. Because I had a feeling that I know he did work there, but I didn’t know anything about what he did. Never said a word. So, yeah. Franklin: Wow, wow. McFadden: I’m sure he contributed to the airplane. Franklin: Yeah, I would imagine so, because that came in June or July or ‘44. McFadden: Yes, yeah. Day’s Pay. Franklin: Yes. In fact, the son of the pilot of that is coming next week. McFadden: Oh, wow. Franklin: To town to take a tour and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s really quite a busy few weeks around here. McFadden: Well, yeah, yeah, that’s great. Franklin: It just seems always to happen, too, around the--because we’re getting close to the anniversary of the startup of B Reactor, and all of those things. McFadden: Yes, yeah. Yeah. Franklin: Did your father keep--did your family keep in touch with anybody from the old town fo Hanford? From the town itself, not the McFadden: Ah, yes. Yes, they did. And once again, here’s where you learn later in life. I graduated from a school called Connell High School, okay, which is-- Franklin: Right. McFadden: Yeah, just down the road. Franklin: miles-ish? McFadden: Yeah, from Pasco. Across from Ringgold and that way. Franklin: Still kind of in the area. McFadden: Yes. And what I learned is that Dad stayed in touch with several families from before those times. But I didn’t really understand that until I started doing research and, wow, this name is familiar. You’re kidding me! Franklin: Do you remember the names? McFadden: Some, yes. One is the Weber family. Another is the Heideman family. And then there was the Purser family, and they lived in Ringgold. Franlkin: Oh, right, across the-- McFadden: across the river, mm-hmm, yes. And see if there’s anymore. Well, then there was the Collie family. And I think you have an interview with one of the Collies. Franklin: Do we? McFadden: Mm-hmm, or maybe it’s in another site. But yeah, the Collies were early settlers around here as well. They had properties out in Hanford, they lived out there. Yeah. So. Franklin: Did your father ever go to the Hanford-White Bluffs reunion? McFadden: One. Franklin: One. McFadden: Yeah. Franklin: Which one? McFadden: Well--okay. It was the one, it had to have been held in the ‘70s sometime. AN they were allowed back on the reservation. Franklin: Was that the first time that that ever happened? McFadden: That was the first time they were ever back. Franklin: So I think that was the ‘68 reunion, because we have a lot of pictures from that reunion from Harry Anderson, who helped lead those with Annette Heriford. So, I think that’s ‘68, if I’m-- McFadden: No. That could absolutely be true. But I know Mom and Dad talked about that forever. Franklin: Really? McFadden: Oh, yeah. They said they got to go back on the reservation and-- Franklin: When we get back to my office, remind me to show you some photos of that, and maybe-- McFadden: Okay. Franklin: It’d be really neat, maybe if somehow, you know, your parents were in one of these photos. McFadden: Oh, that’d be great. Yeah. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: That’d be superb. Franklin: And I believe they had that reunion in Richland, and then, yeah, they bussed them out to the site. McFadden: yeah, yeah. Franklin: Great. Oh, that’s really--and so you, after Moses Lake, I’m inferring, but you moved to Connell. McFadden: Well, actually, we spent two years in Tacoma. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: And then we moved back to Connell, yes. Franklin: And then you ended up going to WSU. McFadden: Go Cougs! Franklin: Yeah, yeah. Go Cougs! McFadden: Yeah. Yeah, I did. Franklin: Yeah, it’s a wonderful place. McFadden: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: And then, did you ever come back to the area at all? The Tri-Cities, Hanford area? McFadden: To live, or--? Franklin: Yeah, to live or work. McFadden: Not really, no. No, no, no. I’ve come back many times. I’ve taken all the tours at Hanford and done that. But as a matter of fact, as I mentioned to you earlier, I went on one of the very first pre-Hanford tours. And actually got to stand and look at my father’s high school, the shell that’s left. And I don’t know if I should say this out loud, ubt they let me go ahead of the fence so that I could--you know. Franklin: Well, every now and then for special folks--like we had Dick Groves, the grandson of Leslie Groves here. McFadden: Oh, sure. Franklin: A couple months ago and they took him all over the place. Because he’s--you know. Because--you know. When you’re the grandson of Leslie Groves. McFadden: yeah, hey! When you have a park named after you--[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, exactly. That tends to open a few doors, literally. Well, that’s great. Yeah, it’s a wonderful tour. Where did your parents end up settling and staying? McFadden: Oh! Okay. They actually ended up in Brush Prairie, Washington. Franklin: Where is that? McFadden: That’s outside of Vancouver, Washington. Dad finished out his career in a town called Stevenson, Washington, which is up the Columbia Gorge. He retired there. And Mom went back to work as a special education teacher. And so she finished out her 30-year career. Then they retired and motorhomed and did the good life and Dad passed away in ‘82, and Mom passed on in ‘84. Franklin: Oh, wow. McFadden: So, yeah. But they ended up in Brush Prairie. Franklin: Well that’s really cool. So your father, at the Hanford Engineering Works for DuPont, from what you gather, is part of the security apparatus? McFadden: Correct. His official title that I can--is investigator. Yes. He was there on the reservation and we know where his office was. Franklin: Where was that? McFadden: Well, it was on a map. Franklin: Oh, okay. McFadden: So what I’ve done is I’ve taken the Google map that they have and you can still see all the outlines of things on that map. Franklin: yeah, are you talking about the construction camp? McFadden: Yes, mm-hmm, and the headquarters and that. So then I have another map that was done back in--that showed the actual what it was and give the, like the bus stops and number and that. So I’ve imposed the two over each other and it had the investigative offices, so I knew that’s where he must’ve worked out of. Franklin: Did your father ever bring you on Site? McFadden: No. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: Not that I--no. No. Franklin: And let’s see here. I think that’s most of my questions. What would you like--what do you think your parents would want future generations to know about living at Hanford before the project and kind of living through the Manhattan Project and the transformation of this area? McFadden: Well, I--wow, that’s a great question. I think that they would want young people today to know that they were citizens and people of courage who had huge convictions, not always agreeing, but had convictions that America was the best place in the world you could be or live and had given them and their families tremendous opportunities to flourish and to do what they chose to do with their lives. And that the Hanford Project was somewhat unfair to those citizens who had gone to this rock-scrabble land next to a river and made it into a beautiful orchard country and agriculture and built themselves their own irrigation system before that was really a big deal. And then they came in, and they were just told to leave, basically, and paid peanuts for what they had, their hard work, and their camaraderie and community and all that, had built these towns. And it was gone. And with really very little notice. And really very little consequence, except this is what is going to happen. And they’d like to know that it was part of a success and helped end a war. And that it was part of the patriotic duties that we’ve done to keep our country free. I think that’s what they’d like to have people remember, and that it was a hard-working group of people. It was a time when everybody came together. Yeah. So. Franklin: Great. That reminded me, when you talked about when people were removed, did your parents, do you know anything about the compensation that the government paid to your parents? McFadden: I do not Franklin: Okay. McFadden: No. Franklin: Okay. McFadden: Except Mom said it was paltry. Franklin: Yeah, that’s seems to be the prevailing--from what we’ve seen-- McFadden: But what “paltry” means, I don’t know. Franklin: What we’ve seen from the financial documents was that it was pretty wide-ranging, but some of the valuations were pretty low. McFadden: Yeah. Well, I got a kick out the history of the Bruggemans: We ain’t going. And so they had to keep sending--you will be gone. But, yeah, yeah. So. Franklin: Yeah, no, so many great stories to tell out there. Well, John, thank you so much. McFadden: Oh! It’s my pleasure and thank you for the opportunity to speak for my folks. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Tom, did you have any questions? Tom Hungate: No. Franklin: Okay, great, well, thanks. McFadden: Thank you! Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 37:56 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John McFadden Subject The topic of the resource Hanford (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Du Pont Company Pasco (Wash.) Description An account of the resource John McFadden's father, Charles, was the superintendent of the Hanford (Wash.) school district and later an investigator workig for the Du Pont Company. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/20/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F73092d11e38acf02e3f9139b59ff29ad.JPG 855dc47ad850f54f3f4a02b434262fd0 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F433d0cbcf01c6525d92c4404f0e21d8e.mp4 b708f88df97c4cbe45941c20fca189c6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bernal Femreite Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Bernal Femreite on June 12, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Bernal about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Bernal Femreite: Bernal Femreite, known as Bernie Femreite. The spelling is B-E-R-N-A-L. Last name is F-E-M-R-E-I-T-E. Franklin: Great, thanks a lot Bernie. So, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Femreite: Well, during university, I was determining where to go to work and what kind of work I wanted to do. And the last—about in graduate school, I became very interested in nuclear energy. At that time, Hanford was still a very viable part of the weapons program. Most of the reactors were still running in the late ‘60s. They had a big program here and a lot of very interesting work for engineers. I was a metallurgical engineer, so everything about the Hanford fuel production was intriguing. And beyond that, I had read about everything I could about the Manhattan Project. The whole thing was fascinating to me. The fact that they went from a theory and some practical experiments to full-scale production in such a short time, under wartime conditions, obviously, that whole thing was very intriguing to me. So, long story short, I had—at that time, engineers coming out of university had a lot of opportunities. So I had a lot of choices. But I was particularly taken with the choice to come here with Douglas United Nuclear at the time. So I took that position and began as what they called process engineer in the 300 Area, where we were producing fuel for the K Reactors, C Reactor, D, and N, N Reactor. We were using the standard process at the time, which was encapsulating the uranium for exposure in the reactors. And we were—my job was, I was charged with developing a new, better and faster process for doing that. So I spent most of my time in what became known as the Small Pilot Plant in 300 Area. And we were producing a new method of encapsulating the uranium slugs that was faster and more reliable. Franklin: How was the old—I wonder if you could walk me through the steps of the old process and how your new process was different. Femreite: Well, the old process was what you might call a canning process. We had pre-formed aluminum jackets that came in, basically, the shape of a cylinder with a cap on one end. The uranium slugs came in milled to a certain diameter. They had a whole through the center for cooling, additional cooling. And then that was inserted inside this aluminum can, which we call cladding. And the whole thing was dunked under what we call a eutectic alloy of aluminum and silicon. That has a relatively low melting point. That would just flow in and form a bond between the uranium and aluminum. And they put a cap on the upper end, and then machine off the excess material. Then they would put on, ultrasonically, they’d weld on a small aluminum fin, which we called a leg, which gave the fuel slug some clearance between the tube that it would go into and the reactor, would allow the water to run past it. Franklin: Right, so that water could go around the entire— Femreite: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen those. Femreite: And through the center. Franklin: Yeah, there are kind of fins on all sides. Femreite: Yeah, you’ve seen them, probably at the N Reactor—or the B Reactor Museum, if you’ve been out there. Franklin: Yes. Femreite: There are some examples of those. That was called the AlSi process, and it referred to the aluminum-silicon alloy that was used to bond— Franklin: Is that spelled how it sounds, A-L, S-I? Femreite: Yup, mm-hmm. It’s capital-A, L and then capital-S, I. So it stands for—it’s aluminum-silicon. It’s the scientific nomenclature for aluminum and silicon. And that process was developed and used for a long time. It had some disadvantages in that it had some byproduct, or leftover product waste that had to be disposed of. So there was the—AlSi would become—well, it would become fairly radioactive from being exposed to the uranium in—small amounts of uranium would be dissolved in it. So that was kind of a hard thing to deal with. Franklin: Can I ask how—what was the process for disposal of that spent product? Femreite: Well, I don’t know that part. Our job was to get the job done, and other people dealt with the disposing of waste. We can tell from what we’re finding in the papers today about the disposal of waste here, was there was a variety of methods, including just plain old burial someplace. Franklin: Yeah, the 300 Area, if I remember correctly, had some interesting waste footprints in the ground. Femreite: It does. And the area surrounding it as well. North of there they had burial pits. They had a waste pit over to the, it’d be the west side, towards what now is the Areva plant. And there were different places. Franklin: So this AlSi process, was this the original process used? Femreite: As near as I can tell, that was the original process. Now, they, in the early years, I read a lot of the classified documents as a young engineer when I first got here to understand some of the history. And they had experimented with different alloys and different heat treatments and things like that over the years, and finally settled on what I was familiar with, as the new engineer on the block, so to speak. I was chartered with developing what was called the hot die sizing process, which was to take the uranium slugs and basically extrude a coating of aluminum onto the slug. Franklin: Like using— Femreite: We used—we put them through what was called an extrusion die. And we’d start off with a small can shape of aluminum. That would sit in the die, and then the uranium slug would come down on it, and we’d basically squeeze the slug through the die, almost like toothpaste—although it was solid. And that would bond the aluminum to the uranium slug. Once it was bonded that way, all we had left to do then was to put a cap on the end. And then that the cap had to be bonded as well, so in order to do that, we used specialized heating coil. And we put the end of that fuel into that heating coil under pressure. It was called induction heating. That would bond that cap to the slug and to the other aluminum. So it was a much simpler process; it basically had no waste, except maybe some aluminum that would be machined, just to dress it up. And of course that aluminum was recycled, so. It was faster than the AlSi process. So my job, for most of the time I worked there, was to develop that, and also to solve any technical problems that came up in the existing AlSi process. So the AlSi process was still big, because that’s how the factory was set up. And we developed our hot die sizing process on a pilot scale. Then we moved the pilot line into big production facility and ran it in parallel with the big production facility and kept track of cycle times and quality. We were trying to prove that on an industrial scale, this was going to be an improvement to the AlSi process. I should mention that that whole thing sounds quite simple. But in the end, it was complicated. Each one of these fuel elements went through a very tight quality control process, where every single one went through an ultrasonic defect device—detector for defects in the fuel. That was all done with ultrasonic sound. Franklin: Huh. How did that work, exactly? Femreite: Well, the sound was transmitted through the cladding onto the uranium, and you get a certain pattern if there’s a good bond there. If there’s a bad bond, you get a completely different pattern from the ultrasonic sound. And so you could detect any, what we call, unbonded areas. You had to have a good bond on every part of the surface, because if you didn’t, you’d get a hot spot in the reactor. And that would, basically, cause the fuel to melt at that point—the cladding to melt at that point, and it would leak. We didn’t want leakers in the reactors because then that led to contamination in the water that flowed through those. Franklin: And you might have to shut the reactor down, too. Femreite: Yeah, if you got enough—if there were enough leakers in there to where you were getting high radiation readings on the discharge side of the reactor, they would have to shut it down, discharge that fuel, put new fuel in. That was not very efficient, and it was time consuming and fairly expensive. Franklin: Yeah. Femreite: So the quality control part of the process was very stringent. Franklin: So where was the uranium machined? Where was it formed into the— Femreite: That came out of a plant in Ohio. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: I think—I forgot the exact name of the plant, but I think it was Fernald. They came in by train in big wooden, pretty strong wooden crates. And then the aluminum was purchased on the market from various suppliers. We had a tight specification on which alloy and dimensions and quality and all that. So the aluminum was pretty generic, but it had to meet all of our specifications. Then the uranium, of course, came from Fernald and that was a single source. Because that was all government-run. Franklin: So was the hot die sizing process a success? Femreite: It was, yeah. We produced, on that parallel line, we produced most of a reload for one of the K Reactors. At that time, K West and K East were twins. So you didn’t know which reactor your load was going to go into. They determined that out there. So that fuel did go into the K, one or both of the K Plants. Franklin: Right. Femreite: So yeah, it was an improvement. And they would have—I believe they would have continued on that path and retired the AlSi process, but about that time, they determined that they weren’t going to run the K Reactors anymore. C had already shut down, or was preparing to shut down. So there wasn’t going to be demand in the business reason to change their method. And if they had—at that time, I think they had just put the Ks on standby, in the event that they might need to get back into producing plutonium. But they were already getting plutonium out of N Reactor and it was still running. So the demand for plutonium dropped, and so they began to phase things out. If they had needed to ramp production back up, it would’ve been fairly simple to start everything back up, because it sat there, basically, on reserve for quite a little while. Franklin: So, and what timeframe was that, when— Femreite: Well, it was late in the history of Hanford. I began work here in 1967 after graduating university. And so that was basically about a three-year deal, before things started to ramp down. So about 1970, they were threatening layoffs and reduction of staff and that kind of thing, simply because they just weren’t going to produce that much fuel. Franklin: Right. Where did you go to university; where did you get your bachelor’s? Femreite: University of Idaho. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: Mm-hm. Franklin: So are you from the area? Femreite: I’m from north Idaho. Franklin: Oh, okay. Femreite: Yeah, mm-hm. Franklin: So then in 1970, you transferred to Exxon, right? And went into commercial fuel production. Femreite: Yes. Franklin: And how—I wonder if you could talk about that transition and how that industry was different or similar, you know, how the work was related. Femreite: Yeah. The work there was—first of all, it was all what you would call private enterprise. So Exxon was in business to produce fuel for big commercial power plants. At that time, there were—I don’t know the exact number, but some 20 to 30 nuclear power plants operating in the United States producing electrical power. Those were built mainly by General Electric and Westinghouse. And in Europe, craftwork union was doing the same thing, and there were a lot of power plants in Europe. So Exxon decided they were going to get into this in a big way, even though they were an oil company, they knew that they were really an energy company. So they decided that they could build fuel and supply it to these power plants in the US and in Europe. So they began the business here, largely on the basis that there was a lot of technical know-how here. They knew that they could recruit from Hanford, which was basically winding down, and they had the access to Battelle. And Battelle had a huge amount of knowledge, collectively, about all things nuclear. So Exxon came in and bought land inside the City of Richland city limits and got all the permits and built the plant. So when I started work, it was a piece of sand out here on Horn Rapids Road. And we had offices downtown, rented offices downtown. There were only just a handful of us. So I had the good fortune of coming in on what they call the ground floor. Exxon—by the way, Exxon was called the Standard Oil of New Jersey. It’s only in later years that they rebranded themselves. And so the plant—the business out here began as Jersey Nuclear, just an offtake of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and that’s how they began. I have a picture of their business sign here if you want to keep that. So that was, for us that had worked there for a long time, the sign was pretty significant, because it was the very beginning of a long-standing business. At any rate, they were a taxpaying business in the City of Richland, and everything was commercial and they had to meet all of the standard safety regulations and all that that any industry does. So they began from, like I said, a flat piece of sand to building a plant out here that could produce this fuel for these power plants. That fuel, as a process engineer and as a metallurgist, that fuel was far more complicated in its design. Franklin: And why was that? Femreite: Well, the fuel for Hanford was, as I explained earlier, just a slug that was a uranium slug, we called them, that was encapsulated in a cladding and then tested and put in the power plant. But the fuel for commercial plants—and you’ve probably seen displays around the Tri-Cities and different places—are individual pellets about the size of a pencil eraser, more highly enriched than the fuel for the plutonium reactors. And it’s encapsulated in a pretty exotic alloy, zirconium alloy. So each tube, then, produces heat and a lot of it. So they have to be made to extreme precision and very high quality. You have to build them with a very robust process, and then you have to test them under very robust conditions to make sure that they’re going to produce and perform the way they’re supposed to. So the whole thing was quite interesting. And over the years, what we called the nukes, the nuclear engineers, who were experts on how to load these power plants with different kinds of fuel, they came up with a lot of different designs. Basically all the same design in terms of outward appearance. They were tubes with uranium pellets in them. But they varied the sizes and the enrichments and all that kind of things to get better performance in the power plant. So that whole thing was pretty challenging for all of us. Franklin: You had mentioned that Exxon, Jersey Nuclear, Standard Oil, New Jersey Nuclear, Exxon, had drawn—or one of the decisions to put it here was the availability of knowledge of the nuclear industry. Did a lot of former Hanford workers go to work for New Jersey Nuclear? Femreite: They did. Franklin: Okay. Femreite: Yeah, there were quite a few. And there were a lot of—well, not a lot, but quite a few scientists from Battelle that were retained, you know, under contract. They helped us build the first reload, as an example. Our first reload went into a power plant by the name of Big Rock Point and Oyster Creek. So they kind of held our hands to get that first delivery made. To start from zero requires a whole lot of stuff, because you have to come up with all your procedures and all of your quality documents and methods and processes and you have to train your staff. So it’s really quite a complicated enterprise to bring something from zero to fully functional business. Franklin: And how long did you stay with that company? Femreite: Well, I retired there 30 years later. Franklin: Oh, so in 2000? Femreite: Yes. Mm-hmm. Franklin: And did your job change at all during those 30 years? Femreite: Yes, mm-hmm. Yeah, I started out as a process engineer, individual contributor. And the last five years I was the vice president of manufacturing and the Richland plant manager. So I managed to work my way through the organization. Franklin: Yeah. Femreite: But it was all very challenging and all very gratifying work. In that 30 years, we replicated the Richland plant in Germany. Mainly because—well, I should back up. We delivered a lot of fuel in the United States and quite a bit of fuel overseas. Overseas, there was a huge tariff on the fuel because it was imported. Germany kept saying, well, you know, if you guys want to beat this import deal, you should just build a plant over here. And we can facilitate that, and suggest a place that’s suitable for that kind of business. And they did. They struck a deal with what, by then, was called Exxon. We duplicated—replicated this plant in a small village in northwest Germany, and began supplying Europe from that plant. We took all the best technology from the Richland plant that we had developed up to that point, and we had developed a lot of it, and then transferred it to Europe in that little—what I call a little—Lingen plant. It was actually a sizeable plant in what was a very friendly village there. So that was quite remarkable, too, because we had to recruit people that didn’t know what nuclear even meant to come to work there. But they were all crafts of different kinds: welders, machinists, and other crafts that’d come through the trade schools or industry in Germany. So we put together a very successful operation over there. And so that, then, basically, put an end-run on the tariffs. And it was good for their economy and good for our business. So it turned out quite well. Franklin: How did the fortunes of what is now Areva respond to kind of the ups and downs of the nuclear power industry, at least domestically? I know that—I feel like there’s been some downturn in that industry or has come under a lot of criticism in the past few decades. Femreite: Yeah, well, yeah, there is a lot of bad publicity, which is unfortunate because it’s a clean—it’s basically a clean energy. It doesn’t produce any greenhouse gases and all that kind of thing. But the bad publicity with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and all that puts it at a real disadvantage, and there’s a lot of public opinion against it. But as a business, we just carried on. Despite the publicity, there was still demand for electricity. And that didn’t go away. [LAUGHTER] So the utilities that ran the power plant just said, well, we’ll do everything we need to do to keep our plants safe. But we have to carry on, because people want their light to turn on when they go home. So it wasn’t quite as remarkable a result as some people might think, from a business standpoint. But there are becoming fewer and fewer power plants because the ones that were built a long time ago are getting old or are so old they had to be closed down. So there are fewer. Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission keeps saying that they’re prepared to license some new plants, improved plants—what they would call improved plants. But basically just from a business standpoint, it was fairly stable. The hardest part of meeting the market was to meet the power plants’ schedules, because they have, as you might know, just like the plant up north here, Energy Northwest, they closed down about every two or three years to refuel. When they do that, they want their fuel then and then only. So you have to run your business to kind of match up with the refueling schedules of these various plants. Franklin: Right. That makes sense. And so you went back to Hanford in 2001, right? Femreite: Yes, after I retired, I was asked to participate in a, oh, I don’t know what the—you might call it a short study, about a month’s study, of industry experts that they assembled to figure out why they were having so much trouble in the K Plants, getting the fuel out of the basins and dried and stored. They developed a process to do that, and basically it took the old residual fuel in the basins out there, put them through a drying process and encapsulated them in a very strong container. And that’s stored out there in the 200 Areas. Franklin: What is the drying process? What is that doing? Femreite: It’s basically a vacuum. They put it in a big chamber and run a vacuum on it for a long time—a relatively long time. Franklin: And why is that done? Femreite: Well, they want the fuel to not corrode any further. Franklin: So how is the fuel being stored? Femreite: It was being stored in the water pools at K East and K West. So they were stored underwater in 30 feet of water, as a shield. It was spent fuel, so it was hot, radioactively hot. Well, thermally hot, too. And that was stored in those pools and had been for years by 2001. I was familiar with those plants because I worked out there when I began in 1967. Because I’d go out there a lot to consult with the engineers that were running my pilot—my new fuel through their plant. Franklin: Right, well, you might’ve even have helped to make some of that fuel that was in the basin. Femreite: Oh, absolutely, yeah, sure. I should digress a little bit. When I first came here in ’67, I was out at those plants and for my own pleasure I interviewed a lot of the old-timers that had worked there through the war. And I was always fascinated by the fact that they didn’t know what they were actually doing there, because it was secret. It was all compartmentalized. So you could talk to a person who worked on, like the front face of K Reactor, and he’d tell you that that’s all he knew at that time; he didn’t know what went on anywhere else. [LAUGHTER] And furthermore, they couldn’t talk about it. So that whole thing was very intriguing to me. But, anyway, back to our topic, I was one of, I think, about 12 people, so-called industry experts, that were called in to understand why things weren’t going well out there, and they weren’t meeting anything close to their schedules that they were supposed to dry this fuel and store it. So they brought in experts in almost every field. A lot of them were safety experts, regulation experts, and things like that. I went there as a manufacturing expert. So we spent, I think, two weeks there. I determined very quickly that they were not running that as a what I call a manufacturing process, which it really was. They were running more as an engineering process. So I wrote a report about that at the end of my little short tour of duty there and left it with the management. Then I went on a trip, a vacation with the family after that. Well, I got back and my phone was ringing of the wall. They said, Bernie, you need to come out here and help us figure this out, because we think that we have all this advice from all these people, but this seems to be the real key to getting this straightened out. So I then went to work under a contract, and basically taught them what’s called a constraint management manufacturing. Which we used in our own plant. And what that means is that any process—you can name almost any process: human process or manufacturing process, or almost any process—and you can find what’s called a bottleneck. You can put together any scheme of sequential operations. One point in there will be what’s called a bottleneck, or what I call a constraint. The real secret to making that all work is to zero in on the constraint and figure out if it can be made better or not. If not, manage the constraint and everything else pretty much takes care of itself. And so I called it constraint management. It’s called different things. In order to—so you’d identify the constraint, and then you put in modifiers that support the constraint. You put in what’s called queues, upstream and downstream, which a queue is just simply a place to store things that you either going to process or that you have processed. And then everything else pretty much runs itself. And they had a serious constraint out there, but they weren’t managing it; they were trying to—a group of engineers that were making charts everyday, trying to schedule everybody for every hour of the next day, to get them to do what they were supposed to do. [LAUGHTER] And it wasn’t working out. So I taught them how to do constraint management and what we call process control. Just in a short time, it just started working great. And in fact, the constraint turned out it wasn’t the constraint that they thought it was, because once we focused in on it, they got smart about how to run it, and it moved the constraint further downstream. So that became the new constraint down there, and then we started managing that as the constraint. So anyway, long story short, it put everything put together very well. Their production levels went, like, improved by three or four times. And I think they ended up actually beating their endpoint schedule before by implementing that method. Franklin: Oh, wow. Femreite: So it was pretty gratifying. And I got a lot of calls about how well that worked, and they were quite happy with it. So that was very successful for them and very gratifying for me. Franklin: How long were you on that project? Femreite: I was there for—that only took us about three months. Franklin: Oh, okay. Femreite: Yeah. They wanted me to stay on and work as a consultant there, but I told them, look, I’m retired. My job now is to stay retired. So I declined to do that. Franklin: Was that the last time you worked out at Hanford? Femreite: That was the last time I worked there, yeah, mm-hmm. Franklin: Great. Well, we’ve got to most of my questions. I do have a couple more just quick ones. I’m wondering, was Richland—I know you came to Richland after the town had been turned into private ownership. But I’m wondering if Richland was still, at that point when you arrived, if there was anything remarkable or unique about it, or what your impressions were compared to where you had grown up? Femreite: Oh, definitely. You could tell that it was still very much a government town. There wasn’t a lot of infrastructure here, compared to what we’re used to now. Columbia Center was just desert, for instance. There wasn’t anything out there. The government housing had just, as you said, turned back to civilian ownership, just a few years prior. The housing around town was still largely what had been built for the war effort or after the war. Franklin: Did you live in an Alphabet House when you arrived here? Femreite: I lived in what was called a Richland Village house, which was government construction. Richland Village was just north of Safeway, that whole area in there. Those were all mass-produced government houses. They weren’t really called an Alphabet House. I could’ve been in an Alphabet House very easily, but it just turned out that the Richland Village was a good choice for renting. I wanted to buy a home, but I didn’t want to do that immediately upon arrival here. I kind of wanted to get the lay of the land. So we rented what’s called a Richland Village home at the time. At that time, that whole place was run by one business. One business owned all those houses and rented them out, and were wanting to sell them to individual owners. So a lot of them are rented, and I’d say maybe half of them had maybe been sold to individuals at that time. But as you drove around town, it was largely still the government-built houses that you saw. Very few new construction. And the furthest, the northern extent of Richland at that time was where the 7-Eleven is on G-W Way down here, on Saint. In fact, that area where the 7-Eleven is and Washington Square Apartments was a drive-in theater. [LAUGHTER] It was still operating. [LAUGHTER] And the houses on Harris—there were no houses between G-W Way and Harris Street. But at the time we came here, Harris was being developed as a new upscale development. So all those homes along Harris there that are along the river were upscale houses. To get there, there was one street over to Harris, I think it was the street that goes past the 7-Eleven now, and you went across the desert to this strip of land along the river where these homes were being built. I was explaining to your colleague a while ago, this campus was one building, and it was called the Graduate Center. Franklin: Yes. Yeah, it’s what’s now the East Building of our campus. Femreite: Yeah. So, yeah, it was still kind of a frontier town in my opinion at the time. It was quickly changing. We saw a whole lot of changes in the time we’ve lived here, that’s for sure. Franklin: And where did you end up—I’m assuming you ended up buying a house. Did you end up living in Richland? Femreite: I did. Our first home was what I’d call a starter home, just off of the boundary of the Richland Village. There was a string of little, three-bedroom two-bath places that had been built and we bought one of those. Later on, there was a new development further north. I don’t recall if it even had a name, it just—a lot of nicer homes, bigger homes. Split-level and that kind of thing. So we ended up going there, moving there later on. And then I was asked to go to Germany, so we sold that and went to Germany. And came back and lived in a similar house in that area. Then Exxon asked me to go to Idaho Falls. We went down there and ran a secret weapons project that I never talked to you about earlier. But Exxon was asked to go down there and run what was then a secret project, military project. Then when we came back, we moved to a home on Harris Avenue and lived there until I retired. Franklin: Oh, okay. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security of secrecy at Hanford impacted your work while you were there? Femreite: Well it made—you had to be very, very conscious of it. I had proper clearance to where I could get almost any kind of classified document that I wanted, and I needed to, because there was a lot of science developed there that was Top Secret. So as a practical matter, every engineer there had a fairly sizeable safe. And we kept all of our documents in that safe. Including documents that we had checked out to use or to read or whatever. And then our own writings, our own documents, were sent to a classification officer before they were published and he gave them their appropriate classification level. So at the end of the day, you made sure that everything that was classified was in the safe. And then patrol would come around in the evenings and odd hours, just to see if there was anything left that shouldn’t be. Or unattended. You could not leave a classified document unattended; you had to have it with you. If you left it on your desk and walked out, that was a no-no. If you were going to go somewhere, you locked it back up. Franklin: Did you ever run afoul of— Femreite: No, I never did get a security infraction. I knew people that did. Franklin: That’s good. Did you ever have something that you had authored become classified to where you couldn’t use it again? Femreite: Well, I could use it, but others couldn’t. Uh-huh. Yeah, I had several things that were classified. Mm-hmm. Franklin: My last question is, I’d like to ask you what you would like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Femreite: Well, the Cold War for people of my age was very concerning. I was raised in the period where they were teaching students to duck under their desks. [LAUGHTER] As a civil defense exercise. There was a lot of information and publicity, or maybe even propaganda, about the threat of nuclear war. A lot of films got shown in the schools about what nuclear war was about, and what atomic bombs were like, and what you might be able to do to protect yourself, or might not be able to do to protect yourself. And then there was, of course, the headlines about tensions between Russia and the United States. Cuban missile crisis and all that. So it was very disconcerting. As a child, or an adolescent, I was worried about it, as were my colleagues about the same age. And then as a young engineer, working here, it became clear that there was a lot of very high technology being developed and that was important to our health and safety as a nation. It was guarded very well. People were quite dedicated to their work here. That was always very gratifying to me, that people weren’t taking it lightly; they knew what their responsibilities were and how important it was. So for anybody looking back on it, I think they can just be grateful that there were a lot of folks that had a very high principles and very high expectations and were very capable. And, you know, now, in retrospect, there are quite a few workers who were essentially overexposed. At the time they didn’t know it, and neither did management, but in retrospect you see reports of people, a lot, that have lasting diseases and that kind of thing, from the exposures they took here. So, those folks are heroes. They laid their life on the line for the rest of us. They’re every bit as much a hero as the people that were fighting the war, I think. Franklin: Great, well, thank you, Bernie, for coming in and talking to us about your career. Femreite: Yes, it was my pleasure. Thank you. Franklin: Okay. Awesome. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:50:37 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bernal Femreite Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) B Reactor National Historic Landmark (Wash.) Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource Bernal Femreite came to the Hanford Site to work for Douglas United Nuclear. He worked in the 300 Area, and at many of the Hanford reactors. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 6/12/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fdc0f2cdd12f6011b8d91de6fd335cf02.mp4 2c1ac9f583c71829747c1d137160ba4f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Robert Drake Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Same deal. I got the introductory boilerplate, and then we’ll just, we’ll get right to it. Marilyn Drake: Okay, thank you. Franklin: Ready? Marilyn Drake: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Robert Drake on July 17, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Bob about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Robert Drake: Robert J. Drake. R-O-B-E-R-T. J. D-R-A-K-E. Franklin: Great. And you prefer to go by Bob, correct? Bob Drake: That’s what most everybody calls me, yes. Franklin: Okay. Is it all right if I call you Bob? Bob Drake: Business world, doctors and so on, they all call me Robert. But that’s— Franklin: Okay. Well, I’ll just call you Bob if that’s all right with you. [LAUGHTER] Bob Drake: That’s fine. Franklin: I’m not a doctor. So. Bob Drake: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I just play one on TV. So, Bob, tell me how and why you came to the area to work on the Hanford Site. Or just first came to the Site in general. Bob Drake: Well, I graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1959. I didn’t even know the Tri-Cities existed until one night, my dad decided to bring me down here and show me Pasco, anyway. Then— Franklin: I guess that would’ve been kind of the big city of the area, right, besides Yakima? Bob Drake: Yeah, I think Pasco, at the time, was the larger of the three cities. Franklin: Okay. Bob Drake: Because it was the oldest. Franklin: Yeah. Bob Drake: Then my dad and my mom and myself moved down here, and we lived in a mobile home park in Pasco. He was working on one of the dams up the Snake River. Then I went to Montana myself and worked in a sawmill up there for about, I don’t know, six months or so. Then my dad told me, come on down, he says, I’ll get you called up on the dam as a laborer Monday morning. Well, I sat for six months without any work. I finally went to work in Columbia Park, and I worked in Columbia Park for five years. Franklin: And what did you do there? Bob Drake: A little bit of everything. Drove dump truck, bucket loader, mowed with the mowers that they had at the time. I just—whatever I was asked to do. Franklin: Sure. Bob Drake: So then, how we got to Michigan was, this gentleman and his wife came out, and I was taking care of the campgrounds in Columbia Park at that time. I did that for two years. But anyway, Fred Driller was his name, and Jackie was his wife. He was a pipefitter, and he worked out in the Area out here. Well, he’d get laid off every so often. After he went back to Michigan, he wrote me a—well, he called us. He said, Bob, if you come out, he says, you can get any craft that you want to be in, as an apprentice. Well, I went back and the first job that offered me an apprenticeship was in truck driving. I told them, no, I didn’t want to do that. And then finally decided that—my dad had always been a carpenter, so carpentry would be good enough for me. We spent five years back there. Our first son was born in the old Beyer Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan which was just east of Ann Arbor, about maybe five miles. Then they built the new Beyer Hospital. Well, I was a carpenter and I worked on the new Beyer Hospital. So our second son was born in the new Beyer Hospital. It’s kind of a joke between the wife and I, when we moved back to Richland, they had built the new Kadlec Hospital. My wife looks at me and she says, don’t even think about it. So, yeah, we already had our daughter. But anyway, I went to work for George Grant, I believe was the first contractor I worked for. I take that back; it was Lydig. Lydig was the first one. Then George Grant and Halverson pretty much kept me busy for most of the years I was here, except for when I worked at FFTF and at Number 1. Franklin: What was the name of that first contractor? Lydig? Bob Drake: Lydig. Franklin: How do you spell that? L-I-D-I-G? Marilyn Drake: That’s right. Bob Drake: I only worked for them the one time. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bob Drake: My brother—yeah, Lydig, he worked for them for years. But I only worked for them the one time. Franklin: And what did you—what was your job at FFTF? Bob Drake: FFTF? Franklin: Yeah. Bob Drake: Oh, I was just a carpenter. Franklin: And like what did you make? What did you— Bob Drake: Forms. Forms for—and every time we’d get the forms built for a pour, we had to wait for a whole month before they made that pour, because if they made the pour, it was already obsolete. What the deal was, every month they’d get in new—mm! Marilyn Drake: Specifications. Bob Drake: Mm. My mind’s blank. Marilyn Drake: Specifications. Bob Drake: Well, specifications, but that wasn’t they called it. But anyway, because if they wanted to make any changes in the pour, they would do that. Franklin: So this was like a wood form— Bob Drake: Yes. Franklin: To mold the concrete? Bob Drake: For pouring walls. Franklin: Oh, for pouring walls, okay. Bob Drake: Yes, that’s what we poured mostly. When I went to work there—I worked swing shift for about nine months. Franklin: Okay. Bob Drake: Then I quit that job and went to work elsewhere. Franklin: Okay. And then you mentioned that you worked at WPPSS, the Washington Public Power— Bob Drake: Yup, I started up pretty much on the ground floor of that. Made the base for the containment, was the first big pour that was made. And then the form worked for the containment was poured in ten-foot heights and we went up to over 300 feet. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: But as you got used to—you got used to going up to those heights, because it was just ten feet at a time. Franklin: Sure. Bob Drake: I never got afraid of heights at that time. And like my wife said, we worked out there until they got ready—in fact, the carpenter work was virtually done when the big layoff came. They had come out about maybe three weeks before that. Superintendent on the job told all of his carpenters, we wouldn’t have to worry about work because he had 24 other plants on the drawing board at the time. Not knowing that the nuclear system was just about done as far as that went. Franklin: Yeah. Bob Drake: But, yeah, it was quite a deal. I remember the one guy that, on our crew, Ray was his first name; I don’t remember if I ever knew his last name—but because of the information that we’d received, he and his wife went out and bought a new home, new cars, new everything. And then they walked up to us about three weeks later and handed us our final check. Ray said, you can’t lay me off. I got to have this job. And the boss says, we’re sorry, but we’re—they’re shutting it down. And as far as I can remember, it seems like to me, that one of the guys told me that Ray had had a massive heart attack and died shortly after that. Because of just the worry of how he’s going to make his payments on his home and stuff. But up here at the golf course in Kennewick, Meadow Springs, a lot of the guys that worked out there, men that worked out there, had gone up there and bought homes. They just let them go back, because they couldn’t afford to make the payments if they didn’t have any work. So they just all left the area. Most of the iron workers went to Denver, Colorado. Most of the carpenters went to South Bay, California, down around San Jose. Franklin: Which is where you ended up. Bob Drake: Yes, that’s where I ended up. Yeah, and it was really a surprise when we went down there. The parking lot at the carpenter’s hall was pretty good size. And there must’ve been probably 60 or 70 of us carpenters that had our—well, we stayed in the parking lot of the carpenter hall. And they welcomed us there because they said the carpenter hall had been broken into several times. But I take it you’re more interested in the things that went on-- I worked at the Tank Farms. Franklin: Oh, really? Bob Drake: Yeah, worked for George Grant when we were pouring bases for the tanks. I don’t remember which farm it was that I worked on. I helped build several of the office buildings in the 300 Area. It was Grant and Halverson. Halverson was out of Spokane; Grant’s local here in Richland. But, like I say, for the 13 years we lived here, George Grant and Halverson, out of Spokane, kept me pretty busy. Franklin: What were some of the unique challenges doing carpentry at Hanford versus elsewhere? Bob Drake: It wasn’t any different. I remember one time, we’d made the lift that had the forms all formed up and ready for a pour. And they had the company people come out and check the forms and everything, and they said everything was fine. Then they sent the government inspectors out and they said—well, before they ever wanted the forms they told us they weren’t going to okay that pour. Well, 59 straight days we were there, waiting for them to give the okay to make the pour. Now, that meant Saturdays and Sundays, so we were taking home some pretty good paychecks. We mostly sat around and did nothing, just waiting for them to give us the okay to make that pour. And then they made the pour, and then of course, we made the next ten-foot lift. But yeah, 59 straight days that we were on the job. Franklin: Wow. [LAUGHTER] That is classic. Bob Drake: Yeah. Franklin: I’d like to ask a similar question to the one I asked your wife: what are your memories of the major events in Tri-Cities history such as the plants shutting down, WPPSS shutting down, and also but the plants starting up, like FFTF. Bob Drake: Well, by the time FFTF took off and was actually functional, we were living in California at that time. Franklin: Oh, yeah, that’s right. Bob Drake: Number 1 was, I believe, 65% done when they laid most of the people off. The only carpentry work left to do out that at that time was building scaffolding and such for pipefitters and the electricians. And then it was several years after that before they ever got Number 1 online. What was the question again? Franklin: Oh, just, I wondered, some of your events of the shutdown. Bob Drake: Oh, the one thing that sticks in my mind—when Columbia Center first went in, Richland was offered to take that in, and be in the City of Richland. But for some reason, the heads of the city decided they didn’t want to take the Columbia Center. Which I thought at the time was kind of foolish because of the tax revenue that they could get off of it. But, yeah, they allowed Kennewick to take Columbia Center. Franklin: Ah. Bob Drake: But that’s the one big thing that I thought was a little bit ridiculous, as far as the city— Franklin: Tri-Cities history? Bob Drake: Yeah. Franklin: You mentioned, earlier, that you—or your wife mentioned earlier that you have stage IV lung cancer that you link to working at Hanford. Is that something you want to talk about? And if not, that’s totally fine. Bob Drake: Yeah, it don’t bother me at all. In fact, I’ve come totally at peace with it; did shortly thereafter because I am a Christian, and if the good Lord decides to take me home with him, it’s a win-win situation. Franklin: Sure. Bob Drake: It was a big surprise, because prior to getting the information that I had the stage IV lung cancer—I play golf three days a week, and I walk the course. Never ran out of breath or anything like that. Then the winter hit, and I was—neighbors on each side are—well, the one lady’s 90 years old, so she couldn’t scoop snow. The neighbor on the other side, he has lung problems and he’s on oxygen 24/7. So I was scooping their driveways and sidewalks with snow, and never got short of breath. The good Lord had his hand in that, too, because I was sitting at home one day and the phone rang. And it was our primary care doctor’s nurse or receptionist called and said, Bob, according to our records, you haven’t been in in over a year for your physical. So we set up a date, went up there, and she checked my breathing and everything, and said more or less that I was fine. And then Marilyn, my wife, said, why don’t you tell her about when you lay—because six or eight months prior to that, when I’d lay on my right side when I was in bed, I had a hard time breathing. And so I mentioned it to her, and she checked my lungs again. She said, I’m going to send you downstairs and have an x-ray taken immediately. And then she said, within the next two days, I’ll give you the results. Went down and had the x-ray taken and left. By the time we got home, the phone was ringing, and we answered, and it was a doctor. She said, I want you to see a pulmonary doctor. She said at Kadlec they have three of them. She said, I want you to take the first appointment you can get. So my wife called and it was 4:00 in the afternoon and they were all gone home, but she left a message on the phone. The next morning, we got up and we just kind of lazing around the house. The phone rang, and again, the receptionist or nurse from the pulmonary doctor said we want you at Kadlec Emergency ASAP. So went over there, and they took—they had the x-rays and the doctor looked at me and he says, I can almost guarantee you, you have stage IV lung cancer. So, anyway, the next day, the three pulmonary doctors got their heads together and decide the next step they needed to take. So they decided to go in and take— Marilyn Drake: A biopsy. Biopsy. Bob Drake: I can’t— Franklin: A biopsy? Bob Drake: Yes, biopsy. So the next morning at 6:00, I was in and the doctor took the biopsy. It took seven days to get the results back. But anyway in the meantime, the pulmonary doctor that I had, he said that I had anywhere from three to five liters of liquid in the area where the lung was supposed to be. Well, the lung had totally collapsed. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: That evening about 5:30, he put the tube in, in my side, and drained about a liter-and-a-half of liquid. And—[LAUGHTER]—my wife has some pictures she can show you of—I was sitting in my bed, trying to watch TV and I was propping my eyes open, trying to—because all of the sudden, I couldn’t see the TV. She looked at me and I was swollen up like a toad. Well, what had happened when he took the biopsy, he must’ve nicked the lung, and the air was going into my body— Franklin: Oh, my gosh. Bob Drake: Yeah, and they related it to— Marilyn Drake: Rice Krispies. Franklin: Rice Krispies? Bob Drake: Yeah, Rice Krispies. Yeah, it was really strange. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: So anyway, they had virtually every nurse off of every floor down there wondering what they could do for me. And the head nurse on the fourth floor where I was at, she finally decided that they better call the doctor in. Well, it was about 8:30 when the doctor got in there, and he put this other tube in my side that was about at least a half-inch in diameter. They started pumping all of this air out of my system and so on. I was in the hospital for nine days. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: That was during the worst part of the winter when the weather was really bad. Then they sent me home and told me to go see the cancer doctor. I walked in and sat down in the room, and he told me, he says, Bob, if you don’t have anything done—any procedures done, you’ve got three to four months to live. So, anyway, as time went by—well, I took five days of massive radiation, five consecutive days. And that was over with. Then it was about six weeks before they got the okay for the medication. Pfeifer, I believe, is the name of the company, but it was going to cost $15,300 a month for the medication they were—it was a pill they were going to put me on. Well, I couldn’t afford that. So, anyway, the nurse and other people said, well, have you had your income tax made out yet this year? And we said, no. So they said, well, go down and get your income tax made out as soon as you can. And we took all that information back to the cancer doctor’s office. The lady there sent the information back to Pfeifer, and they said that they would give me my medication free. Franklin: Wow. Bob Drake: Which was a good—well, it was wonderful. Anyway, my oldest son and my wife were sitting there, and I said, if the pill makes me deathly sick, I’m not going to take it anymore. I’ll just—meet my maker. My oldest son says, Dad, you got to consider you’ve got loved ones here that love you. Well, anyway, as it turned out, the first morning I took the tablet, it made me a little nauseated and a little bit weak. The second morning, virtually the same thing only a little less, and since then, it hasn’t bothered me at all. Franklin: Hmm! Bob Drake: And I take that cancer pill twice a day. Franklin: Wow. And what led you or the doctors to suspect that you had got that—that cancer was linked to Hanford? Bob Drake: Well, I really can’t say. But anyway we filed through the government for the program they have going. Franklin: Right, the EEIOCPA, I think? Bob Drake: I believe that’s right, yeah. Anyway, they accepted my—you know. The forms that we filled out and sent in and so on. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Bob Drake: So, yeah, I was accepted into the program. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Bob Drake: Because of the time period that I worked in the Area was the main reason that I got accepted in without any having to prove or so on. Franklin: Right, because you would’ve been out there doing carpentry work during production. Bob Drake: Yeah. Yeah, well, like I said, I worked in the Tank Farms, and I remember looking over at a tank maybe 60, 80 feet away and it had rust around the bottom. You could tell that it had probably leaked. Franklin: And you were there constructing new, additional tanks. Bob Drake: Yeah, we spent some time out there building new bases for more tanks. Franklin: These would’ve been the double shelled— Bob Drake: I believe, so, yes. Yeah. Franklin: So concrete surrounding the steel. Bob Drake: I believe so, yeah. Franklin: Well, great. I mean—great that you were able to get into that program at the end easily without too much of a fuss. And thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing your story with us. Bob Drake: Well, it’s—no problem. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe any ways in which secrecy or security ever impacted your work? Bob Drake: No. Out at—when I worked out at 2 West, I had to check through the gates every day. Of course any time you worked in the Area, you had to go through the gates. But out there once a week, we had to get new permits and new tags that we wore around our necks. And those checked the radiation that we received while we were out there. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Bob Drake: But, no. It wasn’t that bad, the security, at all. Franklin: Okay. That’s good to hear. And my last question is what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Bob Drake: It was just—to me, it was just another job. As far as the future generations, I still think that atomic energy is probably among the best electrical plants that you can build. And me and my wife have discussed this before, we’ve told each other many times, that we’d much rather live around an atomic energy plant, as to a—come on, dear, help me out. Marilyn Drake: Chemical. Chemical. Franklin: Chemical, or— Bob Drake: Chemical plant, yeah. Anytime. Franklin: Yeah, you hear that a lot from people that live next to nuclear power plants and chemical plants, yeah. That’s a very— Bob Drake: Well, you think of all the ships, most of the ships we have now in the Navy are atomic powered. And they’ve never had any problems with one of those, that I know of. Franklin: Right. Bob Drake: So, yeah. I’m not afraid of atomic energy. But chemical plants, yes. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, me too. Well, great, well, Bob, thank you so much for sitting down and interviewing with us today. I really appreciate it. Bob Drake: I just wish my memory was still quick enough that I could answer your questions without hesitation and so on. Franklin: You did a great job. That’s just how it happens with memory. You know? It’s just the way it goes. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:27:18 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Robert Drake Subject The topic of the resource Fast Flux Test Facility (Wash.) Washington Public Power Supply System Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Robert Drake was a carpenter on the Fast Flux Test Facility, the WPPSS Project, and the Tank Farms. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/17/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff3da4d16bba583704caea6d400bb98ce.mp4 cbd5b1985472081504ab0215ba4f5c1a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F57cb3e60dc53182221069668bb36efb4.JPG fdcdc00119f25a1ff49da8ae8822fac3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Marilyn Drake Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: We’re ready. Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducing and oral history interview with Marilyn Drake on July 17, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Marilyn about her experiences in the Hanford area. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Marilyn Drake: My name is Marilyn Drake. It’s M-A-R-I-L-Y-N. Drake is D-R-A-K-E. Franklin: Great. Thank you, Marilyn. And so tell me how and why you first came to the Hanford area. Marilyn Drake: Well, I was born in the state of Kansas, and when I was about five weeks old, my parents headed west. And somewhere when I was a baby, I would guess less than a year old, we ended up at White Bluffs out in the Hanford Area. Not long after being here, because of the dust storms and things, I got dust pneumonia, so my parents had to leave. So they ended up in Belfair, Washington. My father was planning on working in the shipyards there, and instead went to the Aleutian Islands. So anyway, we were out of the area then until about 1950, ’51. He was well enough to come back here and work as a carpenter out in Hanford. We lived in North Richland, the first time, in the 200-block, I believe it was, of north Richland, in the trailer park that was out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: And it was approximately a mile long and two miles wide. [LAUGHTER] So it was a big trailer park. Then, of course, being on construction, he was in and out of jobs, because they’d finished up or whatever. So we had a home in Ellensburg and we’d go there until he got a job again, and we’d come back. So the second time, we were in the 1100-block on F Street in north Richland. I have fond memories of that time. I loved the John Ball School that was there. I went fourth grade with Mrs. Campbell. Fifth grade was—I take that back. Fourth grade was Mrs. Atkinson. Fifth grade was Miss Campbell, and sixth grade was Mr. Hoffman. Mrs. Atkinson gave me a love of knowing about travel, I guess. She shared experiences with being in Switzerland, which really got me interested. Taught us some things abut the Danube River. Then Miss Campbell was the next teacher, and I enjoyed her. And then Mr. Hoffman, he shared where he was during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was decorating for a high school prom. So we went to school at John Ball in sixth grade until about halfway through the year, they moved us into Richland to, I believe it was, Marcus Whitman School, if I remember correctly. Evidently overcrowding. But the school was a neat place. We were in Quonset huts. The big cafeteria was huge; at least it seemed that way to me when I was a child. That was the times when teachers stayed with the class from the morning until they went home in the afternoon. So we wouldn’t go in the cafeteria, and we’d all join hands around the table, and we’d say the Lord’s Prayer before we had lunch. Which nowadays would not be done. [LAUGHTER] We had a Christmas play there. I played the accordion and I played We Three Kings of Orient Are for the play that was going on. When we went outside to play, there wasn’t any grass; it was all dust and rocks. So we took—the girls anyway—took the rocks and laid out floor plans for houses, and we’d play house while recess was going on. We also had air raid drills which, we all went out and there was a big ditch out there that we all jumped into, covered our heads with our hands, and got ready, in case it happened. The rooms were smaller Quonset huts; they had wings off of the main hallway. Whoever sat in the last of the row had to be a short person, because otherwise they’d hit their head on the roof of the Quonset hut. Franklin: Yeah, the semi-circular roof. Marilyn Drake: So it was an interesting school, but just really had fond memories there and really enjoyed it. I still think about it. And had some good friends. Each block in the trailer park, at the end of the block, there was a playground. We had swings and a couple teeter-totters. I think that was about it. The rest was an open sandbox and so on. So we kids spent a lot of time in the playground. There was also a large laundry room that had restrooms—because most of the trailers in those days didn’t have bathrooms in them. So you had restrooms there and there was a laundry room across the end of it. So usually after dinner, mostly the girls would go to the laundry room, and we would have a small ball. And we played bouncing against the wall and clapping your hands to catch it and so on. That was our form of entertainment. We didn’t have the TV and the Xboxes and so on that people have today; we had to make our entertainment. Franklin: Did you have a radio? Marilyn Drake: Yes, we did have a radio. I remember my father listening to the news, which I didn’t enjoy. But. [LAUGHTER] As I was young, then. Franklin: I never enjoyed it when my father would watch the news on TV when I was young, either. Marilyn Drake: Well, there were times he would lay on the couch and go to sleep and the radio was up above that in the front window on a ledge. So I’d sneak up the side of the couch and crawl across the back when he was asleep and either turn it off or change channels. And the minute I did, he’d wake up. So it was futile. Franklin: So did your trailer have a restroom? Either one that you lived in? Marilyn Drake: The first one didn’t. It was just a bed in the back, and we had a couch in the front. The second one had a bathroom and it was one-bedroom so I had the couch to sleep on. Franklin: Did you have any brothers or sisters? Marilyn Drake: I had seven half-brothers and a half-sister, but all of them didn’t live with us. Once in a while, one would come and stay a while. So I was more or less an only child. Franklin: I guess that makes it easy in a one-bedroom trailer. Marilyn Drake: My parents were quite a bit older; they were in their mid-‘40s when I was born, so— Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: I grew up with older people. So the kids were mostly—the other kids in the other family were mostly grown and on their own by that time. So that was interesting. I remember the pharmacy or drugstore as we called it then in north Richland. Always loved to go in there because they had a big rack of magazines, all kinds, outdoors, comic books, whatever. Liked to do that. My neighbor next-door, they had two children: a daughter that was older than me and a son that was about three years younger, who I just reconnected with this last week. Franklin: Oh, really? Marilyn Drake: We hadn’t seen each other since 1954. So it was interesting. We had a good time visiting and we’re going to do more things together. His parents wouldn’t let him go to the movie unless I went with him, so it was kind of my first date. [LAUGHTER] Baby-sitting, I guess. But nice family; they were from Nebraska. Most all the people out in Hanford were from somewhere else, because they came in here to work. My maiden name was House, and this gentleman I just talked about that I reconnected with, his name is Tool. And across the street were the Surpluses. And so people would come by and say, did you guys put these signs up to be funny, or what? They didn’t realize we were actually with the names that we had. So just fond memories of the whole situation. [LAUGHTER] I remember the old steam plant that used to be, I think, on the hill not far from here. As you started up into north Richland, it was there. And that’s what they heated, I guess, the old barracks and stuff. So you had the big tubes that ran along the streets. Close to there, there was part of the lot that it as on, they had these piles of, I think, it was coal. And if you went there, you could find mercury. Being stupid kids that didn’t know better, we’d go and play with the mercury in our hand or whatever. Not a good idea to do, but we did. It was part of growing up, I guess. Had some pretty good dust storms during that time, which the Tri-Cities used to be well-known for. Also, a few rumbling thunderstorms that moved through. The streets at north Richland were paved by the time I lived there, but there are some pictures in the book that I brought that shows it without paved streets. There were several thousand people lived in this area. Franklin: Do you remember—you said there were blocks of these trailers, do you know roughly how many blocks there are and the amount of houses per block? Marilyn Drake: Okay, these were trailers, so you had 12 blocks long, or wide, whichever way you want to call it, by 24 blocks the other way, so— Franklin: Okay, and that was that mile by two miles? Marilyn Drake: Yeah, more or less. It was a big place. And we rode our bicycle everywhere; we didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped. It was a lot to explore around the area. We could ride down to the river and see what was going on down there. Franklin: Now, were these personal trailers that people brought or were they government owned? Marilyn Drake: No, they were personal. Each trailer had a roof, a second roof over top of it, just like the roof of a house, because of the heat. So that helped somewhat, because there wasn’t much air conditioning around in those days. We did get an old, old swamp cooler that my parents put in the backdoor of the trailer that we had, which helped. But it could get pretty hot. So anyway you had all these roofs that there were that many roofs over that many trailers. Franklin: Wow. And did the government provide those roofs for each trailer? Marilyn Drake: Yes. Yes, they provided. Franklin: Okay. And did they provide any other amenities? Marilyn Drake: Just the washroom and utility room area. I think, if I remember correctly, we paid $20 or $25 a month to the government for rent on the lot. You could raise—it was big enough that you could have a small garden or flowers, whatever you wanted. And people kept them up pretty well. Franklin: I bet. That was another thing I was going to ask about. Was there much landscape—you mentioned the roads were paved by that time and at the John Ball School there was no grass. But was there landscaping in the trailer court? Marilyn Drake: If each person wanted to put it there. There was nothing—the playground was dirt—actually sand, around here. So we weren’t the cleanest kids around when we came in from playing. But it was, I guess, what you’d call pristine compared to today’s standards. Most everybody had grass, which we had water to water it with and stuff. If they liked flowers they could have flowers. My folks planted up the one side, they strung, just off the—there was a wood deck, just like a porch. Just off of that, my mother got some, they were called something-cucumbers, and they strung them up, and they grew up the strings, so that you had shade. That helped a whole lot with the heat, too. So that type of thing, yeah. Franklin: Let’s see here. At school, you mentioned doing the air raid drills. Did you ever have to do evacuations? Where they would get people on buses and they would go outside? Marilyn Drake: No. Just, we went to the ditch and dropped down and covered our head. Franklin: Oh, wow. So I guess it must’ve been interesting having—you probably didn’t remember being in White Bluffs, but having been at White Bluffs and then now, the area’s totally transformed. Did you ever meet anybody from the old towns of Hanford and White Bluffs after you came back to Richland? Marilyn Drake: Not that I’m aware of. I’ve read stories, and I have the book that is put together about Richland, which shows things and tells about the schools. I’ve heard about the families that had to move out, government came in and said, tch, so many days and you’re out of here, and took it over. Which seemed kind of sad, because some of them had been like pioneer families. But it was for the nation’s cause, so. Franklin: You said that your father moved to Richland to do, was it carpentry? Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Why did he move to White Bluffs originally? Was it to farm, or to do carpentry? Marilyn Drake: To do carpentry. He went to work for—or, I think he went to work for Hanford. I don’t know how long that lasted because of my illness. But, yeah, he had been a builder of wooden barracks in Kansas when I was born. So for whatever reason, it was move west, young man. I guess. So he came out here and he was more or less a rough carpenter. Didn’t do finish work and stuff for the most part. Franklin: Okay. And do you know what kinds of buildings or projects he worked at on the Site? Did he ever talk about that at all? Marilyn Drake: I don’t know that he ever named them like 300 Area or 1000 Area or whatever that way. They built a lot of forms for buildings out there. He ended up with three broken ribs at one point because someone had put a two-by-four, stood it against the wall, and he bent over to get something out of his toolbox and the two-by-four came down and hit him across his back. Franklin: Ooh. Marilyn Drake: So he was kind of in pain for a while until that healed. But I don’t remember him specifically saying exactly where he worked. Franklin: And you said that after a while, when you were in sixth grade, your family moved into Richland proper, right? Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. The school did. We still lived in north Richland. But they did. Franklin: Oh, the school did. Marilyn Drake: Yeah. Just our class. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: I think it was the sixth grade class that they took the whole class in. And I’m assuming it was because they had too many students and needed the room at John Ball. And I was only there part of—I think we left in March of that year. The job ended here, and we ended up going up to Bridgeport, Washington to work on the Chief Jo Dam up there. So I was only a part of the sixth grade year. Franklin: Did you mostly hang out with north Richland kids, or did you know anybody in Richland? And was there a real—it sounds like there was kind of a separation between north Richland and Richland. Marilyn Drake: Yeah, more or less. The kids were usually the kids that went to school out there; there were quite a few of us. I remember one classmate, his name was Ronny Sloan. He liked beans. And my mother would make ham and beans, and whenever that happened, Ronny got invited to dinner. Because he enjoyed the beans. There was the Saltz family, which had, I believe, 12 kids. They had a very small trailer, but they had a truck that had like cattle racks on it, and they had canvas over the top of it. Most of the boys, I think, slept in the truck. They eventually owned a trailer park in Kennewick until a few years ago, and apparently sold it. Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: So I’ve been able to track a few of the kids, not knowing—not talking to them, but at least knowing where they were. Franklin: Were there stores in north Richland, or did you do your shopping in Richland proper? Marilyn Drake: For the most part in Richland. Like I said, there was a pharmacy, I believe there was like a soda fountain in the pharmacy if I remember correctly. I don’t remember any—there was a movie theater. That’s where we went to the movie. Saw Titanic with this neighbor I was telling you about. The original Titanic. I don’t remember any of the stores being there. Uptown Richland was really pretty new at that point; it had just opened not too long before that. So we went in there for groceries and anything else that we needed. Franklin: Okay, great. So then eventually your family moved away, right? You said up to work at the—which dam? Marilyn Drake: Chief Jo, up at Bridgeport, Washington. Franklin: But eventually, you came back to Richland, right? Marilyn Drake: When I graduated from high school in 1960, I was looking for a job and came down to Pasco and applied for Pacific Northwest Bell as a telephone operator, and I got the job. Had met my husband and he was in Sunnyside and I lived in Yakima when we met. But he was also down here with his parents. We ended up being married here in Richland by Judge Erickson. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: Our daughter was born in the old Kadlec Hospital which was the old barracks from the Hanford time. And then we moved away then to Michigan for five years, came back and spent 13 years here. We bought an F house and lived in it. Over on Mahan Street. Ended up in California for 23 years, which we didn’t initially plan on, but it worked out that way, and we came back in 2007 to retire here. Franklin: Okay. And what did—and so you said you lived here for 13 years, so from ’70 to ’83. Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And your husband worked out on Site? Marilyn Drake: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And where did he work? Marilyn Drake: He worked on FFTF, Number 1, a lot of the other places out there, 300 Area. Bob Drake: 2 West. Marilyn Drake: 2 West. He was construction, also, so you worked whatever job was going at the time. Bob Drake: The office buildings in the 300 Area, yeah. Franklin: I just want to say, for the record, Marilyn’s husband, and you prefer to be called Bob, right? Marilyn Drake: Yeah. Franklin: Right, Bob Drake is here. Just so—for whoever’s watching in the future. And what did you do while your husband worked out on Site? Marilyn Drake: I had a daycare in my home. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: Over that period of time, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 children that went through my daycare. Plus raised my own three children. We had two boys that were born in Michigan while we were there. Yeah, so we had three children. Then my mother—my father passed away, and we moved my mother in with us. I had no trouble staying busy. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Marilyn Drake: It was a busy time. But enjoyable time. We had good neighbors and enjoyed them. Couldn’t say enough about our neighborhood at that time. Hated to leave, but work is work and you like to eat, so— Franklin: Yeah. And how come you left Richland at that time, in ’83? Marilyn Drake: Because WPPSS had shut down the plants out there, the construction of them. For about a year-and-a-half, my husband was without work, and we finally decided, better start looking before the savings account dwindled. He and some other men from here went down to South Bay of San Francisco and found work there. That’s where we ended up living, was in California, for the 23 years. Franklin: Okay. Marilyn Drake: And there I went to work for the school district as a head custodian and spent 14 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. And how come you ended up moving back to Richland? Marilyn Drake: Well, in the process of living in California, my husband was an over-the-road truck driver for a while. We kind of watched everywhere we went, didn’t find anywhere that we liked any better than we like it right here. So then we came back. Our daughter lives in Yakima. Our two sons came back about the same time we did; the one son was here a little bit ahead of us. So that was the first time in 23 years that we’d all been in the same state together. So it was a—we just kind of like the area. This is, we consider home. Bob Drake: Consider it home. Franklin: Sure. No, that makes sense. Well, great. Was there anything else that you wanted to say about— Marilyn Drake: Let me think a minute to—just that we really like the Tri-Cities, the history is here. Our kids went to Richland School District until we moved to California. The two boys graduated from down there. They had good friends here and stuff, and still keep in contact. So just really enjoyed it, and like the history that is here. Got a lot of water to play with if you want to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions that are on my sheet here. I wanted to ask, what are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history, such as you talked a little bit earlier about the WPPSS plants shutting down. So I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about any of your feelings about that and how it impacted your family and your life? Marilyn Drake: Okay. About the time that WPPSS shut down, we were living in a rental house in Richland Village. The newspaper sent out some reporters to the schools to interview some of the kids to see how this was affecting the families. Just happened, our daughter, who was a third grader at the time, was one of them that was interviewed. She had heard in the morning, my husband had asked me something about money. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he made the comment that he only had $0.38 in his wallet. Well, she picked up on this, and she told a story that Daddy only had $0.38 in his wallet and we just didn’t know how we were going to buy food or any of the things we needed. So it made the paper. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: The one night I was fixing dinner, and I can remember, I was stirring gravy, and the phone rang. There’s this man’s voice on there. He’s, I understand you’re having a hard time making ends meet, something to that effect. So my gravy is getting thicker and thicker as he’s trying to talk to me. I didn’t recognize his voice. Finally, I told my husband, I said, you talk to him. But it turned out it was the father to this young man that I just reconnected with. He had read the article in the paper and had called to give me a bad time about it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, jeez! Marilyn Drake: So that was kind of a fond memory. We did go out and watch them set the dome on the— Bob Drake: Number 1. Marilyn Drake: The Number 1 plant out there, which was interesting. I’ve always regretted—because you couldn’t—used to couldn’t take cameras out there, so I didn’t take a camera that day. Well, it just happened that that was the day everybody could have a camera. So I didn’t get pictures. But it was very interesting watching that huge dome go on there. Bob Drake: The crane that they set that dome with was, at the time, the largest track crane in the world. And it still is, as I recall. Marilyn Drake: It’s the Lampson crane. Franklin: Oh, wow. Marilyn Drake: That had the big cement deals on the back of it to counter balance it. It was quite a sight. Franklin: Was that the first time you had ever been out on Site? Marilyn Drake: Yes, for me. Franklin: Oh, okay, for you. Marilyn Drake: Yeah, we’d gone through the highway that goes out to Vantage many times, but you could just see from a distance. There was always signs, no camera, don’t take pictures, you know. Franklin: Yeah, don’t stop. Marilyn Drake: Yeah. So, that was an interesting time. Franklin: How did that affect the community more generally? Marilyn Drake: Well it— Bob Drake: A lot of people lost their jobs. Marilyn Drake: Yeah, there were like 6,000 people lost their jobs in a very short period of time. Bob Drake: In about a week’s time. Marilyn Drake: So it was rough on everybody. The Tri-Cities always seems to come back, though, when they’ve gone through something like that. Hanford was one of those things that when the funding was there, jobs were good, and then it kind of petered out. So things would be quiet a while, and then they’d give some more money, and so here we go again. [LAUGHTER] So, being construction, if you’re smart, you save some money while you’re making it, to get you through those times. And usually the bad times were always around Christmas time, because weather’s bad and that was usually layoff time. So you better have some laid back a little bit. And of course I had my daycare, which helped out, too. Franklin: Yeah. Marilyn Drake: And I only did that because our youngest son, we were in a neighborhood that was mostly retired people, and he didn’t have anybody to play with, so I thought, well I’ll take care of a child or two and he can have playmates. Well, that mushroomed on me. [LAUGHTER] So I became an owner. [LAUGHTER] But. Franklin: What were your memories of like the social scene and maybe like local politics of that time that you lived in Richland? Marilyn Drake: Things, as I recall, were fairly quiet in those days. We didn’t have the problems that we’ve got today, because we didn’t have as many people, for one thing, I think. Richland was the smallest, I believe, of the Tri-Cities at that point. It was an All-American city. I believe it was in 1959, if I remember right, which was a little before we moved here, but we enjoyed our government house that we bought. It was well-built. About 1200-and-some square feet we raised three children in. They have fond memories of living there, which surprised me. [LAUGHTER] As far as the politics, I don’t remember—I remember President Kennedy, when he came and talked at Hanford. Franklin: Yeah. Marilyn Drake: That was a big deal here. Franklin: Did you—but you didn’t get to go see--? Marilyn Drake: I didn’t get to go to that, no. We watched it on TV in those days. So, I did get to see it. The hydroplane races are a big thing, still, here. They used to be a little bigger than they are now. But that was a big thing for everybody to go to the hydroplane races. Tri-Cities has always been a giving community. Not just Richland, but the whole area. When there’s a need for a family or whatever, people chip in and give. That’s very nice. Franklin: Great. I guess my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War? Marilyn Drake: That it—I know there’s been a lot of controversy over the years with the Richland Bombers. I never thought of it that way. It was just a mascot that the high school had. I think that it’s a good place to raise children. There are things here now to do. Like I said, when I was a child, you made your own fun. And we stayed out of trouble doing it. [LAUGHTER] Like anywhere, there are problems. More so now than there were years ago. It’s a nice clean place to be. We’re kind of located where it’s not that far to Spokane or Portland or Yakima or Seattle. So you’re not confined just to the Tri-Cities. It’s becoming more and more farming all the time. The desert is not what you think of as a desert anymore. It’s green! [LAUGHTER] We don’t get the dust storms that we used to when I worked at the telephone office in 1963 through ’65, the Horse Heaven Hills were all wheat fields. So in the spring, they had the fields tilled up and then the winds would come. There were many times that the highway would shut down because of the dust; you couldn’t see. So that, with the vineyards and stuff that we have now, that’s not as much of an issue. So I just like the Tri-Cities. It’s good weather. We did have a little bit of snow this last winter, but that’s not all bad. Bob Drake: It is rare. Marilyn Drake: It’s rare for here, yeah. So just enjoy being here. Franklin: Oh, great. Well, thank you so much for coming and taking the time to interview—or let us interview you. Marilyn Drake: Enjoyed it. Thank you. Franklin: Okay, great. Watch the microphone when you stand up. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:30:14 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Marilyn Drake Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Marilyn Drake grew up in the North Richland Construction Camp, attended the John Ball School, and then lived in the town of Richland. Her father worked at the Hanford Site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/17/17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9b9686e50c88c457899c6d7831221e3f.JPG d2cbc16ee310bc1c491a5128b063e47a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F89eaaa9583a9445b5b1ec0f7bb88fbe0.mp4 f972553908e020e5deaacbd5c300a90a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Marilyn Devine Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Em DeVine on May 21, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Em about her experiences growing up in Richland and working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Em DeVine: M-A-R-I-L-Y-N. D-E-capital-V-I-N-E. Franklin: Great, thank you. And you prefer to go by Em? DeVine: I prefer Em. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: Although most people down here know me as Marilyn, because I didn’t change it until many years later, after I had left. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. So tell me how your family came to the area to work at the Hanford Site. DeVine: Well, we didn’t come from far. We’re from Ellensburg, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. DeVine: My dad was a fireman there. And I know nothing about how he heard about the Project or anything like that. But he came to work at Hanford in 1943 and then the family didn’t move—he came early. Perhaps July or June. But the family didn’t move until December 6th of [19]43. And the reason I know that is because it was my brother’s 10th birthday. That’s the only reason I know the date that we moved. We lived in a farmhouse that of course had to be abandoned by the owners. It was ten miles from Hanford; it was three miles beyond White Bluffs. So we were in the country. And I’m so sorry I didn’t ever ask my dad why—how we happened to have the privilege of being there. Franklin: Maybe because they wanted him to be close, close to the fire station in case there was— DeVine: Possibly. Franklin: --an emergency. DeVine: Right, that’s certainly plausible. Franklin: Because I know that some patrolmen were allowed to live in some of the old houses, because they wanted them close. And how old were you when the family moved down? DeVine: I was nine. Franklin: You were nine, okay. DeVine: Yes, I had just turned nine the month before. Franklin: So your father leaves some time in the middle of 1943. And did he tell you why he was coming down to Hanford? DeVine: No, I don’t remember knowing why he was gone. They must’ve told us he was working someplace else. Franklin: What were your first impressions of the Hanford Site when you moved here? DeVine: Oh, of our house? Franklin: Yeah, of the whole thing. DeVine: And that area? Well, it was definitely old and dead and dry. The house was old and not a very—well, it wasn’t very good. We didn’t have running water. We had one electric light. We had a wood stove, of course. The bosses, the rulers of the Project, they had people build us a water barrel. It was up on stilts, and they would bring water every week. That was our water supply, except that it was a farm house and there was a barn a little bit down a hill. I can remember my brother and I loading up pots of water from that well and taking them in our Little Red Rider wagon to the house, and that was what we bathed in. Franklin: Oh, wow. DeVine: We drank and cooked with the other water, yeah. Franklin: Right. Did the house in Ellensburg have more modern— DeVine: Oh, my, yes. Yeah, it had a telephone, running water, lights in every room. It was very different situation. Actually, there were four kids. I had an older sister. She was eleven at that time, and my younger brother was probably about four, three or four, years old. The house had a kitchen, of course, and the dining room, and what was probably called a parlor, and then a living room, and one bedroom. But it had a covered, or a screened-in sunporch, I suppose it would’ve been. Franklin: This is the house here out at Hanford? DeVine: That’s the house at White Bluffs, right. So we three older kids had beds in that room. And then my baby brother had a crib in my parents’ room. It was—well, my mother had chickens. I think she had five chickens. And we had a dog that we had taken with us. While we were there, we bought two young goats, which were an awful lot of fun. Now my sister, Charlene, didn’t have a good teacher. The school system was not great. It wasn’t well-developed at that time. So she and my younger brother, because our mother was sickly quite a bit at the time, they moved back to Ellensburg with relatives. So it was just Terry and me for most of the time that we were there. It was a wonderful place to live, I thought. I mean, for kids that age, exploring and—it was just a really, really great opportunity, experience. Franklin: Were you near any other houses? DeVine: No! No, there was a number of fields between us and the houses that were along the Columbia River. They looked big and nice. They were painted white and all that stuff. It was really nice. Franklin: Were there any crops left on the farm? DeVine: No, just—well, actually, there probably was wheat or hay. But I didn’t really recognize it as such. But looking back, thinking back, there probably was some. But it was more just like weeds. Yeah. Franklin: What can you tell me about the school system out at Hanford during the war? DeVine: Well, the grade school kids went to what had been Hanford High School. It was a two-story brick, or block, construction. It’s still there. The high school kids were bussed into Richland, here into Richland. We went on double shifts. We had the morning shift, so that meant, I think, school was like from 6:00 to 11:00. Something like that, maybe 7:00 to 12:00. Very crowded rooms, although we all had desks. Because our mother was sickly, my older sister, my sister and the baby went back to Elle—I said that already. Sorry. Franklin: Oh, sorry, go ahead. DeVine: You go ahead. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What did you do for leisure time when you were out there in this farmhouse? DeVine: Oh, gosh! We explored. Not too far from our house, there was a gravel pit. And one of the things that I especially remember is that my brother would stand up at the top, and I would go down below into the gravel pit. He would throw rocks down, and we would see if we could break them open to see if there was something interesting inside. We knew about thunder—hmm, now I have to think, the rocks that have something really—thunder eggs. I don’t think we found anything precious. If we thought it was, we would take it to our mom and have her look at it. That summer, spring after we were—before we had to leave, there was a meadowlark nest not too far out in one of the fields. That was fun to go watch the babies grow, and then they flew off. And as I recall—I could be wrong—as I recall, I was there when they took off, and each of the four birds went in a separate direction. Like, as if it had been planned or scripted, you know. I don’t know about that. Sometimes we would go down to the river and wade and catch minnows and take them home in jars. That was pretty much what we did. Franklin: Did you go like shopping with your father or down to the construction camp or into the town of Richland at all? DeVine: Not to Richland, no. We went into Hanford; there was a doctor’s office there. I was having health problems, too, so we would go there for odds and ends of things. Yeah. And my mother was hospitalized there for a short—a few weeks. And, no, I never did see the inside of any of the—well, let me take that back, because different famous groups came through to entertain as part of the war effort. I remember Truth or Consequences came, and then there were some others. We went in to those events. Franklin: So you’re kind of a local—like, I guess almost as local as you could get, coming down here, except for the people that had been displaced. DeVine: Right. Franklin: But you must’ve went to school with kids from all over the US, right? DeVine: Yes, yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that, about being in this community where everyone was brand new. DeVine: Yes. There was a huge campground—trailer park, and I met one of the girls there was Louanna Ivers. She and I were friends up until she passed away just a year or so ago. Franklin: Oh, wow. DeVine: Yeah. Which was fun. It was fun to have someone that went all the way from fourth grade through. Franklin: Where was she from? DeVine: Mm, Oklahoma somewhere? I don’t know exactly. But yeah. Everybody else that we knew was from someplace else: Utah, the South, the deep South. Yeah. Franklin: Did you know anything about the communities that had been there before the Manhattan Project? Did you ever run into anybody who had been displaced from the area? DeVine: No, not that I know of. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: I surely must’ve. I know that I heard somewhere along the line. Some of the people went to school to learn what they needed to do so that they could move back and work. But they weren’t allowed into their old homes, into their old homes out there anyway. Franklin: Did you live near any of the Hanford facilities? Or did you watch any of them go up? DeVine: Actually, the reason we had to leave in June of 1944 was because they were building B Reactor. We couldn’t see anything except that this concrete thing was going up. But we had to leave anyway, and our house wasn’t finished in Richland. So we had to go to for a few months, and then I think we came from Sunnyside in August to a prefab. Yeah. That was kind of interesting, too. We lived about a block from the stockyard, which was rather odorous. [LAUGHTER] Given the wrong wind direction. [LAUGHTER] But, gosh, we had a real house. It was a real kitchen, toilets, running water, electricity— Franklin: This the house in Richland? DeVine: No, the house in Sunnyside. Franklin: Oh, this is Sunnyside. DeVine: Right. So then when we moved to Richland in August, I think, of ’44, we were in a little prefab. And I asked—I wish I had remembered to ask my dad—I think I said this before—why we had gotten to live north of White Bluffs, because we didn’t have a telephone. There wouldn’t have been a way for them to contact him. That I can think of. Of course, my memory’s fuzzy at this point. Yeah. In Richland we had a prefab on the corner of Swift and Wright. Franklin: How many buildings—bedrooms, sorry. DeVine: Three. Franklin: Three-bedroom prefab? DeVine: Yeah. And I asked my dad not that many years ago why we had a prefab when there were bigger houses. I said, was it because of the money, the rent? And he said, probably. [LAUGHTER] He probably didn’t really remember either; he was pretty old by that time. But that was the last street west at that point, and that’s why my mother chose it. She did not like being hemmed in. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah, because at that time it was just open—everything was just fields and-- DeVine: It was open. We played all the way to the Yakima River. And there was an old car body chassis out there. And of course there were rattlesnakes and bull snakes and scorpions. But nobody that I know ever got hurt with any of those things, yeah. It was a good place to live. Franklin: How did the prefab compare to other houses you had lived in? Was there anything unique about it? DeVine: [LAGUHTER] Well they were called cracker boxes. You may have heard that. Because of their shape; they were just a big square put on a platform that was about three feet on over side smaller, so that you had a place to play in—[LAUGHTER] I guess a place to play in the shade. Franklin: And they had the flat roofs then. DeVine: And they had a flat roof, yes. They had a swamp air conditioner in one window. Franklin: Swamp cooler? DeVine: When the sand blew, it came in the house. It was very dusty anytime we had any kind of a wind storm. We were lucky. We had nine peach trees. We were planted right in the middle of a peach orchard. My dad, being a farmer at heart, knew exactly how to take care of those trees. He had the best peaches in the city, and he would have contracted each year with a store to sell the peaches to them. Every year we had a big wind storm that blew most of the peaches off. So, yeah, that was very—a sad situation for him, especially. Because it sort of made him feel like nothing he did went right. You know what I mean? Franklin: Oh. Yeah, yeah. DeVine: Yeah. Franklin: I know exactly what you mean. DeVine: And we didn’t have grass; we didn’t have paved streets, no sidewalks. We had irrigation water, one irrigation hose in the yard, which was different than our house water. Franklin: And from when you moved in until ’58, they—did your parents stay in that—did you stay in that home the whole time? DeVine: No. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: We moved in ’48. We moved out to a ranch house, and it, again, was on the last street west, on Cottonwood. That was before Cottonwood Loop was built. So, once again, we were out as close to the open as we could be. And that made us all very happy. It was nice. It was four bedrooms. We fit in a little bit better. I think I was going into high school at that point. My sister, she lived with us for two years before she graduated and went to college. And then my older brother and I graduated in ’52. My younger brother graduated in ’57. So we’re all Richland Bombers. Although the high school was called Columbia High School at that point. Franklin: Yeah, Col High. DeVine: We consider ourselves—yeah. Franklin: It’s always interesting that it was Richland High and then became Columbia and is now Richland High again. DeVine: Right, right. Franklin: So you were in Richland—you moved into the house on Wright in ’44. DeVine: Correct. Franklin: So you were in Richland when the war ended. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: What do you remember about—I’d like to ask you about two events. The first would be the dropping of the bomb. What do you remember about that, that day, that time? DeVine: I remember that there was jubilation and people were saying, the war is over, the war is over. I don’t know why we had the car home that day; maybe our dad was—he worked shiftwork, so maybe he was sleeping. Anyway, the four of us kids got on the hood of the car with American flags and my mother drove us all around through town, yelling and celebrating that the war was over. It was later, I think, that I realized that the Hanford Project had had such a pivotal response to that. Franklin: Hmm. And that’s also a time when a lot of people— DeVine: Contribution to that. Franklin: Contribution, right. That’s also a time when a lot of people found out what was being done, even a lot of the workers. DeVine: Exactly. Franklin: Do you remember your parents talking about that moment when they realized what they had— DeVine: No. I don’t remember, except that I know my uncle, my mother’s brother, was in the war. And he went around—supposedly went around yelling, my brother-in-law did that! My brother-in-law did that! [LAUGHTER] And I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the story that was passed on to us. So it was a wonderful time. It had been such a fearful time for us. When we lived in Ellensburg, we had—the college had been taken over by the Army. We had war bonds to buy; we had parties and weekends and people coming to town to try to get people to spend more on war bonds. And you could buy victory stamps, and when you got your book full of stamps, then you could buy a bond. And my brother and I sang over the radio—it was a really big thing, and there were airplanes flying over. There was a tank in a parade. So there was a lot of fear. We knew that we could be bombed, or we were led to believe that we could be bombed. We practiced air raids by ducking under our desk, which is pretty ridiculous. All of the houses had cans of sand in case of fire. All of the houses had blackout curtains for nighttime. So there was a lot of fear. But also a lot of joy in our lives. You know, I think our parents and our relatives did a really good job of trying to neutralize that fear. Franklin: Did you have a victory garden as well? DeVine: We did, yes! My dad, being a frustrated farmer, he had a big garden in our yard there. But he also had what we had a victory garden at my great-grandparents’ home. So he had two big gardens going on. Franklin: Richland, for all this time that you were living—or until 1958, was a government town. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could—what you remember about that era in respect to that peculiar nature of there being really no private property in Richland. DeVine: I don’t think we knew the difference. Franklin: What kinds of things was the government responsible for in terms of people’s housing? DeVine: Well, they chose the designs. [LAUGHTER] They chose the colors. They chose what would be where. They did not dictate anything about landscaping or anything like that, that I know of. It just seemed like a normal town, really. Except that we didn’t have the streets and those kinds of things. But that didn’t really affect us. And then when we did get pavement downtown, when we’d go to a show on Saturday for a dime, we would go barefoot and we would stand in the shade of a building and then we would run as fast as we could across the pavement to the next shade. Because the pavement was so hot—blacktop pavement—was so hot on our feet. But it just—well, I remember one thing, too, that we had very long lines at the post office and they probably had long lines at the bank, although I don’t really remember going to the bank. I remember going to the post office. Franklin: The town had a pretty active bus system. DeVine: Yes, they did! And it was free. Franklin: Yeah. DeVine: Later. All the workers could ride the bus to work. And in fact, many years later, I did that when I was working at 300 Area. I rode the bus a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, yeah. Franklin: What schools did you go to? DeVine: Well, we started out at Sacagawea because Marcus Whitman hadn’t been completed by that time. But that was only until maybe Christmas break. Then we went to Marcus Whitman. And then, of course—there was no junior high at that time, so then we went straight to Columbia High School from eighth grade. So it was a four-year high school. Franklin: And what year did you graduate? DeVine: ’52. Franklin: ’52, okay! DeVine: Yes. Franklin: And then you went to—you being working out on Site, shortly afterward? DeVine: Yes! I was 18. So I had to have a birth certificate to prove that I really was. I worked at 300 Area as a lab assistant. What we did was process sheep pee to—it was just for a local control of the nuclear activity in the animals. I don’t even, to tell you the truth, know what they were looking for. We just were told what to do and we did it. I loved it. Franklin: Yeah, why? DeVine: I like anything science or anything medical. A number of years later, I came back. I had married, moved, had children, came back. And then I got a job as a chemical analyst. And, oh my goodness, that was such a good job. I really loved it. It was important. It was also in 300 Area. Then our little unit ran out of money, and I was the last hire, so I had to go to work at B, in B Reactor for six months until the new budget was passed. Franklin: What did you do out at B Reactor? DeVine: I swear to goodness, I do not know. I know we were processing samples. I don’t know what they were looking for, I don’t know where the samples came from, anything about it. Except that when I went on the tour of the B Reactor, I thought, oh yeah! This is—I do remember it. So I don’t know very much about that. It only took about six months to be out there. And then I remarried and got pregnant and moved to Alaska. Franklin: Okay. DeVine: So that kind of— Franklin: So you worked out on the Site—for how long total did you work out there for? DeVine: Oh, total, oh gosh. Not very long, actually. Maybe five years was all. I really hated leaving Richland, because for one thing, I really enjoyed the work. And I loved the people that I worked with. And it was important work. So—but I left, because I had to. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What were the most challenging or rewarding aspects of your work out at Hanford? DeVine: Well, the rewarding part, especially when I was a chemical analyst, was knowing that it was so important for our safety, locally. But I think it was an international safety, as well. All we were permitted to say was radiochemical analysis of fission products. That’s how secret it was. But we did know, because they thought it was important for us to know, what we were doing so we would be especially careful, and especially precise. I guess the hard part would’ve been being in a closed system for the entire work day. The challenge was just doing a good job, you know? It was just a wonderful job. Harvey Tenney was our chemist, and then they went on up from there. Franklin: Did you have to wear any type of special protective clothing or equipment to handle— DeVine: Yes. Well, we wore lab coats. And of course gloves and safety glasses. We did not wear the masks. We didn’t have our hands in places where the radioactivity was so great that we had to wear the big gloves. These were just medical nursing gloves. Franklin: What about radiation monitoring? Were you monitored at all? DeVine: Oh, yes, absolutely. We wore a badge and on the badge was some sort of thing that could detect radiation. We checked our hands before we left work, and then we turned in our badges once a month to be read. At one point, I did get what’s called crapped up when I was working out at B Reactor. It was interesting. At one point I had to take off my dress and wash it. And of course I had a lab coat to put on. They washed it. And then I wore it home, of course. And another time, they were going to check my house, but I hadn’t taken anything home. If I had, I would’ve been fired right then. But I hadn’t taken anything home. So it was fine. Franklin: Where did you—did you live after you graduated and you started working on Site? Did you still live with your family? DeVine: I lived with my parents for a while, and then when I came back, I had three children, so I bought a prefab, a little three-bedroom, added another bedroom and remodeled the bathroom. It was on the corner of Hoffman and Smith. So I was on another corner, yeah. Franklin: Okay. I know that area pretty well. It’s kind of over by where I live. Could you describe a typical work day as a chemical analysis— DeVine: As a chemical analyst? Franklin: In the lab? DeVine: Well, yes, we would go and show our badges to get through the gate, go into the building, 325, I think it was. And put on our white shoes and our lab coat. Go into an airlock, close the door behind us, and then we could go into the actual lab. I can’t really give much about that, except that we prepared samples and then they were taken out to be radiated. And then we would get them back a few days later and process them again to see what the radioactive content had been. And I have no idea of any of the finished information, of the ending information. Yeah. Franklin: Right, yeah, that would’ve been passed up the chain. DeVine: No! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history, such as plants starting up--? DeVine: No, I don’t really remember anything like that. Atomic Frontier Days was the big celebration of the year in the summer. A big parade and all that. And the sports activities were an important thing. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about the Atomic Frontier Days. What kinds of themes were there and what kind of activities were common in those celebrations? DeVine: Well, we had a parade, like I mentioned. And we had a Miss Tri-Cities. Hmm. I’m sure we had baseball games that were connected with it. Speakers, politicians would come and speak. I don’t remember any famous entertainers coming like they did at Hanford during the wartime. But—oh, one thing that I thought was fun. We had a swimming pool, Richland, the town of Richland had a swimming pool down by the Columbia River. And I thought it was really a huge pool and it may not have been. But there were so many people here that you could only swim for an hour, and then you had to get out and stand in line again for another hour to try to get in again. That made an impression on me [LAUGHTER] because I just had never heard of such a thing before. There wasn’t enough space for everybody to swim at the same time. Franklin: Yeah, wow. DeVine: They since filled that in and built another one up at Richland High School. Franklin: Yup. Yeah, the George Prout pool. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: Were you here when President Kennedy visited? DeVine: Yes, I was! Franklin: Did you go out to see him? DeVine: I did not. Franklin: Oh, okay. DeVine: My mother went. She was sick with cancer at the time, and she felt like she had touched him when he walked by. Whether or not she actually did, I don’t know. But it suited her to think that she had actually touched him. It was a very big thing, that visit was a very big thing around here. Yeah. I’ve seen pictures of it. But I didn’t—and I knew it was going on. But I don’t know why I didn’t go. I might’ve been at work. I don’t know what day of the week it was or anything. Franklin: Could you describe the ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? DeVine: Well, we always felt real safe. [LAUGHTER] It’s not like life today. It wasn’t a big deal; we just had our badge, and we turned them in each month and got a different one. So probably we rotated. That’s the only thing I can figure. They wouldn’t have been able to do all the badges, like, for instance, over the weekend or something. Because that job in 300 Area was just straight Monday through Friday, 6:15 to 2:00-something. Yeah. So it wasn’t a big deal. Franklin: What about the secrecy aspect? Did that ever impact your daily life or your friendships or relationships with anyone? DeVine: In a way, it probably did. You know, we had the signs: we will bury you; Khrushchev saying, we will bury you. And loose lips sink ships. And how important security was. Now, when I first got that job—maybe I shouldn’t say this, but when I first got that job as a lab assistant, I was telling a friend, a neighbor, about it. And she thought I went too far. Franklin: Oh. Like you had said too much about what you were doing? DeVine: What I was doing, right. Franklin: Oh. DeVine: She asked me, thermal heat or—? [LAUGHTER] And I said, oh, yeah—no. So, her sister, I guess, was the one that told me that she thought I’d said too much. Franklin: Oh, wow. So there was like kind of community policing in that regard. DeVine: There was, yes. Franklin: Do you remember—I’d heard stories that there were FBI agents that would kind of walk down the street or go to people’s houses to interview people about— DeVine: I think we were aware of that, yes. Yeah. Interesting. Franklin: Yeah, isn’t it? It’s kind of—it’s strange. When you were in school, did you have to do the duck-and-cover drills, civil defense drills? Was that a concern? DeVine: No, I don’t—I may be wrong. But I was so impressed with the ones that we had in Ellensburg, that anything else probably wouldn’t have been important enough to even think about. Franklin: Knowing what was being made at Hanford, and knowing the geopolitical situation—you mentioned the ‘we will bury you’ signs—and knowing that Hanford played a large role in the development of atomic weapons, did you ever feel like you were on the frontlines, or like the Hanford community might be a target in case of an eruption of hostilities? DeVine: You know, I think probably a lot of people did. I don’t remember feeling that. Now, I may have. That’s been a long time ago and a lot of things have happened in my life since then. Maybe that’s why is not a big memory. But I don’t think that I—there’s always fear of war and terrorism and stuff like that. But I don’t think it affected my life significantly at all. Franklin: How long did your father work out on Site until? DeVine: Well, he started in ’43, and then he would’ve retired probably when he was 60 or 65. He retired as a fireman there. Franklin: Oh, okay. DeVine: And I don’t—I was gone. I don’t know what year it was. Franklin: Did he stay in Richland his whole life? DeVine: He did, he did. They moved away for a little—five years or something. Then they lived up in Chelan for a while, on Lake Chelan, in Manson. But then he came back and lived here until he died. Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? DeVine: Well, it was a unique situation, certainly. Many of us have stayed in touch with people. Part of that is the result of a thing we call—it’s like a daily newsletter, we call it The Sandstorm. So that we know what’s going on among our friends. They talk a lot about no other town ever being like this. I don’t buy that, myself. I think there were a lot of safe towns, unique towns. But it was interesting. We didn’t really know the difference, I don’t think, at that time. I mean, things were safe. You could walk home any time of the day or night. Neighbors played in the streets, you know? Things like that. But I think that happened in a lot of towns. But we, because we were here, and maybe because we came from so many different places in the United States, we saw it as being very unique. And I don’t know. Franklin: Certainly, until ’58, you had to have a job at Hanford or be working— DeVine: Correct. Franklin: --to live in Richland. DeVine: Right. Franklin: So everyone had a job. DeVine: And many of them were, like, the stores. You could be an employee in the stores and things like that. You didn’t have to have a job on the reservation. Franklin: Right. But even those stores all had to have contracts with the Atomic Energy Commission— DeVine: Right, right. Franklin: --to operate the store. I think, maybe, that’s where a lot of people feel the community is unique, certainly because most towns didn’t have 100% employment and were owned by the government. DeVine: That’s true. That’s true. Franklin: I mean, there was no private—there was private property, but there was no—all the land and everything was— DeVine: Right, right. Franklin: It certainly is very interesting. DeVine: Yes, it is. Franklin: In how we think about small town America. DeVine: Right. And I don’t even know what small-town America is like, anymore. I think it’s changed so much since I was a youngster. Franklin: I wanted to ask you, when you moved back to Richland in 2000—how had the Tri-Cities changed from when you had left to when you came back? DeVine: The most staggering thing was the growth. The busy streets, the highways going in. Just the stores, traffic, all the time. It was—that was the thing that struck me the most. Franklin: Well, Em, thank you so much for—I guess I’ll, last point, is there anything else you wanted to say in regards to— DeVine: I can’t— Franklin: Your life in Richland? DeVine: Nothing significant comes to mind. I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, it’s fine. I just didn’t want to end without giving you the chance to—if there was something that you had thought of. DeVine: Right. Well, there’s lots of things, but not important enough to— Franklin: Well, I don’t know about that. What comes to mind? DeVine: I guess all high schools have this rah-rah-rah mentality. And we did, perhaps in the extreme. Because we had come from all over, there was just a different kind of closeness, maybe. And inclusion, they would call it now. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think we even had that word back then, as far as people are concerned. Yeah. Franklin: Because everyone—that’s another thing, actually, I wanted to ask. So you had family that was close by. DeVine: Yes. Franklin: Extended family. But many others didn’t. DeVine: Oh! Franklin: Do you think that led—how do you think that impacted people? Is that maybe what led to some of that inclusion? DeVine: Oh, I think it was so hard on so many of those families to be far away form any relatives at all. And yes, I think you’re right, that that did have something to being neighborly and being inclusive in our schools, and really gelling as a community. It must’ve been absolutely horrible. Now, my mother was raised, born and raised in the Ellensburg, Kittitas Valley, as was my dad. And she called these hills, those bald-headed hills. I mean, she really, really did not like the topography. [LAUGHTER] The fauna. Franklin: Right, she must’ve missed the trees and— DeVine: Oh, my gosh, it was terrible. But our neighbor from Kansas called them mountains. [LAUGHTER] You know? So there was just a different perspective for everybody that came here, and what was great and what was terrible. But I do think that having people come, and some of them maybe never seeing their relatives again. I don’t know about that. But it must’ve been just— When I drive through the countryside now and I see these farm houses, I think back to the days when women were out on their own—families, with their husband and whatever children—all by themselves. And I think about that every time I go by these buildings that are somewhat isolated, still. But they have cars, they have phones, they have TV, you know, so they can get around and they can see what’s going on in the world. We had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world, except the war. Yeah. Oh! President Harry Truman came and visited and talked. Franklin: Oh. DeVine: And the Richland High School band marched in a parade for him. That’s the closest I ever got to a president. Franklin: Do you remember what year that was? DeVine: Gosh. Well, I was in high school, so it had to have been ’49 or ’50 would be my guess. Franklin: So during the second term. DeVine: Yeah, ’49 or ’50. Franklin: That brings me to another question. So after the war ended, it looked like Hanford might shut down for a while. DeVine: Yes! Franklin: And I’m sure some people were probably making plans to move or leave or figure out—do you remember—did your family have any such plans or— DeVine: I think there was quite a bit of turmoil for a lot of people in that regard. But then they just kept finding things to do and finding things to do. There was a lot of—I think there were a lot of families that left, fearing that it would shut down, and went and found jobs other places. But a lot of us stuck around, just hung in there. Franklin: And there was a new boom in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s when they built K East and K West and some of the other reactors. How did that impact Richland, and do you remember much about that? DeVine: I have no idea, except that people came in. I’m still astonished by how many houses are being built here. Where are the people coming from? Who are these people? Why are they coming here? [LAUGHTER] You know? Franklin: Back then or right now? DeVine: Now. And I probably thought the same thing then. Why are all these people here? Franklin: Well, I’ll tell you, as someone who’s trying to buy a house right now, it’s a tight market and everything’s getting snapped up. Yeah, I wonder that, too. But our economy must be good. Housing’s tight. DeVine: Yeah, it’s very interesting to watch it. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m trying to buy a house, too. I need a bigger house. I bought a small house just for me. Turn that off. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:49:52 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Marilyn DeVine Subject The topic of the resource White Bluffs (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Marilyn (Em) DeVine spent part of her childhood in White Bluffs, living in an old farmhouse during the Manhattan Project. Her father was a patrolman and had to be stationed on the site. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/21/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4b3b39e87ce2507d604a1502d8a7ab60.jpg 770df6b0e7699c07a4956c77fd36fe8a https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F52781766779487f891c66cb12dd10aac.mp4 80f3a4e1bf5e27d53fb0329c79865a7f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Elaine Davis Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready? Elaine Davis: There. Franklin: Better get that closed. Ready? Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Elaine Davis on September 2, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Elaine Davis about her experiences growing up in Richland. So, the best place to start is at the beginning. So why don’t you tell me where and when you were born? Elaine Davis: I was born September 27, 1948 at Kadlec Hospital. I grew up on 1918 Howell in Richland and I went to school at Jefferson Elementary, Chief Jo Middle—Chief Jo Junior High at that time, and Columbia High School. Franklin: And Columbia later became Richland? Davis: Richland High School. Franklin: Yeah, the gentleman I just interviewed also went to Columbia High School. And so, Elaine, we’ve already talked a bit, and I’ve read your bio here that my intern put together, and so you were born here, but your dad, your family didn’t work at Hanford-proper, right, but they worked for the government here? Davis: My dad, I think, worked for the Manhattan Project. He came in March 1944. And my mother came out in June of 1944, after she finished nursing school. And then my brother was born on the 2nd of August, 1944, and he was the first baby born in Kadlec. They didn’t have bassinets at that time; they put him in a dresser drawer. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: How new was Kadlec Hospital at that time? Davis: They had just completed the emergency room and the maternity section. Franklin: Okay. Davis: So my mom was admitted on the 1st, but she didn’t have him until the 2nd of August, 1944. Franklin: So your brother is somewhat of a local celebrity at the time, correct? Davis: Yes, he is, right. He was grand marshal for one of the parades that Richland had, with my mother sitting beside him, and they were the grand marshal. Franklin: I guess he kind of, in some ways he might symbolize—the first birth of the community, right, is something for the community to kind of gather around. Because up until that point, right, there was no one who worked for the Manhattan Project who had any kind of—no one could say, like, oh, I was born in Richland. You know? Davis: Mm-hmm, right. Franklin: Or at least the new Richland that was—is distinct from the— Davis: Because Richland did exist before the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Right, yeah, but most of those people had had to leave and were of a very different—they would’ve had very different lives and memories of Richland than all of the people that would’ve came. Davis: Yes. Franklin: So what did your father do at the Manhattan Project? Davis: He worked—he was one of the—not the first male nurse out on the Project, but one of the first male nurses out on the Project in 1944. Franklin: And— Davis: And— Franklin: Oh, please. Davis: But he didn’t, you know—he didn’t know what was going on. All he knew is he was here as a nurse to help out in any way he could. Franklin: Do you know where he worked in those early days? Davis: He didn’t tell me where he worked. I’m sure it was probably because it was so secretive. Franklin: Right, right. So then he transferred over to Kadlec when it was completed then? Davis: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And what did he do for Kadlec? Davis: He was the administrator for Kadlec. Franklin: Okay. So was he then in charge of like the day-to-day operations? Davis: Yes, he was. Franklin: Okay. And you also mentioned that your mother worked there? Davis: My mother worked from the time I was 13 months old, and she worked until I was in the third grade, when I was about nine. She went to work for Dr. Buren Lee for 17 years and then they started the Richland Clinic. She worked for Dr. Ballmann for 17 years after that. But she continued working until she was 78 years old. Franklin: Wow. Davis: Because of having Alzheimer’s, they had to let her go. Franklin: Right, right. And what did she do when she worked for the doctors? Davis: For Dr. Lee, she was a surgical nurse. For Dr. Ballmann, she was his medical nurse. Franklin: And how long did your father work at Kadlec for? Davis: I’m going to say for maybe a year, year-and-a-half, after Kadlec came into existence. Franklin: Okay. Davis; And then he worked for HEHF when they got the contract. Franklin: When was that? Davis: I’m not really sure when that was. He worked until he was 65 for HEHF as the administrator. Did all the hiring and firing for HEHF. Franklin: Okay. It says here that your father lived in the barracks at one time? Davis: He lived in the barracks for the first three months. And then they lived on Armistead—and I don’t know the exact address—for four-and-a-half years. And then they moved into 1918 Howell, three months before I was born. My mother was out watering the new lawn when she started her labor with me. Franklin: How—sorry. Did your father have any stories or anything about—or your mother—about—well, actually, I guess that’s a good question. So your father came in ’44, and your mother in June ’44. Do you know if your mother worked on the Manhattan Project? For the year— Davis: No, she didn’t. She did not— Franklin: Okay. Davis: --work for the Manhattan Project. But she did tell stories of standing in line for rations, meat rations, sugar rations, coffee rations, when it was 110 degrees and no trees. Franklin: Oh, man, wow. Davis: They would both talk about the terminating winds that people would just leave because it was dusty, so dusty you couldn’t see. And every day, you had to clean out your window sills because of the dust that piled up in the windows. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Do your parents have any other stories about that time? Anything that sticks out to you that you can remember? Davis: Now, they went and watched Eddie Feigner, the baseball player, was here. They went to a lot of baseball games to watch him, and they did a lot of their own entertaining. They played bridge every week, and rode their bikes an awful lot, played a lot of tennis. Franklin: I see. Oh, that’s good. I mean, you got to stay entertained. Tell me about growing up in Richland, you know, being a government town. I understand you would’ve been young for a lot of that, but during the Cold War, being this government town. Davis: I remember in grade school, we had to do duck-and-cover under our desks. We did that once a week. Franklin: Can you walk me through that process? Davis: You got under your desk and got on your knees and put your hands over your face, and you waited until they said everything was clear. Franklin: And you said you did that about once a week? Davis: Once a week. Franklin: So that means you got—I bet everybody got pretty—was it the same time all the time, or did you just hear the bell and know it was duck-and-cover time? Davis: You’d hear the siren and they’d have you—give you directions to do the duck-and-cover. Franklin: When did you understand, first understand, what was at Hanford or what was being produced at Hanford? Davis: I think that I learned about it when I was about 14, 15 years old. Franklin: Oh, really? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, and what do you remember about that? Davis: That everything was secretive. Nobody could discuss their jobs, what they were doing, or anything. So there was a lot of secrecy in it. But we didn’t question it. Franklin: Really? So, what did you think about it, when you found out what was being made at Hanford? How did that make you feel, or— Davis: I think it made me, you know—that saved our country. If we hadn’t done it, we might be slaves to the Japanese or to the Germans. Franklin: What about the work that had happened after the World War II, what about the continued—because, you know, when you would’ve found out about that, right, there was still a lot of production for the Cold War weapons arsenal. What about—so, I understand that feeling of in the World War II there’s that feeling you mentioned about being physically at war with other countries, declared war. But what about the Cold War? Is that trickier to draw a feeling about, or how do you—what about the Hanford’s relationship to the USSR and to the Cold War and to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Davis: It was, I thought, was scary, growing—learning about it. There was nothing that we could do as citizens ourselves. It was up to what the government—it was their decision, not ours. I really don’t have anything to comment on. Franklin: Sure. I just—the main reason I ask that question, these kinds of questions is for people—I grew up at the very end of the Cold War, but for myself and for people to come, it’s illustrative, I think, to hear from experiences of people that lived in that time and lived with the fear or the risk or just in that situation. Because it’s so unique. Davis: It is. Franklin: And such an interesting period of time, because World War II is so easily well-defined, and it ended with a lot of joy here and this kind of momentous occasions. Whereas the Cold War had its ups and downs. Davis: Right. Franklin: So that’s why I ask those—not to sort of draw any kind of gotcha moments or anything like that. But to just explore how you felt, or, like, the feeling of the sense of being in that conflict. Davis: I didn’t do a lot of reading, but I did listen to a lot of the news commentators and stuff like that. So just learning about it was an experience to go through. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. So you would’ve found out about Hanford as a teenager, and then do you remember the sale of when Richland became privatized? Davis: Yes, I do. Franklin: I guess you would’ve been about ten. Davis: My dad showed my brother and I the biggest check we’d probably ever see written by my parents when they bought their house for $8,000. He took it with him when they signed the papers so that—we had ownership of our house, rather than the government coming in and changing lights; we changed our own lights, we could do reconstruction or construction—remodeling on the house and stuff like that, where we couldn’t before. So it was a great experience for my brother and I to go with them and to see what the process was in buying the house. My parents’ first house. Franklin: Did life change for you substantially after Richland was—or did you notice changes? Davis: I didn’t notice anything changing. We never locked our house or our cars. The kids in the neighborhood played out in the summer until 11:00 at night and you didn’t have to worry about children missing or being molested. We were a safe place to live and grow up. Our main activity was going to the river and swimming and water skiing everyday during the summer. During the winter, we snow skied. My dad learned to snow ski at 48. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Davis: We taught him. He took a few lessons, but he learned, basically, from my brother and I. Franklin: Wow, that’s really cool. And so you graduated in— Davis: 1967. Franklin: And then what? Davis: Then I went to two-and-a-half years at CBC. And I’m dyslexic, so I could take about 12 credit hours. And then I decided after two-and-a-half years, I could get a job in the Area and my dad said—I said, can you help me get a job? And he says, I don’t want to be owing to anybody for getting a job for you. He says, if you get a job, you’re going to have to get it on your own. So I laid out of school for a year-and-a-half and I worked at Roger’s of Walla Walla in a potato shed. We had no air conditioning. Franklin: Whew. Davis: You inspected the potatoes and they were done then made into French fries. They’d come down the conveyor belt, and you’d pull the potato off that was rotten, or it wasn’t good enough to be used. So you pulled them off. And then you also packed five six-pound bags into a box and put it on the conveyor belt to go into the freezer. Another job was to make the box—the boxes were made, but you had to put it on a conveyor belt down to where it was put into—the potato sacks were put into the boxes and shipped to the cooler. What made me decide to go back to school was, I was working graveyard the whole year-and-a-half I worked there. But I’d worked there three summers and got a job full-time. Two women got into a brawl, biting, kicking, scratching, and I quit that night and said, I’m going back to school. I went back to school and majored in recreation, park administration at Eastern Washington University. It was a state college then. Franklin: Right. Davis: And I worked between my junior and senior year of college for the Richland Recreation Department. And then after I graduated from college, a year-and-a-half after I graduated from college, I got a job, my first job at Exxon. My salary for the whole year was $5,000 a year. Which was low in ’74 when I started. But everything was lower. Prices were lower then. And then I worked for them for four years, and then I got hired in by United Nuclear in 1978. And I worked in document control through many changes of companies until I was laid off in 2005. And then— Franklin: Oh, wow. Davis: 27 ½ years. And then I got a job working for the Richland School District as a bus aide for special needs kids, and just loved it. And I just quit working when I turned 66 two years ago. Franklin: Wow, that’s really—well, it’s great that you really enjoyed your last job. Records control, was that at the Federal Building? Davis: In the Federal Building, when I worked for United Nuclear, I went out and changed the operating procedures for N Reactor and the production of making the fuel rods for N Reactor. And then I worked in all aspects of document control for 25 years. The last job I worked at was procedures. I would take around procedures for safety operations, environmental, and I’d get the signatures from the engineers and that’s what I did. Franklin: And so what did—when you’re doing document control, what would those duties usually consist of? Davis: What would what be? Franklin: Sorry. When you were doing document control, what did that consist of? Like, what were your duties? Davis: Like I said, I retired records, and they were stored in records storage. Then my last job, like I said, was working with the engineers on writing of the procedures. Franklin: Interesting. It’s very similar to what I do as an archivist, is I manage records as well. Although in a different—manage them for research use. But it’s very similar steps, right? You follow a disposition schedule, you file the records in appropriate places, after a certain time you send things to— Did you send things to the National Archives at certain times, or--? Davis: No, we didn’t. I did not. But my group did. Franklin: Okay. How big was your group? Davis: We had about six people in that, in all different aspects. Franklin: How many different contractors did you work for, starting with United Nuclear? Davis: I worked for about four different companies. The last one was CH2M Hill. Franklin: Okay. And so what were the other two? Davis: Boeing. And I can’t remember what the other one was. Franklin: Is it Lockheed? Davis: Yes, Lockheed Martin. Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve seen their— Davis: It was Boeing and then Lockheed Martin. Franklin: LMSI. Davis: LMSI. Franklin: I’ve seen that on a lot of the documents we have in the Hanford Collection. Davis: Yeah. Franklin: I just—it’s nice to kind of trace that—I’m just going to write that down. United Nuclear Industries, Boeing, LMSI, CH2M Hill. Thank you. That’s very helpful to me, actually. Because it’s not always clear to reconstruct form the documents. So your brother, the famous Ed Quigley, Jr., the Richland-famous Ed Quigley, what did he do? Davis: He has a degree in social—not social work—psychology and sociology as a double major. But he didn’t—he got into the clinical aspect of it and didn’t like it. And then he started taking—his first wife, Chris, was accepted into Dalhousie University in Canada and they moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. And he started—that’s where he started his clinical work and decided he didn’t like it. So he was really interested in music, and he took guitar lessons and now he is teaching at Ted Brown’s Music Center in Tacoma. He’s been there for 40-some years. Franklin: Wow. Davis: And he just went with us to Canada. We went to Canada for a month. Just got back last week. And he went with us. That’s what he does. Franklin: Oh, cool. Davis: And he lives in a beach house which has got 210 stairs up and down to his house, so anything you bring down and all the garbage has to go back up. Franklin: I bet he stays in pretty good shape doing all that, right? Davis: Yeah, he is. Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that would—maybe I should get 210 stairs to my house. Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your work or growing up in Hanford or your parents? Davis: I can remember, during the time that we were government, if you dialed 0 you got the FBI. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Did that accidentally happen in your new household? Davis: We did! Once! [LAUGHTER] And got in trouble for it. Franklin: Wow. Davis: You know, we lived in a real sheltered community. When I was growing up, there was only one person that—or one family that I knew was divorced. They were a doctor and his wife and their three kids. That was the only divorce that I knew. So we were a pretty sheltered community. If your kids got in trouble, you were out of here. They didn’t put up with it. But I feel blessed to be in a community that was so caring and so carefree with letting us play outside. Now, you don’t let your kids go outside without being chaperoned. Some of my friends have got grandkids, and they don’t let them out of the house, because of the crime situations, child molestations. So I feel pretty blessed that I lived in a community where nobody bothered anybody, but you knew everybody. Franklin: Right, but I suppose a lot of that is due to kind of the single focus of that community being on Hanford employees, right? Davis: Right. Franklin: And the government control of the—the fear of—maybe not the fear of retribution, but knowing that there was kind of something watching over you. Davis: Right, right. Franklin: Which was the government. What about—did you—like the racial situation in Pasco or Kennewick ever make a mark on you, or do you remember any, like the civil rights era kind of stuff in the Tri-Cities? Davis: As a child, or as parents, our parents never took us to Pasco because of the racial situation there. And Kennewick didn’t allow any blacks, either, at that particular time, growing up. They were all in Pasco, on the east side. So we didn’t really go to Pasco a lot, or to Kennewick. We just stayed in our own community. Franklin: Because Richland just excluded—until ’58, you couldn’t live there unless you worked there, and they didn’t hire many African Americans. Davis: No, they didn’t. Franklin: At all, because there was no civil rights legislation to push equal—you know, push away discrimination in housing or employment. As you mentioned, Kennewick had sundown laws that kept African Americans from owning property. What about, is there any other significant events in Tri—do you remember like the Atomic Frontier Days parade? Davis: Yes, I do. That was one of the big things in Richland, was to go to the Atomic Frontier Days. We went every year, and just had a lot of fun. Franklin: How long did those go till? Davis: Now, that, I’m not sure. I can’t remember that. Franklin: Do you remember President Kennedy’s visit in 1963? Davis: Yes. I was let out of school to go hear him dedicate N Area, N Reactor. Franklin: How was—can you talk a little bit about that? How was that? Davis: Lots and lots of people. It was so crowded. It was good to see—that was the first time I’d ever seen a president up close. Franklin: How close were you? Davis: We weren’t right up front, but we were in the midst of the crowds that was out there. And it was a great feeling. Franklin: Wow, that’s great. Any other events in the Tri-Cities’ history that come to mind? Davis: No, I can’t remember a lot about that. Franklin: How did—so you worked for several different contractors and you also worked from production to shutdown to kind of cleanup. I was wondering if you could talk first about, how did your job change with different contractors? Or how was that—did the work situation change at all, or was it pretty constant? Davis: No, you did the—I was doing the same job that I was assigned to. Nothing seemed to change when a new contractor came in. Franklin: So was there kind of a lack of like an organizational culture with each contractor? Davis: Now, when we went—when CH2M Hill came in, we had to apply for our—re-apply for our jobs, and that was real unsettling to everybody. Because you didn’t know whether you were going to be the one that was going to be out on the street or whether you weren’t. So that was a lot of pressure was put on us. Franklin: Wow. I bet. What about, how did your job change at all from production to stoppage of production and then to the cleanup phase? Davis: Now, from production we changed a little bit, but not a whole lot. And then when we went into—I was laid off in 2005. And so I don’t know—I didn’t work with any of the cleanup completely. Like they are now. So I don’t know. Franklin: What kind of—well, but then—since production stopped in ’87, ’88— Davis: Yeah. Franklin: What happened in those years of the ‘90s and up? Davis: Well, N Area was still going. And then when they closed that down, things started changing, document-wise, with that. Franklin: How so? Davis: You had different things that we were given to do that were different from what we were doing when we were in production. Franklin: Could you describe that? Or like maybe some—what was different about them? Davis: I can’t really explain it. Franklin: Okay. Davis: But it was different. We had different things to do and different things to follow during that time. Franklin: Okay. Is there any example that comes to mind? Davis: Not really. Franklin: Okay. Let me see here. How did—can you describe how this kind of element of security or safety impacted your work at Hanford? Davis: You took pleasure in your job, and you were really loyal to what you were doing. You just had a great sense of gratitude for how we were doing it and what we were doing. Franklin: That’s great. What about for your father? Was he ever—do you know if he was ever impacted by security restrictions or safety stuff, or how that affected his job? Davis: That I don’t know, because he didn’t really discuss that with us. Franklin: Right. Davis: His work thing was separate from his family and social life. So we really didn’t hear about it. Franklin: Oh, right, okay. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Davis: I think that, you know, we were safe. And then when the Cold War came on, we weren’t as safe, because we didn’t know if somebody was going to send a bomb over and destroy us. Or destroy themselves, because we would probably retaliate. And to think that we could wipe the whole world out by what we were doing. We just didn’t trust each other. And we still, to this day, don’t know a lot about what’s going on either. We know more, but we don’t know everything. Franklin: Mm. Yeah. That is very true. One of the last things I’d like to ask you about is your relationship or your involvement in the B Reactor Museum Association. Davis: We just joined in June, so we’ve had— Franklin: Of this year? Davis: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: So we’ve had two meetings [LAUGHTER] before we left to go to Alaska. Franklin: Oh, okay. And why did you choose to get involved in that? Davis: We wanted—because we both, both Charles and I worked here, and we wanted to get active in the organization to promote what Hanford’s about and the B Reactor especially. We went on the July 16th thing to B Reactor. It was great. We learned a lot. Just to walk into that face, and see the face of the reactor. Franklin: Was that your first time to B Reactor? Davis: That was my first time. Franklin: Yeah, it’s almost a religious experience in some ways. Davis: Yes, it is. Franklin: To be confronted with that massive, powerful reactor. You said your husband, Charles, worked on Site? Davis: Yes, he did. Franklin: And what did he do? Davis: He worked, to begin with, as a Hanford Patrol. And then he went from there into nuclear operator, and then from there he went into operations at T Plant. He was one of their administrators. He wasn’t high up, but he— Franklin: And how long did he work at Hanford for? Davis: He worked for 24 ½ years before he got laid off. Franklin: Oh, okay, and what years were those? Davis: Okay, ’78 to 2003. Franklin: Oh, okay. Davis: ’80. No, I take it back. 1980 through— Franklin: And—oh, sorry. Where did you guys meet? Did you meet at Hanford? Davis: No. We met square dancing. Franklin: Oh, okay. That’s really great. Did you meet him before you were working at Hanford or after? Davis: No, after. Franklin: Okay, you worked there pretty much around the same timespan. Davis: Mm-hmm, yeah. Franklin: Oh, that’s really interesting. Cool. Davis: You might want to interview him, too. Franklin: Yeah, that would be really interesting. Davis: He wasn’t born or raised here, but— Franklin: No, but that’s—it’s really good to get—one of the things we’ve been looking for is perspectives of those who worked during the later Cold War. Because, you know, it’s such a big event. Davis: Right. Franklin: And then the shift, too, from production to cleanup is a really important shift that will become more historical as time goes on, so it’s good to get the people while they have fresher memories than trying to make them drag out stuff from 50, 60 years ago. Which is—if that’s the best you got, then that’s the best you got. Well, great, Elaine, thank you so much for the information and the interview. Did you want to narrate some of the stuff you brought, or did you just want to donate that to us to scan? Davis: I’ll donate that to you. Franklin: Okay, great. Well, we’ll have that and we’ll put it in the file with your interview and so people can take a look at that, too, to kind of—if they want to see pictures of Ed, Jr., and all the newspaper articles. Well, I mean, I think there’s really something important about a community coming together to celebrate that first new life. That’s so important at the beginning of a community to see that happening, it makes it, I think, a nicer place to live. So that’s really neat. Well, thank you so much. Davis: You’re welcome. Thank you. Franklin: Yeah, watch out for the microphone up above you. Sorry. Davis: Oh! How’d I do? Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:42:39 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Elaine Davis Subject The topic of the resource Richland (Wash.) Hanford Atomic Products Operation Douglas United Nuclear, Inc. Description An account of the resource Elaine Davis grew up in Richland in the early Cold War. Her father came to Richland in 1944 and was an administrator at Kadlec Hospital. Her older brother was the first baby born in the new town of Richland Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/2/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F086b14362420c4dd52a43bbf5e5e0b36.jpg 3b9817accaa1e01263a76c3dc07ed128 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0bc49f909539b18632f713f021af9ab5.mp4 dcc3c56a58bfbaa6987b71cc189ab983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jim Daughtry Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jim Daughtry on April 4, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jim about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, Jim, can you state and spell your full name for us? Jim Daughtry: James Daughtry, spelled D-A-U-G-H-T-R-Y. It’s often misspelled and often misspoken, but that’s what it is. Franklin: Great, and James is J-A-M-E-S? Daughtry: J-A-M-E-S, James. Franklin: Okay, but you prefer to go by Jim, correct? Daughtry: Sure, yeah. Franklin: Well, whichever— Daughtry: No, I go by Jim. Franklin: Okay, good. [LAUGHTER] So, Jim, tell me how you came to the area to work for the Hanford Site. Daughtry: Yes, I was hired in 1973 by Peter Hoffmann. Peter Hoffmann was earlier with Battelle Northwest, but at the time, he was a manager in Westinghouse. I guess it was referred to as Westinghouse Hanford Company at the time. He had a physics background and he had responsibilities related to the physics aspects of the Fast Flux Test Facility. Franklin: Okay. Daughtry: So, I had contacted him and expressed interest in coming here and came out for an interview. And eventually, we reached an agreement and I came in to work and he assigned me to a core engineering group, and assigned to a manager by the name of Bob Bennett, who was the manager of core physics at the time. Franklin: Okay. And where did you come here from? Daughtry: Where did I come here from? I had been with Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois. Franklin: And what were you working on there? Daughtry: Well, interestingly enough, I was actually working on the engineering mockup experiments for the FFTF. That was the connection. I had been working on that for a couple of years, and those experiments were ramping down, and I thought, well, okay, I have that experience and it would be of value here. So that’s why I contacted Peter Hoffmann, and we went on from there. Franklin: What interested you about the FFTF? Daughtry: Well, of course I got interested early on, because of the experiments we were doing. We were doing experiments there that would be used to calibrate the computer codes that would later be used for all of the physics analysis for FFTF. So, the interest was there because I knew what FFTF was all about. Franklin: And when you say computer codes, we’re talking about a much older type of computer, right? Were you using punch cards at that time? Daughtry: Yes, indeed. Yes. Actually, it was interesting, because the Department of Energy had turned the design responsibility for the FFTF to the advanced reactors division at Westinghouse Corporation in Pittsburgh. So they had their own computer codes, which were of their advantage, anyway. I was working at Argonne National Laboratory; they had their computer codes. And out here at Hanford, they had their computer codes. They were all different. They did about the same thing; they didn’t always agree exactly the same. But we knew that the codes that were developed here would be the ones that would be used as we started up the plant and did the final calculations. And also, those needed to be calibrated with the experiments that were done at Argonne National Lab. So you said punch cards? Yes. When I first came to work here, our offices were in the Federal Building, first floor of the Federal Building. I believe the computing center was in the basement of the Federal Building. We would prepare the calculations for the day and those would then be punched on punch cards and those then would be probably verified by someone else, and then go into the computer. I don’t remember now what the turnaround was, but I suppose if it was a large calculation, we might have to wait until the next day to get the results. Franklin: Wow. How did you get the three different systems to match up? Or what kind of effort did it take to get those three different systems to kind of match up so this engineering mockup information and the headquarters in Pittsburgh, how’d they all talk to one another? Daughtry: Well, there were a lot of meetings, of course, between the Advanced Reactor personnel in Pittsburgh and the personnel at Argonne National Lab, and people here at Hanford. But it wasn’t necessary for the codes to match up. They had to be close enough that they could decide on what experiments to run at what we referred to as the engineering mockup. I even brought a picture that you might see. This is what the—this was called ZPR-9. ZPR stands for Zero Power Reactor. The engineering mockup was assembled there. This would be a front face. The core of the reactor in FFTF is about three feet high, four feet in diameter. This represents the core and the shield. But, see, this was done at the engineering mockup near Chicago. Franklin: Oh, at Argonne. Daughtry: Yes, at Argonne. This was designed and built based on meetings between the people here at Hanford and the people at Argonne. They decided what experiments to do, and they designed it what they thought at the time that the FFTF would look like. Anyway, I just brought that to show, because you never see what the actual core of FFTF looks like, because—but this is the front face of a— The way this works is the engineering mockup was divided into two halves, and it was movable. So that when it was pulled apart, it would never go critical. It was only when it was brought together and the control rods moved out, it would become critical. But it never operated at power. It was called Zero Power Reactor. It never reacted at power. It was just an experimental facility. It was very important to the final design of the FFTF. Because by building an assembly that replicated what FFTF was going to look like, then they could run a whole series of experiments on it to predict what we would see when we ran the FFTF. Franklin: Okay. Backing up a little bit, what was—I guess, maybe enlarging the scope. What was the purpose of the FFTF and the breeder reactors, breeder reactor program? And how was it different from the other reactors at Hanford? Daughtry: Well, the Fast Flux Test Facility was built to test materials and fuel that were going to be used in the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor Program. Liquid metal, meaning sodium, which would be the coolant. And by fast reactor, it means that the neutrons’ fissions would occur while they were at high energy, rather than, in light water reactors they are allowed to, what they call, thermalize, to come to lower energies where the fission cross-sections were higher and the probabilities for fission are higher. But the breeder program, you probably know, it was intended to build a reactor that could convert depleted uranium into plutonium, and so it could make fuel as it burned fuel, and therefore it could extend the usefulness of the uranium supply by orders of magnitude. Franklin: Great. And so what kinds of—you mentioned your work at Argonne and the engineering mockup was critical to the success of the FFTF, which makes sense, right? Building this prototype would allow you to work out kinks. Were there any significant kinks or things that you figured out doing the mockup that changed the as-built of the FFTF? Daughtry: I’m not sure I can answer that. The design of the FFTF was not completely finalized during that time, so there were some changes made to the design of our experiments there as the design work proceeded. Again, with the design, final design was given to the advanced reactors division of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. They had their offices in Pittsburgh. But I mentioned that, not so much to highlight that aspect, but just to point out that when I came here to work, the first job that I had was to analyze the experiments that had been done in engineering mockup. And so the experiments were all done to support the final design, the planning for the startup and testing in the FFTF. So my first job there was analyzing the experiments that we had done back there. So that and then I came into an organization that was called the core physics group, and that was managed by, at that time, by Bob Bennett. The core engineering organization, which included him, and Wilbur Bunch who managed the shielding and criticality group, were all focused, pretty much, on planning for the startup. We were not involved, really, in the design of the plant. That was still under Westinghouse Electric’s responsibility. But we worked with the Department of Energy to design what we called a reactor characterization program, which was to determine the characteristics of FFTF. That was done during the acceptance testing program. We had a fairly extensive set of physics measurements that were done shortly after the reactor went critical for the first time. So, much of our work from ’73 up until the time that the plant first went critical had to do with the preparations for that, and also preparations for refueling after the plant started into normal operation. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what was the date that the FFTF went critical? Daughtry: I believe it was 1980 when it went critical. As a matter of fact, I have another little thing that I can show you about that. There was an announcement that I still—I kept a copy of that. Well, anyway. This was February the 9th, 1980. Franklin: Ah, February 9, 1980. Daughtry: You may have seen a—this has been shown before, a number of times. It shows the—it’s a diagram that was taken off of the charts in the control room. This shows the time of day, and this shows the neutron count rates in counts per second. And what it shows that at this time, when this line became straight, this is a logarithmic scale; it shows that the power level or the flux level is increasing exponentially. And you can even pick out from this the fact that it had increased by about a factor of ten in less than a minute. Franklin: Yeah. Daughtry: And so at this point in time, we confirmed that the reactor was critical, February the 9th, 1980, at about 3:46 in the afternoon. And then they inserted the control rods a little bit at this point and leveled it off at a higher power. This was still essentially at very low power. It was not at full power. We were just demonstrating that we could take the plant critical. Franklin: Oh, okay, interesting. Earlier when you said you worked in this reactor characterization program for the DOE to determine the characteristics of the reactor, the reactor design, I guess, then, was solidified, but maybe the plant design was still being worked out? Or how did this work with this reactor— Daughtry: No. As a new reactor, there was a fairly extensive acceptance test program. You had to verify that all of the plant was working the way it was supposed to work. Part of the acceptance test program was this reactor characterization program, which was primarily a physics program. We were measuring things like the neutron spectrum, the energy spectrum of the neutrons in the reactor, reaction rates of all—of various materials. Any materials that would be used, we would want to determine the rate at which the reactions would occur. And part of that would be the fission rate, the rate at which fissions would occur, and a wide range of fissionable material that was actually in the reactor fuel, but it could be in experiments that would be in the reactor fuel. So we would measure the gamma ray distribution, and the heating from gamma rays. This was done throughout—I mentioned to you that the size of the actual fueled region was only about three feet high and four feet in diameter. This was surrounded by a stainless steel reflector, they referred to it, and the fuel pins would have stainless steel above and below the fuel part. Franklin: And this was in the sample, or this was in the final reactor? Daughtry: This was in the actual reactor itself. And we had sample—special characterizer assemblies, that we’d call them, that were made that we could put the test pieces into, in order to make the measurements. Franklin: So then this is a much smaller reactor core than the plutonium production reactors. Daughtry: Yeah. It was— Franklin: Because B is massive. It’s a massive face. Daughtry: Yeah, this was operated at a thermal power of just 400 megawatts, whereas a full scale reactor might operate at 2,000 megawatts power, and then they would be generating electricity from that. So this was just a small version. But the fuel assemblies were similar in size to ones you would put into a full-scale reactor. Franklin: Okay. Daughtry: By “an assembly,” an assembly is a collection of pins that are held together and then put into the reactor core in one long, it’s referred to as a fuel assembly. Franklin: And then that was irradiated inside the core. Daughtry: Yes. Franklin: And then pulled out. Daughtry: Yes, now—yes. This particular, the Fast Flux Test Facility, was designed to test fuels and materials that would be used later on in the breeder reactor program. So it was intended not to have long operating power production cycles, but to have cycles that you could put a test in and run it for a period of time and then take it out and examine it. So there was a whole different organization from the operation organization that did that. Westinghouse Hanford Company had a fairly extensive program to do research on reactor fuel, reactor—oh, various types of stainless steel, materials that would be in there, and just see how they performed in the environment that you’d anticipate in a breeder reactor. Franklin: So this, then, was pretty kind of cutting-edge research for this program, but also very different from a lot of the other activity going on at Hanford. Daughtry: Well, yes, it was entirely different from the weapons program. So the FFTF was unique in that respect. I and many others never worked in the weapons program at all. We were all here because of our interest in the possibility of a breeder reactor program in our country. Franklin: Hmm. And so how—could you tell me a little more about the breeder reactor program? Is it still running, how long did it run for, what’s the status of that? Daughtry: Well, it was in full swing when FFTF was—when the decision was made to have that. There was great anticipations that we could build reactors that would breed fuel. And so the Department of Energy had some degree of enthusiasm. So they wanted to have a robust testing program. FFTF was the center of that testing program. There was other work, of course, going on at other national labs. At Argonne National Lab, in particular. But the Department of Energy, with obviously some probably politics involved, decided to build the FFTF here at Hanford. So it became an important step in the overall breeder program. Unfortunately, by the time the reactor started up and was ready to go into operation, the breeder program was not as enthusiastically supported by the administrations, for various concerns. They were concerned about nuclear proliferation and other issues. And eventually, I believe it was under the Carter administration, decided that they wanted to terminate the breeder program altogether. So by the time FFTF had been successfully demonstrated that it went critical, went to full power, that it could operate, and do what it was intended to do, its reason for being disappeared. Franklin: Ah. Daughtry: So there was quite a bit of effort, following that, to determine if there were other ways to use FFTF. To generate medical isotopes to support other missions and so a great deal of effort, after the breeder program was—well, there was a lot of hope that the breeder program could be resurrected. But they had to find some reason to continue to operate FFTF without the breeder program that it was intended to support. Franklin: Right. So its entire reason for being was gone before it was—really, before it started. Daughtry: Well, I’m not sure about the exact date now, when the breeder program was terminated, but certainly, it wasn’t long after the reactor started up and went into operation and began its design testing programs that the Department of Energy was looking for ways to cut back on the cost. So immediately, shortly after the initial power ascent, they tried to cut back on the staff out there, and our group, which was under Bob Bennett at the time, was split up into two parts. One part stayed out at the plant to help, actually, it was necessary for fuel management, to determine, to plan the fuel loading for each cycle. And then the other group went back into what would be the Hanford Engineering Organization to be involved in other activities. However, it wasn’t long before we were asked again to do analyses for FFTF to support alternative missions, to estimate how much tritium we could produce, how much plutonium-238, how much of other materials, how much medical isotopes. So there was a lot of work of that nature that was done after the plant had gotten into full power. I might mention, I did—you know, achieving criticality was a major step, and it was something that everybody who had been involved in it wanted to be here when it happened. I brought this picture because it says—this was just a picture of the plant. But all around it is the signatures of everybody who was present at the time when it actually did go critical. At that time, the president of Westinghouse Hanford Company was John Yasinsky, and you’ll find his signature is up near the top there. And the project manager was John Nolan, who later became president of Westinghouse Hanford. Franklin: Yep, I see his signature. And I see Bob Bennett. Daughtry: There. Franklin: Yeah. Daughtry: So anyway, all of those people were here. Which reminds me that the day before this occurred, the project organization wanted to make sure that indeed the plant went critical, because all of these people were going to be here. So they’d have been very embarrassed if we’d pulled out the control rods and the plant wasn’t critical. Franklin: Right, right. Daughtry: So I remember the day before, we had a meeting. And my group was responsible for projecting criticality. And as we met there with the operations organization, I remember—I don’t remember who all was there at the time—but I remember the question came up, they said, well, we have, I think, 58 assemblies in the core now; should we proceed with withdrawal of the control rods? And I remember saying, no, we need to add one more assembly. So we added, I think it was the 59th assembly. And then the next day, they pulled out the control rods, and sure enough, the reactor went critical, and of course, everybody was there and everybody applauded and I believe they may have passed around a bottle of champagne. I don’t know; I didn’t get any. But anyway, it was a big deal, because it had been started back in the mid-‘60s, and this was 1980. So you see a lot of time, a lot of effort had gone into it and of course the cost estimates had gone up and all of that. Franklin: And you yourself had at this point—you weren’t there from the beginning-beginning, but you had been working on this thing for seven-plus years. Daughtry: Since 1973, yes. And actually a little before that, since I was working on the critical experiments before I came here. Franklin: Right. Daughtry: So, yeah, I spent almost all of my career after graduate school working on the FFTF. Franklin: Wow. Daughtry: And how long did the FFTF run its various research missions? Daughtry: I don’t remember the exact dates. But it ran through several operating cycles in which many tests were irradiated. I cannot tell you when it was—when the decision was made to shut it down and not operate anymore. It would’ve been in the—I think it would’ve been in the mid-to-late-1980s. I don’t remember the exact date. Franklin: Okay, yeah. You had mentioned other ways—other alternate missions for the FFTF, other ways to use the reactor. Were some more successful than others? Daughtry: Well, none were completely successful. I’m sure what the Department of Energy would be looking at would be, it takes so much money to actually operate the reactor. You have all the operating crews, you have the security, you have safety organizations, quality assurance organizations. So you have a large number of people and you could squeeze it down only so far and still operate safely. So that cost a designated amount of money. So what the Department of Energy would look at is, how can I get a return comparable to the cost from some other mission? So they looked at a lot of different possibilities. But none of them came up to the point where they said that either this or any combination of these missions put together did they feel would justify the cost of continuing operation. I was not in that aspect of it. But that’s just my take on it, that it came down to dollars and cents. Franklin: As many things do. Especially in the world of the federal government. So then it really was designed, then, for its original mission. Daughtry: Oh, sure. Franklin: Which it never really fulfilled. Daughtry: And it was not intended to run forever anyway. But it was intended to operate for a long time, because they anticipated a continued testing program that—and to follow up to this was to be the Clinch River reactor in Tennessee. That’s when that was canceled and then the breeder program was canceled. As successful as FFTF was, it still didn’t have, any longer, reason for being. The experience was really great. The personnel that operated the plant were extremely capable, extremely—they set an amazing record. And I felt that the people I worked with here were just top-notch. I was pleased. I’ve heard many people in the management realm complain about not being able to get good workers, skilled workers. That was never my experience. The people that worked in my organization were just exceptional. And that was true of most of the people involved in the FFTF program. Franklin: Great. Did the FFTF influence any other reactors, either in the United States or worldwide? Daughtry: Well I think, Japan had their own test reactor, and I believe they—well, I know that they had some experiments in the FFTF, and were interested in the results of those experiments. They had continued on, and their breeder reactor program was not terminated at the same time ours was. It eventually was, but theirs had extended on quite a few years beyond our program. And I’m thinking that some of us who were involved in the startup and testing at FFTF went over to Germany to talk to people there who were planning to start up a similar test reactor to the FFTF. Unfortunately, they didn’t ever start up. They got very close. They brought the fuel in, they built the entire reactor, and they brought the fuel in. But I think the state, one of the organizations there, never gave the approval to operate it. And so it was never done, never operated in Germany. So there was interest around the world. Russia went further than we did in liquid metal—the breeder programs. And I’m not abreast of what they have operating now, but they did build probably the equivalent of our Clinch River plant and then maybe even beyond that. Franklin: Mm. What did you think of Richland when you arrived here in the early ‘70s? Daughtry: Okay. Well, I had grown up and spent most of my early years and education and all in the eastern part of the US. So when I came out here, my family and I arrived by car, I believe July the 1st. And we didn’t have a home, so we had to look for a home. But the temperature that day was over 100. We were fortunate they let us stay in the Hanford House while we were waiting. We did finally, after the first week, found a home, which we purchased, but couldn’t move into until the end of July. So we stayed at the Hanford House for almost 30 days. And outside of the Hanford House, I believe the bank had a sign out there that would have the temperature on it. Of the first 30 days, 15 of them were over 100. So that was our introduction to Richland and to Hanford, and to the Tri-Cities. It was quite a change, quite a change from what we were used to. But it’s all behind us now and after 1973 to now, that must be something like 44 years? We thought this is a, really an easy place to live. Franklin: And did you purchase a house in Richland? Daughtry: We did. We purchased a house in Richland. Franklin: So you lived in Richland. Daughtry: We did for 20 years, and we then later built a home out in Benton County where we live now. So we lived in Richland in 20 years, and we’ve lived where we are living now for 24 years. So we have, I guess, about 44 years in the Tri-Cities. Franklin: Sure. How has Richland changed from when you moved here in the ‘70s to now? Daughtry: Oh, well, not just Richland, but I believe at the time, I’m pretty sure Richland was larger than Pasco, and Pasco has grown. West Richland was almost nothing, but now West Richland has boomed. The Tri-Cities as a whole have changed more than Richland itself. The whole area has just—has thrived over the years. But it’s still a comfortable place to live. Franklin: Sure. Were there any—considering you had worked for different national labs in the field of nuclear technologies since getting your degree, was there any—you kind of were, maybe more indirectly, I guess you could say, involved in the Cold War, or directly involved in technologies that played a vital role in the Cold War. Did you feel connected to that conflict at all in any way, or did you feel any anxiety about living next to a place of weapons production during the Cold War? Daughtry: No, I did not. I was aware of what was going on, and I was aware of what happened at Chernobyl. I was aware of what was happening here at Hanford as far as weapons production. But I was focused on our mission, and that consumed my time and I was never uneasy about living where I was living. But, no, I never ended up working in the weapons program at all. After FFTF was shut down, I spent a short period of time involved in some of the calculations, criticality-related calculations, for the cleanup effort. But that was a small part of my career; most of it was with the FFTF over those years. Franklin: Speaking of Chernobyl, how did—I’m wondering if you could give me your impression on how that incident kind of reverberated in this community? Daughtry: Well, I think one of the first concerns that people worried about around the country was the N Reactor was a graphite-moderated reactor and Chernobyl was, too. So people wanted to compare it. But there was significant differences. And again, I wasn’t involved in that, so I could not tell you what exactly the differences were. But people argued that, no, no, no, the N Reactor was not like Chernobyl. But other people around the country were not so convinced. And ultimately, of course, that was shut down as well. But we hated to see Chernobyl happen because any major accident anywhere in the world affects everybody else in the industry. So we hated to see an accident anywhere. That was, unfortunately, a very serious one. Franklin: Yeah. Probably the worst manmade nuclear accident—Fukushima is the result of a tidal wave, and so, nature— Daughtry: Yeah, tsunami and a tidal wave. Franklin: Nature played more of a role there. So, okay. Thank you. When did you retire from Hanford? Daughtry: As I recall, it was December of 1994. So I had that—I’d worked for Westinghouse about 21 years. I think, if I recall, it was the next fall that Westinghouse, essentially left and Fluor took over operation here at Hanford. So all of my time here at Hanford was with Westinghouse. Franklin: What drove your decision to retire? Daughtry: Well, I don’t know. It was a bad—it was not as healthy a time. It seems like there was so much effort to reduce cost. And the cleanup program had not, seems like, gotten the support that it got later on. And the FFTF had been shut down. There were other things that we could do and other things that we did do, but—I think because of the Department of Energy were putting pressure on Westinghouse to cut back staff, they offered early retirement incentives. I looked at the opportunities and what there was left of interesting work to be done, and I just decided to take the early retirement opportunity. Franklin: What I’m getting is kind of a picture of a kind of a rudderless era, maybe, in some ways, compared to the production period. Daughtry: Well, yes. That was really a time of great enthusiasm when we had this mission and we had a goal. So many times, you’ll see government projects start and go a while and then stop and never be completed. For example, there was the superconducting supercollider. It was to be built in Texas. And it was funded and it was approved. But then eventually, probably due to financial issues again, it was terminated. So you see so many projects that start and don’t make it, but we saw it. We didn’t see the breeder program, but we saw a reactor whose concepts were first developed in the mid-‘60s. They went all the way to completion. The reactor was built, it was operated successfully, and to see something really successful is really a good part of a career to see that sort of thing happen. After that, of course there was other work, and there was the cleanup program. But I never saw anything here that engendered the same level of enthusiasm that the FFTF did. Perhaps there were that I was just not aware of. But I was happy that I had the opportunity to work there when I did. Franklin: Right. What did your wife do while you worked out at the FFTF? Daughtry: My wife has a degree in physics as well. Franklin: Oh! Daughtry: An undergraduate degree. But she came here, and we had, at that time, two children. So her goal was to make sure those children were raised properly. As time went on, she became quite interested in gardening and decided, as the children got older, that she’d join the Master Gardener program here in the Tri-Cities. So she actually worked with that for, I believe, over 35 years, she was involved in the Master Gardener program. She assisted the program director, Marianne Ophart. So that was a great fulfilment for her. She found a real place where she felt like she could contribute, and she did. Franklin: Oh, wow. Great. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Daughtry: Well, that then goes back mostly to the work that went on here that I was not involved in. I think you need somebody else to answer that question. The Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States led to a series of burst of activity here at Hanford. They felt like that they needed to make more weapons periodically. So Hanford did its share. And of course we’re paying much of the price for that now, because we have the remnants to be cleaned up. That’s taking much longer than anyone might have anticipated. But at the time they were producing plutonium here, that wasn’t the major concern. A major concern was that there was a competition between the Soviet Union and the US. But that’s a whole different area, and that’s not my—that was not my involvement, where I was involved. Franklin: Sure. Let me rephrase that question, maybe tailor it better to you. What would you like future generations to know about working on the FFTF and the breeder reactor program? Daughtry: Well, I think future generations should remember that there is a concept that has been proven, that we could generate electricity, and we could—we do have, in the form of uranium, a fuel that could last for a long, long time. It doesn’t produce greenhouse gases. So it’s there, and it hasn’t gone away. The fact that we’re not following right now doesn’t mean that it won’t be followed sometime in the future. But I believe that FFTF served its purpose then. It might have accomplished a great deal more than it actually did. But the breeder program is something that was not just a pie-in-the-sky; it was real. And it’s still a possibility, and perhaps we’ll have to just see what the future holds. Whether that will ever resurrect itself remains to be seen. Franklin: Great. Is there anything that we haven’t discussed that you’d like to talk about today? Daughtry: Not that I—I think we’ve sort of covered the issues, covered the things. I just hope, you know, what I’ve been able to pass on to you is somehow helpful. Franklin: I think it is. Thank you very much, Jim, I really appreciate it. Daughtry: Yeah, appreciate it. Franklin: Your photos, would we be able to make digital copies of those and place them with your interview? Daughtry: Sure. They’re easily—I think they would be available. Franklin: Great. So if you don’t mind, what I’ll do is I’ll take those with me and I’ll make digital copies, and when we process your interview in a couple weeks and make a DVD out of it, we’ll slip these in the mail along with the DVD. Daughtry: I think those are the ones that I mentioned to you. Franklin: Okay, great. Is there any others that you think are of historical significance that you’d like to have with your interview? Daughtry: This is the first ascent to full power. Franklin: Oh, okay. Daughtry: And it went up step by step. There was also—I don’t know, does that show there was a bunch of signatures around there as well? Franklin: Yeah. Daughtry: So it’s a similar thing, that people wanted to be there the first time the reactor got up to its designed operating power, full power. And by that time, it could be that John Nolan may have been taken over as president of Westinghouse Hanford. I’m not sure of the exact time. But it’s a similar sort of thing. Achieving criticality was one major step, but another major step was when the reactor actually reached full power for the first time. Franklin: Great. Wow. This is great. Thank you so much, Jim. Put these in my folder here, and I’ll put these in a nice protective envelope when we mail them back to you— Daughtry: Okay. Franklin: So they don’t get all beat up. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate— Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:52:47 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jim Daughtry Subject The topic of the resource Fast Flux Test Facility (Wash.) Westinghouse Hanford Company Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Jim Daughtry came to the Hanford Site to work at the Fast Flux Test Facility. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 4/4/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4a35f372f4b52570ee849e45d2d5926a.JPG cffa87237eafbc5227c6dc8eb9c913cc https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fd244e6972247b281ea3b84e454b5d96e.mp4 67e666aad21ba00e26e7fb583d01d4b9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Criswell Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an interview—an oral history interview with Dave Criswell on July 20, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave Criswell about his experiences growing up in the Tri-Cities and working at the Hanford Site. So, Dave, the best place to start, I think, is the beginning. Where—why don’t you tell me when and where you were born. David Criswell: Born in Portland, Oregon. [SIGH] I guess there’s nothing wrong with 1937. We moved to the Tri-Cities the first time, Dad and I drove up here after midnight, January 1st, 1948. We only lived in Pasco for all of ’48 and part of ’49, and then we moved up to Hungry Horse, Montana. We returned here in spring/summer of 1953. I entered Pasco High School as a junior. The school was brand new that year. They’d just opened the doors for us. So I graduated in 1955. I don’t recall how I ended up being selected as part of a program to become an engineering assistant, was the program, in 1955. They were conducting night classes that we had to take. At the same time, during the day, we would work in the labs out at Hanford in different labs. I started off, because I wasn’t 18 yet—my birthday didn’t come until October; I got hired in September. So 17-year-olds couldn’t work on the Hanford Project. So, Richland, being a government town, and DOE ran everything, including the city library, there was myself and a couple, three other 17-year-olds went to work in the library until we were old enough. And then we were assigned to labs out at Hanford. I was assigned to a chemistry lab in 325 Building. We were separating radioisotopes, from I know not where, to see how efficient the process was that they were using for separation out there. I can’t even remember the names of some of the materials that we were separating. The one that I can remember is ruthenium, I think it was. But day in, day out, taking samples and running them, cooking them down, putting them on filter papers, and then that would go to a lab for reading. Some point in time within first year or so I worked, I was transferred out to 222-S, another chemistry lab, doing the same thing. I suspect that maybe whatever I was running the analysis on was a little fresher than the stuff we had in 325 Building. It must’ve come from right there in the 200 Area. But the same thing. The only thing that—real memory that I had was when I graduated from high school, I wasn’t—I didn’t have—I wasn’t as tall as I am now. I graduated at 5’7.5”. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And weighed 135 pounds. Went to work out there in September of that same year, ’55, and I was 6’0” and weighed 135. Tired. Man, I was tired. I don’t even know if I ate when I got home, I was so tired. Going to bed was the most interesting thing I had. But at some point in time, in the period of time that I was working at 222-S, apparently had another growth spurt. Because every day you could drive out to the gate of 2-West and then you go through the badge house. And you would then climb on a bus that would take you to whatever events inside of 200 West you were going to. We were going to S, so that’s where we went. And one day, I got off the bus and something knocked me to my knees, and I fell out of the bus. I brought a box with me, and in that is a report that said that they thought maybe I was inattentive, that I had hit my head on the bus, and fallen on the ground. Well, it didn’t dawn on me until years later, maybe even when I read that doggone memo, that the reason I hit my head is I’d had a growth spurt, and all of the sudden I was too tall to go through that bus door without hitting my head. Co-worker said I didn’t throw a shadow on a sunny day, I was so skinny. And ended up being about 6’4” at some point in time early on. Uh— Franklin: Oh, sorry. Criswell: I could not get a hang of chemistry. The night school was difficult for me. I hired a tutor to try and help me; I still couldn’t get the hang of it. They determined I probably wasn’t going to work out in a chemistry lab. And they transferred me into tech informations in 300 Area. If you’re not familiar with that old building, that was the one just inside the south gate of the 300 Area on the west side of the road. That had the plant’s library; across the hall, it had the security files. Documents were stored over there. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Basically, I was putting books on a shelf. I also had the job of traveling all over Hanford. When somebody would have a safety meeting, they would occasionally call us and ask us to bring a film that they had heard about, or asked if we had a film that they hadn’t seen. So, I traveled all over. Franklin: So kind of like a AV, audio-visual, tech? Criswell: Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. Only, I was using 16-milimeter projector. Old-fashioned stuff. I don’t even know if you could find one of them today. Franklin: Oh, we actually—our declassified—not declassifying, but getting ready for public release, some of the materials in the Hanford Collection, and we had to purchase a 16-milimeter projector to view some of the old movies. Which could possibly be some of the old movies that you showed. There’s some about safety, and there’s some of the promotional ones produced for Hanford. Criswell: We had some Walt Disney flicks. We had one that—Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. I think that was The Ventriloquist. Franklin: So, wait, so, these weren’t—these were like movies and shows? Criswell: Some of them were. They were movies. They dealt with safety things. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: They dealt with security, with reinforcing the security, you know, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I learned early on in the early days if the film broke, I had to take it downtown to a little Quonset hut behind the old Federal Building and they had plant photographers down there. There was a photographer down there that knew how to splice the films. Anyhow, they determined if I was going to keep coming down there, that I needed to have the equipment to repair those things and keep the stuff going and they wouldn’t have me running downtown all the time. So I ended up learning how to do that and take care of my own films. I did that for a couple, about two-and-a-half years. And someplace about 1958 I guess, I ended up being offered a job. I had a coworker that he was married, he had kids, and both of us were offered the job. I wasn’t—I didn’t have the expenses he had. And I told our manager—we were both in there at the same time—told our manager that he had to take a job, and I could wait for the next one that came along. And he said, no, you don’t understand; there’s two jobs. The metallography lab needs a tech in 326 Building and they also need a tech down in 306 Building. So both of us got a job about the same time, transferred out. The other tech’s name was somebody by the name of Ray Beauchamp. And he ended up, a lot of his photography work in metallography ended up being in national competition. And he won a number of awards. He also had the privilege of polishing moon rocks that came back from one of the moon trips. I think that’s probably on display out at one of the Battelle buildings out there, even today, I would guess it’s still there. But he had a lot of notoriety. And I worked inside the fence. I was working on materials that were of nuclear nature before they went into the reactor. And then you end up with things being even more irradiated; you had higher dose rates on the stuff that came out. The work that I did in the lab in 306 Building was to see what the material looked like before it went in the reactor. It was a base study, basically. And then when they came out of the reactor, they took it to another facility in the 300 Area called 327 Building, Radio Met—radio metallography. And they cut up the slugs that they got out of the reactor and they looked at the integrity of the cladding on the different types of slugs they were getting out of there. They’d section them, pass the sections into the next cell. They’d sand on them, pass them into the next cell. They’d sand them down even more, ultimately getting a mirror finish polish on them, then they could put them onto the cell that the metallographs, old photograph metallographs. The technicians that worked over there, I was amazed at what they were able to do with everything that was being handled by manipulators inside of two feet of them, or four feet. I don’t know how thick those walls were, but it was amazing what they could do. I was doing the same thing, hands-on. It took me a while to learn how to put a polish on there that I could photograph without having scratches. [LAUGHTER] That was the secret. You also couldn’t round it off; you had to have it essentially flat. The higher the magnification goes, the flatter it has to be; otherwise, you don’t get very much in focus. So I worked there until, let’s see, I guess that would’ve been August of 1961. I took a vacation and I took a honeymoon at the same point in time, and when I came back, I had a new job. That job just kind of morphed into the job I retired from. It was a materials testing facility down in the 314 Building. Again, in the material that we were using there, it was all cold, new materials that they were going to be using in reactors. Their concern was, how far could a crack grow before it became critical and it went full-length? If this happened, then, essentially the reactor was done, you know. So they wanted to know how big a crack could it grow before—and the water would then be coming out, how much water would they lose before they could determine that they had to shut it down, pull that part out, replace it? They wanted to know what kind of a warning sign they were going to get. Franklin: And this was for the fuel slug that would go in? Criswell: No, because you’re not running water through the fuel slug, per se. It’s not going to leak. You’re talking about process tubes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: Probably the first—I don’t know if we did anything on the K Reactor; I think that was in another facility. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I know there was another facility that was testing graphite. But K Reactor and N Reactor, those two had process tubes that they put the slugs into. They were both water-cooled. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: So they wanted to know if they were going to be able to determine when things were getting anywhere near the critical point, and they could shut it down, pull the process tube, and then start it up again. We also developed inspection probes for the reactor in 300 Area, what they referred to as PRTR. Let’s see, Plutonium Recycling Test Reactor. And here, again, they wanted to know from our inspections, what we could determine as far as wear and tear on the process tubes. So, we were actually sitting right on the faceplate of the reactor, with the access port open, running our inspection probes down. One had a camera that took 16-millimeter images of what we determined was down there. And the other one was an inspection probe that sensed the space between the process tube and another tube. And I didn’t really understand all of the process in PRTR. Anyhow, at that point in time, my wife and I had at least one child, and I don’t remember exactly what the date was, but I came to work on a Monday morning and was told to report to PRTR. I was amongst the first that they suited up. Over the weekend, a test that had been in the reactor failed. And in turn, that test caused damage to the two tubes that the test was inside of. Damaged those, and water was released and it went right down into the very lowest level of that reactor, the bottom shield. And they dressed us up, put all kinds of monitoring equipment on us. Anyhow, went through what looked almost a porthole in a sub, and it was only probably about four feet high, to go through. Gave us a mop and a bucket and told us, one at a time, we were in there mopping up as much as we could in 20 seconds, and we had to be out of there. I have no idea to date what my dose was on that. Anyhow, I spent two more days over there, but never went back down there. They determined we had too much dose and we were sent back to our labs. That was the end of PRTR. They never did bring that thing back up for operation again, as far as I know. Franklin: How long did it operate, do you know? Criswell: I got married in August of ’61. And got a letter from President Kennedy in October of ’61. Had to report to Fort Lewis the day after Thanksgiving in ’61. I got out in August 1st of ’62. Reported back to Hanford, and when I got back there, we were building the inspection probes to inspect. So, I don’t know if PRTR was operating at that point in time. It might’ve been close to that point in time. And anyhow we finished it up, and we probably spent maybe three or four outages where they’d—every time they’d have an outage where they’d pull fuels out or do something or whatever, then they’d give us two or three days to go in and inspect. It was twelve on, twelve off for us, for the techs. And they had the top shield had two rings that they could rotate. By rotation of the two rings, they could get us to the center and to the outer of all the process tubes. The inner ring would actually rotate and go all the way to the outside and all the way to the inside. The outer ring would rotate around, so they could—they’d set it up for us and they’d have the thing open for us when we got there, and we’d just start running stuff. Anyhow. Franklin: What did you go to Fort Lewis to do? Criswell: In 1961, Jack Kennedy was having problems with Russia and the Cubans. We were also involved in the Vietnam War at that point in time. My service dates include the Vietnam process, but I had nothing to do with that. We didn’t really know what the heck was going on. There was more secret over there that, what was going on, that we just didn’t understand. One of the strange things was that I got assigned to an amphibious truck outfit out of California. Know what the DUKW is, it’s a floating deuce-and-a-half truck. You can sink it with an M-1. Just fire at the waterline, it’s going to sink. [LAUGHTER] When I got over there, the day after Thanksgiving, there was nobody there to receive us; we spent Friday, Saturday, Sunday sitting around in a bunkhouse, essentially, waiting for somebody to show up. Finally, Monday, we started getting processed. But the strange thing was, after things got up and operational—I was the only one that had ever worked at Hanford. They gave me the job of explaining how to avoid radiation. I found it really strange. Here I am, a Spec/2, an E4, and I’m giving a lecture on how to avoid radiation. Basically, if you’d double your distance from your source, you divide the radiation exposure by four. That was a real handy thing, if you just get yourself as far away as you can in the shortest period of time. That was the message we had to give everybody. Our company was picking up duffel bags and equipment from other companies that had been brought in. We were loading them onto a MATS aircraft over at McChord Air Force Base, loading a great big aircraft with all kinds of stuff. Anyhow, we never saw the troops get on them when we were loading their material. Strange thing was, in July of ’62, we were told we’d be going home August 1st. And no explanation. Nothing. We still didn’t know why we were there, outside of we were loading troops onto airplanes to go to Berlin. Anyhow, much later, I had a friend who was a mess sergeant, and at that point in time, he worked—when he wasn’t in the military, he worked as a tech for Bell Telephone. He quit that job and he went to a company, Collins Electronics, down in Texas. Next thing I know, he’s in Vietnam installing new avionics in military aircraft. And I found out later, he was all over the world installing new communication electronics. Ultimately, he’s got plaques on his walls referring to him as Colonel—I’ll stop the last name—Colonel. Anyhow, he told me, good grief, that had to have been in ’71, ’72, nine, ten years later. He said, do you know what you were over there for? I said, no, not really. Basically what it was is the Russians had been in the habit of rotating a division into East Berlin, or East Germany, and the old one would go home. In ’61, they rotated a second—no, good grief, mind block—rotated another group in there and didn’t send one home. So now they got two. At the same time, the Russians are moving missiles into Cuba. Jack Kennedy, if he was still alive, you wouldn’t want to play poker against the man. What I found out, and I don’t know what the date was, but I have in the past ten years, I have seen confirmation of what I was told about three different times, different people. Some of them were military talking to our news people. But Jack Kennedy, I think it’s a little jet, I think it’s a B-47, a little—actually two pod jets hanging from the wing, small jet engines hanging from the wing. They got one sitting in the tarmac in front of Boeing Museum of Flight in Seattle. We had well over a thousand of those things. The term I was told was thousands. You can see pictures of those things lined up in the desert down in Arizona. They’re waiting to become beer cans. Jack Kennedy ordered all those things loaded up and he sent them all to Russia. I may be in trouble for this, but it’s a story that not very many people have heard. But it’s true. It happened. He sent them all up. Plus, they knew that all of our subs, basically, they didn’t know exactly where they were, but they knew we had them, they knew the numbers. And they knew that our missiles were capable of making the trip. They could actually see all of the jets headed there. They knew they could take out a lot of them, but they knew they couldn’t take all of them out. They knew they were going to get hit, and they were going to get hit hard. The Russian leadership blinked. They got on the phone and they called Kennedy and they told him, you turn those planes around. Turn them around now, and we’ll pull out of Cuba. We’ll take the division out of Germany. Things will go back to the way they were. And they did. And August 1st, we went home. But never a word as to why we were there; never a word as to what the heck was happening when they released those planes. I didn’t know why I was asked to tell people how to avoid radiation. Didn’t have a clue. So, came home, went back to work, and same organization, group, I was with when I left. That was still GE. I was still with GE. Franklin: So were you—when you got pulled to Lewis, were you in the Guard? Criswell: No, I was active Army. Franklin: Oh, you were active Army. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. But the whole time you were active Army you were stationed at— Criswell: I could’ve been there until August 1st or if the Russians didn’t call Kennedy, I probably wasn’t coming home. Franklin: Right. Had you—so were you in the Army before you got called up to— Criswell: Yeah, I’d spent six years in National Guard. Franklin: Okay, all right. Criswell: Pasco National Guard. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: When my six years were up, which was probably about April of ’61—I think someone was unhappy with me leaving, and they put my name in there. Strange thing is, at the point that I got released from the Pasco National Guard, they were an amphibious truck outfit. So my MOS was a key personnel as a filler for an amphibious truck company from California. It made sense why I ended up there. I mean, quotation marks around my name. It had to stand out, you know? I don’t know how many of us there were nationally. I don’t think there were that many of us. I think there was truck drivers that were pulled in to help fill, mechanics to help in the shop, what-have-you. I was one of the few people that came in, I think, that knew anything about an amphibious truck. You know, how you have to take care of it and what-have-you. It was interesting time, but I’m glad, maybe, they didn’t tell us what the heck was going on, because then, you know, I think it would’ve put a whole new light on why we were there, and something for us to really worry about, I think. They basically kept us like a bunch of mushrooms. [LAUGHTER] So definitely kept us in the dark. But anyhow, once back here, went back to work for the same company, the same actual group. They had developed or were in the process of putting together the probes to inspect the reactors. That just morphed into all kinds of different things over the years. One of the engineers that came to work, he was new, he was hired from Boeing, he was interested in fatigue cycling. Franklin: What is that? Criswell: Cycling is, there’s thermal cycling—the reactor heats up, it cools off when they shut it down for a period, heats up, cools down, and you’re talking about a lot of heat. You’ve got mechanical cycling where you have load changes. Everything that’s built probably has a fatigue starter in it someplace. Either something in the manufacturing, in a casting, in the machining. Things happen when you’re making parts. They wanted here, again, to see how long—we actually put together a system where we were fatiguing process tubes that had a little slot machine partway through it. Then we had to put endcaps on it. Then we had to pressure cycle each thing. Something like the reactor. You got water pressure going through there, and then they shut it down. We were doing this cold. And ultimately, the crack would grow. And the first problem we ran into is the crack was growing, but then it was leaking. The crack didn’t go all the way through, initially, but once it got growing, it went all the way through. So we were having oil squirting out every which way, on this end was oil. And we could pressure to, I think, 2,000 psi is what this machine could do. We weren’t getting that high. So we had to come up with a way of keeping it from—keeping the oil. So we figured out a way to patch the inside of it with a thin piece of material, yet it was flexible enough that it wouldn’t hurt the integrity of the load cycling. Ultimately, we figured out how to make this thing grow until it blew. And then, I mean, you had gallons of oil all over. After the first one, where it was just squirting like that, then we have to have it turned toward the measuring device which is optical. When it blew, I’m on one side of what we’re doing, and the engineers are on the other side. Anyhow, they didn’t know how to turn the thing off. It had a second part to the system that would replenish the oil that it was losing to expansion. It was an air-operated pump that would just put more fluid in there. Anyhow, they couldn’t turn it off, and I had to duck underneath the stream to get around. Then I had to mop up all the oil. So the next thing was to come up with a hood that we could do the test in that had a glass that we could look through, but when it blew, the oil would just drain back into a bottle. Instead of—oh, I had a mess in that basement. I had to clean it up. That was one of the tech’s jobs. Well, ultimately, ended up the company that made that first piece of equipment, electronics, the machine that would cycle the oil pressure, was an MTS corporation out of Minneapolis. And we ended up with a lab in the basement at 326 Building, we had ten different machines that went—one machine, I built. It was a 1,000-pound machine. And we had machines, the rest of them, MTS built, and they went up to a half-million pounds. Some were 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000-pound machines. The whole idea of all these machines was to take a chunk of metal that they were planning on using in the reactor or find out which one they could use in building the reactor. They would fatigue it, and they’d fatigue it different speeds, they’d fatigue at different temperatures, and different environments. Replicating what environment the part might see if it was being used in a reactor. So ultimately, we ended up having to send a whole bunch of polished specimens just like the ones we were testing in 326 Lab to the reactor. I had to polish all of these things, and we’d put them in a stack, and we had to separate them so we could keep the fluid flowing between them to keep them cool, and we sent them over to a reactor. They would irradiate these for a period of time until they got a certain exposure rate, then they’d send them back. We’d take the top off, we’d extract certain specimens out of there, and then we’d put new ones back in, and then we’d send—it was, you know, just constantly. But then we had a collection of irradiated materials so that we could compare the radiation damage to the same materials as we were testing in the labs. This allowed them to get a good idea of what they could expect for the mechanical integrity of the material once it was irradiated by the reactor. Franklin: And what kind of material was this again? So this wasn’t fuel, this was— Criswell: No, this was structural material. Franklin: Okay, so, like a process tube? Criswell: Maybe a hanger that held up pipes, or maybe it’s the support for the reactor vessel. I don’t know what parts they were looking at; I have no clue. I just know that we went through maybe a couple dozen different types of materials. There’s 314 stainless; I remember that. 316 stainless. Maybe there was, there’s Hastelloys and Inconels. They refer to them as superalloys. These are all high temperature materials that are designed to operate at high temperatures. Franklin: Was there anything—did you come across anything surprising in the tests? Anything that was unexpected? Criswell: I just ran the tests. Franklin: Right. Criswell: I’m the one that—in doing the fatigue cycling, you’d cycle it, to begin with, a large number of cycles, maybe 20,000 cycles. It might run a week, and then I’d open up the—turn things off, open up the furnace door, put a microscope in there and measure how far the crack had grown. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: And the idea was to get about a twenty-thousandth—twenty-thousandths—0.020 of growth. As it would begin to grow longer and longer, then the fatigue cycle would become shorter and shorter. So finally, I’m down to where I’m measuring these things a couple, three times a day. And every time I’d open up, maybe this doggone thing is running at 1200 degrees F. And I open it up; I’ve got to get in there and measure that thing. And my eyes, I mean, I don’t know what—numerous times a day, I’m opening this thing up, and I’m putting a microscope in the furnace door, and I’m measuring how long that crack is, get the furnace door closed, get it back up to temperature and start the cycling again. And I did this—oh, good grief—probably from 1965, and I was still doing fatigue cycling to the day I retired in 1999. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: Some of it, with GE and Battelle, in the early days, and Westinghouse—Westinghouse, we basically fixated on the structural materials. Battelle, when I worked two times with them, they had a different charter that they worked under. The government allowed them to test materials for small companies that had questions about what they were doing. That was probably more interesting than when I was working for Westinghouse, because Westinghouse, day in, day out, everything was the same. The only thing different was when they finally got the materials back from the reactors and they sent me over to 324 Building and we set things up in there to start running tests on their irradiated material. There was problems in that process. You’re looking through four feet of leaded glass at a test frame that’s probably two, three feet from the glass. I guess the only thing that made things work is, with my height I’m able to get up—at the top, the lead glass is tilted. It’s not vertical; it’s tilted looking through the cell wall. I’m having to look down through there to get as vertical a sight on the crack that’s growing as I can. Otherwise, every plane of glass in that window—that’s not a single pane; it’s multi-paned—would give me a little bit of—it would-- Franklin: It would bend the image, right? Criswell: It would distort the image. Franklin: Because of refraction. Criswell: Yeah, refraction or—I wasn’t getting a clear image. And that was, oh man, just a real learning process. The whole idea of the polishing before they went into the reactor and became irradiated—I put a mirror finish on them. The last polishing that I did had to be vertical to the crack’s growth across it. The idea being that when you opened the thing up, and you shined a light down from the top, the image that you’re looking at is black. You don’t see the light. But if there’s a crack growing, then the crack would show up as a white line. You can measure from the initiating point, there’s a machined notch in the specimen, so you measure from here to the crack tip. We did this for a couple, three years, over a 324 Building. For whatever reason, I guess money ran out, for that program. Battelle is a little more interesting. I was able to run tests on aircraft parts, ship—One of the problems, going clear back—not that I had anything to do with Liberty ships, but if you remember clear back in the early ‘40s, they were sending ships out that they were making as rapidly as they could for the Second World War. They’d run into the North Sea, and all of the sudden, the ship is floating—what’s left of it is floating in two halves until they sank. They rapidly developed a test called a nil-ductility drop-weight. They determined that the problem was in the structural material of the ship and the weld material that they were using to weld the plates together with. Strangely enough, my dad worked during the Second World War part-time—well, actually he had two jobs. One with Bonneville Power and one eh worked for a period of time for a shipyard in downtown Portland, and he was of small enough stature, they were sending him in between a double hull of a ship to weld. I don’t know if he was working on Liberty ships or what. But anyhow, the nil-ductility test, they would weld with a very brittle weld material. About a two-inch bead on top of a plate and then we’d cut a notch in that. And then you could, at different temperature, drop a given weight a given distance, so that you have how many foot-pounds you hit it with. If it didn’t break, that was fine. So you make things get colder until it breaks all—I think just the one side; that was a break. Some of them would break part-way across; that wasn’t a break. If the break arrested itself, fine. But if it would go all the way across, then that was a failure. So you’d end up going back to where you keep dividing things in half on the temperature until you found out where it would break and where it wouldn’t break. And then the temperature it wouldn’t break was nil-ductility. But I did run tests on ice breaker, I think it was the Polar Star, I think is the one, we said, a big chunk of this Polar Star, my gosh, that thing’s thick. The idea is that they would ride up on the—they didn’t cut and break it; they would ride up on it, and the weight of the ship would bust the ice. They didn’t know the history of what material was in there, but they wanted to make sure that they didn’t have any material from the Liberty ship era in it. I mean, the Polar Star was old enough, I guess, they had to worry about it. I’ve done testing on aircraft parts. Again, I mentioned earlier that you can impart a crack starter into a finished part. If it’s a threaded part, you can get this if, say, the coolant material is interrupted for just a second. Well, then, you’re going to get a hot spot. You can turn and make sure you can get the stuff going again, and you can start it again, but chances are, it isn’t going to break immediately, but over 1,000 cycles, this crack is going to grow more and more and more through this thing, and then it’s going to break duct-ally over here on this part. And that’s the part that broke last. This part over here, I mean, if you look at it under high enough magnification, it looks like a bunch of waves have washed up on the shore, each one making another line on the shoreline. You can actually go backwards through those waves to where is the smallest part, and you can find that there was a hot spot there, or there’s a piece of carbon there that was embedded in the material at some point during its manufacture. In the early days when I was in metallography, we had to use metallograph. Probably the highest you could go without having image problems was, say, 200, 250x. It would go to 500x; you could probably go to 1,000x, but you’re only going to see just a very, very small part of what you’re looking at. You’re not going to see—because getting a flat surface that doesn’t have any curvature at all. So the era of the electron microscope came in and that allowed us to not only not have to polish it; you could look at a fractured surface, I mean, something that has been pulled apart, and you can actually see down into the fractured surface. That allowed us to take a look at broken pieces, you can look at those benchmarks, you can look, and if there’s a piece of material— In one case, a copper part was actually failing and it was catastrophic when it failed. Copper, pure copper, is something—you might as well be looking at a blank wall: there’s nothing there to see. I mean, you can polish it and there’s nothing there to see. It’s strange stuff. Anyhow, I’m down to the tip where the crack is at. We had to break it apart. This stuff, in order to form it, they had formed it using a thermal weld, or explosive weld process, where you put two plates going different directions, and then you hit it with an explosive charge. This thing, they kept breaking them. What we found was, I noticed something that looked completely different. In this whole thing, there was one piece that looked different. Electron microscope, again, you can zero in on one item, hit the button, and basically, it’ll melt a little piece of that, and it will tell you what you’ve just melted. It will tell you that, okay, this is carbon, or this is iron, or this is, in this case, it was phosphate. You know, phosphate’s part of the explosive. There’s a material, a copper material, it’s called phosphated copper. They can use that as a spring material in making copper parts where they want flexibility, but they also want to keep contact. I don’t know if it’s what they use in, say, a flashlight where they make contact with the back of the battery. Excuse me. But anyhow, it’s something like that. But the problem with phosphated copper is that it’s also extremely brittle. I knew that from some exposure I’d had years before. When I found that, I went to the engineer, I says, this is the problem. And the end result was they were able to tell the customer, okay, you’ve got to find another way of fusing these together that doesn’t use phosphate. I told you that parts that are machined or, the one I’m thinking of is they were basically putting a serial number on every part, and then these were being used in some sort of a structural event. For some reason, these things were breaking. What we found was that if they had a part that had a 1 laser-etched on it, or a 7 with a vertical line on it, or a 9 with a vertical line on it, an L, F, Es, anything with a vertical line on it, these things didn’t last any cyclings at all. They’d break. We noticed that, say, a Z, we could cycle a Z for almost forever. What would another letter be? Ss. They didn’t break. Franklin: X. Criswell: A zero, that’s a round zero, it didn’t break. So our suggestion was that they change their laser. If they’re going to keep using a laser, instead of having vertical lines, that a 7 would have an angular line on it. Nines, maybe a circle, like a 9. Stay away from vertical lines. It was a simple one, but, you know, it was an answer we were able to give them. We actually did testing for a little mom-and-pop company down in Irrigon, Oregon. He got the license to build a gimballed trailer hitch for fifth wheels. A standard trailer hitch didn’t allow for any torqueing. If you’re going over a curb someplace. If you’re backing into a parking place and you’ve got two different levels, you know. You tried to unhook, you’re going to have a problem. They actually came up with a gimballed trailer hitch; they had the license for it. But they wanted to know, how many cycles would this take? We were able to tell them, hey, you know, with the exception of maybe a farmer carrying 50,000 pounds of hay on a flatbed trailer, you’re probably not going to have a problem. If it’s just an RV trailer, I wouldn’t worry about it. I actually did testing for Ti Sports. They came to us. They had developed a new welding technique, and they wanted to know how good it was or wasn’t. So we compared a lot of their old welds to their new welds. And found the new weld was significantly better than their old weld. Franklin: And what product was this for? Criswell: Ti! Titanium. Titanium bikes. Franklin: Titanium bikes. Criswell: Expensive bikes. Apparently one of the problems that they’d had with the early ones was that the weld technique left something to be desired. So they developed a new one, and it was much better. Battelle was interesting, because there was always something new coming in the door. Franklin: It says here that after you retired, you took up a part time job at Battelle as a security escort? Criswell: That wasn’t with Battelle. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was with a couple different companies. When I retired, essentially, November 1st, I took that day off. It was my first retirement day. I went back to work on November 2nd, half-time. I worked Monday through Wednesday noon. [LAUGHTER] They were setting up a new lab. Somebody remembered I’d worked in the metallography lab years earlier. The tech specialist that was setting up the metallography in that lab retired. They needed somebody else, and somebody’s memory remembered me. So I’m working part-time before I retired in there, and then I’d go back to my lab and do some testing, if it required. And they were bringing in somebody new. But the facility I was going to be working in, it was going to be a secured facility. It had special requirements, everything. By the time I was asked if I’d mind going full retirement, which was in April—It was financial situation, they had a lady who also had worked in metallography and she was still young, they wanted her to continue in that respect. But the lab was going to be secured. We were taking pictures. In my case, I was using a copper penny to check out how things were working. Totally new metallograph, it was all digital, I mean, it was much different than anything I was used to. So having to set this thing up so it would work with computers. Oh, man. The only thing significant there that we found, and I did find, what was going to be a security problem, made a suggestion, and they got excited. We had to go out and find something new that was going to meet security requirements, so I guess I did my part. [LAUGHTER] Knowing what they have to do in a secured facility—every time an engineer or a scientist writes a paper, before it can be released, it has to go for review. It has to be—it can be unclassified or it’s given a classification. If it has given a classification—number one, in ’99, when I retired, things were being transmitted by the internet—no way were they going to transmit anything via the internet, if it’s classified. At least, not when I got out of there. You know, if they had to transmit someplace else, it was hand-carried if it’s here on Hanford. If it’s got to go to somebody that’s working on the same program at another facility, you’re going to have a courier take it; it’s not going via US Mail or it’s not going via the internet. So this is the way things work. Before I retired, I did some escort work with foreign nationals. They could work in certain facilities, but they couldn’t go elsewhere. So after I retired, full retirement, April of ’99, my wife saw an ad in the paper, anybody that still has their clearance or can get a clearance may have a part-time job for you. And my wife saw to it that I signed up for that. [LAUGHTER] I was put back to work out at Dash-5, construction work out there. Construction craftspeople, temporary, they’re not going to go to the trouble of getting them all a full security clearance. Each security escort can escort up to five. If you’ve got two, though, you need to have two escorts, and then you can escort up to nine. Because if one person has to go to the head—you know. So we always had a few extras. But if somebody’s got to go to the tool room or if they got to go talk to somebody, they have to have—the escort has to escort them to that point, be with them full time, escort them back. You can’t leave nine people short, so. Just keeping, making sure they didn’t wander off making trouble someplace. We have to be aware of where the radiation areas are. We can’t go there. So did that for another eight years. Took another short time job with—kind of with Battelle again. That lasted for about five, six months. Then I’ve been retired since then. Franklin: Finally retired? Criswell: Yeah. To say the least, I kind of miss it. I guess one of the things that—they sent me to a couple of short courses on something called failure analysis. Again, why things break. It kind of fit in with what I was doing, only I was the reason things were breaking. I mean, I was getting paid good to break things. Who could argue with that? You could hire an eight-year-old to break things for you. [LAUGHTER] But that half-million-pound machine we had, an interesting one. They sent the actuator back to the factory and set it up so it would high rate. I forget what the rating would travel at, but it would break things up to 500,000 pounds in the blink of an eye. Or you could do it slow. It would go either way. You had control over how that machine worked. We were doing work for, I guess, Areva at that point in time. We were doing some testing for them. But, again, Battelle was interesting. I do miss it. I was kind of hoping I could be summer relief or something like that after I retired. But they brought in—matter of fact, the gentleman I recommended for the job ended up getting it. I hope he isn’t too mad at me. I think that was one of the—it bothered me. He was a long-time Westinghouse employee. When I retired in ’99, I think he might still have been working for Westinghouse. Or—but anyhow. He had either four or five weeks of vacation. And he was a tech specialist. I guess they hired him as a tech specialist. So he could keep his vacation. Shortly after he was hired in, Battelle determined they needed to tighten up on finances or some darn thing, and they saw fit to reduce him back to a technician, and he lost some of his vacation, I understood. That didn’t go well. He wasn’t happy about that. He’s a good man. I recommended him, because he’d worked with MTS equipment. He knew it. And I knew him to be a self-starter. You weren’t going to have to hold his hand and have somebody there with him full-time; he was going to work. One of the people that put a name in for the job, I didn’t know him, never heard of him. And the other one was a tech specialist, but he hadn’t worked with that kind of equipment, either. And I didn’t know whether he was a self-starter or not. So Mike got the job, and I guess Mike is still there. Good grief. 17 years later? Franklin: Yeah. I have a couple questions I’d like to return to some stuff you said earlier, if you don’t mind. Criswell: No. Franklin: When you mentioned you moved to Tri-Cities January 1st, 1948 at midnight—why does that stick out to you so strongly in your mind? How do you--? Criswell: Well, the family had a get-together. They were in Portland to celebrate New Year’s Eve. After that, Dad and I climbed in the car and drove to Pasco. Franklin: Why? Criswell: Because he had a new job up here. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what did your dad do in Pasco? Criswell: He went to work for a company called Empire Electric. Empire Electric had a shop, a storefront, there on Lewis Street about three, maybe four, doors west of the corner building there on, let’s see, that’d be the northwest corner of 4th and Lewis. That corner building in 1948 and up through ’61 was a drugstore. Can’t think of the name of the drugstore, but it was a drugstore. Anyhow, Dad worked there for a year—better than a year, anyhow. He got the— You know, I don’t know what Dad did for them. I really don’t. Dad was kind of a public informations officer. When the opening came up, up at Hungry Horse, Montana, he took the job up there as public informations officer. We were there for, oh my gosh, we moved up there in February. I’d never seen so much snow in my life. And cold, my gosh, it was cold. But it wasn’t as cold as it got. I actually saw 40-below when I was still in grade school. I had to put on the skis and I actually skied down to the grade school. It was downhill from our house. I mean, when it got 40-below, it was clear. I mean, it was so clear, it was beautiful. Because what humidity was still in the air was coming out as little sparkles. It’s amazing. But I hated it. My grandmother on my mom’s side was into knitting, and she knit us kids, out of wool, probably some of the first facemasks. She found a pattern for these things. They had a mouth, they had a place for your nose, and two eyeholes. At 40-below, the tears from your eyes froze to the wool. You might want to turn this off. By the time I got to school—you can edit it. I’d have a wad of snot hanging on that wool, and it’s frozen. And my mouth, breathing around here, I got a lot of moisture around here. This probably wasn’t snot, probably vapors. But, ugh, terrible. It got worse. Franklin: I was going to say, I grew up in Alaska and I remember some really— Criswell: So you know what I’m talking about. Franklin: Cold. Oh, yeah, where you— Criswell: Did you have a wool one, or did they finally come up with those nice nylon ones that slick them? Franklin: No, we had the nice nylon. But still, you’d get the—you’d go outside, and you’d feel the heat being sucked out of your nose and your mouth as soon as you open to breathe, you just feel the moisture being pulled out of your face. It’s cold, yeah. Cars won’t start, usually. Criswell: Oh, yeah, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. Franklin: Yeah, I don’t miss those days. Criswell: Hungry Horse was interesting. Summer times were great. Get the fishing pole and go fishing. Summer time was that. Excuse me a second. Franklin: No worries. And so when you returned, spring/summer of ’53, what was your family—did your mom work at all this whole time, or was she a housewife? Criswell: Housewife. 1953, the job up in Hungry Horse was done. President Truman had come through, dedicated the dam. My dad actually wrote the speech. Public informations officer, he wrote the speech, he knew the information about Hungry Horse. Anyhow, I do remember, I was either in the eighth grade or I was in high school, going to school in Columbia Falls at that point in time. We went down to where the railyard went through Columbia Falls. Train’s stopped, Truman’s on the back platform on the train, he talks to the crowd out there. I mean, all the kids in school went out there. And then he climbed in a car and up to Hungry Horse he goes. So, that’s one of the memories. When Dad came back down here, he had a job as, again, kind of a public informations officer for Franklin County PUD. Franklin: Oh, okay. Criswell: That was ’53. In 1960, Dad, Mom, and the rest of the family packed it up and went to Springfield Municipal Utilities. He actually sold himself the job of being the director for Springfield Municipal Utilities and down there, that was water, sewer and electric. Franklin: And where is— Criswell: It wasn’t part of the city. They were a municipal utility that was separate from the city. Franklin: Are you talking about Springfield— Criswell: Springfield, Oregon. Franklin: Oh, Springfield, Oregon, okay. Criswell: He held that job until he retired in 1960. I forget exactly when he retired. But he was there—no, went there in ’60. 1980 he retired. So he held it for 20 years. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: And then he ruined the family name; he took a job as a—oh. [LAUGHTER] Kind of a political job. Lobbying! The Oregon State Legislature. [LAUGHTER] We kidded him about taking that job. Franklin: Getting into politics. Criswell: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Anyhow. Franklin: So— Criswell: About the only job Mom had is, both Mom and Dad were involved with what is now the Water Follies. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was the Pasco Water Follies. And the races were down at Sacajawea Park. Dad was president of the Pasco Water Follies for a period of time, and I think Mom—I forget if she was the treasurer or the secretary, I forget which. Maybe both at one point in time or another. But they were heavily involved in the Pasco Water Follies. I’m pretty sure that Dad came up here only once to watch the Water Follies after they became the Tri-City Water Follies, and he saw the new boats running. I don’t think he enjoyed them as much as he did the old thunder boats. That’s the part I always enjoyed. You go down there in the Columbia and the thunder boats are running five in a heat, it almost felt like the ground you were standing on was shaking when they were going by. That’s the part I really miss. I know the new ones go a whole lot faster, but. There’s just something about the old boats; they were special, as far as I was concerned. I knew John Owsley. He had the Pasco Boat Basin. He was probably responsible for the sleds they use at the Tri-City Water Follies. I know he was building them. He built a couple small ones, probably for the Pasco Water Follies. Ultimately, he ended up building kind of a three-point sled that he thought would go faster out there in the river to get to the crashes a little bit quicker. The whole idea was you didn’t have to haul somebody up over the transom of a boat to get them in; you basically just float them onto the back of the sleds that he was building. I thought that was pretty good. I know that when I was in the service there in ’62, came home on leave, and things were pretty tight for the wife and myself. John gave me a job. I guess somebody complained about not having any railings on the docks down there. He gave me a job to build railings on there for him. I did that on leave one time, and he was in the process, I think of building that three-point step one at that time. But things are different today, I’ll tell you. Franklin: Yeah. How did you meet your wife? Is she from the area? Criswell: Oh, that’s another one of those stories. [LAUGHTER] Strange you should ask that one. Somebody else asked me that question here, this past week. I blame it on a Pasco police officer. I was going to night school, oh, I don’t know what I was taking. A number of different night school classes I took over at CBC. I was taking another one. I was working, trying to get myself up to a decent grade point average. But I wasn’t having a whole lot of success. I had a C over there. But anyhow, part of my problem was that in 1960, early ’61, I was baching it, cooking for myself, studying. I get into the studying, I’d burn my dinner. Didn’t have the money to replace it. Decided it’d be cheaper for me if I went down to—it was the Payless Drug on the corner of 4th and Lewis. Payless Drug, they had a lunch counter down there, they cooked dinners down there. I’d get myself a supper; I’d sit there at the counter and study. Anyhow, I was doing that. One evening, police officer—and I mentioned to whomever I was talking to this week, I want to go over to Pasco and find out this police officer’s name. He had kind of a walking beat in downtown Pasco. He was an older gentleman. And he came up to me, he says, Dave, I got a couple of tickets for you. Whoa, what the heck? I’m working at Hanford; I don’t get tickets. I’ve got to be careful. I look at him real strange. Tickets? What kind of tickets? What’d I do wrong? He’s messing with me. He says, well, these are kind of special tickets. I said, what kind of ticket? He said, they’re tickets to the policeman’s ball. These two are for you. I said, I’m not going with anybody! Who am I going to get? He says, I’ve been drinking coffee here. He says, you’ve been watching that little lady over there. He says, you go ask her to go to the policeman’s ball. So I did. And I’d been cashing my checks here, and she’d been cashing my checks. She knew how much I earned. Didn’t pay any attention to what my name was. I had to always take my check downstairs and get it approved by the owner of Payless Drug at that point in time. I think his name was Tom Bishop. Yeah, it was. Tom Bishop. So Tom knew my family. Knew it wasn’t any problem with me getting my cash checked. So he’d initial the check, I’d take it back up, and this little gal would cash my check. So I asked her out. She said yes. Good grief. Next month it’s going to be 55 years. My wife and I have hardly ever been parted. Only when I went over to Fort Lewis. That didn’t last long. We moved the trailer that we were living in over there. A few trips where they sent me to school to learn something, one thing or another. That’s been our—[LAUGHTER] So I need to find out the officer’s name so I can blame him by name. Or thank him. Franklin: Yeah, Officer Matchmaker? Criswell: Yeah. He real did me a real favor, I’ll tell ya. Franklin: Aw. Criswell: But I would like to find his name. I have no idea what his history was or what happened. But after 55 years, I assume by this time, that he’s deceased, unfortunately. I wish I woke up to that question 30 years ago. Franklin: Is your wife from the area? Criswell: She’s born and raised here. Born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. My two natural-born children were born in Lady of Lourdes Hospital. I don’t know—I know in the early part of my wife’s—they had to—I guess they had to get over to that hospital in a—I guess they had to cross the river in those years in a ferry boat. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: They had a little boat that ran back and forth across the Columbia. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: I’m not too sure what year the old green bridge got built. But I do know in the early days. Another strange piece of information was that my great-grandfather moved to the Northwest from Michigan, I guess. And he went to work in a lumberyard, lumber mill in north Idaho, a place called Harrison, Idaho. His job was training the horses and seeing to the horses’ needs that went out into the woods to pull the logs back in. And my grandmother, when she became of age, she worked in the millinery shop there in Harrison, Idaho. My wife and I have determined, at the same point in time, her grandmother’s family is living in Harrison, Idaho. I think her grandfather, her great-uncle, and an uncle were working in the woods logging up there. So, both of our ancestries have got connections to Harrison, Idaho. A couple, three years ago, my wife and I went up there with my wife’s sister, and we were looking for gravesites. And we found a couple of my wife’s family members in the Harrison graveyard, up on a hillside, up above Harrison there someplace. And still couldn’t find my great-grandfather. Turns out that Coeur d’Alene has two graveyards. And my sister looked in one, but didn’t look in the other one. My sister lives up in Sandpoint. And could not find our great-grandfather. Anyhow, on one of our trips up there, I took the time and went over to the other graveyard and found a gentleman mowing the lawn. He got off, went into the office, came back out, got a book, looked in the book, took us over and he pointed right at a gravesite where my great-grandfather was buried. Turns out that my first name is great-grandfather’s last name. And I always thought that Engelbert Humperdinck’s name was all made up. I never heard of anybody named Engelbert in my life, so I thought that was all a stage name. Turns out, my grandfather’s name was Engelbert David. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sounds like that should kind of be reversed. Criswell: Yeah! Thank goodness I didn’t get hung up with Engelbert. But I believe my great-grandfather came to this country—he was an immigrant—he came to this country from Austria. I’m not too sure what year he came here. I don’t know how old he was. My great-grandmother and one of my great-aunts, apparently, died during a measle epidemic. I have no idea what year that was. But anyhow, Engelbert David packed up his one remaining daughter and apparently a girl that she was friends with, maybe family friends, and apparently they had problems. Maybe lost some family members also. So he brought the two girls out to Harrison, Idaho. I think, two things make me believe that maybe Engelbert David—he apparently changed his name sometime after my grandmother grew up, he remarried. Now his name on the tombstone is Egbert David. This is quite common. David is probably a frequent name of people who are of Jewish faith. And living in Austria, in probably the late ‘30s, or maybe even early ‘30s, things were not too favorable to the Jewish religion. I think that might’ve been the reason for the migration. And maybe the reason for changing the name at some point in his life. But my dad’s father, my grandfather, was blind at the time. My youngest years, almost totally blind by the time I remember him. He was a radio operator for the railroad—telegrapher for the railroad. And then he went to work in the merchant marines, was in the merchant marines when the Second World War blew up. And then he was in the Pacific. But his eyesight got so bad he couldn’t see to write anymore. And he couldn’t read the messages that had to be sent. So they had to release him. So I grew up—Grandpa Criswell was kind of funny. Let’s face it, in some ways he was a bit bigoted. I do believe that he was bigoted toward the Jewish faith. I’m sure my dad and his brothers ribbed him incessantly about some of his bigoted views. But they were all a bunch of cards, as far as I was concerned. They were some of the funniest things they ever came up with. But anyhow, he couldn’t see my dad and his brothers laughing at him, unfortunately, but maybe he would’ve changed his mind with time. But strange things. So I really don’t know that much about Great-grandfather. My grandfather lived to be 101. My grandmother lived to be four hours short of 102, deceased a few months later. Literally, if she’d lived to midnight, she would’ve lived to be 102. But aunt and uncle moved them down to Florida when they were in the 80s. I think my uncle was figuring they only had a few years to live. That didn’t happen. My grandfather, when he was packed up and ready to leave, he didn’t want to go. They were flying him down to Florida. Uncle Hank worked for the United Airlines. He’d made arrangements for them to fly. Probably made arrangements then to fly them first class. The story granddad got was that all the coach seats were full; they’d have to seat them in first class. Of course they got real good treatment, so granddad didn’t mind traveling anymore. But when he was getting ready to leave, he didn’t want to fly. Visited him just before he left. And I asked Granddad, I says, why don’t you want to fly? Because it’s a great way to travel. He tells me, straight-faced, they fly so high you can’t see the ground. I’m thinking to myself—I’m polite—I was thinking to myself, Granddad, you can’t see the ground you’re standing on. You know? I don’t understand why—you know. One of my uncles was coming by to take him down to see the Rose Festival parade. Oh, that’s cool. Well, we’re not going to the Rose Festival parade; I'm upset. Why? Well, they’re taking us to the warehouse that they decorate the floats in. What’s the matter with that? You don’t have to stand there for hours to watch. You can’t see anything. His reason for not liking the warehouse versus standing on the street is he doesn’t get to see any of the pretty girls. He hasn’t seen a pretty girl for 50 years. [LAUGHTER] Well, I don’t understand him. Anyhow, that’s my granddad. Franklin: When you—[LAUGHTER] Thank you for that. You started work at Hanford, were you still living in Pasco? Criswell: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Did you ever move to Richland, too, or did you live in Pasco the whole time-- Criswell: No. Franklin: --you worked at Hanford? Criswell: My wife and her family lived in Kennewick. But when Helen and I first got married, before we got married, I was living in a little studio apartment there in Pasco. And we found a single-wide 50-foot mobile home. We figured this’ll hold us for a while. We set it up on a lot there in Pasco. Right across the highway from the outdoor theater there. Anyhow, that was supposed to hold us for a few years. Well, we moved in and a few months later, we ended up having to pack it up and move it over to Olympia. And then we moved it back to Pasco when we got out in August. So we lived in Pasco. While we were in the service, my wife knows that she was expecting our first. Anyhow, after we moved back, we discovered that our single-wide mobile home and an infant—we were wall-to-wall toys within no time at all. We found somebody who decided that their house was too big for them to care for any, and they were willing to make a deal on it, and we took their house. So that was—then we moved to Kennewick. I guess, basically, we either lived in Kennewick or just outside of Kennewick now for a number of years. It’s been— Franklin: One of the things— Criswell: Excuse me. Franklin: Oh, no, that’s okay. There’s kind of several big events or things that happened in the Tri-Cities during the ‘50s and ‘60s. One of them is—it’s kind of commonly known that Pasco, especially east Pasco, was one of the only places that African Americans could live when they first came to Hanford during the Manhattan Project, and then was one of the only places they could buy property, up until, you know, civil rights legislation kind of forced some changes. I’m wondering if you could speak to any of that, or if you ever noticed segregation or witnessed that, or kind of your experiences living in Pasco during that time? Criswell: Well, I lived in Pasco in ’48-’49. I guess I never noticed it. I wasn’t old enough to understand those things, I guess. ’48, I would’ve been 11. ’49, probably living in Montana by then. Yeah, we moved up there in February of ’49, so. Anyhow, by the time we moved up there, didn’t seem to notice anything. Moved back to Pasco in spring of ’53, summer of ’53. Junior in high school. There was students that were black. Some of them I got to know. There weren’t very many. Yeah, it was strange. But when I was a kid going to Portland, I didn’t—this wasn’t something that I saw in Portland. I didn’t know it; I didn’t understand it. My wife, however, she went to Kennewick schools. Kennewick was one of the cities that, I guess, on the Kennewick side of the bridge, the old green bridge, there was some sort of a sign over there. I never recognized it as being there, but it told our black population that they needed to be out of Kennewick by sundown. Both my wife’s family and my family, that’s not the way we were brought up. My wife’s family were essentially farmers, lived on the outskirts of Kennewick and went to Kennewick schools. My wife’s family lived just on the west side of Kennewick. The only way to get to Pasco was across that old green bridge, so you had to go through Kennewick. My wife says that they had people to come from Pasco that would help her family on the farm. They were blacks, black people, Negro, whatever term is politically correct, socially correct. I don’t want to offend anybody. But their family, their kids grew up, their kids played on her farm. If they ended up picking until sunset to get the crop in, the family, kids all went out and they slept in the barn, or the extra bedrooms, or I guess my wife and her sister, bedroom was probably in the basement of the little house they lived in. So the families that were working on the farm worked and then they slept down there. But they all ate together. Somehow my wife grew up, didn’t know that there was a problem, didn’t understand the difference. Franklin: Do you remember the civil rights demonstrations in Kennewick? I think it was 1963 or 1964 when the NAACP— Criswell: I didn’t. At that point in time, I’m out at Hanford working. Franklin: Sure. Criswell: Went to work out there in August, no September, of 1955, I hired in out there. I was working with colored people, black people. There Fort Lewis, I met a gentleman who didn’t end up in my company, but while we were there on Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the troops came back to Hanford—they were all gone for Thanksgiving. Anyhow, he played for pro ball for, I think, the New York Giants. Big man. Told great stories. Great stories. He entertained the few of us that were stuck in that barracks for the weekend. You know, they stuck us in that barracks over there, it was empty, it had the cots, the mattresses were folded up, no blankets. There was no coal for the furnaces, no hot water. Having had experience with Fort Lewis, I became—I don’t want to say a leader, but definitely I knew what the heck to do to get around things. So I had three or four of the other gentlemen that were stuck there with me—that may have been the one from New York Giants; I don’t really recall. I had my sleeping bag, so I was all right. But anyhow we needed to get heat. So I told the guys, let’s find some boxes. And after dark, we went down the line and found some barracks that had kindling. We found barracks that had paper. We found barracks that had the coal. Anyhow, we took anything we could find. I knew all about those barracks. We got a fire lit. We knew we had to take turns watching that fire through the night and we had hot water in the morning. We had heat in the barracks through the weekend; we just had to keep watching that fire. All of us ended up having a fairly decent weekend; it could’ve been miserable because there wasn’t anybody else there to help us. They threw us into that barracks and, adios, we got the weekend off. That’s the last we saw of them. Well, we got the fire lit, and we had power in the day rooms, so we had television and we had a pool table. I guess maybe we shared some of the coal with the day room so it’d have heat. Monday morning here they come back and we all got to take physicals and we all end up getting busted up and going different places. Franklin: Did you go to the N Reactor dedication when President Kennedy came to— Criswell: N Reactor. No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. Probably because I was working. [LAUGHTER] And sometimes, they didn’t even want me taking a vacation when I needed one. They let me know they would remember that. If I insisted on a vacation, they couldn’t stop me, but they’d remember it. You know, getting a raise was—My dad was here for that. Because Dad was part of the—what’d they call that group of power companies, public utilities? He was part of that. At one point in time, he was president of BWIP. Of the contributors or whatever-the-heck they called that group. Anyhow, he was one of the—he was up here for that. He sat in the audience. He was up here for all the BWIP meetings that they would hold. No, that wasn’t BWIP. BWIP, Basalt Waste Isolation. No, he was one of the, I guess they call them stakeholders. The electrical utilities that signed on for—but anyhow, he was here for that. And for all of the meetings they had here for that. He was here when the president came up for the dedication. Seemed to me that was Kennedy, wasn’t it? Franklin: Yeah. He came for the dedication of N Reactor in September of 1963. Criswell: Okay, well, I know where I was. If that was in late ’61 or spring of ’62, I was over at Fort Lewis. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, it was September of ’63. It was just about two months before the assassination. Criswell: September of ’63, okay. Well then, okay, yeah, I remember that all too well. Yeah. Franklin: One of my last questions is one a little earlier, probably, when you were going to school, but when you were here in Pasco or in Hungry Horse do you remember doing lots of civil defense things? Because that would’ve been right during the height of the Cold War. So what can you tell me about civil defense? Criswell: I don’t think Hungry Horse they were worried about it. They never did anything like that up at Hungry Horse. Franklin: What about here in Tri-Cities? Criswell: I’m trying to think about Tri-Cities. Pasco High School, brand new school, graduated, second graduating class from Pasco High. I don’t remember anything special about it. I really don’t. And I don’t—after I graduated and then the Russians started playing around like they did in—that’d have been late ’61. Yeah, late ’61, that’s when they pulled all of us in. And then in ’62, and ultimately they sent us all home when they talked the Russians into pulling everything out of Cuba. But it was a strange time. Franklin: Did you ever feel any sense of urgency or fear, living so near to Hanford? You know, knowing what was being produced, how it was contributing to the nuclear weapons stockpile? Criswell: Well, when I was over there at Fort Lewis in—it would’ve been ’62, probably the early spring of ’62—I am a lowly Spec/4. That’s the equivalent of a corporal. I got called into the office and I was told I was going to give a class on irradiation and avoiding irradiation, minimizing exposure to radiation. And they had me a book and I had no clue as to why they were giving that to me. I didn’t have a clue. They didn’t tell us nothing over there! I mean, hey, we were a bunch of mushrooms. Anyhow, I had to give the company I was part of a breakdown on, you know, how to avoid radiation. Basically what the difference was between contamination and radiation. There’s a lot of people don’t understand that today. You double the distance, you reduce your exposure by four. That’s one of the big things. Get the heck away from it as fast as you can. You don’t know where it’s at, but distance from the source is big. I had no reason why I’m giving this class. The only reason I understand now why I’m giving a class is I worked at Hanford. [LAUGHTER] That’s it. I didn’t know what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER] So that’s why I had to give this thing. So I did my best. And that’s the last I ever heard of it. We never had another seminar on it. There was never anything else about it. Franklin: Interesting. Criswell: It was a strange, strange period of time. But I don’t think anybody really understood what the period was. Nobody in the military told us, really, why we were there. Nobody told us a thing. We were a bunch of mushrooms. It just didn’t make sense. Didn’t make any sense. But, you know, number of years later, I was told why things happened the way they did. And Kennedy, if Kennedy was born today, you wouldn’t want to play poker with the man. He pulled the ultimate bluff on the Russians. Every B-52, and we had a thousand, or more than 1,000—I think they’re B-52s, the lightweight ones? Or are those B-47s? Franklin: I think those are B-47s. Criswell: Okay, B-47s. Lightweight. They got two engines hanging on a pod on either side, on the wings. And they’re all small, lightweight bombers. Had thousands of those things. And to my knowledge, they’re still all lined up in the desert, down there in Arizona, unless they made beer cans out of them. But sometime, probably the early part of ’62, Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. He wanted the second division pulled out of East Berlin. He wanted the missiles out of Cuba. And he told the Russians—no, he unleashed all those B-47s at the same time. And the big ones. All of our big ones. The Russians could see them. There wasn’t any questions. The Russians could see that they weren’t going to be able to stop them all. They knew that they were going to get through. We were going to lose a lot of planes; we were going to lose a lot of crews. But we were going to have one big mess. I forget who the heck the Russian was at the time. He got on the phone with the Kennedys, he says, turn those planes around. Turn them all around. He says, we’ll pull out. We’ll get the stuff out of Cuba. The extra division will go out of East Berlin. And that’s the way it went. But we, at Fort Lewis, we didn’t hear a dumb thing about it. It wasn’t until years later that a friend of mine told me what the heck had happened. Kennedy pulled the ultimate bluff. You don’t want to play cards with a guy like that! But if I’d known, I think I’d have—I don’t know what the heck you’d do. Franklin: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about before we conclude the interview? Criswell: The only thing I can say is my career at Hanford was interesting. I did a lot of different things. I’d still like to be working out there. I’d still have a ball working out there if I could. Unfortunately, I had a senior engineer PhD do a number on me. Franklin: What do you mean by that? Criswell: He lied. Franklin: Okay. Criswell: Okay. He wanted to come into my lab, he wanted to set up a series of tests. At the point in time, I was telling management that we’ve got to get new controls for the equipment we’re operating. These things are getting old, they’re unreliable. I knew this machine would fail. I couldn’t predict when, I couldn’t figure out why. I referred to it as a ghost. I mean, one time it does something wrong, and the next time you go to look for it, it isn’t there, it’s working perfectly okay. But you can’t trust it no more. This PhD insisted that I use this particular machine. There’s another one sitting alongside of it that would’ve done the job. He wants to use this machine. I tell him, no. This machine is flaky; it can’t be relied on. He tells me before I leave his office, before we run any tests, your fault, the machine’s fault, I’m going to get you. So, either the first or second test, I’m sitting there. We run a block of cycles, we take a reading. Start it up again, run a block of cycles, take a reading. It’s at high temperature, what-have-you. So I’m tilted back against the cupboard, waiting for the cycles to end. All of the sudden, bang! Doggone thing fails. Oh, by the way, I told the engineer that I directly tied to that, hey, this isn’t a good machine, you don’t want to use it. But he insists on using it. Anyhow, he goes running to my manager. It’s all my fault. He lived up to his word. And my manager accepted it. Franklin: Wow. Criswell: So I didn’t get a raise. And that would’ve been January 1st of ’99. I didn’t get a raise. So I wrote a letter, put it in my file that, no, this wasn’t my fault. And I had told him it wasn’t my fault. But I tried to keep the thing going, work to make sure that things ran properly, but I needed some support from management. I didn’t really get the support I wanted until after I left. Franklin: Right. Criswell: When they brought in the gentleman that replaced me, then they replaced all the electronics. But if I can figure out what—each one of these electronic things has got a whole bunch of drawers in it, and it’s got a whole bunch of pieces in each one of the drawers. If you can figure out what controls what, and it stays broken, then you can fix it. But when it goes back and forth, no. That’s when I call it a ghost. It didn’t work. So, anyhow, they kind of promised me that if things worked out, I’d get a raise in July, mid-term, mid-year. Anyhow, that didn’t happen. So I decided, well, I’ll be 62 in a couple more months and then I can retire. And I did. But I came back half-time. I’d probably still have been out there. I don’t know how long I would’ve worked. Hey, I enjoyed the work. It was interesting, and I was good at it. But unfortunately I couldn’t get the backing to replace the equipment when I needed it. And I ended up taking the hit. Unfortunately, this particular engineer, scientist, ended up causing problems for others. I guess, maybe, I’m kind of happy or proud about one thing. The gentleman I recommended to take my job ended up with it, and he’s still there. Franklin: That’s good. Criswell: I picked a younger man who, I’m assuming he’s still there. That’s been a lot of years. Franklin: Maybe you should call him up. Criswell: I probably ought to. I know that—I talked to him a few times since they moved out of the building we were in and moved downtown. That was one of the things they did, was they had to leave the basement that I was in. And they asked me about moving this big piece of equipment, this half-million-pound machine, how are we going to get that out of there? I told them how it was done. Anyhow, I don’t know what went wrong. But they had that—I suspect I know one thing. They had to back the semi down a ramp to the basement of the building. And if they got cockeyed or if the wheels are sitting in the hole, the deck on the flatbed is going to be canted. So they have to lay this huge frame down on its side. They have to get it over to where there’s an elevator that goes up to the half level that it’s got to go out of. But when I was there, they did this. They had to support this huge frame using railroad ties. And I’m there to watch, make sure that they don’t do anything wrong. All of the sudden, I hear this really screwy noise. And I go out in the hall. They’re out in the hall with a chainsaw cutting creosoted railroad ties to length to prop the elevator bed at a half-level between the floor level and the exit level. Because it won’t support the weight of this machine. So they got to support it there, and then they got to put a ramp going out. So anyhow, there’s this blue fog going down the hallway. I mean, this is—railroad ties with creosote on them, they’re cutting them with a chainsaw out in the hall of the building. [LAUGHTER] Stinky poo mess. But they got it out. This is when I was there. And they take it over to 324 Building. And they lift it up, they sit it on the ground upright, they take the lid off of 324 Building, the roof off of it. They take the shields off of 324 Building, they set them on the ground. And then when they got access to the hot cell in 324 Building, they go over there and they pick this machine up and they lift it up, over, and they set it down inside of the hot cell in 324 Building. They’re going to do some low level work. They wrap it with plastic and everything else. And then, later on after they finish doing whatever testing they were going to do, they pick it up again to go through the reverse, they bring it over and they set it down. Some other point in time, they take that thing—they’re making another lift on it, and anyhow, it crashes down. The actuator on that thing is about three feet in diameter. It generates 500,000 pounds of force using 3,000 psi of oil pressure. And it crashes. No, that’s upright, yep. Anyhow, yeah, they got it sitting off the ground over at 324 Building, outside of the cells, getting ready to make a lift. And all of a sudden, the cable comes loose from the drum on the winch on the crane. And this huge doggone frame drops a foot or two, down onto the ground. Anyhow, one of our engineers is looking around behind, he’s headed back to 300 Area proper. He looks behind him, and he can see the cable of the load cell going up, coming back down, going up, coming back down. And then pretty soon it just falls to the ground. It’s come off the drum on the frame. So anyhow it’s sitting there on the ground. And now the riggers have got to go through about four months of writing reports on why they dropped this thing. So anyhow, they lift it up, they finally lay it back down, and they get it over to our lab and they lift things back up, and they put it back in our lab. We make sure it’s nice and clean, it’s okay for use. When they get ready to take it out of that lab—this is after I’ve left—and they’re putting it onto a flatbed truck, instead of using a crane to move this thing with, they’ve got—they haven’t hired the riggers. They went out and hired a tow truck company. [LAUGHTER] They’ve got a flatbed truck sitting there by the rollup door, and it’s going down here, and apparently it’s tilted to the side. And they’ve got nothing on there to keep this thing on there. Anyhow, instead of lifting it, they’re dragging it up an I-beam incline on rollers. They’re using a tow truck in front of the semi that’s going to haul this thing over to the new building where it’s going to be installed at. So they get it up through the rolling doors and onto the flatbed truck, that apparently is at an angle. One of the gentlemen that’s watching this, he says, all of the sudden they get it out there, off the I-beam that it’s been pulled out on, and this thing starts to roll sideways off the flatbed truck. And it falls off and crashes. Well, this huge actuator is really quite a delicate piece of equipment. Number one, the rings inside of this piston—I don’t know how many are in there; I’ve never seen the inside of one of these things. But the cylinder itself is coated with silver. It’s got a silver plating in there. And the silver in this case is there for additional lubricant, besides having the—it’s a paraffin-based hydraulic oil is what they’re using, so very specialized. But when it lands on its side, you’ve got all the weight of that piston going to one side. And you’ve got seal rings in there, you’ve got wiper rings in there, to keep the oil inside of the things, so that it doesn’t leak oil very much. And then there’s a provision for oil that does get by the seal rings to go out and go back to the pump. That’s about that big around. Well, when this thing smashed down, it dented those seal rings. It dented everything in that doggone thing. Well, they sent it back to the factory, but—no, they didn’t! No, they did send it back to the factory. I’m getting mixed up, because I wasn’t there. I’m trying to remember everything. But they did send it back to the factory, but it was to make sure the columns in the load frame were vertical. I don’t know if they rebuilt the actuator or not. I really don’t’ know, but I don’t think so, because it came back, it’s leaking oil badly. Because the seal rings in there and everything are flattened on one side. I mean, you’ve got tons of force, wham. And if it came off the bed of the truck, that bed’s got to be four, five feet in height. So to my knowledge, it’s still leaking today. But that was a pretty special piece of equipment, and I wish to heck—like I said, I wouldn’t mind going back to work. [LAUGHTER] I enjoyed it. They’ve got new electronics now. To my knowledge, everything’s working fine. Franklin: New stuff to play with. Criswell: This is kind of specialized equipment. The old stuff, the old bald ones, the old Instrons, they’re not—you just program to do one thing. One thing. It’s either to travel a certain distance at a certain rate or you could tell it to increase the load at a certain rate. Either way. If you’re increasing the load, when the specimen starts to break, it starts to travel faster to keep up. So for most testing, when you’re testing something like this, you want to have this thing traveling at a certain ram rate. This way the load goes, and when it starts to yield, it bends over, and then it starts to drop off and it’ll fail. So this is the way it’s supposed to work. MTS will do it any way you want it to do. It’ll control the speed of the actuator; it’ll control how fast you load something. But when it starts to break, and if you’re under load control, it’s supposed to keep loading so many pounds per unit of time. When it starts to fail, then it isn’t keeping up, so it speeds up. This thing can go really fast. And then it can control load, displacement. It can also control—you can use something called an LVDT where it opens, it’s on the deflection of the specimen you’re trying to break. So there’s different ways of breaking things. But anyhow it’s all closed loop. You tell it you want it to go so many pounds per unit of time, it’ll do it. You tell it you want to go one inch in an hour, it’ll do it. But only one of those things can it do at the same time. And if it’s leaking oil, it isn’t going to keep up. So anyhow they’ve got a mess. They can’t keep up with it now I guess. My recommendation was they send it back. I don’t know. That’s an expensive process, plus they’ve got to get that actuator out of there. Franklin: Well, Dave, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us today. I really appreciate it. Criswell: Yeah, it’s a good thing you caught me before my mind’s completely gone. Franklin: Yeah. No, you had so much to say. I mean, it was a great interview. Criswell: Yeah. Franklin: I appreciate you sharing your knowledge. Criswell: The equipment was great. It really was great. You program it right, it’ll do what you want. But like I said, when you’ve got a ghost in your electronics, it works most of the time, but one split second it goes haywire, whatever you’re doing is gone. And some of these things, you’ve got to be real careful of. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Criswell: You betcha. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 02:17:59 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area PRTR 222-S K Reactor Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Criswell Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Atomic Products Operation Description An account of the resource David Criswell worked at various facilities in the 300 area including separations labs and the PRTR. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 7/20/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/.mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operated under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who were the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F0992948e0811e502f33a2bd348c050ec.JPG 5291abbce0561a907b2d7644e150dd77 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6ec2237aa7c6afe662829d90aa1b99c5.mp4 8c4228f038926fb13821ea6d37770f4d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Frank Cobb George Swan Location The location of the interview Home of Frank Cobb Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Frank Cobb and George Swan on August 28, 2018. The interview is being conducted at the house of Frank. I’ll be talking with Frank and George about their experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us, starting with Frank? Frank Cobb: Frank Cobb. F-R-A-N-K. C-O-B-B. Franklin: Great. George? George Swan: George Swan. G-E-O-R-G-E. S-W-A-N. Franklin: Great. When did you two start working together? Swan: Hmm. Was it in the late ‘70s? Cobb: No. Swan: Mid-‘70s? Cobb: I met you in 1980. Swan: Okay. Yeah, we started out where I had projects at the dams on the Columbia River with National Marine Fisheries working with the traveling screens that we put down in the turbine intakes. Frank came on and became one of my maintenance men, and we pretty much formed a team from there on. I was kind of like the junior lieutenant and he was a sergeant major under me. You know, we’re both old marines, so we tend to look at it in that respect. But basically, I was a biologist project leader, and Frank was head maintenance man, doing a lot of the fabrication and making stuff happen in the field so we could get the research projects done. Franklin: What types of research projects did you two do together? Swan: We did the traveling screen stuff at different dams. Putting the traveling screens down and they’re elevated to divert juvenile salmon and steelhead that are drawn in to the turbine intakes with the flow of the river, and then divert it up into gate wells. And then they find a bypass orifice that would draw them through into a bypass system. Takes them down and around the dam into a collection facility. And then they were collected and sorted and some of them were tagged for studies and so forth, and they were taken downstream below all the hydroelectric dams, so they didn’t have to go through any more of them, and release down there. And there were juvenile salmon and juvenile steelhead, primarily. Eventually—did you work with me on the radio, tracking stuff later on? Cobb: No. The first time he and I really worked together was after I got started diving, and we did a spawning survey in 1986. Swan: I was a fisheries research biologist, but also I had an extra duty as diving supervisor in the NOAA diving program for the National Marine Fisheries in the Inland Northwest area. Frank was interested, so I got him into it with me. I had learned to dive recreationally when I was in the Marine Corps many years before. I was not a military diver, but when I got out, when I was going to college, I fed myself off Puget Sound, collecting seafood and spearfishing and collected samples for the different researchers at University of Washington and the Seattle Marine Aquarium. Eventually got appointed as the diving supervisor for NMFS for different things we did underwater, projects. And a lot of it ended up being at the dams in the gate wells and around some of the structures. And then eventually when we got into this checking water withdrawals, pump intakes, all the way from little, small things, somebody plopped the line in to draw water out to water their lawn, up to big industrial and agriculture things. We had a project that ran for about three years, locating all these, finding out who owned and operated them, and inspecting them. The end-goal was to find out if there were fish protective facilities on those intakes that were protecting the juvenile fish that were migrating downstream, again, salmon and steelhead and other resident fishes. Let’s see. Guess that was about it. Then our director of coastal zone and estuary studies in Seattle, Wes Ebel, also a former marine—he was a diver, but he was getting up in years and also his responsibilities didn’t let him get in the field much anymore, but he was a diver in our program up until a certain point. One day out of the blue, he came to me, called me up, and said, get some people asking if we could do a deep water spawning survey in the Hanford Reach. Could you guys do it? And I said, hell, yes, we could do it. And he said, okay. See what you can put together. And I went out in the shop and talked to Frank about it, and I said, we can do this, can’t we? [LAUGHTER] And Frank said, we can do anything. So that’s how it took off. We started—I started researching the literature, finding out about other outfits that used underwater devices to run surveys or collections or different things. And we found that some guys used a sled, like we came up with, to evaluate the turtle excluder on some of the shrimp fisheries in the gulf. They were, you know, netting shrimp, but they were also getting a lot of sea turtles. And they wanted to figure out a way to keep the turtles from getting caught. So they had designed what they called a turtle excluder that would divert them out of there. And in order to—I mean, this is kind of a simplified version; they did a lot of other things, too, but—they used, when the shrimp boat was towing this thing, then it would be towed on this sled and they could actually underwater, you could kind of fly it around, and they’d film what was going on, and that’s how they were able to—instead of just putting it down, undetermined if it would catch any or not, they could start to look at what works best to try to divert the turtles from getting caught and that sort of thing. Cobb: Wasn’t the first one made out of a Stokes litter? A Navy Stokes litter? Swan: Yeah, they actually used Navy Stokes litters that they had onboard ship in World War II. You know, that were-- Cobb: With the wings on it. Franklin: You mean to carry, like a litter, to carry a body? Swan: Yeah, you’d lay a guy in it, and it was a tubing frame and then it had a wire basket that you’d lay the wounded person in. Well, they took two of those and built them into a framework. And then they came up with a diving plane so they could go up or down. So we took that and went a little further with the sled. Frank came up with the one that you’ll see after a while, here. When it was first built, the Plexiglas was clear, of course, and you could see out through it. Now it’s kind of yellowed from sunlight and all that, but it was like a windshield underwater. It would divert the flow over us. Otherwise, we had a tremendous—you had the current of the river coming. We didn’t tow into it when we did our survey; we went across current. So we were catching whatever the river flow was at that point, and having that—we started out with some small things, and then Frank kept coming up with some little bigger and better. You couldn’t go too much. If you get too carried away, it’d be like a bass plug wobbling down there, from the resistance on it. But he got it worked out pretty good, so it put the flow above and below and around the divers. Of course, we’re on scuba, and then we had a problem with, as we’d exhale bubbles, they’d get drawn in front of us, and it was full of bubbles for a while and you couldn’t see. So he came up with some slots that helped let some flow go through there and trained those bubbles and pulled them away from us. So then we had a clear line of vision. That’s kind of in a nutshell. I don’t know if I’ve missed anything or not. Those are the basic things that we worked together on and gradually ended up with a— Cobb: Yeah, as far as that sled, kind of the evolution? Like many things have been throughout history, somebody starts out with a design, somebody else modifies it for their purposes, and that’s kind of the evolution of it. Swan: Yeah, the actual original was just a diving plane, a board, that a diver with scuba gear on would hang on to. And he would just manoeuver that board and it could make himself go up and down being towed by a boat. Cobb: An underwater airplane. Swan: Yeah. And it just kind of grew. Different guys would get different ideas, you know, and expand on it. And that’s how we ended up with this. Cobb: You’ve heard that term, there’s no I in team? Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: That’s what all this was about. There’s no I; it’s we. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: Frank, how did you get started doing fabrication? Cobb: Well, I had a shop teacher in high school that taught me to weld. And then I went four years in the Marine Corps. And then I’ve always done fabrication work, whatever I could figure out to do. And then when I was in the same place he worked, I did a lot of fabrication down there. I never learned anything in school. I was hands-on. Swan: Frank actually fabricated a lot of the big test frames that we hung mats on and things, when we tested the traveling screens or did modifications to the screens. I mean, it was—all the way from little, small items to gigantic things that had to be handled with cranes to move it around and install it. Franklin: Wow. So, what was this 1986 spawning survey, deep water spawning survey, in the Hanford Reach, what was the goal of the project? What were you tasked with finding? Swan: Well, we were approached by the Corps of Engineers that had talked to the director I was mentioning, and knew that we had a dive team, and asked if we could do anything to determine if salmon were actually spawning deeper than they could see from the air. Because up until then, the way they did their counts of salmon spawning was they would fly in an airplane and look down. And when the salmon sweeps the sediment clear where they’re establishing a redd, or stirring up the gravel to lay their eggs and fertilize them—it’s called a redd, R-E-D-D. That’s the way they were determining the amount of spawning that was going on all up through the Hanford Reach. They would fly it once a week for a couple months, or it was usually, they’d start in September and, well, maybe even longer than that. They’d go, I’m pretty sure through November and maybe into December. But the Corps of Engineers had been approached by an organization in Wenatchee area that was trying to promote marketing their produce, like apples and fruit. And see if they could get barge traffic coming all the way up the Columbia to Wenatchee. There are no locks in those dams, so they couldn’t lock the barges through. But they had come up with the idea of a lift, like they have in Europe, I guess. In some of the dams where they would pull the barge in with a tug below the dam, and this cradle would come out, start raising it, and that barge would be disconnected from the tug, and they would lift the barge up to the top of the dam, over it, down into the fore bay. They’d have another tug there that would couple up and take it to the next one. The concern was those tugs and barges going up through the Hanford Reach in those spawning grounds, what effect was that going to have on the salmon spawning? So that’s where they came up with the request to see if we could put together a project to try to measure the spawning and that’s how we got into that. And when we began to use the sled, you know, you could go across the shallow water, which you could see from the air and you already knew they were spawning there. But then we’d start to go deeper, as we went across the river. And we in fact found, in some locations, based on the average main level of the flow in the reservoir, we found that salmon were actually spawning down to 32 feet or so, something like that. Franklin: What was the depth that the plane could view? Swan: The sled? Franklin: No, sorry, what was the depth—you said that before— Swan: Oh, the airplane? Franklin: That the airplane, yeah, how deep could the airplane reliably view to? Swan: I don’t know for sure; it’d depend on water clarity. But I would say on the average, probably ten to twelve, maybe 15 feet would be about max. Franklin: So you were able to go down about double. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: And did you find a lot of salmon spawning in the deep water? Swan: Yup. A lot. Cobb: Yeah, one year the return was like 100,000 of the upriver brights. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: Was that what researchers had expected to find? Or was it a surprise? Swan: I don’t think so, because, as I recall, the guy that was the project engineer for the Corps—[LAUGHTER] He wanted to—we were going to do another study the next year, but what we found out worked against him. And I think it was the Northwest Power Planning Council had approved the study with the Corps of Engineers’ funding. But when they found out how much spawning was going on, to what extent, they put the kibosh on the project right away. They said there’s no way we want barges and tugs running up through those spawning grounds. So, in a way, our success meant our demise. Because we would’ve liked to have done another year of study. But at the same time, they determined that there wasn’t any point in going on with it, because they could see right away it was not a desirable situation to ever try to let get started. Cobb: Between Priest Rapids Dam and just north of Richland is the last free-flowing part of the Columbia River. I think I’ve got that right. Franklin: Yup. Cobb: And that’s part of what people were interested in, not destroying that. Franklin: Right, known as, yeah, that section is, I believe, known as the Hanford Reach. Cobb: Yeah, basically the Hanford Reach, yeah. Franklin: So tell me about how you operated the sled. It’s a two-man sled, right? Cobb: Right. Franklin: And were you the driver as well as the fabricator? Cobb: Yeah, I mean, I usually was the one flying. Flying underwater in a denser medium. Swan: Yeah, we had guys who started to take over and pilot it, but Frank was primary—he was chief pilot, I guess you could say. Franklin: Chief pilot. And so it uses a rudder system. Each hand controls a different rudder, right? Cobb: Well, each wing—it can be individual, so—but at one point we were entertaining ourselves. We were doing barrel rolls. I’d put one wing, can go like this, do barrel rolls, flying upside-down. And, anyway, it was probably illegal to have that much fun making a living. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And how would you be seated in the sled? Cobb: You’re laying down. Franklin: Laying down, okay. Swan: In the prone. Franklin: So one person is flying the sled and the other person is--? Swan: The observer. Or he would be—we had a button that if he passed over a redd on this, well, what we should probably—Each of our test sites, or sample sites, were, what, 2,000 feet, from upstream to downstream. We would start at the top, the boat would manoeuver across. We had markers set on the bank, and he would go all the way across. Once they were to the other side, then they would drop back 150 feet, and come back across to the other side. And we’d keep doing that until we finished the whole thing. Now, the boat had this towline with a sled on the end of it that was 150 feet. And attached to that towline, so that when the sled was down, just about above us was a float with a cluster of prisms, the reflector mirrors, that no matter what the position of it was, if a beam, a laser beam was sent from shore out to that cluster, it would reflect back. And they had a computer survey company that worked with us how to computer set up. As we would go across, the observer had this button, also had voice communication, but we kind of had a duplication in case our voice system went out. We had this button you could push, would send a signal to shore or vice versa. If the other failed, hopefully, between the two of them. And as the sled would go across, and the guy that was the observer would see a redd, he would just say, redd, and he’d punch the button. As he did that, there’s an antenna on that float that would trigger a signal to the shore, and this tracking device they had would instantly tch-tch, and it would log in the coordinates of where the redd was. And that’s on the maps I showed you, the little red dots? Franklin: Yup. Swan: That’s how they get logged in. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Swan: And that’s the basic nitty gritty of how we did this thing. Cobb: I think I gave you some stuff on paper that shows the sled and what he just described. Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: In other words, back in the old days, antique. Now there’s GPS, we could’ve done the same thing, but in today’s GPS. Franklin: Yeah, and we’ll digitize those materials and make them available with the interview for the viewer. So, Frank, you used the sled again to do another survey by N Reactor. Or, no, by one of the reactors, right? Cobb: We did. Basically, pretty much every place that George and I did the spawning survey, we’d punch into the bottom of the river, and we would extract groundwater samples and the target was hexavalent chromium. Now, what else was in those samples, I have no idea. I don’t think anybody wants us to know what we were exposed to. Franklin: Where did—who was leading this project to do the groundwater sampling? Cobb: It was a guy by the name of Steve Hope, and he worked for CH2M Hill, who at that time was basically contracted to Bechtel. I think at this point, CH2M Hill is independent of Bechtel. But Steve Hope was the biologist in charge of it. And there, again, it was relative to the salmon. The EPA and the Indians wanted to know. Franklin: How much hexavalent chromium was in the groundwater? Cobb: Right. Franklin: And what year was this? Cobb: Pardon me? Franklin: What year was this? Cobb: I think ’95 and part of ’96. Franklin: And so what did you find? What were the findings of that survey? Cobb: Well, I think I gave you some paperwork on that also. As far as numbers, I don’t—I don’t remember, and I never—that was not part of my job. So I didn’t—but the concentrations were higher than—I shouldn’t say this—higher than Battelle said it would be. Which they also said we couldn’t do it. But we did it anyway. Franklin: They said you couldn’t do the groundwater survey? Cobb: They said we were not capable of doing it. Franklin: Why is that? Cobb: Well, for one thing, they were questioning our qualifications as divers. Steve Hope had been a Navy diver. I was certified with NOAA’s dive program and two others. But they never bothered to find out we were getting ready to embarrass them, because they said they had told DOE, I believe, that it couldn’t be done because of the high flows. Anyway, a guy came to me, wanted to know if we could do it, and I told him the same thing I told George: you can do anything. Shortest route to failure is do not try. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Was the same kind of—were you also the pilot in that? Cobb: Yes. Franklin: That’s right, and was it the same type of work and same areas, in fact, that you had done--? Cobb: Well, basically, most of the same areas that we did the spawning survey was the same place we did the groundwater sampling, the same areas. Not quite as many as we did in the spawning survey, but basically the same geographical locations. Swan: He drove pipes into the substrate to collect the groundwater, right? Cobb: Yeah, we’d drive those in and then we would purge out the actual river water, with syringes. I think you’ve got pictures of those. And then we would take three samples and they would go to, I think, three independent labs for analysis. Franklin: I imagine that must be—I mean, the flow of the river in that area is pretty fast. How did you keep everything steady enough to take these kind of samples? What was that experience like, being in the river in the sled? Cobb: Well, there again, like with the thing in ’95, ’96, we’d anchor the boat, and then we would park on the bottom and keep the wings down real low, just tight to the bottom. And then the guy beside me was the one that would—basically it was a concrete chipping hammer, gear-operated, to punch in. And then had a long enough anchor you could drop back there again and transit so far back. And then you have to pull the anchor and go and then re-anchor and do the same thing. I forget how many hundreds of feet on the anchor we had. Anyway, they said, can you? And we said yeah. Swan: They were able to stay in place long enough that they drove those pipes down deep enough that they could sample the groundwater after sucking all—purging all that river water out of there so they could get valid samples of the groundwater coming in. And that’s basically what had been said that they couldn’t do because there was too much flow; you’ll never be able to do anything. And they were able to accomplish it that way. Franklin: Wow. Cobb: One of the sayings I love, and I told several of them out there, people a whole lot smarter than I am, I told them, do not limit me by your limitations. Just because you cannot do it does not mean I can’t do it. Franklin: Um. Cobb: That’s one of those shut-up-Frank deals? Franklin: No, no, no, no, no. I just—you did it, so there’s nothing else to say about that. The work was done. So did you use the sled in any other surveys? Cobb: Oh. Let’s see. No, actually, anything that amounted to actual projects, no, I don’t believe so. Swan: The original sled, when we were all done with the spawning survey, and eventually they disbanded our diving group, said we’d outlived our usefulness, and they could call Rent-a-Diver if they needed divers—this is our fisheries outfit. So we kind of pfft, dissolved. And I had all this gear and so I passed it onto other diving units that were still active. And a guy who was up in Alaska got the sled. The last I heard, he was going to use it up there for trying to do studies on king crab. I guess king crab, when they spawn at night or something, they have a behavior of coming together—or maybe it’s the juvenile ones, I’m not sure. But they form into a big ball for protection. And then come, I guess, daylight or whatever, or a certain time, they’ll disperse. Anyway, he was doing a study on something about that, and I don’t know anymore than that for details, but— Franklin: So then, is this sled the same one that was used on the surveys? Swan: No. Franklin: No, okay, so what is the provenance of this sled? Cobb: Well, when I—I was 40 years old when I went to work for the fisheries and I was too old to learn to work for the government. So I went back to shoeing horses full-time, and I built the sled strictly on speculation, thinking someday somebody would want me to do another project. Somebody heard about it and Steve Hope came to me, and I’d already basically had that mostly built. And he told me what they wanted us to do. So then I finished it. Franklin: Okay, so that sled was used in the hexavalent chromium survey. Cobb: Correct. Franklin: And is it safe to say, is it pretty much a copy of the sled that was used in the fish--? Swan: An improved copy? Franklin: An improved copy? Cobb: It is basically—well, slightly improved, but mostly just slightly modified. Franklin: And what were the modifications between the two projects? Cobb: Between the two? Well, I made the wings a little bit more surface on them, and then where the divers lay, I made that where you can reach down—basically, it is very little different than the one that George and I used. Franklin: So how—when you were done with the hexavalent chromium, was the sled just not needed? How did it end up back with you? Cobb: Oh, it belonged to me. Franklin: Oh, so you supplied it to the— Swan: He was a private contractor at that point. Cobb: I was a private contractor. In fact, when I told them how much I wanted, they didn’t want to pay it. So they started calling diving companies. All the diving companies says, say what? There is no such thing as that. That does not exist. Nobody knows—there’s still nothing. It does not exist. So, then, they kept coming back to me. I’d be out shoeing horses, and they would keep calling me on the phone, trying to beat me down on the price. And I told them, no. That’s what I want. So that made me a sole source. So then they finally agreed. And I made them put a cancellation clause in it. And of course that was Bechtel, and they said, well, we can’t do that. And I said, well, then I can’t do that, either. Because I knew what they were going to do. As soon as we satisfied the Indians and EPA, they would cancel the rest of the contract. Which they ended up doing. And then they ended up owing me the $46,000. And I had to go to war to even get that. But anyway. I had heard enough about how Bechtel does business. And they figure they’re the only ones in town to make nay money, and us little dumb guys, we’re supposed to work for nothing. Anyway. Franklin: That’s great. So is there anything else you guys would like to say about either survey, or the sled? Cobb: Not me, really. Other than that I had an awful lot of fun doing it. Franklin: It sounds like a lot of fun. Cobb: It was for me. Swan: The only thing I can think of is, that spawning survey we did, I thought we accomplished something highly unique, and so did a lot of other people. The thing that kind of irked me was, my higher-ups just, like, oh, shit, you guys are just having fun, you know, no big deal. But we got more accolades out of other agencies that were amazed by what and how we did it. I even gave a presentation at Scripps and a couple of different research divers’ conferences, and they were blown away by what we had accomplished. We had Dr. Don Chapman that did a whole bunch of work on the Vernita Bar early, salmon spawning stuff. He came and— Cobb: [LAUGHTER] Swan: I think he was a little skeptical about what we were doing. And so he was up in years then, but he was still diving. So we said, well, you want to go for a ride on the sled? Yeah, I would. So, he went with Frank. I’ll let Frank tell you about that. Cobb: Oh, anyway, we were about the highest flow—our flow meters topped out at ten meters per second, and I don’t know what the flow was there, but the sled was just kind of bouncing around. It was kind of like a gusting wind. So he went across with me, and that was one of the wider places. So we got back over and dropped back, and I said, well, Dr. Chapman, you want to take another ride with me? Anyway, I won’t say the words he said. He said, no! Let me off of this thing! And then I did some diving for him later. That’s another subject. He hired me to do some more diving for him, after meeting him in that particular environment, anyway. Swan: Anyway, a nutshell, to finish up that thing, is, I had some people approach me, and they said, how come we haven’t heard more about this? And I said, I don’t know. My higher-ups didn’t seem to be too impressed with it, you know? Well, a guy in Great Britain got ahold of me and wanted me to come over there and give a presentation on it. He was instrumental in a journal over there called Regulated Rivers. So, we published the paper in it. It’s back in mid-, late-‘80s. It’s “Spawning surveys in a regulated river,” or something like that. I don’t remember the title; it’s been 20-something years. Franklin: Sure. Swan: Anyway, it’s in a journal called Regulated Rivers out of Great Britain, and it gives a real good nutshell of that whole spawning survey project. Cobb: But, yeah—oh, go ahead. Swan: To me, that was kind of, okay, somebody finally paid attention and we got some recognition out of it. Which is what I kind of appreciate you guys doing this. Because, hell, we thought everybody’d just forgot about everything we did, you know? At least you guys are going to try to get recorded so that down the line when we’re long gone, somebody’ll say, jeez, those crazy guys did that! Cobb: The only thing, last thing I got to say is, I’m still very happy that they did not go up to the free-flowing part with dredges for barges and it’s still basically the way we left it. Swan: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that is definitely a major accomplishment. Cobb: I’m glad I was instrumental in them not doing that. Swan: I will never forget sitting there in that meeting. We were just there, not to present anything, but just to see what went on. And the guy who was the project leader with the Corps of Engineers who had contracted us to do the diving project—There was a lady on the power planning council there—and I don’t even remember his name, it’s been so long ago. But she listened to the presentation and everything. And then they had a break, and they got together and discussed it and they came back. And she pretty much said, Mister whatever-his-name-was, how is the best way to expedite your demise with this program, or something, in so many words. In other words, she said—no more. We kind of went, phew. And he just went livid. And I don’t know what happened to that guy. Last I heard, he had disappeared. He couldn’t deal with it. But I thought, well, we did our part, and we showed you, you know? And that’s what you asked us for, so. Franklin: Yeah, no, that’s great. I mean, without that, if barges and dredges were up, it wouldn’t be the Hanford Reach anymore, and it might not be a national monument. That’s really one of the great national—ecological treasures of this whole area. Swan: So I guess without really making a big deal out of it, Frank and I can feel like we were instrumental in helping preserve the Hanford Reach. Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: I’m just glad I didn’t get arrested for having too much fun. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right! Well, I told you guys, we do—part of the tours that the national park offers is this pre-Manhattan Project tour where we go to these former sites: Bruggemann warehouse, and the Allard pump house at Coyote Rapids, and the White Bluffs ferry landing. Now they’re very peaceful and you can get a sense of the history there, and if there were barges coming up through there— Swan: Yup. Cobb: Oh, yeah. Franklin: I mean, it would totally change the entire character of the tour. It would just be jarring. Swan: And they would have to dredge those channels and then repeatedly keep them cleared so that would have a hell of an effect all the way up through there. It would also probably affect the flows that would come out of the dams upstream in order to keep enough water for the barges to keep going. So it would’ve affected it tremendously if they’d ever approved it. Franklin: Well, great. Well, Frank, and George, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about these surveys and your guys’ work, having fun in the river, diving around. I’m very—I’m jealous of— Cobb: I’ve run that whole river clear, all the way. I know that river. I know where to stay out of trouble. And everybody used to tell us, you can’t run that river with a prop boat; you’ve got to have a jet boat. Swan: Oh, yeah, that’s something we ought to make a point of. We did that whole thing with an inboard-outboard, and we only dinged one prop, and it was just a goof, you know, loading the boat or something. We did that whole thing and never destroyed one propeller. And they kept telling us, you’ve got to do that with a jet boat. Well, the inboard-outboard seemed to work for our purposes better, so. Franklin: What would be the reason for the jet boat versus the— Swan: Oh, we wouldn’t have a propeller down there to catch the bottom, you know, and you could run in shallow areas. Now, later I did get a jet boat when we were doing our—more of the water withdrawal stuff and that worked out pretty good. But the other problems you run through those milfoil areas and if you don’t zip right through, you’ll suck it full and it’ll pug the intake and you’ve got to go underneath and rake all that crap out. Cobb: And then on top of that, one of the boats—I kept telling them to stay out of those shallow places. So they suck rocks up the propeller. I kept telling them, don’t do that! Twice they did it. Swan: Yeah— Cobb: And I’ve run that whole thing up, prop boat— Swan: Suck the gravel up there, it’ll just chew the propeller up. Cobb: Well, it’ll jam the propeller up, and then if you don’t have an outboard to get you back home— Swan: Yeah, you’d better have an outboard on the set like a trawling motor for fishing. Cobb: I do not want a jet boat. They take at least two or three times as much fuel, and I can go any place I want to go with a prop boat. You just got to know how to read the river. If you don’t know how to read the river, a jet boat will get you in trouble. Franklin: Yeah. Cobb: Anyway, shut up, Frank. Franklin: Nope! No, you’re good. Well, thanks a lot, guys. I think we’ll now switch to getting some shots of the long-awaited sled. [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: [INAUDIBLE]--and they tried to use it and it scared them to death. And they called me up, wanting me to train them— [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: We’ll get a couple more pictures while it’s all nice and up on these sawhorses. So you still do horse shoeing? Cobb: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Until you’re 80, right? Cobb: No, not me. [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: Oh, okay. Cobb: I’m a young guy. Franklin: I mean until you’re 80. Cobb: My brother—[INAUDIBLE] [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: Yeah, I understand that. I agree with that. Cobb: [INAUDIBLE] [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: [INAUDIBLE] people to take care of them. Franklin: Makes sense. Cobb: We’d do the barrel roll one direction, and then the other way of course, and then I’d do upside-down. And the flow, if it was high enough flow, you didn’t even have a tendency to fall out. Franklin: So the flow was kind of keeping you— Cobb: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Cobb: And then you had— [VIDEO CUTS] Tom Hungate: How it connected, you had a cable, I presume, to the boat? You said that was 150 feet or so? Cobb: [INAUBDILBE] Attached through here, and it was attached to the boat. And the flow, the faster the flow was, that’s what gave you the maneuverability. Franklin: And so then it’s the driver, pilot, on the left here, right? And then the surveyor, researcher, here on the right. Cobb: Correct. [INAUDIBLE] primitive. You want to fly it sideways, you went along like this. If you wanted to do barrel rolls. Side down, and then come back up, like this. Anyway, it’s very maneuverable, if you have enough flow. If the flow is too slow it’s real sluggish. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But I guess that’s where it’s really kind of made for the Hanford Reach, right? Cobb: Right. Franklin: Because the flow there is fast enough for you to have real maneuverability. Cobb: Right. Franklin: Right? Cobb: I always wanted to fly an airplane. [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: [INAUDIBLE]—as far as the wings. [INAUDIBLE] experimentation. Franklin: To kind of stabilize the back of it? Cobb: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Wow. [VIDEO CUTS] Cobb: Isn’t it nice and [INAUDIBLE[? Franklin: Yeah, it’s really not that—I mean it’s easy enough for two people can— Cobb: Well, when we were deploying it on and off, I had a set of runners, and this wasn’t on it. That was back in the front. And that was sitting down low on the water, and the flow slid up good, and that winch would float it up onto the boat. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:48 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Frank Cobb and George Swan Subject The topic of the resource Columbia River Salmon Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Frank Cobb constructed the "Redd Sled" to survey the salmon redd's of the Columbia River and to perform underwater water sampling near Hanford Reactors. George Swan worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and oversaw the salmon monitoring program where the Redd Sled was first created. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 8/28/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7194ce577e47504c63002b978488faf3.jpg fec812f761a66cb868de1623907fd0d9 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4f96830baf7c716580f9b628fb86b21b.mp4 0cb1dd85a78b125f9469688f27c3d344 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Glen Clark Location The location of the interview Northwest Public Broadcasting studio at the Washington State University Tri-Cities campus. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. So, before—so I have a little boilerplate at the beginning, and then we’ll just go straight into it, and I’ll ask you about your dad and mom and— Glen Clark: Okay. Franklin: And what you remember, what they told you, and then your childhood in Richland. Okay, great. Clark: I’m just following the lead. Franklin: Okay, good. Well, eventually, you’ll have to lead. Clark: Okay, I will. We’ll BS with the best of them. Franklin: Okay, awesome. Ready? Lori Larsen: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Glen Clark on February—March 7, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Glen about his experiences growing up in Richland and his father’s and mother’s experiences growing up in the area before Hanford—before the Hanford Site came. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Clark: It’s Glen Clark. G-L-E-N. C-L-A-R-K. Franklin: Great, thanks, Glen. So your father and mother were both born here, in the old towns of Hanford and White Bluffs? Clark: They were raised. Franklin: Raised, okay. Clark: Yes, and actually, I think my dad was born at Hanford. Franklin: At the town of Hanford. Clark: Town of Hanford, yes. Franklin: And then your mother came to White Bluffs? Clark: Right. Franklin: What can you recall about what they’ve told you about their childhoods in the area? Clark: You know, we could go on for hours. Franklin: Okay. Clark: And I had the opportunity, three or four or five times to go out to the site with them, or with my dad and uncles. They used to have a Hanford-White Bluffs picnic every year here in Richland. And if you signed up ahead of time, they’d badge you and you could actually go out to—normally, we met at the high school, what was the remnants of the high school. Franklin: The Hanford high school. Clarke: The Hanford high school. And then from there, they just said, go any place you want. Obey signs, obviously, radioactive signs, and be out of here by 1:00. Franklin: Wow. Clark: So we had an opportunity to go out and actually was able to get into, I call it a basement, but the hollow under my grandparents’ home, that is still there. Franklin: Really? Clark: Yeah, it’s basically a hole in the ground. Franklin: Okay, that would’ve been like a cellar? Clark: Right. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So I think it was a two-bedroom house and they raised six boys there. But slept on the porches and out in the sagebrush or wherever they could find someplace to sleep. And my mom moved here later than that. She wasn’t born here. I think she was born in Prosser. And her stepfather worked for Atomic Energy Commission, and that was actually prior to the Hanford Site being taken over. And they had an orchard out in the White Bluffs area. Franklin: So—but he didn’t work for the AEC before the Manhattan Project. Clark: He worked for the AEC before the Manhattan Project. Franklin: Okay. What was the scope of the AEC at the time? Clark: You know, unfortunately, I was too doggone young to listen to my step-grandfather, who was quite a bit older than my grandmother. But anyway, I didn’t get the opportunity to really find out what was going on then. Franklin: Sure, sure. And do you know roughly when your mother moved to White Bluffs? Clark: No, she went through high school in White Bluffs. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So her grandparents were from Prosser. He was a colonel, Colonel Baker. He was actually a real estate and insurance guy back, turn of the century, and did some surveying work. My grandmother was editor of the paper in Prosser for several years. Franklin: Okay. Clark: Great-grandmother. No, grandmother. Great-grandmother. Great-grandmother. I’ll get it right here sooner or later. Franklin: And how many times did you go out with your father and uncles, out to the Site? Clark: It was either four or five summers that we got an opportunity to go out there, and we’d go down to the pump station along the river, which is just down the road from their old house. And there’s over on this side was a guy by the name of John Kashier, had a five-acre, ten-acre spread. And he was also very prolific in making moonshine. They finally—the sheriff at the time finally caught him, so he went to Walla Walla for several years. Franklin: The penitentiary. Clark: To the penitentiary, because they frowned on that back in those days, I guess. Before he went to the penitentiary, he stopped at my grandmother’s, my grandparents’ house, and gave them a roll of money, and said, could you save this for me until I get back? So they did; they put it in their safe, which was a pipe in the side of the cellar, in the basement. They had a pipe, and they stuck that money in the pipe. So that was kind of the highlight, when he got back to them, he got his money back. So there’s a lot of stories of, you know, the kids going down. John Kashier’s house had a dirt floor, as the story goes, but it was just immaculate. It was swept clean. And he was a bachelor, and he always had a can—or, not a can, but a handful of peanuts and raisins for each of the kids. So I guess by all accounts a very good neighbor. Franklin: Popular one, too, I bet. Clark: With the kids. Franklin: And with the adults, right, for the— Clark: Yeah, for the moonshine. Franklin: Would this have been during Prohibition? Clark: Possibly. Because, like I say, they were pretty intent on him. You don’t normally go to prison, I don’t think, so it probably was during prohibition times. Franklin: When was your father born? Clark: Well, he’s 92. Going to be 92. Franklin: Will be 92. So, 1925. Clark: Math wasn’t my best—yeah. Franklin: Okay. Interesting. So what years did you go out with him? When was the last time you went out? Clark: I think it was the last year of the Hanford-White Bluffs picnic, and that’s probably been gone eight years now, probably, is the approximately the last time they had that picnic. People were just getting pretty elderly. Franklin: Sure, I mean, the last people born in those towns would’ve been born in the early ‘40s, so we’re approaching a wall. Clark: Right. Franklin: And who was running the Hanford-White Bluffs Pioneer Association? Clark: You know, I talked to somebody on that. The one that I know best, and not that I really know her, is Annette Heriford, was really active in that. And then there was another gentleman that—They had a banquet the night before where everybody could kind of mix together, normally down at the Shiloh and then the next day they would have the picnic in the park. Franklin: Was that Harry Anderson? Clark: Harry Anderson, yeah. Franklin: Okay. We recently just got the collection of his papers and all of the association documents. Clark: Mm-hmm, right. Franklin: And so you would go down there with your father and your uncles, you would go to the homestead, right, or the old house. And what else would you go see? Clark: Well, we would then drive down to the pump plant which my grandfather used to operate. Franklin: Oh, the pump station. Clark: The actual pump station where they pump water into Hanford. And drive around and see the different—you know, Gilhulys lived here, and I used to pick asparagus in that field, and—so just kind of doing a little tour. And then we’d normally go by, because my dad retired from 200-East and West house, power houses in 200 East and West Area. So then we’d normally drive around the outside of that and then book on out. Franklin: So your father also worked at Hanford? Clark: Yes. Franklin: So he was one of the—was born there, but then was not fully displaced— Clark: Well, yeah, he was. They came in and took the property. Franklin: Yes. Clark: “Buy.” It wasn’t really a buy; it was just, you get out of here and we’ll give you this amount of money. Franklin: Sure. Clark: And they moved to Yakima. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So that was in early ‘40s, I would guess. Franklin: 1943, yeah. Clark: Yeah. And then my dad enlisted in the Navy. And served in WWII. And then afterwards he went back to Yakima and worked for Picatti Brothers, which is pump operation. Franklin: For irrigation? Clark: Irrigation and domestic, and they rebuilt motors, and then he got on at Hanford as a motor-winder. Franklin: And what is a motor-winder? Clark: They actually rebuild electric motors, all the coils that are inside of them. I don’t think they do that anymore, probably, but back in the day, they did. They actually rewound them. Franklin: What kind of electric motors? For--? Clark: Anything. Any kind of electric motor. That’s what he started at Hanford doing, was in the motor shop. Franklin: The motor shop. And this was in the 200 Area? Clark: That was, I believe, in the 200 Area. And then he finally worked his way up. He was, when he retired, he was foreman for power and maintenance. He had a couple of crews, 18, 20 people, different crafts. Franklin: How long did he work for Hanford? Clark: Well, he retired when he was—started in 1950. And so 40, 40-plus years. Franklin: Oh, so he retired in the ‘90s, wow. Clark: Yeah. Franklin: And so you said he worked his way up in the shop from being a motor-winder to a foreman. Clark: Right. Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. That’s quite a long career. Clark: Yes. It was, you know, it was a good job. Franklin: Did he ever talk about—what were his feelings on the forced removal and then being back there, working for that same project? Clark: You know, I just think he got over it. Franklin: Yeah? Clark: Everybody was in the same shape, as far as the old-timers that had lived out there, were in the same shape. Get out. Franklin: Was there any bitterness, do you think? Maybe initially, or--? Clark: Oh, I’m sure there was a lot of—I mean, those people would be saints if there weren’t bitterness. The story goes that one of the guys had an orchard, and he said, just—cherry orchard, I believe. And he said, okay, just give me another month so I can harvest my cherries, and I’ll give you the land. And they said, no. Out. So the story goes. Franklin: Right. Clark: So I’m sure that there was a lot of bitterness. And I’m sure, in those days, nobody knew why. Or what was going on. They just knew that they were gone. Franklin: Did your father ever express any bitterness or resentment? Clark: I don’t believe so. I never saw that. And, actually, my grandparents who moved into Yakima didn’t either. But, there, again, some time had lapsed. Time, they say, cures everything. So. Franklin: Except for old age. Clark: Yeah, well, yes. I keep thinking that, maybe I ought to petition the government to give it back to who it was taken from. Which would be an interesting legal challenge. Franklin: Well, yeah, on a few levels. Because, you know, before white settlers came there was also another— Clark: Indian. Franklin: Yeah, another claim to that land. That would be very interesting. That would face some immediate legal challenges from, I think, many— Clark: Oh, I’m sure that, yeah, definitely would. But the Indians used to stop by my grandparents’ all the time. Franklin: Really? What—did they tell you about that, or--? Clark: Yeah, they’d just say, oh, Johnny Buck stopped and walked in the house and had dinner with us. You know, he was kind of the chief, I guess, of the—And my grandfather, for a period of time, was a Benton County commissioner. So anything that happened in his end of the county, he was kind of—he’d take charge of it. So he knew all the Indians. He used to, the story goes, that he took the family car and went down to Horn Rapids, which is now Winwash or whatever-in-the-heck it is. But the Indians had deals set up; they were netting salmon. So anyway, they gave him as many salmon as he could haul. And he loaded up the backseat, you know. I’m sure it smelled great. And then he went around to the community and handed out salmon to people that needed food. So it was interesting. Franklin: Yeah, that is very interesting. Kind of acting as a redistribution agent for that. So your grandparents, your family had pretty good relations, then with— Clark: With the Indians. Franklin: With the Wanapum. Clark: Oh, yes, yes. Franklin: That’s interesting because I’ve heard other stories from other people who mentioned friendly Wanapum visits, or they would ask people to store things for them if they were going to, like, a fishing camp and they didn’t want to carry everything. Clark: Yeah, no, they stopped—Dad tells one story that the whole tribe stopped by. They were moving to some different area for fishing or for root collecting or whatever they were doing, and the whole tribe came by and waved and stopped for a little bit. Franklin: Wow. Clark: So they were all on very good terms. One of my uncles—there was a lot of arrowheads and those type of things that they found over the years. One of my uncles has actually took a bunch of his collection up to the new museum that they just built up at one of the dams. They built a nice museum, so he donated a bunch of his collection to them. Franklin: Oh, that’s cool. Clark: Actually, I think all of them. Franklin: Oh, wow, that’s great. That’s always good to see that, to hear of that stuff getting— Clark: Back to where it— Franklin: Yeah, repatriated. Clark: I mean, it wasn’t against the law at the time. Franklin: Sure. Clark: It is now, obviously. You’re not supposed to pick anything up. But back in those days, was just doing their thing. Franklin: Right, and if there ever were laws they weren’t as enforced really, much, as they are now. Clark: Right. Franklin: No, that’s good to hear. Clark: They used to—the boys, the older boys—there were six boys, and my grandfather used to go up to Priest Rapids and there was some kind of logjam up there. They would make a raft out of these logs that are floating down from dam construction or whatever they were doing on the river. And then they would float that to Hanford, which was a couple-day ordeal. And that was their firewood for the winter. So they’d pull it up, with the horses, and pull it up on the bank, and cut it up. Franklin: Wow. That sounds really dangerous. To make a raft out of logs. Clark: And you know, all the boys survived. Franklin: Yeah, I’m sure. Well, they also knew how to do it, though, too, right? They had learned. I can just imagine somebody trying to do that today and probably getting killed. Clark: Yes. Yes, probably most likely. Franklin: Very much, I respect that knowledge of how to make a raft, a serviceable raft, out of reclaimed logs. Clark: Well, they’d just lash it together, and put a big boom pole on it. They’d do one or two rafts, and away they went. Franklin: Wow, wow. That’s really something. Clark: Yeah, it’s quite an undertaking. And of course back in those days, they didn’t have chainsaws and all that stuff. So it was a tough way to make some firewood. Franklin: Yeah, well, also, though, your options around here are pretty limited if you don’t want to burn sagebrush all the—which I imagine isn’t very good firewood. Clark: I wouldn’t think so. Franklin: Where did your father fall in the six boys? Was he— Clark: He was number three. Franklin: So he was square, pretty much, in the middle. Clark: Right. Franklin: Did any of your uncles work for Hanford? Clark: Yes. My number two uncle worked out there for many, many years. I can’t even tell you what he—well, he worked with my father. I think on a different shift, but he was in management of some sort or another. Franklin: Are the six brothers still pretty close—or were they pretty close? Clark: They’ve been close all their lives. Franklin: And did they all stay in the same area? After the displacement? Clark: No. Well, the two youngest went to Yakima with my grandparents, because they were still in school. Then all of the older ones were in the service. And then when my oldest uncle got out of the service, then he moved to Yakima and went—his entire life, he only worked for one company and that was Picatti brothers. Who was a friend of my grandparents. The elder Picattis. And they’re still a viable company. So my uncle retired from Picatti Brothers after, I don’t know, a lot of years. Franklin: Your grandparents probably knew him from then— Clark: From Hanford. Franklin: From working at the pump. Clark: Yeah. They—because grandpa used to do, like, general contracting. Hand-dig wells. And so they kind of worked hand-in-hand with Picatti Brothers for pumps and that kind of stuff. Franklin: Oh, I see. Clark: They’ve been family friends for years. Franklin: Would all of the boys often get together and go on the picnic—the White Bluffs-Hanford Reunion? Clark: Normally there was three or four. Franklin: Three or four. Clark: Yeah. Well, probably, a lot of times there were five. One of my uncles ended up moving all over the Northwest for a power company. So he was, a lot of times, down in Medford or over in Montana. Someplace way out of the area. So he normally didn’t come up for the picnic, but the rest of the other five did. Franklin: What did your grandparents do after moving—after being—moving to Yakima after being displaced? Clark: My grandfather—my grandmother didn’t work outside of the house. Franklin: Sure. Clark: But my grandfather went to work for PP&L, Pacific Power and Light. Franklin: Oh, okay. Clark: And he was running a substation there in Yakima for a lot of years. Franklin: Did your grandfather ever get a chance, or grandmother, ever get a chance to go back onsite? Clark: If they did, it was before my time. Franklin: Okay. Clark: They weren’t with us for those years that I went out. Franklin: Sure. When did they pass away? Clark: Now, that’s going back ancient history. Franklin: Okay. Clark: I should’ve brought my book. I’ve got a book that chronicles the whole family back, the Clarks and the Straddlings, which—but I didn’t bring it. Franklin: That’s okay. Do you remember your grandmother or grandfather talking about the displacement, their feelings about it? Clark: I didn’t really, like I say, they were displaced in ’43, ’42-’43, whatever. I was born in ’50. So, no, they’re not going to talk to a five-year-old, anyway, about that. So, yeah, there was never really much of any hard feelings that, at least, were apparent. Then they moved a lot of the graves to Prosser, which is where my grandparents were also buried. But they were buried at—they had never have been buried at Hanford, obviously, or it wouldn’t have been able to be moved. But then they moved a lot of those graves. Actually, I was—we go up there for Memorial Day every year and decorate graves. So I was cruising the—which sounds like fun, cruising the cemetery. And I found that John Kashier’s grave, which is—that one section is Hanford-White Bluffs. They were moved there. So I found his grave. Franklin: Was your family close with any other families that were displaced and stayed in the area? Clark: Not to any great extent. I mean, they kept in touch, but not—others, couple that were fairly close, the Burford family, and then the Meek family. And the Meeks used to own BB&M, was one of the owners of BB&M in Uptown Richland. So Dad used to see them quite a bit. And Don Burford still calls him. I think he’s in Port Angeles or someplace over there and still calls him every once in a while. Franklin: Because your father is still alive, yes? Clark: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And you said he’s 92. Clark: He’s going to be 92. Franklin: Going to be 92. So what about your—do you remember any recollections of your mother from growing up in White Bluffs, or her family’s— Clark: They didn’t have the roots as deeply in White Bluffs as they did in Prosser. Franklin: Ah, I see. Clark: So, it wasn’t as big a deal, I don’t think. Because they had not been there—I guess they had an orchard and something out there. But they hadn’t been there as long as—and of course, with my step-grandfather working for AEC, you know, that was kind of all tied-in. I don’t know how long they actually lived in White Bluffs. Or whether he was one of the first ones there and then the movement came. I can’t tell you. Franklin: Sure. Did you—when you would visit the site with your father and uncles, do you remember any other—are there any other experiences that stand out to you, anything else you saw, or— Clark: Yeah, I mean, there were deer everywhere, as there still are. And we were driving along the river, and there’s a couple of baby bobcats that went up a tree. Back in those days, I was a little young and tougher. A little dumber, too. So I decided I was going to try to get those bobcats. And make pets. Well, they convinced me that that would not be a real smart move. Franklin: The bobcats did, or your— Clark: No, my uncles. Dad and uncles. Franklin: Yeah. I bet Mama Bobcat would have something to say about that. Clark: She wasn’t immediately visible. Not that she wasn’t there. Franklin: I was going to say, she was probably watching. Clark: I would guess. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Clark: But like I say, I was a little younger and dumber back in those days, and a whole lot tougher, so. Franklin: Anything else that stands out to you? Clark: No. It was interesting just to go through and they would point out, well, Gilhuly’s family lived here, and this is where John Kashier lived, this is where such-and-such lived, and this is where—you know. And then we’d go by the old store, which wasn’t there, but the bank in White Bluffs. And then they would talk about, you’d go in there for a nickel and get three ice cream cones or something. So it was interesting. Franklin: And so you moved to Richland in—right, you were born in Yakima? Clark: Born and moved, three days old. I don’t remember the move, but I understand I was three days old when I moved to Richland. Franklin: And you grew up in Richland. Clark: Yes. Franklin: And so your family, you guys lived in an Alphabet House, then, when you were a kid? Clark: Yes. Franklin: A government-owned house. Describe that, describe growing up in Richland in the government days. Clark: It was a great place to grow up. You’ve heard the stories. I mean, we rode bicycles without helmets, we drank out of the garden hose. I remember, I don’t know how often it was, but all the houses—not all of them, but most of the houses had coalbeds. And they would just drive up with a coal truck up to your little chute in the basement, the little window, and they opened up the window and filled it full of coal, and that’s what we heated with. But you didn’t—I was pretty young; I think they started selling those houses, if I remember, ’56, ’57. Franklin: 1958. Clark: Okay. So I was still pretty young to understand, but somebody’d come over and change light bulbs. Normally it was three people, because you had to have safety, and you had to have the manager, and the person who actually screwed the light bulb. So that was just the way it was. And for many, many years after that, when I finally got older and got into business, there was still a lot of people in the business community that didn’t like doing business with Hanford people. Franklin: Really? Why is that? Clark: Because there was the perception that they had been given, for many, many years had been given everything. I mean, you didn’t change your own lightbulbs. So there was that mindset. Franklin: Was that a perception within the community of Richland, or more of a Tri-Cities— Clark: More Kennewick, Pasco. Franklin: Kennewick, Pasco thing. Clark: Right. Franklin: Dealing with Richland people. Well, I guess to a small extent, that was somewhat true. I mean, the level of home service you were talking about. You paid your rent and people came and delivered your coal to your house. Do you remember what kind of house you lived in? What Alphabet? Clark: Yeah. My dad still lives there. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what house is it? Clark: It’s a B duplex. Franklin: A B duplex. And where is it? Clark: On McPherson. 1300 block on McPherson. Franklin: Oh, okay. And that’s where you grew up and— Clark: Right. Franklin: And went through childhood and everything. Do you have any examples of people not—that kind of—because kind of I’m fascinated about that inter-cities relationship between Richland and Pasco and Kennewick. Clark: Yeah, and I don’t have any specific other than you’d go into a business and be negotiating something with—and, you must be from Richland; you have that attitude. Of course, back in those days, you didn’t live in Richland, basically, unless you worked at Hanford. Especially up until ’58. I mean, if you lived there, you basically worked at Hanford or some kind of subsidiary. Franklin: Right, you might have worked at a business in Uptown, or owned a business that had, though, that had the government contract to run that business. Clark: Right. We had a good friend of mine I went to school with that his dad had a floor covering company in Richland. It took him a couple of years to get a contract to be able to do that, but anyway, he finally did. And spent many, many years in Richland doing floor covering. Franklin: Mm. So you say that was kind of a perception from Kennewick and Pasco businesspeople that Richland people were kind of coddled or entitled? Clark: Yeah. Franklin: I guess is the word they’d use? Clark: Entitled, maybe, is a good word for it. Franklin: Okay. And did that persist for a while? Clark: For a while, I mean, it wasn’t—because I didn’t really start in the business and I didn’t graduate from school until ’68, from high school. So it was after that, into the ‘70s before it—and then of course by that time, Richland had greatly expanded; a lot of people had moved in that didn’t work at Hanford. So it kind of changed that whole focus. Franklin: Sure, sure. What do you remember about going to school in Hanford, especially in regard to—were they doing civil defense drills and things at the time that you were in elementary and middle school? Clark: Right. You know, it wasn’t a huge deal, but they’d have an air raid, and you’d crawl under your desk. It wasn’t a huge deal, but they did it on a regular basis. So there was some thought to that. Franklin: Were they practicing emergency routes at the time that you were in elementary, middle school where kids would get on buses and they would practice leaving town. Clark: No. No, there wasn’t any of that that I recall. Of course, you have to understand, my first day of kindergarten, I went to a different school than what I ended up graduating from. First day of school, they got me to school, and when I came home, my folks had moved. And it was like three months before I found them. Nah, I’m kidding. [LAUGHTER] But, no, I don’t recall any bus route. I remember one time as a cub scout, I was able to, with cub scout group, go up to the Nike missiles up on the hill. At the base of Rattlesnake. And got a tour—somewhat of a tour of those missile silos. Franklin: Wow. Clark: And to this day I can’t tell you whether there was actually any missiles in them or if they were just the empty—just the facility. But I don’t think they’d let a bunch of cub scouts around a bunch of Nike missiles. Franklin: Well, I mean, you never know. Clark: And kids were a little dangerous, you know. Hit the wrong switch, and— Franklin: You’d hope they’d have slightly better security for launching missiles than that. Clark: You would hope so. Franklin: When did you first—do you remember when you first found out or became aware of what was being made at Hanford? Clark: No, because it was—you know, by the time that I was like going to school, I mean, that was out. I mean, obviously, they had used the atomic bombs and—so, everybody knew what it was. Franklin: Were you ever worried about the effects of radiation or of production on your dad’s health, your family’s health? Clark: You know, it’s always—I’m in the real estate business, and have been for 40-some years, okay? So one of the first things we got—you know: I don’t want to be anywhere close to Hanford. Okay, people moving into town, not working at Hanford, well, we want to stay as far away as we can. You know, if the people who were in charge of safety lived in Spokane, I might be a little concerned. But they live right here, too. So, really, I was never—never overly concerned that there was any kind of an issue. I mean, it’s all the Hanford employees had their dosimeters, their little badges they have. And then there was a metal box on our front porch for many, many years that the urine sample went in. They’d come around and collect them and they’d check just to make sure people weren’t getting a dose that they weren’t expecting. Franklin: That was for employees, though, right? Clark: Employees, correct. Franklin: So, but what about—did you ever wonder about just the general—anything getting into the air or the water or anything like that? Clark: No, like I said, the people that are in charge of that live here, too. So I was really never all that—and we used to hunt up on the Columbia River, on the Hanford Site, on the shoreline, which was legal to hunt waterfowl. And you know, you just never gave it much thought, that there was still a lot of messes, or still is, out there. Franklin: What about the—given Hanford’s role in the production of material for two-thirds or three-quarters of the US nuclear weapons stockpile, did you ever worry about Hanford—about their being a danger in Hanford from a Cold War perspective? From a—that there might be reason to be doing all that civil defense, that Hanford might be a target? Clark: Well, that’s why they had the Nike missile; that’s why they had Army out here. Franklin: Sure. Clark: Obviously, it was a factor. But one of the times that we went on the Hanford-White Bluffs picnic, and we were all staged there at the old Hanford school, high school, and here came a helicopter. And it swoop, swoop, swoop, sat down right there out in front of everybody, and three guys get out submachine guns. And it kind of goes—okay. And obviously, it was a show. But we were able to go tour the helicopter, so-to-speak, and talk to the people. And I asked them, I said, how—because they have heat-seeking stuff, or did. I don’t even think they have helicopters anymore. But they had heat-seeking. He said, I can find a snake if I want to. If I turn it down to that, I can find a snake. So, obviously, security. And we, being raised in Richland—you know, what does your dad do? Well, he’s Hanford security. One of my buddies all through school was a courier, and he used to take highly secret stuff on trains. And they would take it wherever they were going, Savannah River, wherever, on a special train. And they were all armed with machine guns—I mean, it was pretty brutal. Franklin: Right. Clark: But they just—so I’ve always felt safe. I mean. The Cold War was the Cold War, and Khrushchev taking off his shoe and beating it on the table was part of the rhetoric. Franklin: Right, right. Clark: They have kind of the same thing now. Franklin: In— Clark: [LAUGHTER] In our president. Franklin: Ah. Can you elaborate? In what way, like how— Clark: Well, he’s a little off the wall, kind of like Khrushchev is. Now, I like him; don’t get me wrong. But he’s a little off the wall. Franklin: Yeah, he can get a little—act a little quickly sometimes, maybe. Where—luckily, in the Cold War, clearer heads prevailed—clear heads prevailed. Clark: Right. Franklin: Because I guess that’s where they—I understand the physical security, spies and operatives wouldn’t come, but what about—I mean, much of the Cold War was ruled by the fear of—because most of the nukes were on ICBMs or in planes, so I’m wondering, what about that more existential fear that could’ve become real, of Hanford likely being a site in a nuclear war? Clark: Really didn’t cross my mind. I mean, I honestly would be more concerned right now, because of North Korea, than I was back in those days. There wasn’t really any great fear. Franklin: Right. Yeah, luckily their rocket technology isn’t as good as the Soviets’ is yet—now. They keep trying, though. Very much so. So you live in Richland. Did you go to Columbia High? Clark: Yes. Franklin: Now Richland High. Clark: Right. Franklin: So, proud Bomber. I’m wondering if you could—since you would’ve—you graduated in 1968, right, so you came of age in a very turbulent time in American culture. Clark: Mm-hmm. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could speak to any kind of civil rights action in the Tri-Cities and what you observed if anything— Clark: Not in Richland; in Pasco, yeah. During that timeframe, there was some riots. Pasco High School wasn’t exactly the safest—well, I shouldn’t say it wasn’t the safest place, but there was a lot of unrest. I mean, they kept their thumbs on it, but there was a lot of unrest. Franklin: And what kind of unrest? Clark: Oh, girls of different nationalities ganging together. But it really didn’t spill over into Richland. I’ve got good friends that are African Americans and there was several that—one in particular I went to school with, and then two years older, Fred Milton, who was a big, big black guy, a football player, was a good friend of my older brother’s, so he’d be over at the house all the time. Franklin: And this was in Richland. Clark: This was in Richland. But originally, the stories go, and I believe the stories to be true, there wasn’t any black people in Richland or especially in Kennewick. They were all Pasco. Franklin: Right, because Kennewick had had sundown laws that prohibited homeownership. But there were a few African Americans in Richland, though, right, because— Clark: There were, but not many. Not many. The guy that just passed away was a realtor for many years; I knew him well. Franklin: CJ Mitchell. Clark: CJ. His family was in Richland there. And you know, great family. I mean, it’s—so, yeah, we just—it never was really an issue during my time. Franklin: Sure, sure. Do you remember the JFK visit in 1963? Clark: I do! I was actually out there. Franklin: Were you? Clark: Yup. Franklin: Okay, I’m wondering if you could describe that. Clark: [LAUGHTER] That’s been many years ago. Franklin: Well, sure. Clark: As I recall, it was just hotter than hell. And somehow I went out—I can’t remember now even how, but we got to see him. Maybe it was a scout deal or cub scout deal or something, but, anyway, I was able to go out there and see him. At the time, it was a big deal. Franklin: What else do you remember about the event? Clark: Really not much of anything, other than it was hotter than heck and longer than—you know, when you get a president speaking and a couple of senators speaking, and they’ve all got to say everything they can say. Franklin: Right, also, I bet there’s a lot of lead-up to the actual event. What did your mother do? Clark: She worked. She retired at the public health department. Franklin: Okay, was that for Kadlec or for— Clark: No, for Benton and Franklin Counties. She wrote the checks. Franklin: Oh, okay. Clark: She was a bookkeeper of some type. So I’ve always had a good in with the folks there at the health department. You want your check? Approve this plat or you don’t get your paycheck. Obviously, she wouldn’t do that, but it was always a good story. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Did she ever work any with Hanford or anybody out at Hanford? Clark: You know, I think she did very early on, but that really would’ve been in the, probably late ‘40s. Because I don’t think, you know, with four kids to raise—I know that she didn’t work after, you know, in my memory. Franklin: Did she ever go out to the Site with any of the reunions? Clark: Not to my knowledge. Franklin: Okay. Has she passed? Clark: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And so then after you graduated from Columbia-slash-Richland High, did you stay in the area, or--? Clark: Stayed in the area, actually bought a B house. Franklin: Oh. Clark: In ’70, I believe. Franklin: Really? At 20 years old. Clark: At 20 years old. And I sold it, I think, ’72 or ’73 and bought some other properties. Ended up moving to Kennewick for a while, and then ended up, in ’80, I think, I bought a house in Pasco. Franklin: Okay. Clark: So, where I currently am. Franklin: And so did you get bitten by the realtor bug early on then, or--? Clark: You know, when I bought my duplex in Richland, I paid $18.5k for it. And I don’t remember much about it. I was kind of doing odd jobs, and I worked for this realtor, Clair Groves, used to have Allied Brokers down the river shore. I said, Clair, if you ever find a house, a B duplex, I’m interested. So anyway, he called me one day, I found one, I looked at it, 18.5. Okay, how much down? $600. So I borrowed the 600 from my grandmother and bought it. And the only thing I really remember off the closing statement was how much money he made. Of course, I didn’t pay him; the seller did. But still. And I thought, that’s a pretty lucrative business; I can do that. So, yeah, so in ’72 I got a license to—and I’ve been in it ever since. Franklin: Ah, I see. So you’ve bought and sold property, then, all over the— Clark: All over the Tri-Cities. Franklin: You’ve sold, I assume, a fair number of old Alphabet Houses or prefabs. Clark: Yeah. Prefabs is—I’m working on one now that I own, and I’ve owned one or two others. But that’s it, because they’re a bearcat to—there’s no halfway fix. Franklin: Right. I live in a prefab. Clark: I know. But if you start remodeling it, there’s no going partway. You’ve really got to do it, do it all. Franklin: Oh, okay. Right. Well, they were really never—I mean, they were temporary housing. Clark: Oh, yeah. Flat roof, just like, an oven, I guess, the first couple years they were there, and then they put the peaked roofs on them. Yeah, they were built to last four years, five years. And a lot of them are still there, and a lot of them are excellent homes. Franklin: Yeah. Do you find you have a special affinity for Alphabet Homes? A connection? Are you keyed into that history at all? Clark: Yeah. No. Well, the market for As and Bs, and Cs, if you can find a C, and there’s another one, D, I think, that are duplexes. They’re almost not—they’re very hard to find, available. So, and the price has gone from, I paid $18.5 for mine, and I sold it for $26, I think. Now they’re about $175 to $200-plus depending on condition and what’s been done. Franklin: So you find they’re desirable, then? Is that what— Clark: Yeah. And extremely well-built. I mean, obviously, they’re getting old. Franklin: Yeah. Clark: But they used extremely good lumber. Because it was a war effort, and they came in. I mean, some of the duplexes actually had full basements that were all completely built that way. And then they found out that the contract said you don’t do that; you only do half-basements. So they went and filled them back in with dirt and put the wall in that was standard. So, yeah, it’s interesting. But they’re good solid properties. Franklin: Great. Clark: And there’s been a lot of money in Richland because of the price they paid for their real estate when they bought them in ’58, so they were paid off, you know, a few years. So people have been able to afford to upgrade them. So it’s hard to find one now that’s original. I mean, something’s been done to them over the years. Franklin: Oh sure, I mean, you’re talking— Clark: Human nature. Franklin: We’re talking about houses that are 70 years old or more, or around there. That’s pretty standard for—at least as far as the—you’re talking especially about insides, right, the guts of the house. Clark: Right. Franklin: Not so much the— Clark: Not so much the outside. Franklin: Well, and if you change the outside too much, then it’s not really the same house anymore. Clark: When I was a kid, probably 12, 12 or 13, my dad went in partners with a guy who bought, I think a half of one of the barracks out here at Hanford when the Army moved out, and then they were going to just tear them down. So we went out and tore it down. We got the lumber that we tore down, recycled it, and my dad built his big garage with it, and we put an addition out the back of the B house on his side. That was a lot of fun. Franklin: Interesting. That’s kind of neat. That’s also kind of historic, or interesting reuse operation, kind of combining this historic Army structure with—that’s very interesting. And that was done in the ‘60s? Clark: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, that’s really cool. I do historic preservation, so it’s always kind of interesting to hear of good reuse projects like that. Clark: Right. Franklin: And the flavor, that’s great, too. So, being a graduate of Columbia and Richland High—at that time, you graduated, were they using the Bombers, the cloud imagery? Clark: Yes. Franklin: I’m wondering—that’s a very—I don’t know, loaded, or charged, symbol. Clark: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m trying to find a way to phrase that properly. I think you get—I think you know what I’m getting at. I’m wondering, can I get your thoughts on that, on that particular symbol and that mascot? Clark: You know, it served us for many years. I guess I’m just an old redneck, but politically correct is—I mean, it’s just gone way overboard. I’ve got a very good friend of mine that just lost his wife a couple of weeks ago. And she was from Japan. She’d tell stories during the bombing and stuff that they’d take all the kids up and hide them in caves in Japan. But there wasn’t—there hasn’t been really any animosity between us and, like I say, her, she’s been a friend of mine for years. But there wasn’t any—so the bombs created a lot of death, yes. How many lives did it save? And the cost of invading Japan in human lives would’ve been—because those people would’ve fought to the last person. So the war got over, a lot of people didn’t die that could’ve died on both sides. So it was kind of like this, one of the necessities of war. Franklin: Hmm. I wonder, though, how—as that generation is—the World War II generation is almost gone. Clark: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering, how strong of a—how that connection will carry on as— Clark: You mean with the bomb logo? Franklin: You know there’s a generation now that is the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of that, who kind of come— Clark: You try to change it again, and you’re going to get those of us, and there’s a couple of people I can think of their names, that would just have a fit. And very vocal people. So, yeah, maybe another 30 years, when us old guys are all gone, too, maybe they’ll look back and say, well, let’s get rid of that. But it’s just like that R in ’67, that R that was placed up on the hill and that the school district in their infinite wisdom decided to remove without telling anybody. And people came up in arms about it. And now they’ve replaced it. Old school. Franklin: Cool. Is there anything that I—or, actually, no, sorry, second-to-last question. Clark: Okay. Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about growing up in Richland, living in Richland during the Cold War? Clark: You know, I have absolutely no complaints. It was still, then, pretty much a small town, extremely safe town. I mean, you’d be out at midnight, and nobody worried about any kind of violence going on. Or if you’re 17 years old and you got picked up with a six-pack of beer, the cops’d get you. Pour it out, and go home. I mean, it was just laidback, small town, everybody knew everybody. Which is a drawback, because it’s going, who are you taking out tonight? Well, I’m taking out--. Who are you taking out? Oh, yeah, I know her mom real well. Oh, good. That’s not what I wanted to hear. Franklin: That’s interesting. I hear that a lot. And it strikes me that that—the factors that underlie that seem to be that everyone—it was so safe and so secure because the government before ’58 had a very tight control over who lived in the town. But also it was a town of almost full employment and good employment and government employment. So there seems to be—in a town with all this safety and security and freedom, there was also this heavy government hand in some ways. Clark: You know, there, again, in ’58, I was eight years old. So I certainly wouldn’t have felt that. But, yeah, I mean, you couldn’t paint your house or anything that we’re just used to. I mean, you could have it painted; you could get somebody to come in—they’d send a crew of 12 to paint your house; it took them three weeks, you know? But, yeah, there again, I was awfully young to be able to—I probably wouldn’t have felt any of that. Franklin: Sure, sure. Clark: But growing up, like I say, it was—in a fairly wealthy town, from the standpoint that basically all the water and sewer, electricity, all of that stuff was, in essence, given to the city when it became private. So the people in the city didn’t have to pay for it. Now, obviously, we’re paying for it now because a lot of it’s getting old and they have to update the infrastructure. Franklin: Sure. Clark: But that wasn’t the way in the beginning. Because it was all basically in top shape and given to the city to say, here, operate it. Franklin: Right. I mean, they needed good facilities to get good people to come and stay. Yeah, that’s good— Clark: And I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of stories of people coming here and the first windstorm blew them back out of town. Franklin: Oh yeah, very much so. Yeah, it seems people that stayed were more often the exception than the rule in those early days. But that’s a good point, that Richland, when it incorporated, really had started off on a very good foot in terms of all that government investment really created Richland as this middle class, upper middle class city. In comparison to Kennewick and Pasco which had much different origins. Clark: Right. Franklin: And that, like you alluded to before, that might explain—not, you alluded; that you stated, that might explain some of that resentment. Clark: Potentially. Franklin: Potentially. Clark: I mean, they wouldn’t actually put a sign up on the front door saying no Richland people allowed. So it was— Franklin: Kind of subtext, kind of underneath the surface, when the Richland people were gone, they might be like, oh, those Richland people, again, you know? Clark: Well, there again, the wages weren’t top wages, but they were pretty close. They were good-paying jobs. And where most people, you know, I mean, your dad worked at Hanford. You can’t get fired from Hanford, or it’s extremely difficult to get fired from Hanford. You just showed up, did your job, and okay. It’s not the real world, I mean, people in Kennewick and Pasco didn’t have that. I mean, you only worked if you could make the boss money. And in this case, the boss was the people, the taxpayers. So it was kind of like, hey, you’ve got a job here forever. Franklin: Well, and the product was one of very high demand. Clark: Yes. Franklin: You know, at war there. Clark: Well, it’s basically, it’s been good for a lot of families. Franklin: Oh, yeah, very much so. Well, great, Glen, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? Clark: No, I think you’ve pretty well done a good job and kind of covered the bases. Franklin: Okay, well, great, thank you. Thank you so much. Clark: You betcha. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:01:51 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Glen Clark Subject The topic of the resource White Bluffs (Wash.) Hanford (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Glen Clark grew up in the pre-Manhattan Project towns of Hanford and White Bluffs and later moved to Richland as his parents went to work at the Hanford Site. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 3/7/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F63597890b84a4bfcdd0fa256e4c9c15d.jpg ffb070bd2b52785563acbfaadfe10742 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fa9b2de3cbe40e470ac71fb166d655fb8.mp4 5cf2ec6e1c33811ff74fe4b4f0fb6cb1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed David Chambers Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with David Chambers on July 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. We will be talking with David about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? David Chambers: Is David H. Chambers. D-A-V-I-D. H. C-H-A-M-B-E-R-S. Franklin: Great, thanks, David. And do you prefer David or Dave? Chambers: David or Dave, either one. It’s immaterial to me. Whatever’s easiest for you. Franklin: Okay, great. So, tell me, how and why did you come to the area to work for the Hanford Site? Chambers: Well, when I first graduated from college, I taught school for a while. I taught school in Pasco. I went back to the University of Wisconsin – Stout branch, but I was from Wenatchee, Washington. And the Tri-Cities was kind of an up-and-coming community, so I ended up teaching school here. And then I quit teaching school and went to work in engineering for Boeing Aircraft Corporation. There were just too many people in Seattle, so I wanted to get back over here, and got an opportunity to go to work for Battelle Research Laboratories and so I took the job. Franklin: Okay. And what did you do at Battelle? What was your job there? Chambers: I was called a senior engineering technical person. Franklin: Okay. And that sounds kind of vague, so I’m wondering if you could unpack kind of what your job duties were and what kinds of projects you worked on. Chambers: Well, we did a little bit of everything. The first four or five years I worked for Battelle, it was out in the 200 West area. 221-T, head end. And we did what’s referred to as simulated reactor explosion tests. Franklin: Really? Chambers: And what we did, we had a containment vessel and a little reactor core inside of it. And we vaporized high levels of uranium, plutonium, et cetera, different radioactive material, and put it in the reactor and looked at the metals that would withstand it and the coatings we would try to use to utilize to protect stuff, and the chemicals and washes to clean it up after an explosion. So that’s what I did for about four or five years. Franklin: And what kind of work came out of that? Did that lead to changes in reactor design or things used to clean up? Chambers: Well, I’m sure that it did, because stuff was utilized at Chernobyl and also at the Three Mile Island. Basically, sodium hydroxide, NaOH is the best thing we found to wash them down. And after it was washed down to the bottom of it, we collected samples, and run those samples through liquid nitrogen so we could cool it down and put it into little 500-mililiter bottles. And then we set it in the computer that was in a whole room at that time, with air conditioning, naturally, and analyzed it so we could see the drop in the radiation as the time went on. Franklin: Wow. How did your previous work prepare you for this job of testing—reactor explosion tests? Chambers: Well, it didn’t, really. We had a lot of high PhD people that were actually analyzing all the stuff, and there were several of us that basically just did the experiments and stuff. The computer analysis went to the PhD people that analyzed it and looked at it and wrote all the paperwork. At that time, you know, we were kind of bitter enemies with Russia, and yet they were able to get that information somehow and utilize it. And I don’t blame them. Battelle put it out and maybe charged people for it. It was a government-funded program, looking at ways to protect people. That’s what it was for. We didn’t have much protection at all; we had a pair of surgeon’s gloves we put on our hands. That was about it, you know. And a white lab coat. So that was basically what we used. Filled those little bottles with the white surgeon glove, set it over, so. Franklin: Wow. How much shielding was between you and the simulated reactor in these reactor explosion tests? Chambers: There was a lot of shielding there. There was concrete walls, plus the reactor core was steel and metal and stuff and what-have-you. And all the atmosphere was protected because all of the velocities of air went through all kinds of filters and stuff before it was ever released to the atmosphere. And the liquid went into those tanks that are out there now that everybody’s worried about. So any of the chemicals and stuff that we washed down, any of the cleanup that we did on the stuff that we utilized in it, all went into those tanks out there. We also had canisters that we set around, positioned, in the containment vessel at different altitudes, different spaces. And they had little carbon filter systems in them, and we’d switch them on and pull the air through them, and then we’d check the little deals. So, again, over a period of time, we’d do like maybe 15 minutes after it happened, maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour-and-a-half. Utilization time to see how it dropped off over the periods of time. And it was through—they had these little round canisters, if I remember right, I think they had thirteen of these, each one had like thirteen of them in it, and so we could turn them on individually. So pull air through them, and then look at the radiation content and see the slope that it went down over a period of time. Franklin: Interesting. Chambers: And then we had another facet out there that we utilized. We had a separate building outside of 221-T head end that we had a reactor core in it and put waters in that and had two shields in it, metal shields, and used high pressure nitrogen stuff between the two of them, so that as they heated up the water and put it under tremendous pressure, it wouldn’t blow. When it released the pressure, then it would blow. And we did that along with the other—to see what damage, and what would happen when one blew. One time, in fact the last time we utilized that, they made a little mistake and got the pressures and stuff a little bit too high, and the walls on the reactor, that simulated reactor were six inches thick, and when it blew it split it. And not only that, but it blew the frame back in the concrete and sucked the walls in on the building and lifted the roof off of it. We had a neutron generator sitting out to measure stuff. I don’t know where it went to. Nobody that I know of has ever been able to find it. And it was a tremendous thing—the steel—tremendously heavy. And that volume of water and steam and everything went out of that place, and I don’t know where that neutron generator—we looked and looked and looked for it. Never could find it. I don’t know they ever did find it. Franklin: You mean, it— Chambers: It just went somewhere. Franklin: It flew away. Chambers: It flew away or disintegrated, I don’t know. And that was—we weren’t supposed to talk about that for a long time, and so I never did tell anybody. Several years thereafter, I had a good friends that I fished and hunted with, Bob Cullowith[?], he was the head engineer on the FFTF, so he understood. We were hunting—this was, oh, 25 years after it happened—and I told him about it. So our manager, Gordon Rodgers was a skier and Bob Cullowith[?] would go up to Bluewood skiing. And one day he was sitting next to Gordon on the bus. He mentioned that to Gordon and Gordon said, well, I guess it’s time we can talk about it now. At the time it was supposed to be secret; nobody’s supposed to know it. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s a great story. So to your knowledge it was never found? Chambers: No. We looked and looked and looked for it. We had an RM out there always onsite. Irving Winters was an RM, really a nice fellow. They call radiation monitors something different now, but at that time they were RMs. Went out with Geiger counters and everything. We looked all over that country for it; I don’t know where it went to. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: To this day, I don’t know whether anybody knows where it went to. Franklin: Wow. That’s sure a good thing that no one was standing where that neutron monitor was. Chambers: Oh, why, no, we wouldn’t let anyone out there, because it blew out with tremendous force and velocity. Well, as I say, it pulled the sides in the building and lifted the roof. A tremendous deal. And that reactor core is a pretty good size, and it was mounted in steel and stuff, six inches thick, as I say, and it split it and blew it clear back against—broke the mounting brackets and blew it back against the concrete. And our manager was really upset at that, and I don’t blame him. Because they just made some mistakes. A lot of people think you can’t compress water. But they found that you really can, and when it blows, it blows with tremendous force. In fact, they did a test somewhere, I think maybe Idaho or somewhere, where an engineer was doing that and then it got too much pressure and it blew and just disintegrated him. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: And that’s been several years ago, 40 years ago or so. So that—water compressed can end up being pretty dangerous. Franklin: That sounds like some pretty—I mean, obviously this work would have really big impacts on safety and knowing how to construct better reactors. But this sounds like pretty dangerous—there’s definitely some hazards involved with this testing. Chambers: Well, I don’t think there was really hazard that way. The hazard we were subjected to was the chemicals and the radiation back in the samples that we took, and taking the little air samplers apart. They were little stainless steel deals that we put charcoal in them and filters of a different kind in them. And again, we had a little deal we stuck in our pockets, a little dosimeter, they call them. But if you got too high on them, guys would leave them in their lockers, so that they wouldn’t send you home or whatever, you know? And if you thought you were getting too much of it. So that’s basically the exposure problem was what really was dangerous to us, as far as the reactor core and stuff—we were away from it, we were back in the building when it blew or standing off to the sides and back of it, and watching it when stuff like that happened, or in labs. Franklin: Would you be watching it through like shielded glass or CCTV or—? Chambers: When we vaporized the radioactive material, we were watching it through lead glass. Very thick lead glass. Franklin: So, when guys would get too much dose and get sent home, would they be sent home without pay? Is that why they would leave their dosimeter? Chambers: No, I— Franklin: Because you’re the first person I’ve heard that from, and I— Chambers: I think they were all paid, as far as I know. I don’t think anybody lost any pay. They just sent them to do something else or sent them home or something, what-have-you, so they wouldn’t lose pay. If you got overdosed. Like McCluskey, out there, he was paid all that time. Franklin: Sure. I guess I’m just struggling to understand why someone would intentionally leave their—overexpose themselves over the limit just to keep—there are other guys that could do that job, right? Chambers: Well, you know, a lot of the knowledge at that time wasn’t where we are now. A lot of this stuff they didn’t know back then. You can’t blame them, because it was a job and it paid good. They didn’t know the dangers then that they do now. They know a lot more—like asbestos is a good example. Every pipe we had out there, everything was insulated with asbestos. Well, they didn’t know the ramifications of asbestos, you know, 70 or 80 years ago. World War II, every ship that was built had asbestos all through it. But they learned. Franklin: It’s a great insulator. Chambers: Yes. Fabulous. But very deadly if you—you know. Even to people at home, from the clothes that you take home. The women washed them and stuff, you know, they’d get the fibers and breathe it in their lungs, like coal dust, you know? 100 years ago they didn’t know what coal dust would do, and now they—so a lot of those, a lack of knowledge. Franklin: Mm. You also alluded earlier that this had been a pretty high point in tensions with Russia during this part of the Cold War. Do you think that might have played into the attitude of just wanting to get the job done? Chambers: I think so. I think that they were accept—very acceptable to utilizing our knowledge when it came to cleaning up the reactor and stuff. They had to when Chernobyl happened. I think, if you look back, a lot of our people went over there. A lot of Battelle people went over and helped them, because—that was actually in Ukraine. Chernobyl’s actually in Ukraine; it isn’t in Russia, you know. And lately I’ve been seeing some specials on TV showing the beautiful city that they had there and all the amusements and stuff, it’s just sitting there in ruin, because they can’t go to it now because it’s so highly radioactive. But their reactors, you know, were vertically cooled, which means that the cooling water’s all on the bottom. So they got a hot spot and bubbled the water, so the top of the reactor didn’t have any cooling water. Where ours are horizontally cooled. We got the cooling water up here as well as down there, so we don’t have that problem. Different philosophy of making a reactor. Franklin: Sure, sure. So what did you—so after the reactor—you mentioned you worked at the 221-T head end doing reactor testing, and then you looked at different chemicals for cleaning up. What did you do after that project? Chambers: I went down to the 300 Area and went to work in Robert Marshall’s—that was the manager. I worked directly for a PhD by the name of Gerald Kulcinski. And he actually, I told a young man later, the smartest individual that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. And you see him on television every now and then on Discovery Channel, A&E and they’re talking about him. Because he left here and went to University of Wisconsin and he’s in charge of the fusion reactor—the old reactors are fission. What we’re trying to develop now is fusion, where you get 100,000-degree plasma and you can keep it going and contain it. Well, we can get to 100,000 but to keep it going and contain it is different, and that’s what they’re working on. He was kind of in charge of that. Went all over the world to do that kind of stuff, and he’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I think now retired, but he talks about now what’s energy on some planet out there and if we could get that energy from here we could run this world for a lot of years and stuff. They’re way out there in this stuff. Franklin: So what was he doing when you went to work out in his lab? Chambers: We were doing metallurgical research. We were taking various types of metal that we were trying to fiddle with or mend or develop or what-have-you, and putting them in reactors around the country, different levels of radiation and then bringing them back to the lab and seeing what kind of damage they sustained. And the way we would do that, we would thin them down with a variety of ways and then put them in electron microscope so we could magnify stuff and see stuff several thousand powers magnification and then look at the damage that the metal sustained. Franklin: And what was the purpose of that work? Chambers: Well, again, to try to develop metals for different things and to try to develop metals that the reactor wouldn’t harm, and to make all kinds of stuff out of, I guess. Stainless steel now has become widely used in all kinds of cookware and knives. When I was a kid, you never thought of having a knife blade, a pocketknife blade, made out of stainless; they were carbon steel. Now they’re all stainless. Franklin: Hmm. So was stainless steel one of the metals to come out of that work that had high applicability for all these different scenarios? Chambers: Well, I’m sure it was. I’m sure Battelle had a lot of work, because they’re a very competent company in a whole lot of different areas. People don’t realize what kind of research they do and a tremendous amount of developments in everything come from Battelle. I think it’s a very, very good company, my personal opinion. Franklin: Were there any tests of metals that stood out to you in that work? Chambers: Not really anything; it was just a combination—and you’d put them in the reactor at this level. At University of Washington, I took some samples over to their reactor, put them in at their level, downtown Seattle and people didn’t realize in Seattle they had a reactor right downtown Seattle with Dixy Lee Ray running it. Very brilliant lady, you know? And we’d send them everywhere and then bring them back and, say, thin them down and just look at what happened. Of course, one of the things that took place when we did that, our lab became very contaminated. Because some of the metal was thicker, so we had to thin it down to start with. Well, I bought a little milling machine with a magnetic base on it and then glued the samples to a piece of carbon steel with epoxy resin and superglue. And then planed them down with a horizontal milling machine. All of those particles and everything went into the atmosphere in our lab. And then, we’d put them in a little holding device and used high current and various acids to spray against it with the current and to thin them, etch them down, until you could finally see some light. And then we put them in the microscope. So all of that atmosphere was what we breathed. It was just in the room. So it became a very contaminated lab. You can understand why. But, again, we never thought anything about it. It was a job; we just did it, you know? Franklin: Were you wearing respirators— Chambers: No. Franklin: --or anything? Any kind of protective--? Chambers: We didn’t have anything on but our street clothes, like this. Or you could change into a pair of coveralls if you wanted to. Most of the time, we didn’t. But I think I’m probably the only one left alive. My compadre, Jack Humason, a great friend of mine, he and I both worked straight for Gerald. He died about a year ago. Had cancers through the bone marrow and all in his blood and stuff, and just fell over dead, went in the hospital. One of the guys I hunted with, Jones is his name, Maxwell Jones, I read in the paper here three or four months ago that he ended up back in Tennessee doing stuff. And he died. And he’s quite a few years younger than I was, and so was Jack. So I’m lucky. I don’t smoke and I’m not a drinker or anything. Unfortunately, I’ve got bad COPD from all that stuff. Franklin: Wow. Yeah, it’s amazing, I can imagine that just a little—what you’d be inhaling would be a really effective—a cocktail of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: You know, because you’re getting all these samples in from all these different reactors and these different types of metals and milling them and everything. Chambers: Well, yes, and of course the acids and stuff that we were utilizing basically to thin the metals down with the current, the fumes from that that you were breathing, that didn’t do your lungs any good either. Of course, that’s what’s, again, more of what’s in those tanks out there that they’ve got to find a way to drain those tanks and solidify that material. Unfortunately, our vitrification plant is a long way behind time. Franklin: Yeah. Well, it seems like, just from what you just described and talking with other people, it seems like it’s that mix of things that are in the tanks that seems to be a lot of the problem. There’s all these different chemicals and all these different solids and, you know, it’s like a grab-bag. Chambers: Yes, there’s everything under the sun in those tanks and what-have-you. Of course, the acid content and the strong NaOH, that’s what causes the tanks to etch away, leech away and stuff. And you know what an acid will do; pour it on metal, and it’ll eventually burn right through it, you know. Unless you got—if they’d have built the tanks out of stainless to start with, it’d been far better off. But, again, it was knowledge, lack of knowledge. They didn’t have any idea. We had a war to win. When they did this stuff, or when they started doing it. And then we had a cold war for years that we were worried about everything, so we had to do stuff. Now, you wonder if you could win a war now. With the attitude that’s in this country now, it makes you wonder if you could do the things that you did. You couldn’t do the things that they did back then. Franklin: Yeah. So how long did you work at the metallurgical research lab? Chambers: Well, that was over five, about six years there. I had about eleven years in at Battelle. Franklin: Okay, and then you left Battelle? Chambers: Yes. Franklin: Okay, and why did you leave Battelle? Chambers: Well, I had a business going. I had the last year or two, couple of years I was with Battelle, and then I finally went to that full-time. Franklin: Ah, and what business was that? Chambers: I owned Water World Marina, Incorporated at Pasco Boat Basin. Franklin: Oh, okay. So you retired at Battelle to go full-time with your boat business. Chambers: That’s correct. And then I ended up having, oh, about, oh, I don’t know, at the most probably ten or twelve people working for me for—I was in that for 25 years. Franklin: Oh, wow. And so then you sold that as well? Chambers: Yes, that’s correct. Franklin: So you’ve been retired for a while. Chambers: Yeah. Well, I retired and my buddy bought me out, and then not long after that, why, he called me up and said, Dave, would you please come down and go to work for me, you know? Help me out? I need some help, you know. So I said, okay, I’ll do that, I’ll help you out. Franklin: Yeah, it’s hard to stay retired, I’ve noticed. I interview a lot of retired people. Hard to stay retired. When you worked for Battelle, did you live in Pasco the whole time, or did you ever live in Richland? Chambers: No, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, Kennewick. Chambers: At the time. I live in Pasco now, but all the years that I worked for Battelle Research Laboratories, I lived in Kennewick. Franklin: Oh, okay. And so you would do the commute every day out to the— Chambers; Yes, that’s correct. And to start with, another thing I don’t understand, we’d drive to the bus lot in North Richland, right off of, basically a continuation of George Washington Way and a couple other streets went together, and had a big parking lot there. And then you get on the buses and ride out to 2-West. And I never could understand why in the world they got rid of those buses, because it kept a lot of cars off the road, and a lot of—one bus carrying 50 or 60 people is a whole lot more economical than a bunch of cars driving out there. Franklin: Yes, yes, it is. Chambers: I couldn’t understand why they got rid of them. It was something you could relax, both going and coming from work. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of people who rode the buses how much they like them. It sure does seem to make a lot of sense to have them. Chambers: No, it didn’t make a lot of sense to get rid of them. Franklin: I think I just have a couple other questions. Yeah, I have two more questions. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which the security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work. Chambers: Well, I don’t really think that the secrecy or the security impacted it, except that you didn’t take the stuff home with you. You didn’t advertise to everybody what you were doing, and we were beyond a war, in the Cold War. During World War II, people didn’t even really know what they were doing out there, most of them. There were people in the know that did, but the vast majority of them didn’t know. Well, when I went to work there, everybody knew what you were doing. People downtown didn’t know a lot of the stuff and weren’t privy to the writings and stuff that were going on out there. That went strictly to the government or to some organization. And Battelle does a lot of private company research. And that’s probably more secretive than government research, because if you’re doing research for a company and they paid you a lot of money, they most certainly don’t want a competitor to get that knowledge. So that’s probably more secretive than the government work was when I was out there. And then I can understand why. So I don’t think it impacted what we did at all, except that you were limited on what you could take out there and what you could bring home. You couldn’t bring anything home unless you had clearance to do it. And you most certainly couldn’t take any kind of weapons out there. And dope was prohibited. People maybe tried to take it in and stuff, but I didn’t see any of that in our groups at all. And a lot of our groups, not many of them even smoked. I don’t smoke, and Jack Humason didn’t smoke, and Gerald Kulcinski didn’t, and Homer, our manager didn’t smoke. Very few people. Some of them smoked pipe, and some of them smoked cigarettes. But there were more people that didn’t smoke, even back then, than did. So. Franklin: Interesting. Well, that’s—I mean, good for them. Chambers: Yes, yes. Good thing I don’t, as bad as my COPD is. When I went through the impairment evaluation—started on the deal against the DOL in October of 2012. So it’s been almost five years. And had my impairment evaluation last August. They put you in a little room, and put all connected up stuff, and then they put you on a bicycle with stuff on you. And I had, my lungs got an 86% impairment with my lungs with all that stuff and what-have-you. So I have to breathe inhalers all the time. And then I have a heart that beats fast, because of the oxygen transfer, there are no blood vessels shut down or anything for the oxygen transfer. So I have to take medicine for that, so. Franklin: Oh, wow. Chambers: So it catches up to you after a time. But fortunately, I’ve lived for 82 years, you know. And to say, I don’t know of anybody—there may be one or two still alive that worked out there, but I don’t know, most of them are gone. Franklin: Yeah, well, it seems like you were really in contact—close contact with a lot of different types of material and different ingestion pathways for chemical and radiological materials. Chambers: Yes, we were. Both places. In the 2-West area, doing the experiments there, and then the metallurgical stuff. Yes. And especially—the chemicals are probably the worst things. Radioactive material does damage to you; it cooks you from the inside out. But the acids get into you, and we used sulfuric acid and nitric acid and picric acid. Picric you have to be very careful of. It’ll get in here, and it doesn’t burn immediate—it gets down and then burns from the inside out. It’s a very dangerous thing. And then we used some ether and stuff and what-have-you. And you have to be careful with ether, because if it crystallizes and then you twist the cap off, it’ll explode. So you have to be very careful with ether. Franklin: Jeez. Chambers: Ether, highly explosive. And we used some of that. In fact I found some of it down in the lab in 221-T, heading downstairs, and it was setting up there, in the bottom been sitting there for a long time with crystallization on them. So I called them and they took it out in a container somewhere and blew it up, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Chambers: So. Franklin: That’s really scary. Chambers: But you don’t mess with it, you know. You just leave it alone, you know? As long as you leave it alone, you’re okay, and get people in there that know how to handle it. Franklin: Wow. So, David, my last question is kind of a reflective question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Chambers: Well, I think, the thing is to know that we had a job to do, because the world was, at that time, was in a very dangerous situation with China and Russia both. Plus, North Korea. And the bugaboo now, again, is North Korea. And we had things we had to learn and stuff we had to do. And it’s hard to realize, for young people to visualize what the world was like then with Russia developing all kinds of stuff. Shot France’s powers down. When we really—to start with, had a plane that would fly above their missiles. But then they developed a missile that’d shoot them down. So we had to do some utilization there to free him and trade him, you know, to get him back. And Russia was developing stuff. And they had weapons that would blow us to pieces, and we had weapons that would blow them to pieces. And it was just a dangerous situation that we were trying to de-escalate, cool down, and so we just kept doing stuff. It was a job to do, and you had to understand that the world was a different situation then than it is now, and it’s becoming that situation again now. With North Korea and Iran and now Putin in Russia again, and China’s trying to build up islands in the South China Sea. So it looks like we’re heading down that same road again. So. Franklin: Great, well, David, thank you so much for your really great stories and interesting—you had a very interesting jobs out there. Chambers: Well, I think I did. Franklin: Yeah, you did, and I appreciate you taking the time to tell us about them today. Chambers: Well, then, as I say, you know, Battelle was the main instrumentation in this. And you read in the paper what they’re doing all the time now, so I think that’s a wonderful company to have here, and they do a lot of very fine things, I think. Maybe some people don’t like them, but I think they do a wonderful job, and I’m glad we’ve got them here. Franklin: Oh, good. Yeah, they have their hands in a lot of different— Chambers: That’s correct. Franklin: A lot of different stuff. Chambers: And even security, going into airports and stuff. A lot of people don’t realize where that came from; that came from Battelle. Franklin: Yeah, yes, it did. Chambers: You know? And we looked at some IUDs that were put in women in different parts of the world. Intrauterine devices to stop pregnancies. And then analyzed them. And you find that women in different parts of the world destroy those IUDs at different rates. Maybe it’s from their diet, diet and food or what they eat or what-have-you. But just interesting things. Very interesting things. Franklin: Yeah, that is very interesting. Well, thank you. Chambers: You’re welcome. Franklin: Okay. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:33:34 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 221-T Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with David Chambers Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Description An account of the resource David Chambers worked for Batrelle in the 200 Areas 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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/25/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Language A language of the resource English Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6636b7d3ee2798561e5afe99caf2da22.JPG 1e22122264ec625e8c5e2ce56b375112 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fb4a77dbb03596cf36d5d337a3b5f42a5.pdf e09664da34b9a91f8f4cdfd651377fd4 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fe6f5ee7f141b337982328a96183b1fdd.mp4 d0903c921bd7b6006b4ff4f9bbf7d5ac Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shirley Carlisle Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Shirley Carlisle on November 7, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Shirley about her experiences growing up in Richland. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Shirley Carlisle: Shirley Ann Carlisle. S-H-I-R-L-E-Y. Ann, A-N-N. Carlisle. C-A-R-L-I-S-L-E. Franklin: Great, thank you, Shirley. And it’s okay if I call you Shirley, right? Carlisle: Sure. Franklin: Okay. So, you were born in Richland? That’s correct? Carlisle: I was born in Kadlec. Franklin: Okay. And Richland was still a—until—and you were born what year? Carlisle: 1947. Franklin: Okay. And that’s when— Carlisle: It was still under government control. My mother had an Army doctor. Franklin: Okay. And so, to have lived here at that time, your family must have worked— Carlisle: My dad was a Hanford patrolman. Franklin: Okay. And when did your dad come to the area? Carlisle: My grandfather died in Pasco in 1937. My dad came out after that. Franklin: Oh, so your family was here before the Manhattan Project. Carlisle: Before, yes. Before the Manhattan Project. Probably ’34 or something like that. Franklin: Okay, and do you know what your grandfather did in Pasco? Carlisle: My granddad homesteaded down along the Columbia River. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: So, he had a small little homestead down along the Columbia. Franklin: And so your father came out before your grandfather died, or after? Carlisle: You know, I’m not really sure. It was sometime around the time that my granddad died. Franklin: Okay. And what did—did he come to take over the farm? Carlisle: He—yes, he came out to help his mother and he had five brothers and sisters, so he came to help with family. Franklin: Was he one of the older? Carlisle: He was the oldest. Franklin: He was the oldest, okay. So his brothers and sisters still lived with his father and mother on this homestead. Carlisle: Right. I had two aunts—or, an aunt and an uncle that graduated from Pasco High School about 1947, ’48. Franklin: Okay. So what led to your father starting to work at Hanford? He must’ve worked for DuPont eventually, right? Carlisle: He did. That was his first job, was DuPont. He had worked, you know, around Pasco, the farms, that kind of thing. Franklin: Okay. Do you—mention why he got a job at the Manhattan Project? Carlisle: Well, because it was the going thing. And it was much better pay. And he didn’t think there was security there—longevity, I should say. Yeah. He actually worked there maybe ten years and still didn’t think he was going to be there very long, so he bought farm in Colville and when Hanford went down, he was going to go back to farming. Well, we never went back to farming. Franklin: So he must’ve moved—did he move to Richland, then, when he started the job? Carlisle: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: My folks, they were married in ’45 in Hood Park, and then his—their first house they had was 90 Craighill, a little one-bedroom prefab because it was just the two of them. And he went to work for Hanford as a patrolman. My dad wasn’t a very big man; he didn’t particularly care to like being a patrolman because it was kind of rowdy in those days. And so my dad quit. So my mom said, one day about two weeks after he quit, a knock on the door and this Hanford patrolman, and they wanted to know where my dad’s at. Well, he’s out in the backyard. So they go out and talk to him, and patrol leaves and my dad comes back into the house. My mom says, well, what did they want? He said, I can’t quit. So my dad went back to work. Because it was a war effort. So my dad couldn’t quit. So they put him, then—he was working maintenance, then, after that. And eventually ended up in power. Franklin: Oh, okay, in power, where? Carlisle: He was the junior power operator out in the Area. Franklin: Okay. Do you know where specifically he was stationed? Carlisle: The last place he worked at that I remember was the D Area. But he was in several of the different areas. Franklin: And was he running the power plants that supplied the reactors? Carlisle: You know, I really—they didn’t tell you a whole lot, and I really don’t quite know exactly. I just know his title was like a junior power operator. Franklin: So instead of quitting, he was kind of forcibly transferred because they needed— Carlisle: They agreed that they would put him in a different job other than the patrol. Franklin: Well, because also if he quit, they would have to leave the house, right? Carlisle: Right, yes, and they were prepared to do that, because Dad didn’t particularly like all the rowdiness and stuff that was going on at Hanford. He wasn’t a big man, so he just wasn’t able to handle some of the fights and stuff that happened out there. Franklin: Oh, okay. How did he get in—did he do any security or law enforcement previously to--? Carlisle: No, no. Franklin: No? Carlisle: They hired everybody on the spot. My dad was like 5’7” but he was very stout, and so I guess, maybe, because of his stoutness, they figured he could handle that. But he said he was a little too short for that. Franklin: So he was placed into that job, then. Carlisle: Yes, yes. Franklin: He didn’t pick being a patrolman, okay. Carlisle: His mother also worked out there. She worked in the kitchen in one of the barracks-type places. Franklin: Oh, in the mess hall? Carlisle: In the mess hall, yes. Franklin: Oh, wow, so a long—like, several generations or two generations— Carlisle: Right. His brothers and sisters—his sister was a telephone operator for two years out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: And then one of his brothers was a truck driver out there. Franklin: Oh, wow, so a big kind of family—you know. Carlisle: Yeah, it was a whole-family thing. Franklin: Wow, that’s really interesting. Did any of them continue to work after the war, at Hanford, or was it just your dad? Carlisle: Well, Dad was out there about 27, 28 years. Franklin: Right. Any of his other family? Carlisle: No, no. Ella Mae was only there about two years. Franklin: She’s the mother? Carlisle: The sister. Franklin: The sister, oh, okay. Carlisle: And Grandma, which was Mary, she was only there maybe a year. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did they have to ride all the way out from Pasco up there, or did they get— Carlisle: Of course, Dad lived up here in Richland, so he got on the bus and went out. And Grandma, I think lived in a barracks. Grandma and Ella Mae, her daughter, lived in a barracks out there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: Because Ella Mae, I think she walked to wherever she was going. Franklin: Oh, wow. Did your family know any of the settlers that had been in the area before 1943? Carlisle: Not that I’m aware of. Because they were basically from Pasco. Franklin: Sure, but they had known that those people had been evacuated. Carlisle: Yes, oh, yes. Franklin: Did they ever talk about that? The evacuations? Carlisle: No, uh-unh. Franklin: Okay. So your family lived in a one-bedroom prefab before you were born, right? Carlisle: Before I was born. Franklin: And then moved to a two-bedroom. Carlisle: Right, because my mom was pregnant and so we moved up above the hill to a two-bedroom prefab. Franklin: Okay. What do you remember about growing up in a prefab? Carlisle: You know, the things I remember, I think, are so normal that—for other people that didn’t live in a government town would not be—it would be different. I can remember us having FBI agents walk down the street, which I thought was very normal for everybody. You know, asking about your neighbors and interviewing you about what was—what your neighbors was. That was very typical. I can remember that. Usually two guys walking down the street. The little house that we lived in, it was supposed to be temporary so it didn’t have any skirting or anything on it. My dad had to put skirting on it so I wouldn’t crawl underneath the house. And it didn’t have a—it just had flat roof. My mom said, one time when I was little, we had a sandstorm because I lived on the edge of town. She had gone to Burbank where her sister was living. And when she came back—she had left the windows open. She had to put me in the little utility room to clean up all the sand that had blown in, because it was so sandy. And we had a hot water—hot water—a water tank not too far from—just across the street from us. And down the street was an air raid siren that they tested, I remember once a month; it might have been more than that. Franklin: So, there was no hot water heater in the house? Carlisle: No, what I meant to say was it was a water tank—a big water tank for the city. Franklin: Oh, that supplied the water. Carlisle: The supply, yes, yeah. Franklin: So like one of those classic ones on the stilts? Carlisle: Yes, with stripes on it. Black and stripes and— Franklin: Oh, wow. There’s one of those in the town I grew up in. It’s like the tallest thing in our town. Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Yeah, we call it the water tower. Carlisle: Yeah. They eventually took that down and it laid on the ground for a long time and we—they took the top off of it. So us kids got to play inside of it. It was really fun to run up and down the walls of that thing. Franklin: Oh, I bet. And by that time, I guess, the city had put in sewer. Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Right. So, if your water came from a tank, what—do you remember what the bathroom—were there bathroom facilities? Carlisle: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carlisle: Yeah, we had the sewer line and the bathroom and—yeah. We had an irrigation ditch that ran right behind Carmichael and down towards what’s now the freeway. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: Right above Fred Meyer’s was an irrigation ditch. So we had irrigation water. Franklin: Oh, wow. And that had been there from the people before, right? That irrigation ditch had been laid before, for the old farming residents of Richland? Carlisle: In the area that I lived in, as far as I know, there was not a lot of old—well, there was no farm houses that I remember. Where Carmichael was, I vaguely remember that was like an orchard in that area and some of the houses that—the first house that we lived in had like a peach tree or an apricot tree or whatever it was in the yard. So there was still fruit trees left from when it was an orchard. So there really wasn’t a whole lot of farmhouses. Franklin: Oh, wow. Your mother’s family, were they from the area as well? Carlisle: She came out from North Dakota in probably, oh, ’43, something like that. Franklin: Did she come out to work at Hanford? Carlisle: No. Her sister was the one that lived—her sister’s husband worked for Hood on the dairy, which is now Hood Park. So she came out to stay with her sister. Franklin: Okay. And how did—so her and your father met— Carlisle: Yeah. My Uncle Wayne, my aunt’s husband, his dad had a truck farm, and they all lived in the Pasco area, and they just knew my dad, and so— Franklin: Kind of set them up. Carlisle: Yeah, he did. My uncle actually asked him to come out to the house and he needed an excuse, so he was going to buy some car parts that my uncle had. The only thing is, my dad didn’t have a car. He had to borrow a car to out to buy these car parts to see my mom. And then the dog bit him, so. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, what an eventful day! Carlisle: Yeah! Franklin: That’s a really cute story. So, what we know about the prefabs is that they were not really built to last— Carlisle: Correct. Franklin: They were houses from the Tennessee Valley Authority. They were from the New Deal. So it’s kind of amazing that most of them are still standing. I’m kind of wondering what—your parents kind of grew up in older houses, maybe craftsmans or farmhouses. Did they ever talk to you about their impressions of the prefabs, or did they have anything they liked about them or anything they really didn’t like about them? Carlisle: Well, you know, they both came off farms, so I’m sure that having an indoor toilet was, you know, quite nice for them, because they were used to having the outdoor toilets. My mom was very happy with the little house that she had. It came furnished. I still have some of the prefab furniture that we had when I was a little kid. Franklin: Oh, wow. Carlisle: They did everything for you. If the lightbulb went out, you called, and they came up and changed the lightbulb. They had people that came and emptied the garbage. We had three crews that came around. We had a little cubby hole in that prefab and there was a little tiny garbage can; they would take it out of the cubbyhole, set it on the street. The next crew would come along and pick it up, and the third crew would come along and put it back. My mom locked herself out, she’d call and they’d just come up and unlock the doors and let her in. Franklin: Oh, wow. Were your parents pretty happy with that level of kind of control, right, by the government over the domestic situation? Carlisle: You know, I don’t think they really thought it was control. I think they just thought that it was benefits of the job. Franklin: Sure. It’s always kind of—strikes me that a lot of that service that’s done for these people kind of similar in a lot of ways to descriptions of a socialist utopia, you know, where—full employment, provided housing, and all services provided to people. So your parents were happy with that benefit of the job. Carlisle: Yeah. Because they came from—my dad came through the Depression, where he didn’t have anything. He and his brother roamed the fields of Wyoming picking up animal bones to take to the bonemeal factory to make money. Franklin: Really? Carlisle: And so this was really nice. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. So your—you mentioned earlier that your father always kind of had this anxiety about the security or kind of permanency of the job, but he ended up staying there for 20— Carlisle: About 27 years, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, so, wait, why did he choose to stay? Did he ever talk to you about why he kept on the job? Carlisle: Well, because it was a good job. I mean, he had health benefits and, you know, all kinds of things that he wouldn’t have had if he had gone to farming. So that would’ve been his second choice, and that’s what he bought, was a farm, up in Colville. And never did go there, because he didn’t know whether Hanford was going to be here that long or not. He didn’t know what they were making out there. Hadn’t a clue. So. Franklin: Sure, sure. What did your family do with the farm out in Colville? Carlisle: Well, they had until like the ‘50s and then ’57, ’58 and then sold it. He rented it out and from when he bought it to when he sold it, he rented it out. And then he decided that maybe Hanford wasn’t going anyplace and that he would continue on out there. Franklin: Did your mother ever work out there? Carlisle: No, she didn’t. She worked for Newberry’s in Richland. Franklin: Oh, okay, and that was a department store. Carlisle: Yeah, it was a department store. Franklin: And that was in the Uptown? Carlisle: Yeah, in the Uptown. Franklin: In that corner now where the antiques— Carlisle: Where the antiques store is. Franklin: And how long did she work for Newberry’s? Carlisle: Oh, she worked there until it closed and from the time I was little, so probably about 20 years. Franklin: And do you remember when it closed? Carlisle: You know, I don’t. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: It was—I don’t know. Franklin: It’s okay. Carlisle: Yeah, I just— Franklin: Newberry’s was a chain, correct? Carlisle: It was, uh-huh. Franklin: Kind of like a Woolworth’s? Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Yeah, that’s kind of a forgotten era of retail today. Carlisle: Yes, yeah. Franklin: What did Newberry’s provide? Like, what kind of things did they sell? Carlisle: Oh, at Christmastime, they had Toyland upstairs. Wow, that was pretty good. Franklin: Ooh. Carlisle: Stores closed about 5 or 6:00 at night. And the only night they were open late was Friday night. And then at Christmastime they might be open on Saturday late. And never were they open on Sunday. Franklin: So the Uptown was kind of the locus of shopping. Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: In the area. Do you have any other memories about that area? Carlisle: Well, of course, I could walk from my house to Newberry’s. And my mom—of course, I didn’t drive, so then I would ride home with her sometimes. Of course Uptown Richland, we had Macy’s, The Bon, that was up there. Franklin: The Bon Marché, right? Carlisle: Bon Marché was on the corner of Jadwin and—in the Parkway, up there. Franklin: Oh, right. And what was a Bon Marché? Carlisle: It—what was it? Franklin: Yeah. Carlisle: It was a clothing store. Franklin: Like a Macy’s, or--? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: Some of the others— Carlisle: Well, Bon Marché went from Bon to Macy’s, so. Franklin: Oh, okay, gotcha. Gotcha. Interesting. And then do you remember the Parkway being an actual park before they paved it through? Carlisle: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carlisle: I remember the theater down at the end, that we could go to the theater down there, and then Uptown Theater. And there was a drugstore in where there’s a bunch of offices now, where the Players is. But, no, I don’t remember that it was ever anything but the Parkway. Franklin: Okay. Did you go down to Howard Amon much at all? Did you go down to swim in the river and did you have many interactions with the--? Carlisle: I actually didn’t swim in the river very much. My dad actually preferred the ditch. We’d go across the street, and my dad was a good swimmer, so he would swim in the ditch. But we didn’t—he didn’t—he might’ve when he was—before I remember, he might have done a lot of swimming in the river. Franklin: Okay, interesting. So you went to school in—all your schooling was in Richland, or K through 12, right, was in— Carlisle: Marcus Whitman, Carmichael, and at that time, Columbia High School. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember doing civil defense drills? Carlisle: Oh, yes. Franklin: Okay! Can you—it’s so foreign to so many people today, especially anyone of my generation or younger. Can you talk us through one of those? Carlisle: And it was so normal for us. I don’t remember whether we did it—at least once a month, maybe every two weeks; I can’t remember. And when I was a kid, the air raid siren would go off. Because we had air raid sirens, and it would go off, and we’d have to go out in the hallway and get down on our hands and knees and duck our heads, and then we’d have to wait for the all-clear signal. And then as soon as we could hear the all-clear signal, then we could go back to class. But that was normal for us. Franklin: Was it, really? Carlisle: It was normal. It wasn’t anything scary; it was just something we did! I don’t know that at age that we really truly understood what that was all about, but— Franklin: Sure. How long did you do those for? Carlisle: I think we did them probably up until I was in—Carmichael is now middle school, but it was junior high then. And we would do, a couple of times, they loaded us all on buses and took us on an evacuation route in case we needed to be evacuated. So probably until I was in junior high school. Franklin: Do you remember where the evacuation route went? Carlisle: You know, I don’t think it was very far. I know we went down Wellsian Way and around and I really don’t know that it was very far, but. Franklin: What was the atmosphere of that like, for the children? Was that kind of like a field trip-type thing? Carlisle: Yeah, it was more of a fun-type thing. Because I—you know, most of us, a lot of us had lived here all our lives, so we were familiar with that kind of thing. That was not un-normal for us. So it was a day to get out of a few classes. Franklin: How old were you when you first knew what was being produced at Hanford? Carlisle: Oh. You know, I don’t know that I ever really—until I grew up and maybe got into high school, really, understood what was going on out there. Because, like I said, what was normal for us was, you know. We didn’t know anything. If I asked my dad what he did out in the Area, oh, he read dials or that kind of thing. And he would tell me more of the animals that he saw out in the Area. My mother would make him two sandwiches: one cat food sandwich and one sandwich for himself. He would feed the cat food sandwich to the raccoons and he’d tell me all about that. When he worked in town, he would bring me birds and all kinds of things that he would find. Franklin: Huh. But I assume, at some point, you did start to kind of piece together, you know, understand that—when did you first really understand Hanford’s kind of connection to the Cold War and all of that? Carlisle: Probably—you know, when you’re a kid, you don’t—those things don’t mean a whole lot to you, especially when you’ve grown up with that. So probably when I was in high school, and when my dad—I knew that when my dad couldn’t quit, because it was a war effort, then I kind of understood then that, you know, it was a war effort. Franklin: Sure. Sorry. I just lost my train of thought. And so, then, you went to Columbia High as well, and the mascot at that time was the Bombers, right? There’s been—it seems like there’s always kind of a simmering controversy surrounding that mascot, and I’d like to ask you your thoughts about that. Carlisle: Well, you know, the bomb does terrible things, but it also stopped the war and put the end to the war. So, there’s two sides to that. So, it—to me, it’s, the mascot being the bomb, that’s what we were all about, that’s what we made here, and, so that’s fine. I didn’t— Franklin: Okay. Were you ever concerned—when you started to realize that there was—your dad was working next to a nuclear plant, were you ever concerned or was your mother ever concerned about his safety, or, you know, any kind of effects from being so close to radiation? Carlisle: Not when I was growing up, but as I got older, I was very much aware of that, and was actually involved in a lawsuit. Franklin: Oh, really? Carlisle: Concerning that. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: Not because I—I was a downwinder, a Hanford Downwinder. So for 20 years, we kind of fought with the government. Franklin: Can I ask you more about that? What made you join—or, what made you initiate that? Carlisle: Well, I had and still have a disease that the emissions that was going on, it increases that disease. So I decided—my aunt was also involved in Hanford Downwinders. She also signed off on that, but she was able to get the—she was exposed to stuff out in the Area, so she was able to get the, whatever it is, the money that they give out for that. Franklin: The EEOICPA? Carlisle: Yes, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. How did your litigation attempts turn out? Carlisle: Well, it—I think it went on for 20 years. It was very interesting. We eventually lost. I think there was two cases that won, and we eventually—we settled. I shouldn’t say we lost. We settled. Franklin: Okay. Are there terms—can you discuss that settlement, or is there— Carlisle: Yeah, I’d rather not. Franklin: Sure, I totally understand. I guess, I’d like to ask you about the—so growing up in Richland, your father worked for the Site, then eventually you have a disease that is linked to emissions at Hanford. Joining that lawsuit, was that hard for you, kind of having grown up in this very patriotic, pro-Hanford atmosphere? Did you feel like you were turning on the community or on yourself, or—how did you feel about—was there a conflict, I guess, is my question. Carlisle: Yes and no, because we were very proud to be working for Hanford. But it was sometimes really hard to realize that we weren’t told everything that was detrimental to our health. So that becomes kind of a conflict, like you don’t want that to happen to somebody else, so you want to bring that out. It maybe wouldn’t ever benefit me, but it certainly might benefit someone else. Franklin: Right, okay, thank you. So you would’ve graduated—when did you graduate high school? Carlisle: ’65. Franklin: ’65, okay. So I guess I’ll get to that in a minute. So Richland was privatized in 1958. Carlisle: Correct. Franklin: I wanted to hear your thoughts on what you remember about that. Carlisle: Well, that was when we were able to buy our houses. So my dad bought the little prefab on the corner, the two-bedroom prefab. I think he paid about $2500 for it. Because it was a corner lot, it was a little bit more expensive than the other ones that were like $2300. And then eventually the lady that lived next-door moved out, a couple years later, and we bought the precut, and my dad paid $8000 for that. He paid more for his car than he paid for his house. Franklin: Is there a difference between precut and prefab? Carlisle: Yes. Franklin: Okay, can you describe that for me? Carlisle: The prefab, those were ones, twos, and three-bedrooms. They were pretty small. They had the flat roofs that were saltbox-type things. They were some of the first temporary ones. The precut is about 1,150 square feet, and it was built more to stay than the prefabs. Franklin: Did the precuts come in after World War II? Carlisle: The one I’m living in now, I think it was built in 1948. Franklin: Okay, okay. Are those considered Alphabet Homes, or are they— Carlisle: Yes, yeah. I think it’s a Q or something like that. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. So it is a—and they kind of placed those in that prefab neighborhood. Carlisle: Right. Franklin: Right, because there is a distinct, kind of, zones of mostly what we call Alphabets and then others where it’s mostly prefabs. Carlisle: We had a precut on the corner, a prefab, and a precut. And they took the prefab out of the middle of that and then separated the place. The place that I live in, I think there was a prefab there before it, because the plumbing all runs to the front of the lot; whereas now it’s in the back of the lot. So they took out a lot of the prefabs and put in the precuts. Franklin: Okay, and do you remember when they switched the roofs over on the prefabs? Carlisle: 1950—I think I have it on those pictures there. Franklin: Yeah. 1951? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. You probably don’t remember much about that. Carlisle: No. Franklin: I imagine Richland, when you were a small child, would’ve been pretty devoid of trees or kind of still starting to grow? Carlisle: Yeah, a lot of the people went down to the river and got cottonwoods and the trees to bring up to the houses to plant. So, yeah, there was—we had a few small trees in our yard, but they were—because it was orchard. The neighbor across the street had two peach trees in their front yard. And eventually, of course, they got taken down and different trees put in there. Franklin: Was it the government that took those down? Carlisle: No, well, probably the homeowners. Franklin: Oh, okay. Carlisle: Or, not homeowners, but the people who lived there. Franklin: Sure. Were your parents excited, nervous about the transfer of Richland to its citizens? I’m wondering if you remember anything about like kind of the general mood at the time? Carlisle: No, my dad had the choice of staying with the City of Richland and working with the City of Richland if he wanted, or actually going out to the Area. Because my dad actually worked at the sewer plant. The Rose Bowl, when I was a kid. And when the city switched, then he actually went out in the Area and worked in the D Area and I think he worked in B and several different areas. Because he worked for DuPont, he worked for Douglas United Nuclear, he worked for GE. I think he retired from Douglas. Franklin: Yeah, that would make—you said he worked out there 27 years? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, okay, that would make sense with the timeline. Yup, okay. As I was trying to like do my mental math. But pretty happy about that transfer of ownership, then? Carlisle: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Okay. So you graduated in ’65. Carlisle: ’65. Franklin: We’ve been piecing together a bit of history and just started a new oral history project on civil rights in the Tri-Cities, and we know that there were a few African American families that lived in Richland. Do you recall going to school with any of the African American families there? Carlisle: When we were in high school, we had some football players and some basketball players that were African American. But we didn’t have a great population of that. We didn’t have any issues. I mean, civil rights didn’t exist to me. Franklin: Okay. Now we know that Kennewick had sundown laws which barred blacks from owning homes in Kennewick and being there after dark, and most lived in Pasco. Did you ever—and there were some NAACP demonstrations around the time that you would’ve graduated, and a little bit of strife. Did you hear anything about that? Did that impact you in any way? Carlisle: No. I remember, we’d go to Burbank and the African Americans usually lived in east Pasco. Franklin: Yeah. Carlisle: But that’s all I remember. I mean, it didn’t seem to be any—no problems. That I remember, anyway. Franklin: Sure. Did your family go much to the other cities in the Tri-Cities, or did you mostly stay—do most of your shopping and socializing in Richland, or did you get out in the wider area? Carlisle: Well, when I was little, there wasn’t a whole lot in Richland, and my dad was from Pasco. So we would go to Penney’s in Pasco. My uncle lived in Kennewick for, you know, 50 years. So we didn’t do a lot of shopping in Kennewick, but usually my dad gravitated towards Pasco. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you still have family in that area? Carlisle: No. Mm-mm. Franklin: Oh, okay. So after you graduated, then what did you do? Carlisle: I went to CBC for a couple years, and then I went to Eastern Washington State. And then I came back, and I went to work for Payless / Rite Aid on the 29th of October. I’ve been there 48 years. Franklin: Wow. Is that the one on George—? Carlisle: No, it’s on Lee. Franklin: Oh, right, sorry, I always get the Walgreen’s and Rite Aid confused. I shouldn’t, because that’s my pharmacy. Carlisle: Within two miles of that, lived, worked, and was born within two miles of that area, all my life. Franklin: Wow, so you’re really rooted-in-place. Carlisle: Absolutely. Franklin: When you—how long were you at Eastern? Carlisle: I think I was there—I didn’t graduate. I think I was there about a year. Franklin: Oh, okay. Did you—is there any memorable—when people found out you were from Richland, were there any kind of memorable conversations, or did you find it—how was it, living in a community outside of Richland, I guess is kind of my question. Anything you noticed? Anything that was odd to you, or--? Carlisle: No. Franklin: People kind of treat you— Carlisle: I have a friend that lives just three blocks from me, that actually, we went to Eastern together. But she didn’t come to the Tri-Cities until she was in sixth grade. So when I talk about things that went on when I was a little kid, she can’t relate to some of that stuff; she doesn’t quite get it. Because her dad came out later and worked in the Area. Franklin: Oh, right, so she wouldn’t remember the government ownership. Carlisle: Right, the agents walking up and down the streets. That kind of thing. Franklin: I wondered, was your father working out on Site when President Kennedy came to visit? Carlisle: Yes, he was. Franklin: Did you go out to see him? Carlisle: I did. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could—what your memories are of that day. You would’ve been like a sophomore? You were a teenager, right? Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: What are your memories of that day? Carlisle: Well, it was hot, and it was dusty, and it was dirty, and we were back in the crowd, and we just about saw him, and that was about it. About six helicopters came in, and you didn’t know which one he was in. That was it. I can remember Father Sweeney giving an invocation and Volpentest being up there talking. And then Kennedy talked, but how much I saw from the distance I was at? I don’t know. Franklin: How many people do you think were there? Carlisle: I don’t know. It seemed like maybe there was thousands. But I would guess, I don’t know, 5,000-6,000, maybe? 3,000? I don’t know. Franklin: Was that your first time ever being out on Site? Carlisle: Pretty much, so, yes. It was just out in the middle of the desert, so didn’t see anything. Franklin: Right. Have you been out on Site since then? Carlisle: I have, yeah. Franklin: Okay, and for--? Carlisle: I’ve done the B Reactor tour and some of the other tours. It’s very interesting. Franklin: Oh, great, okay. Let’s see here. What are some of your memories of some major events in the Tri-Cities like plants shutting down in the late ‘80s when Hanford—when things started to shut down. Carlisle: My dad—well, I remember the guy across the street took an early retirement and then had to go back to work. Voluntary retirement, and then had to go back to work because they needed him back there, I remember that. My dad, I think retired about the same time. But he didn’t have to go back; they didn’t call him back. You know. It didn’t seem to be any—my folks didn’t seem to be worried about it, because my dad was getting up there into the retirement age, so it was no big deal. Franklin: What do you remember about the end of the Cold War and the stopping of production at Hanford? I imagine that must’ve made the community pretty nervous about what was going—the economic future of the Tri-Cities. Carlisle: It did, and I think there was a sign on George Washington Way that said, last one out of Richland, turn out the lights, type of thing. So, yeah, people who were not long-term people like my folks were, they moved, they went back to where they were from. But they were still building up and things were still going along. It took a little time, but, yeah, we’re getting there. Franklin: Do you remember the Hanford Family at all? Carlisle: No. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember—what impact did Chernobyl have on the community that you can remember? Carlisle: Well, you know, everybody was concerned, of course. But as far as—I’m sure that sent people out in Hanford scrambling to make sure that everything was okay out there. But I don’t remember anything, other than the terrible thing that happened at Chernobyl, I don’t remember related to us. Franklin: Do you have any memories of social scene or local politics or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities since you were a child? Carlisle: Mm-mm. No, it was all—you know, just—it was very normal for me. All the things that went on. I have a hard time relating to the fact that other towns don’t have the cookie cutter houses that the government built. Because that’s the way I was grown up. Now I realize you don’t—you watch your kids. But when I was growing up, everybody had a Q clearance; everybody knew their neighbors. My mom had no problems with us girls sleeping out in the front yard and running around half the night. Franklin: Sure. And also everybody had a job, right? Carlisle: Everybody had a job. Franklin: It was literally a town of full employment. Carlisle: Yeah. Franklin: And people had strong background checks. Carlisle: Right, right. Franklin: Probably make it one of the safest communities you could— Carlisle: Right. Franklin: You know, because so much crime is caused by low economic status, and so, yeah, yeah, it’s— Carlisle: So you know, those were times that we had no problems. My mother was never afraid that if I was outside playing that something was going to happen. Even if the neighborhood guys were walking across the street—we had the bus stop where the buses stopped to pick up the guys—she knew all the neighbors and she knew they had gone all through security clearances, and she had no issues with that. Franklin: Sure. Did you have a bus stop on your street? Carlisle: Right across the street from the house. Franklin: Wow, and your father would get on and get off. Carlisle: Yup. Franklin: Did you have a private telephone, or did you have like a party line system? Carlisle: Oh, we had a party line. Well, we actually didn’t have a phone until my mom got pregnant with me, and then we had a phone for a short length of time. And then after that, the phone got taken out, and we had phone booths on a couple of corners. One lady across the street from us, the Stanleys, had a phone, and she said, anytime you need the phone, just come on over. My door’s always unlocked. So we would use her phone. But for the most part we would use the phone booth. And then when we first got a phone, it was a four-party line. And then got down to two-party line. Franklin: And then eventually— Carlisle: I’ve had two phone numbers in my whole life. Franklin: Oh, wow. Wow. One—I assume, one would’ve been for— Carlisle: A Whitehall number, and then when they changed it from Whitehall, then, to this one. Franklin: Oh, wow, that’s really interesting. I don’t think many people can say that. I know I’ve had so many phone numbers, I can’t even keep track of them. Okay, I think I’ve reached most of my—at the end of my questions. I just have kind of one large reflective question, and that is, what would you like future generations to know about living in Richland during the Cold War? Carlisle: Well, I think we were very unique and very blessed in many ways to be able to—my dad had a sixth grade education. So to be able to work at Hanford and end up with a good retirement and a pension and medical care, that was very, you know, wonderful for him and my family. So Hanford did well by us. Franklin: What about for yourself? Did you ever feel any fear or excitement or anything, being so close to the producer of two-thirds of the US nuclear weapons stockpile? Carlisle: No, because we didn’t realize all that. You grow up with that, and it just kind of sneaks up on you quietly. We never had any problems from it. No, I never—it never bothered me. Franklin: Okay. Carlisle: Always joked about it, you know. The water—turn off the lights and I’ll glow in the dark, type thing, but—heh. And I remember my dad would call home and say he was hot and he had to take a bath. And he said you never got scrubbed down until you scrubbed down by a Hanford nurse. And he would get something maybe on his shoes or just a minor thing, and, boy, they were scrubbing him down. Franklin: Wow. Carlisle: But that was normal for us. It was a different frame of mind, because if I lived in a different town, and I came to this town, this would not be normal. But for me, it was normal. Franklin: But on the flipside, though, you have a—you and others have a disease that’s likely caused by what happened out at Hanford, so it also, though, impacted you in a very personal way—you and your family probably in a negative way, you know? Carlisle: It did, to some extent. And it’s hard to say that, yeah, my aunt passed away from causes related to Hanford, and that was terrible. But on the other hand, she got a lot of benefits, too. So, you know, it’s hard to really—things happen and she could’ve been someplace else, you know, and things could’ve happened. She could’ve been in a church and got shot. Franklin: Sure. I guess what you’re saying is it’s complicated. Carlisle: It’s complicated, yes. Franklin: What would you like—you know, there’s always, Hanford’s critics are often really focused on that latter part I was just talking about, on the effects of Hanford, you know, people in Spokane or on the west side or elsewhere. What would you like them to know about growing up near it and also being affected by it? What’s your perspective that you could give to them? Carlisle: Again, like I said, you know, it’s hard for me to judge outside of where I’ve lived all my life, and so, you know, I would hope that everybody takes into consideration what has happened in emissions and stuff like that that maybe could’ve been controlled. But you look at that B Reactor out there, and you think, oh my god, how did we live through all of that? Because it looks so antiquated compared to what we have nowadays. So, I don’t—you know. Franklin: Okay, well, Shirley, thank you so much for coming and sharing your insights with us. I really appreciate it. It’s good to hear from people that grew up in such a—it helps to understand what a unique environment Richland really was, when you were a child. Because it really—there’s very few—you can almost count on one hand the number of cities that were like that in the United States. Carlisle: Right, right, and when you say unique, it was unique, but we didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize—I mean, having been born here, I didn’t realize we were unique. I thought everybody lived like we did. So that was not unique to me. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Carlisle: You’re welcome. Franklin: Yeah, I—when I first found out about it, you know, it was just like— Carlisle: You’re not from here? Franklin: No, I’m not. I’m from Alaska. Carlisle: Oh! Franklin: And I’ve lived in Alaska and Hawai’i. Carlisle: Well, they had-- Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:47:46 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317kbps Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Shirley Carlisle Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Description An account of the resource Shirley Carlisle was born at Kadlec Hospital in Richland in 1947. In this interview she talks about her parent's work at Hanford and growing up in Richland 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. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11/07/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/.mp4 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context RG2D-2B Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fcc1c5b0c760d1762a7a35a41a36954e0.jpg 351007d7be79050d9e63f8cc203ca4ac Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Bauman Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Andrew Reisenauer Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Bauman: Let's start, if we could, by just having you say your name, and then spell it for us. Andrew Reisenauer: My name is Andrew Reisenauer. Last name is R-E-I-S-E-N-A-U-E-R. Bauman: Thank you. And my name is Bob Bauman. Today's date is November 6, 2013. And we're conducting this interview on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. So I wonder if we could start by you just telling us about how you came here? How you came to work at Hanford? What brought you here, and when? Reisenauer: During 1950, I was a student at Washington State University, on campus at Pullman. And I was invited down here as a summer employee for the summer of 1950. I went back to school and graduated in '51, and came right back to Richland. During that year, 1950, I worked at the health department for the City of Richland. At that time, an employee of General Electric, of course. And it involved sanitation inspections around Richland, milk supplies up in the valley-- Yakima Valley and Moses Lake area. Just general safety and sanitation involved in all the transition of the workers from the old town sites of Hanford, Richland North-- North Richland trailer park area-- and also the development of Richland. Because at that time, the uptown shopping district was all under construction. Restaurants were being opened. Generally just everything that involved sanitation and health. Mosquito control was just being started. That was under our control. There's a huge influx of people, you've got problems with sanitation and food supplies. Food supplies particularly, when you're dealing with 50,000 people. You've got to supply them with tons and tons of food coming in daily. For instance, the milk supply-- that's something that you can't ship for great distances, like you can other products. The Hanford Engineering Works shipped in dairy farms, supported dairy farms. They built milk supply plants in Sunnyside and Moses Lake. They subsidized the farmers to bring in large numbers of cattle. I mean, you don't just dump people in and don't have-- in a place like this, where there's small towns and very, very scattered population. The sanitarians from the Richland area were inspecting all the dairy farms all the way up through Sunnyside and up into the Moses Lake area, just to give us a decent supply of fresh produce. There's any number of those kind of things that went on during the areas when all the people are transitioning from town site of Hanford and into the North Richland trailer park, which had 2,500 trailers or more out there. With bathhouses and laundry facilities for those people were built in to separate housing or block areas, so that you got all the sanitation facilities have to be supplied, have to be inspected. You've got a brand new school out there, John Ball School, which was just nothing but a quonset hut put together. And along with all the schools that were being built in the City of Richland, we were training food handlers, for instance. Food handler classes, and making sure that the inspections got into the schools. And there's just a wide, wide variety of environmental problems. Bauman: Sounds like a pretty challenging job. Reisenauer: Well, even water supply. Because all the water supply in Richland and North Richland was furnished by wells. The treatment plant at Richland wasn't built until '55 or so. So you had well after well. And a lot of these wells were recharged by recharge basins with Yakima River Valley water, and Columbia River water. Places like just west of here. That little valley over toward just west of George Washington Way. There's still a couple wells in there that are being part of the Richland water supply. A lot of that water was being pumped out of the Columbia River into the basin above the wells. The wells are probably 75 feet deep. And they were using that as the method of cleaning the water, keeping the fish and everything else out of the wells. There's the area along Wellsian Way was all recharge ponds. Because there's a number of wells among the buildings down there. They're still being used. But the recharge basin has been closed, when they discontinued the irrigation water through the City of Richland. Few people know that there's a tunnel underneath Carmichael High School, for instance, that supplied irrigation water, and water to those recharge basins. Bauman: Yeah, I didn't know that. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: So when you were here, then, in 1950 as a student, right? You were-- Reisenauer: I was just a summer employee. Bauman: Right. What sorts of things were you going out and inspecting? Reisenauer: Oh yes. I inspected a lot of the restaurants. I was a bacteriology and sanitary engineering student up at Washington State. Bauman: Sounds like a great experience, then? Reisenauer: Oh, yeah. Learned a lot. Very applicable to my studies up there. Bauman: So you did that in the summer of 1950, you went back to school? Reisenauer: I went back to school. And then, when you came back here to work-- Came back right away after graduation. Bauman: And working for the health department again, or--? Reisenauer: The health department, yes. I stayed with the health department until 1956 or so, shortly before the transition the town into a normal town. Bauman: And during those years working for the health department, what were the biggest challenges you had? It sounds like there were a lot of challenges. What were the most challenging parts for the health department? Reisenauer: Probably keeping up with the necessary state requirements for inspecting dairy farms and restaurants. At that time, we were also building the new swimming pool up on the hill. There was an original swimming pool in the old town site of Richland, down in Howard Amon Park. It was built very close to the river. And it was small, and it was not a safe pool, because it transitioned water between the river and the swimming pool. When the river was high, it leaked like I sieve. So it had to be replaced. There's things like that, just innumerable-- Bauman: How large was the health department? How many employees are we talking about? Reisenauer: There were probably-- well, there's also with the health department, they had the school nurses that were—there was probably seven, eight school nurses. And there were like three sanitarians, and the health officer. Bauman: And what was your job title after you graduated college and came back? Reisenauer: Sanitarian. That was the job title. Bauman: And so when that transitioned to being an independent city, right? Reisenauer: Yes. Bauman: What did you do at that point? Reisenauer: The health department was turned over to Ben Franklin County Health District. I left the health department, because they had the personnel. They had hired personnel into their department to take over. I moved out into the area as a chemist, and worked with the geochemistry outfit out there. Wells, drilling new wells out there. Tracking contamination through the wells, of radioactive contamination and stuff like that. Bauman: And so where would these wells drill, then? Reisenauer: Excuse me? Bauman: Where were the wells drilled? Different places on the site, or--? Reisenauer: Oh no. I'm talking about the wells out on the Hanford project, for the facilities out there. And we did a lot of soil chemistry work, along with that. Soil chemistry, soil physics. Bauman: And you said you would sort of measure a contamination also, as part of your work? In the soil and water, or--? What? You measured contamination? Is that one of the things you did, also? Reisenauer: Well, the contamination out there was radioactive. But a great deal different than tracking contamination for the wells in the city. Bauman: So how long did you do that, then? How long did you work as a geochemist? Reisenauer: The job transitioned from geochemistry into actually the groundwater modeling area, where we were doing—we built computer models for the movement of groundwater contamination throughout the [INAUDIBLE]. Where's the water moving from, and where's it move to? And how much contamination is being carried along with it? We developed these groundwater models, such that we were starting to apply them through-- when Battelle took over, we started moving this type of thing into-- looking at county and problems and things all over the United States. I modelled groundwater movement in Brookhaven, New York, upstate New York, Nebraska, Florida, all over the United States. But it all started here. Bauman: And did you find significant contamination of groundwater? Reisenauer: Oh, yes, as far as-- it'd go through the soil down here. Nothing significant that I know of ever moved to the Columbia River. It stayed pretty close to the production plants out there. There's still a lot of that going on out there now. Bauman: So did you work in different areas of the site, then? Reisenauer: Yes, yes. Bauman: Just measuring different places on site? Reisenauer: Yeah, I started out there in 200 West area. But then when I moved out of there into the 300 area, my office moved downtown, up in the federal building, and then back out here to Battelle when Battelle buildings were built. Bauman: I want to go back to when you came here in 1950 as a student. What was the town of Richland like at the time? How would you describe the place? Reisenauer: Well, it's kind of still like a frontier town, somewhat. Everybody that was here had come from somewhere else. People were very, very friendly, because they didn't-- came here and not-- everybody was sort of new. The town site, of course, was being run by General Electric. Everything-- you've probably heard that story before. You can never tell from one day to the next what you're going to be doing the next day. You could plan, but you couldn't continue your plan most of the time because something else would crop up. Bauman: And when you first came here, what sort of housing did you have? Reisenauer: Well, when I came in '50, I lived in a low-level wooden barracks with the construction workers near the Camp Hanford army camp. And when I moved into town, I was in one of the two-story barracks buildings. Because I was single at that time. And shortly after, well, about September the next year, I acquired one end of a ‘B’ house. Which, I got married that year, so I acquired in-town housing. Bauman: Was there much to do here in Richland in the early 1950s? Reisenauer: What we did in the 1950s-- I had a very large backyard behind the house. And when I started having children that was the main playground in the neighborhood. But the different organizations around town, like the medical division and production, some of the other places like that, had ball teams, softball teams. We had softball teams, we had volleyball teams. There was not a whole lot to do, unless you made it up yourselves. Of course, I did a lot of fishing and stuff like that, hunting. Bauman: So Hanford was a place where-- a lot of security was a part of working at Hanford. Did that impact you at all, in terms of your work? Reisenauer: Oh, yes. I had a clearance for moving around out in the area, what they call the forward area. And I had my badge and my pencils and all that sort of thing, if I get into radiation zones or something like that, I had all the-- Bauman: Did you ever have to wear any protective clothing for safety, in terms of certain aspects of your job at all? Reisenauer: Very seldom. One or two times I would get into that type of thing. Bauman: And so how long did you work at Hanford then? When did you-- Reisenauer: 39 and 1/2 years. Bauman: So '89, '90, somewhere in there? Reisenauer: What? Bauman: So 1989, 1990, somewhere in there you retired? Reisenauer: Yeah, I'm 89. Bauman: No, I mean, what year you retired? Reisenauer: What year did I retire? I retired in '88. But I stayed on with one of the subcontractors for another year and a half, two years. Bauman: And you started working for GE. What other contractors did you work for? Did you work for Battelle? Reisenauer: Just Battelle. [INAUDIBLE]. Battelle took over the Hanford laboratories. I went with Battelle. Bauman: So for a good part of the time you were working there, the focus was on production. And at some point, that started to shift to less production, and then cleanup, I guess. Did the shift in mission impact your work at all? Reisenauer: Not really. I was far enough away from the production that we continued doing just exactly the same. Just right on. Bauman: President Kennedy came in 1963 to dedicate the N reactor. I wonder, were you there that day? Do you remember that at all? Reisenauer: Oh yes. Yeah. Bauman: And what do you remember about his visit, or that day? Reisenauer: Well, I could take part of the family out into the area. It was a huge crowd out there. Bauman: I wonder, what was the most challenging aspect of the work that you did at Hanford? And maybe what was the most rewarding part of what you did? Reisenauer: When I was working with the health department, just keeping the day-to-day things that had to be done this day for that day, because you couldn't really plan tremendous-- very far in advance as to what you're going to be doing. And when I was working with the geophysical part of the-- the geochemistry part of there was developing the mathematics and the computer programs to be able to track water movement, and the contamination. That was a brand new area just being developed nationwide. And we built the first groundwater models ever heard of in the United States, to be able to do that work. Bauman: Did the technology change over the years, in terms of-- Reisenauer: Oh, yes. Bauman: --measuring that sort of thing? How did that change? Could you describe that at all? Reisenauer: Well, being able to incorporate the large amount of data that's necessary, and to develop the technique to get the right kind of data that's necessary for that. For instance, one of the last jobs I did was to develop a groundwater model for an area in the middle of Nebraska. A naval ammunition depot had been built there. Covered an area of about 75 square miles. And the soils and area were quite similar to the Hanford project here. So my models were very applicable to that area. But when I went and looked at the area to find out whether-- they knew they had explosives like RDX and TNT and degreasing agents that they'd contaminated into the groundwater. And the idea was, where's it moving, how fast is it moving, which way is it going? Trying to just to gather that data. And one of the hardest parts was trying to develop a computer system back there to be able to run it. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Were there any events or incidents, things that happened during your time working at Hanford that really stand out to you? Reisenauer: I guess I'm not quite clear as to what you-- Bauman: Like if there was anything that happened-- it could be something humorous, or something that happened during your time working there that just has always stuck in your mind as a really unique thing that happened while you were there. Reisenauer: While I was working in the chemistry lab, doing some testing on some of the waste, the old PBP process, we were looking at every batch of waste that came out of there. I was working, trying to get an analysis about a strontium that was being put out to the groundwater, or put out with all the old cribs. I'm using the fuming nitric acid in this process. A bunch of samples that were radioactive in the hood. And while I was by pipetting some of this from fuming nitric acid into these test tubes, one drop of that fell off and hit a cellulose test tube that was in the hood. I had instant fire. Radioactive samples in this hand, fuming nitric acid in this hand, and a fire in the middle. What do you do first? [LAUGHTER] Bauman: Put the fuming nitric acid back there. You put the sample down here. Then you take care of the fire. [LAUGHTER] Reisenauer: One very few humorous incident-- in that same laboratory, one of the other chemists was trying to analyze a particle-- particle analysis on some well samples, dirt samples. And one of these required putting a spot-- well, they say, 10 or 20 grams of soil-- putting it into a solution of essentially vinegar. And then he was going to shake them overnight on this shaking table. This shaking table was built like a rotary. And the border would force it one way, and the clutch would give out. And the spring would bring that back, so it would rock back and forth. You got to shake this all night. He set it all up. We were just ready to move out of the laboratory, and catch the bus into town. We were just checking ourselves out. This thing was shaking away just fine. And all of a sudden a spring came loose. This thing is started around like a centrifuge. And it started throwing those bottles, this small bubbles, all over the lab. He had 24 bottles on that thing. And we were down behind the benches, ducking bottles. When the final, last one finally came off, I says, now what do we do? He says, we go home and clean this up tomorrow. [LAUGHTER] Bauman: And no one got hit by any flying bottles? Reisenauer: No, nobody got hit by flying-- there was only three of us in the lab at that time. Bauman: As you look back over your, what'd you say, 39 and 1/2 years working at Hanford-- how would you overall assess your time there? How was it as a place to work? Reisenauer: Well, it was a very pleasant place to work. Early on, we had a lot of freedom in how we approached things. And you can point out where things needed to be done, and follow up and try to get funding for those particular projects. And usually you didn't have any trouble doing it, because there was so much that we needed to be known that wasn't known. Bauman: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about yet, in terms of your work [INAUDIBLE] for the health department, or working as a geochemist, or any of the things you did there that we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to share, or think would be important to share? Reisenauer: I can't think of anything. We've pretty much covered most of it along the way. Bauman: Well, I want to thank you very much for coming in today and talking with us. I appreciate it. Reisenauer: Yeah, well, I hope I contributed a little bit to your-- Bauman: Thanks for that. Reisenauer: --your project. <a href="https://youtu.be/4eyjWy-hwng">View interview on Youtube.</a> Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1950- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1950-1988 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Andrew Reisenauer Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear waste Nuclear waste disposal Description An account of the resource Andrew Reisenauer moved to Richland, Washington in 1950 to work on the Hanford Site. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11/06/2013 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F85d2697537289322f1ef78bc2e2e8d84.JPG 462252d2da1844068f2fc6dc50b25dae Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John Williams Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Tom Hungate: We’re rolling. Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with John A. Williams on June 1st, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mr. Williams about his experiences working at the Hanford site and owning a winery in the Tri-Cities region. John Williams: Okay. Franklin: So is it okay if I call you John? Williams: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, great. And you can call me Robert. Williams: Okay. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So I read in your—Emma [Rice] was kind enough to give me a bio, and so I read that your father worked at Hanford in World War II and you came here when you were a child. Williams: Mm-hmm. Franklin: The best place to being seems there, at the beginning. Williams: Okay, if you want me to, I will start there. Franklin: That would be great. Williams: Okay. Yeah, I was a little—actually it’s pretty good information about people that lived here in the early days. My father had already came out here. My mother drove us out, about six months after my father had come to work at Hanford. Franklin: Okay, sorry—when did he come to work? Do you remember the time of the year, what year it was? Williams: Well, it had to be in early ’44, I think. Franklin: Okay. Williams: Because we also—then we came out here about six months later and moved in middle of ’44, as best I can remember. I’m not remembering very many dates anymore. [LAUGHTER] We actually had to board up in Sunnyside in the old—they used to have some old Navy homes there. Franklin: Really? Williams: So we were about four or five blocks from the school there. So my mother took me down there, and I started school there. One day at lunchtime or wherever they were going—they were trucking us along the sidewalk, a bunch of kids—and I turned and headed toward what I thought was home. [LAUGHTER] They didn’t tell me what I was going to do. Anyway, turns out I got lost on the first day of school out there. [LAUGHTER] So it took them about a half day to find me or something like that. Anyway, we lived in those old Navy homes, and then we finally—they finished the house in Richland. It was a B house down on Thayer Drive. At that time, they usually had big courts behind all the houses, they were usually built in at least an arrangement where there was usually a large back area in there. And I remember there was not a seed of grass. It was all sand and dirt. And every time the wind blew, it blew like hell. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, that’s our first move to Richland. Then I started school there and went to Sacajawea—originally it was Sacajawea. Then Spalding, and then Marcus Whitman, and then Columbia High School. That was sort of that situation there. I then went to CBC for a year, not realizing that things weren’t going to mesh up too well with the programs at WSU. I had met—I’m not sure how I’d met these people—but I had met a couple people, I guess, that were material scientists, metallurgists. So I talked to them for a while, and I decided that that’s what I wanted to be—a physical metallurgist. So I went to school at WSU in the physical metallurgy department. Now I think they call it mechanics of materials or something like that. It changed—they’re always changing the [LAUGHTER] names of the programs and stuff. So I graduated from there in 1961. Then, like I say, I interviewed a number of places, and decided, you know, I really sort of like Richland. [LAUGHTER] Because I had some--well, there was the mining industry, that was centered up around the Great Lakes. Then Pennsylvania and then there was Washington, DC was a possibility. So I interviewed a number of places, but they really were not something that would fit my personality as a basic country boy. Since I’d also grown up hunting and fishing—that was before they had all the lakes set up around then at Potholes Reservoir area. So we duck hunted on the Yakima River, and fished, and hiked in the mountains. It was a really great—as far as I’m concerned, it was a really great place to grow up because of the diversity of mountains and desert and everything else. [LAUGHTER] Now I live out between West Richland and Benton City. My address is Benton City, but that’s my mailing address. We started—with my former partner there—we started the first vineyard on Red Mountain. I remember it was sort of just a Jeep trail going in there, along what is now called Sunset Road. In fact, it was sort of a sunken road you might say. It was always interesting, because in the wintertime when it rained—and you know it did rain occasionally—but the water stayed in the road. We even had—you’d go in there on that road and there would be ducks sitting on the ponds on the road. [LAUGHTER] Oh, anyway, we started our effort to develop a vineyard, and that was in 19—so we bought the land in 1973, and got some permits and stuff. Actually, I bought the land from my father-in-law who owns—at that time—Waste Incinerating Company. I told him, I says, well, if I don’t hit water, I don’t want to close. [LAUGHTER] We had researched the water and we figured it was down there. I mean, we really researched the water. We figured it was down there about 540 feet below the surface. Through a couple layers of basalt also and the geological formation that the water was in fractured basalt. Anyway, we got an old well driller in there and we told him the water was down about 540 foot--just a couple young kids—guys. He’d look at us and roll his eyes, oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] They know where the water is. So anyway they started drilling and finally got down there. He got down there and we knew that was the day that he was going to get there. So we got out there after work and he was still drilling. Just—he says, boys, I just reached 540 feet, and there isn’t any water there. And we says, well, it’s got to be close. Anyway [LAUGHTER] we were pretty confident. He drilled about two more feet and hit water. I always remembered that, because he looked up, he says, you boys did know where that water was! [LAUGHTER] That was sort of the beginning of our vineyard efforts there. It took all the money that we had to drill wells and plant grapes. So I kept on working at Hanford. I worked with—when it started it was General Electric, and then Battelle came in. I had a program there and I was just like, no matter what I was doing, they just wanted me to do—write proposals and everything else like that. I had a fully funded program and it was one of those things that I just—I know what these guys are doing, because that was their young days in Battelle. I was traveling with some of my research projects at Hanford. So I just decided, well, if this is what the situation is going to be, I says, I think I’ll just change jobs. So I did go to work for my father-in-law at Waste Incinerating. Since I knew metallurgy and the incinerating processes—there’s a lot of metallurgy associated with the incineration of materials and all the different conditions, atmosphere and everything. So I had a pretty good feeling for what it was, so I worked for him for—oh, about a little less than two years. I just—I had some conflict with working for him. But it was one of those things that was really good, because I learned something that has always stuck with me, is if you give a guy a job, let him do it, as long as he’s got the capability to do that job. My son started working with us later, and I realized that a lesson learned is a lesson to be applied. With him, working for me, I give him the viticultural work, responsibilities, got into the wine making, because I was still working out here. He did a hell of a job, you know. But I was always very careful about how I approached what he was doing and what my concerns were and stuff. We got along fine. Anyway, I had three kids by the time I got out of college. So most of them are around here now. My one girl, daughter, just moved back. So whole darn family is [LAUGHTER] pretty much—one daughter in Moses Lake and her husband. He works for the silicone company up there and makes—So anyway I started working here, so I worked in the metallurgy department and that was in the early days. I worked with programs called N Reactor Creep, or radiation of materials and Creep was with N. It was basically on Zircaloy, stainless steel, and materials also for Fast Breeder reactors, which were coming along at that time—or proposed to come along. And then that’s after—that was before I left and went to work for Waste Incineration Company. And then when I came back to work, I had—Westinghouse came in work. I had a program called Heavy Section Steel Technology Program. This was the only non-FFTF fast reactor or nuclear reactor program, because it was all associated with power reactors. More specifically, pressurized water reactors, which were the home and the kind of reactors that Westinghouse was building all over the place. So here I am, sitting in with a bunch of people that are doing all sorts of other work, and I’m doing a pressure vessel steel work, ad interfacing with—it was pretty interesting, because I was interfacing with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who were—the program direction was out of there. With Naval Research Laboratories in Virginia, and lots of AEC government meetings in Germantown, Maryland. So it was back and forth a lot. That was a really, actually, it was a very interesting program, and pretty much nobody else had any expertise in it, so they pretty much left me alone. [LAUGHTER] As a result of that, I really ended up with a lot of responsibilities and finally developed to a principal engineering position. So I would just BS with some post-graduate education, but where most of those kind of programs went to PhDs to be the head of a program. So I felt pretty fortunate. I did a good job, and really was able to pretty much do my own—make my own guidelines and publish quite a bit of data. So I think that was a real opportunity in terms of my growth. After that, then when that program sort of ended, I went to work in the 305 Building, which was the old reactor building at that time. You know, before they changed that, that’s where they had one of the original graphite piles there. So I subsequently went to work there and it was called the SAF—not the SAF program, it was the FMEF Program, which was where we developed all the equipment and tested it and checked it all out and wrote the procedures and trained technicians with the equipment. With the eventual move of that equipment out to the NDE and DE cells and in the FMEF down on the minus-30 or -40 foot level on that. We finally moved those in there and got everything installed and then they decided, well, we’re not going to do that here. [LAUGHTER] Which is not an unusual thing that’s happened over the years, in terms of programs at Hanford. All that stuff was then pulled out and sent to Dayton, Ohio, where DoE had a big lab there, a materials lab and fuels lab and stuff like that. That was a—well, I was a little sorry to see it go, because I thought it was going to be—I thought we had really done a great job, and the people that ended up with equipment just always really thought we had done a great job, too. So from that, I then moved into the SAF operation, which is for the production of—it was called the Secure Automated Fabrication line. It was a line that everything was in hoods, connected for continuous processes through the lines. There was one line that was set up for pellet production, canning of the pellets. Then there was another line for the chemistry sections of it. It was quite a—it was actually a really technical challenge and we had a lot of really good engineers. Normally, we had—with the number of systems, there were like 30-some systems within the process control. Not even counting all the computer model—the computer systems that were used to run it. So it was basically an automated system running from computer consoles and such. Anyway, the people that I worked with there were very dedicated and I thought it was a real accomplishment. They never did—we actually ran the line and tested the line with basically surrogate materials that were used to run the processes and test out the processes. Toward the end of that process, my systems were pretty much done. So I ended up sort of managing the—with the help of a couple of technicians—documenting the systems, reviewing all the operation procedures for each one of the systems, and then documenting that and getting that into the files for running the system. It was quite a system, I will say that, for sure. I think then from there, I went on to—well, we had a group there that had been—the process engineers and the chemical engineers and everybody that was involved to be able to run a system like that and create the documentation for it. As a result of that, we then sort of—let’s see, I got to think just a minute here. Okay. From there, we went—we had a group that we had all worked together there and we formed another group that was set up to, then, start the re-documentation of a lot of the procedures in the outer areas, the plutonium production and those facilities. They had—in other words—they had procedures out there, but nobody liked to read them, because they were so cumbersome. They were! I mean, they were just really practically impossible for the people that worked there to follow the procedures and accomplish work in a simple and a procedural manner where they could have good quality control on the thing. Anyway, we went out and they formed a group where they wanted us to go to the major facilities and rewrite operational procedures for them. I think that happened because of all the kudos that we got from documenting the FMEF SAF line in the facility. In other words, it was a—I will say—it was not a simple system, but it was well-documented and well-designed and all the guys that worked on that project were really pretty pleased with the stuff we had done. We got out to—I think it was 200 West, and we started on—people there, when we first came in, they says—it’s one of those things—well, we’re going to help you. [LAUGHTER] Nobody likes to be helped. But once we got started with it and talked to them about our goals and how we would accomplish it and stuff, they actually didn’t feel that badly toward us. I think there was a lot of animosity. You know, when you come in and tell them, we’re going to help you, you know? There’s a lot of people say, they aren’t going to help us, you know. So anyway with all the interviews that we did, and the participation that we included these people in the writing and the editing and everything for these procedures, for their different facilities, the first one that we finished, our group got a really big kudos and a lot of pat on the backs, and a lot of notoriety within Westinghouse at that time that was doing that. The next one, actually, the people that we did it for initially said, well where are you going next? We’ll recommend you that it’s something that can really be of value. So that’s what we did for the next couple years. Did a number of sites—I can’t remember what they were—oh. [LAUGHTER] It’s been a while. I actually looked for some of the documents and stuff that we had written and also some papers that I had written. And I could not find a damn thing. I had written most of those on a computer and stuff like that. I had kept some of my publications that we had produced in the open literature. So anyway, I didn’t find them. That’s 20-some years ago and not too easy to maintain where those are at, especially getting a house like ours and everything is sort of cluttered. [LAUGHTER] We did a couple more of those facilities, and then I had heard that there had been advertised that there was going to be early retirement because they wanted to do reduction of force. So I actually opted for that about a year or so ahead. What happened then is that they put me on another program where there was a number of us. There were some quality assurance people, some computer people, and a number of other disciplines that we were going to rewrite a lot of the Westinghouse Hanford management plans and that sort of thing. Since we had gotten pretty good kudos from the work that we had done for individual facilities, they decided that, well, maybe we need to update the Westinghouse program guides and stuff like that. We got started into that, and I worked at that for about a year. And that’s when I went because I was planning on—I told my managers there that if they actually had the early retirement, I was—sayonara. [LAUGHTER] So that opportunity came up in 1994 and I opted for the early retirement, which was, I think, a pretty good deal. You get three years on your age—on service, and didn’t have to get any pains to leave. So that’s what I did. Of course, at that time, the vineyard and the winery was getting more and more demanding. So I quit. The other thing was my father was at an age that I wanted to spend some time hunting and fishing with him, and damned if I got out—once I—after I quit, he had a heart attack around Christmas time. I remember, because we were headed—we were going to go over to—well, he’d had a heart attack before that. So every year we always went over to Pasco, up on there, where they used to have all the Christmas lighting and a lot of stuff like that. So we always took them and went up there. And, darn, we were sitting there having dinner at my mom’s, at their house, and my mother was bitching a little bit. [LAUGHTER] You can take that bitching out. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, my dad got up and walked to his chair and picked up his pill bottle. And I says, Dad, if you’re having a pain, just take that pill, don’t have to read the bottle again. Just take the pill. About that time he slipped out of the chair and passed away there. So that sort of put the kibosh on the hunting and the fishing and the stuff like that. But I had plenty of things to do. I also skied a lot at that time—I started skiing after I got out of college and was on National Ski Patrol for about 30-some years. And all my kids skied and they’re still on Ski Patrol, and grandkids are on Ski Patrol at White Pass, so we’ve been a patrolling family for years. Basically my big recreation thing. I still like to fish and hunt, but I didn’t have a fishing and hunting partner anymore. Well, I had some, but it was not quite the same as doing it with your dad, you know. That sort of brings us up to date. Then, like I said, we expanded our vineyards on Red Mountain. We built—I kept pretty busy after ’94. We built one building, because, actually, our house in Richland had ten-foot basement walls and an outside entrance and it was full of wine barrels--[LAUGHTER]—as my garage was. So we ended up finally building another building out there. I said, gosh, this is a really big building. And we immediately filled it up with tanks and barrels. I told my wife, I said, I’m not going to build any more buildings. And she says, I think you probably will. So it’s never say never. And we ended up building another building which was about twice as big for our case storage, and we have a lab in there and a bottling line, and pretty much a full facility winery. And then after operating from—I think we moved into our house in 1982 with the idea that we would move out of the tasting room down there. Because we had a nice tasting room in the basement and people would come there. And we’d move out of there and build another tasting room. Well, I didn’t do that until about 1970. [LAUGHTER] No, excuse me. 2070—20-07. Excuse me. 2007. So we built a pretty nice tasting room out there and have been using that ever since and it’s been a real big addition for us. We have a number of people working in our tasting room for us. I can always go over and get me a glass of wine when I need it. [LAUGHTER] So I think that probably pretty much brings us up to date. Like I said, when we started our vineyards, there were only eight—well at that time, I think there was only about five wineries in the state. Then 1980, I think there was about—when we actually started selling our first wines, I think there was probably ten wineries. That’s grown over the years now—I know over a year ago there was 800 wineries in the state, and I don’t know how many there is now. There’s probably 900 or so. I don’t know. I lost count. Franklin: Nice. It’s huge—it’s a booming industry. Williams: Oh, it is, yeah. And Oregon--the same thing is happening in Oregon. Between our vineyard and my son’s vineyard and then he has another vineyard out in Finley area that he bought quite a while ago—the first vineyard that he went to work for when he got out of college. Finally he ended up buying it. So we sell grapes to a lot of other wineries with the combined acreage of grapes that we have on Red Mountain and that is about 350 acres of wine grapes. We don’t make that much wine, so we sell quite a bit. Franklin: That’s quite a lot of—that’s pretty big acreage. Williams: Yeah. My grandson works for us—he’s in marketing. I guess my other grandson is probably going to go to work for us someday, if he—he travels around the world and goes to a different—works at a different winery every season, either north or south of the Equator. Because he can do that opposite seasons. He just took his—or he’s taking his exams for entering WSU in enology. Right now, though, he does—he’s got one more year and he’s got a job in France for next vintage. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sounds like a pretty nice life. Williams: He’ll come back eventually, I guess. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, unless France grabs him. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: Wow. You mentioned so much, and thank you. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: We covered a lot. If you don’t mind, I’m going to go back and maybe— Williams: You can edit whatever you want. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Get a few details No, I’m not editing anything. I’d just like to drill into things a little bit more. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: So you said your family first came, you lived in Sunnyside Navy homes. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: And that was, I assume, because of the shortage of— Williams: Yeah, our house in Richland was not finished. So when we moved in to rent the house in Richland, it was brand new and it was the best house we’d ever lived in. [LAUGHTER] We came from Missouri, was our— Franklin: Okay. Williams: And my dad was a—he hated farming. [LAUGHTER] And he got into carpentry and then he actually worked for, I guess it was, Remington Arms in—I think they were in—yeah, they were in Kansas City. That’s how he then was offered—and that was during the Second World War—so he was offered to come to Richland—or Hanford at that time—and go to work on the Project as a carpenter. Eventually, he—well, like I said, we settled in Richland with a brand new home there, and over the years, hunted, fished. My dad was a hobby gunsmith. For years, he was the only gunsmith in the Tri-City area. So he—of course there weren’t that many sporting goods stores—there was BB&M and a couple other sporting goods stores that he used to restore guns for and he had a shop in his basement in the house that he bought—he didn’t buy, but he—one of the things that—except there was four kids and two bedrooms—he excavated his half of the B house, excavated the—and you could do that then—excavated the half of the basement and put the concrete in and the walls in down there with the blessings of the Hanford people. So he had a pretty nice shop down there. Of course it had that great big old furnace in it, too. [LAUGHTER] This is another thing I remember as childhood is, when the coal trucks came around and delivered coal to all the houses, because everything was—one of those big old, big furnace, big coal furnace. Us kids would always—my mother would always get a little ticked off, she’d say, get out of that coal! Get out of there! And all this stuff. [LAUGHTER] And we’d come out usually all black and stuff like that. She kept me pretty clean, considering. She was sort of Mrs. Clean. She eventually worked out there at Battelle. Franklin: Your mother? Williams: My mother worked out there. Franklin: Oh really? What did she do? Williams: Well, she was in the 300 Area and she was in the radiation counting department, where most of it was processing badges and radiation levels on badges and stuff like that. I think that’s what she did primarily there. Every time I’d go there for lunch or have something and see her, she’d say, that’s my son! That’s my son! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Aw. Williams: She was pretty proud of me. Franklin: And how long did she work at Hanford for? Williams: She worked there from, I would say—golly, you asked me a question there. I think she probably worked there from about 19—well she must have worked there at least about ten years before she retired. Franklin: Oh, wow. Williams: Yeah. I can’t remember exactly when she started there, but I remember the place that she worked in there. Franklin: What were your parents’ names? Williams: Williams. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Williams—well, right. Williams: John and Ethel Williams. Franklin: John and Ethel Williams. So much of Hanford’s workforce was—especially after the war was primarily male. It’s very interesting that you had two parents that worked at— Williams: There was actually quite a few women working in the different areas. In 300 Area and in Battelle there. Of course there were a lot of secretaries and then there were people in chemical processing and stuff like that, too. Franklin: Okay. Interesting. So what did your father—you said your father was a carpenter? Williams: Well, he was a carpenter and then he was a power operator-- Franklin: Wow. Williams: --at the reactors. He worked at N Reactor and in the early days, I think his first one was—N Reactor and before that he worked at in Reactor. So we worked at F Reactor and N Reactor. Franklin: Okay. Williams: I think that’s correct. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And how long did he work on—did he retire from Hanford? Williams: Yes, he did. Franklin: And do you know about how long he worked until? Williams: Well, he worked there from about 1944 to—I think he retired in—well, when he came here, I think he was about 35 years old. And he worked there until he retired at 65 or something like that. Franklin: So around 30 years? Williams: 30-some years, yeah. Franklin: So then you guys worked there at the same time. Williams: Pardon? Franklin: So you and your father would have worked on site at the same time? Williams: Well, he was out in the outer areas, and I was in the 300 Area. Basically, he was in the reactor—fuel—reactor materials. Excuse me—bomb materials. [LAUGHTER] And that’s what all those reactors—they were producing material for bombs and they were separating—then all the separations were in the 200 and 200 West Area. And then where they completed the plutonium slugs was in the—I forget the name of the building, but that was in 200 West also. I can’t remember exactly the name of that building. Franklin: Was that the Plutonium Finishing Plant? Williams: The Plutonium Finishing Plant, yes, the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Franklin: We just got a big bunch of photos from that. Because they’re taking that down right now. Williams: Uh-huh. Franklin: So our project just got a big mess of photos from that. Really fascinating— Williams: Yeah, it was. Franklin: --how they [CROSSTALK] Williams: So we actually did one of the plant procedure—plant operating manuals again for that. Franklin: Your group did? Williams: Yes. I’m trying to think of all the other ones that we did, but I can’t remember them all. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. So when you moved out to Sunnyside, were there a lot of other Hanford families that were living— Williams: Well they were living—there was a—because a lot of people were living in Sunnyside, and when my dad first came there, he actually rented a room as a boarder in some people—at a house, a home. And I think there were a lot of other people doing that, too. Franklin: Here in Richland? Williams: No, in Sunnyside. Franklin: In Sunnyside, okay. Williams: Sunnyside. Because in Richland, by the time we were moved to Richland, they had the houses done. So they were building houses all along. Franklin: Right. Williams: But I think there were a lot of people that were living in Sunnyside that were traveling—particularly if they worked out in the outer areas—the West areas or the reactors—they were all clear around, pretty much around that. So they were coming, driving from Sunnyside. And I’m not sure if they had buses running from Sunnyside or not, because I just never asked my dad that. But I never did think about it that much. Franklin: I can imagine back in the ‘40s that would have been a pretty long drive to get to work with the— Williams: Well, it was. And I think they had buses coming out of Sunnyside also. Franklin: So I guess one can imagine that Sunnyside would have been kind of jammed with a bunch of new people from all over the US working. Did you ever—did you go to school—the school that you went to you mentioned, say, was that mixed kids from Sunnyside and Hanford kids? Williams: Well, you know what? I was like first grade and-- Franklin: Right. Williams: All I remember is, I sort of remember where that school was and I remember the places that we lived in. And then my grandparents, when they came out, they moved to Sunnyside. Franklin: Oh. Williams: And so we used to go up there every once in a while and visit them. Then we bought—my mom and dad bought a—they moved down to George Washington Way after I went to school and left home, they moved to George Washington Way. My dad remodeled a whole B house that was—he was pretty handy with that. They also then bought a prefab that was just over on I think Adams there or—anyway, it’s about one block past the street they lived on. Franklin: Okay. Williams: So you could run back and forth and visit and stuff. Franklin: Interesting. So how long did your family live in that—so you said your first house, the B house was on Thayer. How long did the family live there? Williams: Well they lived there and they moved—because I had already—after I started college, so that would have been actually in 1960—excuse me, that would have been in 19—I think they sold the houses in 1960—about 1958, I think. Something like that. Franklin: That’s right on the money. You’re talking about when the government— Williams: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah, 1958. Williams: And my folks lived in a duplex with the other person, and they had lived there first, so they had first option on it. So my mother and dad bought another house that became available and they liked it. It was down on George Washington Way, had a big yard and— Franklin: And that would have been one of the alphabet—was that one of the alphabet houses? Williams: Yeah, it was a B house. Franklin: Oh, okay. So a different B house from the first one you lived in? Williams: Well, it was just like it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, right, yeah, of course. That’s true. Williams: Yeah, it’s a different B house. It was right on George Washington Way there. Franklin: I could have been more specific. Williams: Right on the corner of George Washington Way and—not Symons—what is that? Well, it was 203 George Washington Way and I’m trying to remember the street that runs alongside at that corner. Franklin: Oh, yeah, that’s in the—that district’s now on the National Register. Williams: Yeah. And so my dad remodeled that house that had a big shop in the basement where he did gun work and stuff like that. People from all over the Tri-Cities used to come there to get their guns fixed, because he had a pretty good reputation. [LAUGHTER] So anyway we had a lot of guns—rifles and—two things I never—my dad wouldn’t let me have. He wouldn’t let me have a BB gun, and he wouldn’t let me have a pistol. Because he says, those are the things that kill each other or put eyes out. [LAUGHTER] So, you know, if you got a long gun, you’ve got a little more [UNKNOWN] But the shotguns and the rifles and—he used to—well, he had one of the first—Weatherby used to be a big company, in terms of the type of rifles and the quality of rifles. Well, he used to build stocks and stuff like that, custom-built stocks for people. He had probably the only—there were not very many licenses given out to people that were gunsmiths. So he had—he sent a picture of a gun that he had built to Weatherby, and they immediately sent him an authorized license to buy and build rifles with their actions and stuff. Franklin: Wow. That’s cool. Williams: I remember when I was in high school—let me just think about it—it’s called fiddleback walnut. And, like I said, he was born in Missouri and there was a lot of walnut in that country. There was a company in Warsaw that was called Bishop Gunstock. They’d been making gunstocks for years—I don’t know if they’re still there, but I think they are. Not too many people make custom wooden gunstock. But he fitted the stock to—did all the inlaying, and then fitted the stock right to people so that when they’d come up, the rifle’s right where it should be, if you’re going to hunt, you don’t want to be looking around for your scope and that sort of thing. The piece of wood that he built on my rifle—and this was in 19—I would say in about 19—well he built that for me in my sophomore year of high school—so that piece of wood, then, the gun—blank stock made out of fitted—it was 55 bucks in 1960. And it was just fiddleback walnut like the backside of a violin. That’s why they call it fiddleback walnut. Franklin: Oh! Williams: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s interesting. So coming here in ’44 and you said you graduated college in ’61, so that means you would have entered Washington State College and graduated from Washington State University. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: So you grew up then. So the entire time you grew up in Richland, it was a government town. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: So can you talk about what it’s like to grow up in a town completely owned by the government? Williams: Actually, the government wasn’t really that involved in—they built the houses there and that’s who you paid rent to. It made it pretty reasonable for people to be able to work there and live there. Of course, then there were always people that left—I guess they call it the—every time they had a dust storm, the people left town. [LAUGHTER] They’d say, I’m not working here anymore! But you know it’s surprising how many of those people came back and settled here in Tri-Cities. Franklin: And why do you think they came back? Williams: Probably because the places that they thought they loved, they moved to and then they found out they didn’t love it that much. [LAUGHTER] And then of course the other thing, too, a lot of people that came back liked the outdoor sports, and the lower population, which it was—it was not a big city in terms of a lot of those places where people were from. There were people from Kansas City, there were people from St. Louis, there were people from Chicago, back east, Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, all over the country. There was quite a mix of people that had worked at—generally they had worked—originally, people that came here had worked at either different arms plants and stuff like that during the war and transferred out here because there was a big war effort. But there was also a big need for technical people and work in the reactors and stuff like that. Franklin: Right. Williams: You think about how fast they built some of those reactors, and what they would do today, because it would take a whole lot longer just to get—and do more—well, I always call it comment by the unknowledgeable. [LAUGHTER] Everybody—like a lot of the projects that I had in SAF line, we had people—I mean we had review meetings every month. And people from all over the country would come there. Most of the time you spent—you had to respond to any review question. And you spent a lot of time responding to some pretty stupid questions, because they didn’t know the processes to begin with, though they thought they were experts. That’s my opinion of it. You don’t need to quote me on that. [LAUGHTER] Because it might hit somebody pretty hard. My brother and I, when we were in high school and junior high, actually, we started a lawn mowing business. Franklin: Your brother, or brother-in-law? Williams: My brother and I. So my dad built these little carts to go on the back of our bicycles and we could put our mowers up on there and pedal around town and mow yards. So we had clippers. We were at one time mowing about 40 yards a week in the summertime. Fortunately, in the latter part of that, I had a driver’s license, so we—[LAUGHTER] could drive around. But that was very interesting, because we had people—basically we had a customer waiting list to get on the list if we ever had a vacancy for lawn mowing. And because we did such a good job and we trimmed all around the sidewalks, and we clipped—I mean first class jobs. This rumor spread and so we always had—and the interesting thing was that there was a guy named Campbell that owned the Campbell’s grocery store. He lived down off of Stevens down there some place. And his wife—he came home one day and says, well, I’m paying you guys too much. I only pay my box boys a dollar and a half, or a dollar and a quarter, or something like that. We said, well, do your box boys have to buy their own equipment? No. So there was a number of questions. And we said, you know, we have a waiting list for people that want to have their yards mowed. So if we lose you as a customer, it’s not going to really bother me very much, because you’re downgrading my wages. Anyway, we said, well, we’re not going to mow your yard anymore. His wife called us up and says, won’t you mow my yard? We says, well, are we going to get paid what we used to get paid for it? She says, oh no, I can’t pay you that. My husband won’t let me. So we says, well, we’ve already replaced you with another customer. [LAUGHTER] We were pretty hard businessmen, but we—at that time, we were in high school. Actually, we had an account down at Richland Hardware, it was called at that time, right down on the corner of George Washington Way and Swift there—no, George Washington Way and Lee Boulevard there. So we had our own account down there and then we had an account with a guy that sharpened the mowers and stuff like that. We had to have our mower sharpened every two weeks, because with that many, you go through blades pretty fast. Franklin: Right. Williams: And at that time, our first lawn mower cost us almost $500. Franklin: Wow. Williams: For a gas-powered, driven lawn mower. And that was a lot of money then. I mean, now you can buy a lawn mower for 100 bucks or a few hundred bucks, and not too many people make real-type mowers anymore, walk-behind mowers. Of course those were the best mowers in terms of manicuring the grass, you know. Much better than a rotary mower. So anyway! That’s part of my history. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really interesting. Wow. There’s so much in that. So, I guess to return back to it for a minute—so you’re saying that people were pretty happy living in Richland during the—before the sale—before the privatization. Williams: Well, I think so. We had Columbia High School that was the only high school around at that time, or Richland High School. And you pretty much knew everybody at school. Franklin: Right. Williams: Even though there were quite a few people and there was a lot—activities and that sort of thing. So I think people were happy. We were, and I didn’t know too many people that weren’t happy. There weren’t too many people killing each other or anything at that time. Franklin: To live in Richland at that time, you needed to work at Hanford, right? Williams: Pardon? Franklin: To live in Richland at that time, you needed to work at Hanford? Williams: That is pretty much—yes. To live in a house in Richland, you had to work at Hanford. Franklin: So did you ever have—was it ever a problem for you if people left their jobs or lost their jobs, you had friends leave, or your parents have friends that left? Williams: You know it wasn’t—and in those days, more—there weren’t that many big layoffs. More or less, people left on their own volition. I don’t—I just—it was not something that at that time I was concerned about. Franklin: Right. Williams: We had neighbors around the court there that—there was Gunnison Court, and then there was Putnam and Thayer, and that was sort of the little alcove that we lived in. Then there was a great big court behind that. And then up behind that there was a set of power lines going through. So there was a big alleyway up through there. So we had a lot of play space. [LAUGHTER] We’d get out there at night and kick-the-can and all that sort of stuff. [LAUGHTER] So we were pretty self-entertaining and we all got along pretty good together. Franklin: Did you—when did you find out what was being made at Hanford? Williams: Pardon? Franklin: Do you remember when you found out what was being made at Hanford? Williams: Well, I remember—I do remember—actually I remember them dropping the atomic bomb. Because as soon as it was—it was on the radio. Of course in those days, you didn’t have television, you listened to a lot of radio. Lay around in the living room listening to radio, it’s like watching TV then. [LAUGHTER] You know, all the different programs that were on and stuff. But I remember distinctly the announcement coming over the radio that they had dropped an atomic bomb, and that’s when then everybody knew what they were making out there. None of us—nobody really knew, unless you worked there what they were making, because it was mum’s the word. First thing you could do getting fired is if you were talking—loose lips, they called it. Franklin: Loose lips sink ships. Do you think your father knew before the announcement? Or--? Williams: I think that he knew what they were producing in the reactors. Franklin: Okay. Williams: And I think everybody did, pretty much. They didn’t know, though, that it was going to lead to the atomic bomb. They just knew that they were producing a war material and—of course they’d never seen it go out or never seen it come in. Now, my father-in-law did work in the Plutonium Finishing Plant. He actually developed some of the precision machining operations for producing the final puck. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Ah. Interesting. So you mentioned father-in-law. Where did you meet your wife, is she also from--? Williams: Well, she was—they moved out here about the same time she did, and she lived about three blocks behind me and I never knew her until I got into high school. We met, fell in love, and been in love ever since. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: High school sweethearts? Williams: Yeah, we were. Franklin: Wow, that’s amazing. And did you both go to WSU? Williams: Yes, we did. Franklin: Together? And what was her degree in? Williams: Well, she didn’t finish school exactly. Franklin: Okay. Williams: She did do some other—she was actually still in high school when we got married, so she finished high school in Pullman, and then she worked at the hospital in Pullman for a number of years while we were going to school there. And having kids and going to school and studying and playing pinochle. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And you said you had three children when you were in--? Williams: Four. Franklin: Four, but how many when you were in—? Williams: I had three by the time I got out of college. Franklin: Wow, that’s—kids today complain about how little time they have, but I can imagine having three kids and going to school full-time. Williams: Well, you know, they seemed to—they’re all happy and they’re still home. Franklin: Wow. So what did she do—so you moved back to Richland and started working at the site shortly after you graduated. So what did she do? Williams: Well, she has taken care of four kids. [LAUGHTER] And then she was taking some courses at CBC and in Richland. She sort of has a—I would say an associate degree. They didn’t really finish all that, but she’s super-smart. She’s smarter than I am. Reads like fast, and always made good grades. I always wondered why the hell she married me! [LAUGHTER] Maybe because I got her pregnant! [LAUGHTER] You don’t have to put that in there. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] We can cut that if you want. That’s—oh, that’s great. Excellent. So you were working on Hanford site when President Kennedy came to visit in 1963. Williams: Yes, I was. Franklin: Did you go to see that or--? Williams: I did, yes. Franklin: Can you tell me about that, what you remember? Williams: Well, it was just one of things that—I went out there and there was a lot of people stood around there. He said a few things and we all clapped and [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And that was it? Williams: That was it, yeah. Franklin: Are there any other major events that come to mind when you think about Hanford and the Tri-Cities? Williams: Well, I sort of remember—you know, I’m trying to think of a major event. Well, I remember when they built CBC, because when I first went to CBC, it was in the old airport building over at the airport in Pasco. And that came along after I was already out of there. Franklin: Oh. Williams: Oh, what else do I remember? I remember having a lot of fun around here. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s good. This might seem a little out of left field, but I’ve been thinking about this question as I do the interviews. Do you know the name Sharon Tate? She was a Hollywood actress. Williams: Well, you know, I remember reading about her later, but that’s when everybody else did. And I didn’t really know her, or hadn’t gone to school with her. Franklin: Right. But because she was from the community, was there a particular reaction here? Or was the news really— Williams: You know, I think, actually, it was one of those things that you sort of remember hearing about. But she had been gone for some time, you know? So it was—all the aftermath of that was more spectacular in terms of the group. Of course, they still got that guy in prison, and as far as I’m concerned they never need to let him out. He was a crazy man. He made a lot— Franklin: Yeah. He certainly—I don’t think there’s any debate on that. Williams: Yeah, he made a lot of news. And then they had that place in Death Valley where they congregated. Franklin: Yeah. Williams: And they still got a good number of them still—the fact is, I think I was reading last year, they’ll potentially release one of the gals, but I think they then reneged on that. I don’t know if they did that or not. Franklin: I think they didn’t. I think I followed that too. I don’t believe they released her. Williams: So there was nothing that—I don’t think it was anything that anybody really got excited about or anything, because it was so remote from here, and it was Hollywood and you know, all sorts of things happen in Hollywood. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So is there anything that we haven’t talked about? Williams: I don’t know, I keep talking. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s great. We love it. Williams: Yeah, I talked about our younger days and moving here and growing up here and staying here. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I have a question that just came to my mind if you don’t mind. Williams: Yeah. Franklin: What made you decide to start a winery? Williams: Well, I tell you, my former partner and I, we worked together both in material science. And we shared an office. And he was from Vallejo, California. And went to Berkeley. And I was just a beer-drinking kid from WSU at that time. So I tasted some wine that he had and I says, oh, God, that’s pretty good stuff. So we started talking more about wine. And then at that time we got interested in—and we were in research, so we were reading about the research that was being done at the Prosser Experiment Station with Dr. Clore at that time. Being researchers and stuff—and we’re interested in it, we wrote in an application for participation in their sort of steering committee at Prosser Experiment Station for their wine experimentation and wine making. We met Dr. Clore and a number of people that were involved in it. There was a fellow from Stuttgart University in Germany that had toured—came here for a tour, and I think that’s when we had—just after we had planted some grapes. We asked—when he was here—because there was a plant that we wanted to get—a nursery plant from stock at Prosser Experiment Station. That was Lemberger, which had never been planted in this area. It also had a—the guy from Germany, he said, well, he says, that’s the only plant that we allow to be planted in Germany that has a virus. But it’s unique to that plant. And it is completely different than leaf row virus or any of the other ones. I mean, when those leaves turn, it’s just brilliant orange and red out in the vineyard. Anyway, after that, Dr. Clore called me and he says, well, John, we just released these plants for cuttings to Lewis and White Nursery in Prosser. He says, if you want those, you need to call them and let them know. So I got on the phone right then. I told them, I says, well I’ll take all the plants you make. So we got enough for about two acres of grapes. As a result of that, we produced the first Lembergers in the United States, whatever that is. And it’s pretty nice wine. People love it. It produces fairly well and as a result, it’s a fairly—relatively inexpensive red wine. When you think about what we used to sell wine for and what they go for now, it’s—the dollar was worth a lot more and there was less cost in producing everything. Bottles were cheaper, barrels were cheaper and everything. When we started an American oak barrel cost about 250 bucks. That was cooped for wine coop. They had a lot of American oak barrels that were whiskey barrels, but they weren’t cooped as a wine barrel. A wine barrel has more curvature to it. Anyway, when they released those, I called and got the plants and we started planting those in our vineyard. We started, we had 70-some—80 acres out there. We produced, in the first year of planting, we planted about 12 acres. Then we kept planting more acreage every year as we had the money. Sell some wine, plant some more grapes. Make some more wine, sell some more grapes—[LAUGHTER] In about—well, in 1982 after we finished building our house, like I said, we built ten-foot walls in the basement so I could put wine barrels in the basement three high. [LAUGHTER] And it smelled pretty good down in that basement. [LAUGHTER] We also built, then, in the front side a tasting room—real nice tasting room. Panel and had some nice antique oaks countertops and— Franklin: Oh, wow. Williams: So we ran a lot of people through there in a number of years. That was the roots of it. Franklin: Do you still do private— Williams: And it just keeps expanding and expanding. My wife was pretty glad when got most of the barrels out of the building and had a little more room for things. She quickly occupied it, I think. [LAUGHTER] Anyway. Franklin: What was the—so you started—I took it down in my notes—1975, you started. What was the—you said you were one of five in the state, and when you finally started producing you were one of ten. What was the reception in the community to the winery? Was it a popular thing, or did people just kind of— Williams: Well, you know, I think soon as we opened up we started having customers and stuff. We actually opened up a small—in a garage that my partner built in West Richland. So we didn’t really have a formal tasting room, but we could taste wines there during special events. Eventually, in 1982 is when I started building the house that we have there on Sunset Road. Fairly sizeable house. I had a tasting room down there and stuff. So at that point, people started coming. Then other people. Then we entered our wines in a number of Washington competitions, and they were just grabbing all sorts of plump prizes at that time and people started to say, well what’s this Red Mountain place like? And then pretty soon other people started coming out there. Now you go out there and you look at it, just a field of green. [LAUGHTER] Just the—Aquilini, which is a firm out of Vancouver—and they, when they had the—Kennewick Irrigation District was planning on putting in the water system down there and they had already worked on it. And so they had the pipes in and everything. So they actually had an auction for about 650 acres that—excuse me—that KID owned out there. So we went to there and bid on two 80-acre pieces, but it just kept going up and up and up and up. We spent all day out there bidding and then they’d suspend the bidding for a while and then they’d start it, the next level bidding from where they had stopped previous. They weren’t starting over from the beginning. And eventually it was pretty obvious that these people were going to buy it all. And I think they bought it, and it went for $12,000 an acre, which is really a pretty good buy, because I had already sold land to Col Solare, and that was—at that time I sold them 20 acres plus an option on 20 if they optioned that within a year’s time. And it was for more than the one that I originally—so the option was going to cost them more. The first stuff went for—I think it was 20,000 bucks an acre and then they optioned the second one, it was 25,000 bucks an acre. It helped me pay off some of my debts and stuff. [LAUGHTER] Since then, there’s vineyards all over up there now. Franklin: Yeah. So you guys really helped to start something. Williams: Well, we did. It was one of those things that everybody—course at that time, too, in 1975 when we were saying, well we’re going to go out and drill a well and plant a vineyard, everybody says, you guys friggin’ crazy? [LAUGHTER] Because there wasn’t that many wineries in this state. And then some of the wineries that were in the state at that time have already gone broke or quit. So there’s probably—of the wineries that were there in 1980, I would say there’s probably 60% of those under the same owner or still a small winery or vineyard. Then the other thing is, there was five of us in the Yakima Valley, and Mike Wallace had his winery in Spokane—not Spokane, in Prosser. He was about the—he was the first one—actually, I took a wine-making course from Mike at CBC, and from there, the wineries started—well, we formed the Yakima Valley Winery Association. There were five of us that went together and wrote up the federal requirements for starting an American Viticulture Area. So there’s a number of things that you have to cover: climate, location, topography, soils and all that stuff. And mapping and that sort of thing. So each—there was five wineries and we each took a portion of the thing, and put it together and submitted. Helen Willard, out of Zillah, she was a reporter for—I think it was for either Prosser or Yakima or sort of both—reporter for quite a few little papers. She wrote up part of the history. So she was involved in it. Of course, her son—they have a vineyard up there and they used to sell all their grapes to—oh, shoot. Anyway, they’ve been around for as long as we have in terms of wineries. Franklin: Wow. Williams: That was it. Five wineries started in the Yakima Valley and now, goodness, I don’t know how many there are now, either. [LAUGHTER] Must be— Franklin: A lot. Williams: A lot, yeah. Franklin: You can do those tasting tours— Williams: And then now—we formed the Red Mountain AVA, which is a sub-appellation of the Yakima Valley. It’s in the same boundaries. There’s Horse Heaven Hills—excuse me, Rattlesnake Hills AVA now, and—I’m not sure if—there’s another one there that’s sort of—I think they’re starting up there. But I’ve known all those guys for quite a while. [LAUGHTER] I hardly—it’s hard to keep track of it when there’s so many wineries. Franklin: I bet. Williams: But one of the things that I think has happened—because in the first years, my partner and I, we knew what wines should taste like. And we were very critical of our own wines. And we said, well, if it’s not a good wine, we’re not going to sell it. We’ll dump it down the drain or whatever. Because we had other jobs. But it wasn’t worth our—the worst thing you could do is produce a wine and then have a bad reputation forever. And when there’s that many people doing it, it’s easy to get a bad reputation if you’re the worst one out there. But if you’re one of the best ones out there, you really get a whole lot more publicity and stuff. So it was—we put a pretty high goal for ourselves in terms of the wines that we produced. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun, and we drank well and we went—you know. Wrote off a lot of expenses because everything you did was going into that winery or that vineyard somehow. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Williams: I think I hocked everything I had at that time, but—it worked out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s great. Tom, do you have any questions? Tom Hungate: No. Franklin: Emma, did you have any questions? Emma Rice: [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: Which one? Which one of these would you like to—all of them? Rice: Well, yeah. Franklin: Okay. So how do you think the wine industry has shaped the area? Williams: Pardon? Franklin: How do you think the wine industry has shaped the Tri-Cities area? Williams: Well, I think it’s had a big effect on it, because every place that you read, it’s wine, there’s wineries all over Richland and the Tri-Cities now. And I think that the big thing of it is, you’d be surprised—there’s people coming from all over. There’s people coming from California now to taste wines in Washington. I think the fact that we had the Red Mountain as probably one of the most acclaimed wine areas in Washington state is partly because Col Solare is there, but also we’ve just, over the years, had a lot of good press from people that were interested in doing wines here. Bob Waller, who died a few years back, and was a real wine—I mean he was the first—when he started, he didn’t know a friggin’ thing about wine. [LAUGHTER] But he learned it real fast, and was a good wine writer and really promoted the wines. Then the other thing that was very conducive at that time is the wine—support that we had from Prosser Experiment Station and the work they were doing up there in making wines. They didn’t really make wines to barrel age them or anything like that. But they made wines to see how the wine grape—the wines would respond to different grape growing techniques. And they did a lot of work over the years. There was a lot of information in planting, in terms of watering plants, in terms of maintaining the plant growth, and also in terms of varietal selection for the different wineries and vineyards and stuff. Franklin: Did the boom here—is it something that you thought was a real possibility that could happen, or was it kind of a surprise? Williams: Well, when I—I always had confidence that we would do something here, but it grew so fast that after that, I wasn’t very—didn’t have a whole lot of doubt. Because it took off. It really, within—by 1983, from going from eight or nine—eight to ten wineries—I don’t remember—in 1980. But by 1983 there were, oh, there was 40, 50 wineries in the state already. And then it kept growing, and two years ago—and I haven’t kept track of it. Two years ago, there’s over 800 wineries in the state, and I’m sure there’s at least 900 there now. I mean, every place you read, there’s a winery there someplace. Franklin: Wow. So I guess the last question’s kind of a shift in topic, but—what do you remember about segregation in the area before the Civil Rights Act? Because of— Williams: Well, you know, I think—there was a couple families that went to—lived in Richland. Their parents worked at Hanford and stuff. Franklin: A couple of— Williams: Yeah. So I think—I don’t think it was an issue, because the guys that were there, they were both super athletes and stuff. I knew a couple other kids, too, that lived in the area. I don’t think there was—there was definitely segregation in Tri-Cities, because most of the black people lived in East Pasco. Franklin: Right. Williams: And so that was, I think, already prominent there before they even started Richland. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. East Pasco— Williams: And the reason why I say that is because a lot of those people worked for the railroad, and the railroad was a big thing in Pasco in the early days. It moved from—I can’t remember the name of the pre-Pasco village. Franklin: Ainsworth. Williams: Yes, Ainsworth. So that was pretty much—the people that worked in—or lived in Pasco were different kind of workers than in Richland. And quite frankly, at that time, in those times, there was a lot of segregation. People lived there in where they lived in Pasco because of the segregation. Franklin: Right. Did you see the effect of civil rights legislation in the Tri-Cities? Did that have a pretty—a big impact on the ways that people— Williams: I didn’t personally see that, because, again, it was—our population of blacks in Richland were not that many. I know there were people in Richland. I just call them assholes—excuse me—bigoted people that I’d hear them talk about Pasco or stuff. But even the people—there was the few colored people that went to Hanford—or to Columbia High, I never saw—I personally never experienced feeling one way or another about them. I certainly didn’t feel like I was prejudiced against them. My dad had a guy that he knew that used to go fishing with, too, liked outdoor sports and particularly hunting and fishing. It’s hard to say. I just—I would say no, in terms of living in Richland. Franklin: Okay. Williams: I don’t know, in the early days of Hanford, there was a fair amount of segregation on the Hanford Project. Because they had different dormitories and housing for onsite housing for construction workers there. So I think it was pretty well segregated there. Franklin: And they had minstrel shows— Williams: But I only know that as more of history than having personally experienced it. Franklin: Okay. Williams: You know, when you’re at that age, you’re not—you’re just a kid running around the neighborhood playing kick-the-can at night. [LAUGHTER] Now that was the interesting thing. When I was a kid, we rode our bikes everyplace. We were never in fear of anything. The other thing, the Richland swimming pool had shifts. You’d go in there and swim for an hour, and then you’d get out, have to wait in the park someplace, and then you’d get back in the next hour after that. So it was not a very big pool, but there were a lot of people lived here at that time. So it was fairly restrictive of that. My dad had an old fishing boat, so in high school—and you know, boats weren’t then like they are now. So I think it had a 15 horsepower motor on a little [UNKNOWN] And the guys at BB&M that owned BB&M then had also a dock down there on the Columbia River, right there, right in front of the park down there at that time. So we used to go down there and hang on that and waterski off that platform off their boathouse down there on our little old 15-foot boat with a 15 horsepower motor on it. [LAUGHTER] And skis were wide, they were longer, so you didn’t really need a whole lot of surface area. Franklin: Wow. That’s really neat. Well, John, thank you so much. Williams: Oh, you’re welcome. Franklin: It was a really excellent conversation. Williams: Well, glad—hope you can edit all of my wows out of there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, you gave us so much. Williams: Okay. Franklin: You’ve lived a really fascinating— Williams: Well, I don’t have trouble talking too long. [LAUGHTER] Or too much, so. All righty, well-- <a href="https://youtu.be/nFJmibUsayY">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor 305 Building FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facilty) 200 West 300 Area F Reactor 200 Area PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1962-1994. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with John Williams Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Metallurgy Viticulture Vineyards Nuclear reactors Segregation Description An account of the resource John Williams moved to Richland, Washington in 1944 as a child. John worked on the Hanford Site from 1962-1994 and opened the first vineyard on Red Mountain in 1973. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 06/01/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7979506dcf39c0bb292c727b9f9b0e0b.JPG 2c7a6cf253f23a1ad1751be3abceed88 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dave Harvey Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dave Harvey on February 21st, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dave about his experiences working on the Hanford Site and helping to preserve the history of Hanford and the Tri-Cities. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dave Harvey: David Harvey. H-A-R-V-E-Y. Franklin: And D-A-V-I-D? Harvey: Oh, yeah, D-A-V-I-D. Franklin: It’s okay. So, Dave, what is your background and how did you first come to Hanford? Harvey: Well, I got a degree--[LAUGHTER]—oh, gosh, many years ago—undergraduate degree in American history and government in 1970, back at a private university in New Jersey. And then went to—did various other occupations, but then decided to go to graduate school and came out here to Western Washington University in 1973 and was in history. At the end of my two years in grad school, they were just getting historic preservation kind of component. It was mainly just history, government, what-have-you, and the whole cultural resources management, historic preservation—I should call it occupation, for want for a better term—just got going. I mean, the National Historic Preservation Act wasn’t passed until 1966. So it was kind of like the archaeologists had been doing work on cultural resources, mainly—you know, just archaeological, like with the dams out here, with the construction of all the hydroelectric and irrigation water storage dams. So there was a lot of need for kind of emergency archaeology to document before those areas were going to be flooded. So they got into the cultural resources management game a lot earlier than historians, architectural historians, you know, landscape architects and what-have-you. So, initially, I would be on field crews with the archaeologists. In fact, I even went to an actual field school in France at one point. I had a lot of interests in archaeology and I got on some digs and so forth. But more and more, my interest and focus was on the built environment and dealing—especially out here in the Northwest, and of course Hanford’s a perfect example. You have this continuum. Besides the prehistory you have the early settlement and the agricultural landscapes. And everything is much more intact. There’s a lot of public land, so there’s a lot of opportunity to go out and document, because federal agencies are required, under National Historic Preservation Act, to—they’re supposed to be proactive to document. All the cultural resources, whether it’s prehistoric or on the built environment, you know, houses, cabins, agricultural remains, and landscape. It’s just really fascinating. So that’s another attraction for being out here in the Pacific Northwest. And after I got my master’s and then—boy, that was in 1975. Ever since, kind of went back and forth between the built environment and archaeology, but I would say the last 35 years has mainly been dealing with the built environment. Franklin: And when you say built environment, could you define that term for us? Harvey: It would be any aboveground structures. And that could be early settlement remains. You know, there’s that fine line. When you come to an old farmstead, homestead, and it’s dilapidated, let’s say there’s just remains. Well, you’re going to use archaeological, maybe, techniques as well. But essentially you can document it and do—go to the historic record to get your information. So it’s basically, you know, that’s the built environment. But it can be like the government homes in Richland. Let’s say you have over 3,000 government homes. That’s the built environment. And I had a lot of experience documenting those just here in Richland. But out at Hanford, once again, it’s also the industrial Cold War era, Manhattan Project era buildings, and what they call the recent past, which more and more is no longer recent. But at one point when I was working documenting out here for the Pacific Northwest National Lab—that’s what brought me over to the Mid-Columbia, to Richland back in 1993—you know, the Cold War era was basically just ended, and there was a big movement to document these properties before they disappeared. Because technology today—well, even back then, but much more so today—things change so rapidly that you’re going to lose these significant properties and so forth. Yeah. Franklin: Great. So then, the built environment can encompass anything from a single structure to an entire town or— Harvey: Yup. Franklin: Like the Alphabet Homes, to many even thousands of structures connected to a historical event or a historical period. Harvey: Mm-hm. Franklin: Right? Harvey: Correct. Franklin: Okay. So how did you get—why did PNNL bring you out, or why did you come out in ’93 to— Harvey: Well, I had been in Seattle. In fact, I had worked as kind of a consultant, freelance, like a lot of archaeologists had done for decades. But there was a need for historians, architectural historians, to document, as we were saying, about the built environment. So I had projects in Alaska, all over Washington, Oregon, California, and then I found out through the State Historic Preservation Office that the Department of Energy—well, actually Pacific Northwest National Lab, Battelle Memorial Institute that operates the lab—was looking for cultural resources specialists but more dealing with buildings and structures. Because they had archaeologists. This was in 1993, so I applied and my wife and I moved over from Seattle. Franklin: What attracted you about working on the built environment, architectural environment, in Hanford? Or in the Tri-Cities? Harvey: Well, initially, I don’t know if—I think I gained that appreciation after being here for a while. It sure was quite a transition, especially back in the 1990s. And you could talk to my wife about that. But seriously, it was quite different. I mean, I think today, it would be a much larger community and there’s a lot more things to offer. But at the time, it was quite different. All of the sudden, you’re out here in the shrub steppe environment, and I was so used to the [LAUGHTER] marine, wet environment of western Washington, western Oregon. So it took some transition, but I wouldn’t want to leave now. Franklin: Was it also a cultural or political transition, as well, coming from Seattle, doing cultural resources work there versus doing cultural resources work here? Harvey: Oh, yeah! Extremely. And I guess you could say, the Big Sky country. I should actually backtrack a little. One of my quarters when I was doing my masters at Western Washington was with the Bureau of Land Management in south central Montana, south of Billings. I was stationed out of Billings. So I did have some connection with that type of environment, with, you know, the arid west, so-called. But it was definitely a transition. It was a cultural and [LAUGHTER] political. It was just so different. But I think occupationally, you know, it’s—yeah, I think—well, actually, there had been times, like I even worked a project in central Oregon for a half a year back in the ‘80s, the 1980s, where it was kind of a shrub steppe—that was more of the high desert. So I kind of knew what I was getting into, but I think not so much about Hanford. That was a big transition. Yeah. Franklin: Had you heard about Hanford before you had accepted— Harvey: Yeah, and to be honest, I said, gosh, why would anybody want to live—[LAUGHTER] I’ll be honest, because after living in western Washington, it was—the transition—I didn’t appreciate at the time like I do now. And just the wide open spaces and the—I mean, and I’m also looking for personal reasons why we like it over here just from recreational—and so forth. Because we do a lot of hiking and bicycling and so forth. So, yeah, there was a lot of transition going on there. I’m glad we took it. Franklin: Good. What did you first start working on when you came in the early- or mid-‘90s for Battelle? What were some of your projects? Harvey: Well, it had to deal with kind of the Manhattan Project/Cold War era industrial properties. A lot of the concrete block buildings. And of course there’s a lot of prejudice against that, meaning, gosh, how are these significant? You get that question all the time. And of course, we’re looking at the unbelievable scientific contributions, what was going on in these properties during the Manhattan Project and early Cold War. And Hanford was one of the—produced over two-thirds of the plutonium for the country’s nuclear arsenal during the Manhattan Project/Cold War. And all these outbuildings and—I shouldn’t even say outbuildings. But it was kind of—we had to document them because the Department of Energy wanted to tear them down. A lot of them were contaminated, and so they—and part of the Tri-Party Agreement to clean up Hanford, there was this big movement—I think that’s why they needed somebody who had experience with the built environment—with building structures. And there was, I’ll have to admit, a steep learning curve, because I hadn’t worked, necessarily, with these type of buildings. But I caught up pretty quickly. And the scientific and technology, and the unbelievable challenges of what took place. I’m still learning to this day about the Manhattan Project and so forth. And now of course with the National Historic Park, it’s pretty fascinating, and just the contributions. Franklin: What kinds of resources did you use to document those industrial landscape? Harvey: Oh, boy. There were a lot of—a wealth of material, archival material, at the Department of Energy and the different contractors. It wasn’t just in one central location; they did have the central files. And that’s changed over the years, where you can get this material. Of course a lot more is available today than back in the ‘90s. And historic photos. And at that time, of course, you could talk to a lot of long—unfortunate—long-time residents and people that worked out there that unfortunately are no longer with us, but we got to talk to them. Especially a number of the early settlers or immediate descendants of the early settlers. And that was pretty fascinating. Franklin: So you were doing, then, the pre-’43 agricultural documentation as well as the Manhattan Project. Harvey: Yeah. I was remiss; I didn’t mention that. Yeah, and that was—I came kind of at the perfect time, because a number of these people unfortunately are no longer around. But we got to talk to them and their stories were documented, fortunately. Just the contributions. It was just—and that’s the whole part of the removal of over 1,500—it was more like 1,500 families, as well as the Wanapum Indians up at Priest Rapids. Just becoming exposed to this, it was really—I’d never—see, I wasn’t able to or wouldn’t have had the good fortune of being able to be exposed to that over—if we had stayed in Seattle. Yeah. Franklin: And so where—in the timeline of remediation or removal of the buildings, when did your work often happen? Was it right before the building had been— Harvey: Yup. Franklin: Was there ever an outcome where your work had revealed that a building was— Was there ever an outcome where your work may have changed the decision to remove or tear down a building? Harvey: Pretty much no, unfortunately. Most of the buildings since then have been removed. But we were able to document them and also get the artifacts. A lot of the industrial artifacts, we tagged and got them removed. Or if they were too large to remove or going to be too contaminated for storage, then we were able to document them. Photo and— Franklin: So you’re talking now about the Hanford Collection. Harvey: The Hanford Collection, which you’re in charge of. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So can you—what was your involvement with that? Were you there at the beginning of when that was being set up? Harvey: Yeah! Franklin: Okay, so can you tell me how that came to be, within the Department of Energy? So, politically and then what steps you took to document artifacts and bring them in? Harvey: Okay. And I don’t think I answered fully your original question. Franklin: Oh, sure, sorry. Harvey: Let me finish that. No, that’s good, that’s great. We documented the buildings, like you said, prior to being demolished. Because the ones that had been determined eligible—and a lot of them, you know, for the National Register of Historic Places, being federal facilities, this is a federal agency, Department of Energy, which is required under the National Historic Preservation Act. Because they—the Department of Energy, as a federal agency, was required to document and basically take into consideration any properties of what we call historic properties, properties that are listed or determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. So they had to take into consideration that these properties—they could go ahead and remove them, demolish them, or modify them. But if they’re found eligible, and then— Now, fortunately we’ve been able to save B Reactor and a lot of the artifacts from that era from some of the other reactors ended up there. But of course that’s only one of the nine reactors. But on the others—so this all kind of all of the sudden there was a dilemma here, because you’re going to have to go through this extensive documentation process for each building, almost, or at least ones that have been determined eligible. So that’s—we got into the whole Programmatic Agreement where we had a group of buildings that we’ve—no longer eligible—or I should say we determined not eligible so we didn’t have to do much documentation, if at all. Others were eligible but not really significant. And then we had a third group, really significant that required more extensive documentation. That’s kind of in a general sense. So this Programmatic Agreement was with other contractors, other cultural resource management specialists. I won’t go into all that, but that was kind of signed, I think in 2002. A programmatic agreement with DOE and State of Historic Preservation Office. And that kind of streamlined the whole process. Now, as part of that, you had mentioned about the industrial artifacts. That was kind of an offshoot of that, because these are just as important sometimes as the buildings themselves. And it’s not—it could be signs, it could be instruments. It’s not necessarily just big pieces of industrial equipment. So anyway, those—then we would go in and tag these. So it kind of made us aware—at least, at the moment, don’t touch these, and then we’ll decide later on, if they end up being contaminated or if DOE can’t remove them, then at least we’ve made record of it. Franklin: Right, right. How many buildings do you estimate that you were able to perform this documentation of, and/or the artifact removal? Harvey: Well, see, there were a thousand buildings that ended up—but because there was this streamlined, you know, the Programmatic Agreement, we didn’t have to go to each building. We went to a lot of them. But we—some had already been documented, some—if it was just kind of a generic—let’s say Butler Building, corrugated metal or something like that, might have to just take a picture or something like that. And we did visit—like I said, there was other cultural resources specialists for the other contractors: Bechtel—well, there was Westinghouse and then Bechtel—and so there were a number of other contractors. And then part of the—I would say, the largest productive outcome of this whole effort was this book, The Manhattan Project Cold War Era Facilities, that kind of outlines and chapters on each significant--whether it’s military operations, the reactors, the chemical separation plants in the 200 Area; the 100 Area, you have the fuel manufacturing. There were all these chapters done on Site security, and research and development. And there was—I think Tom Marceau was the lead editor, I think it was with Bechtel, and there were about seven or eight of us were coauthors of several of the chapters. Franklin: Okay, thank you. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Did you directly participate in the efforts to—any efforts at B Reactor—because I know it was a Historic Engineering Landmark, right, and then it’s gained kind of more recognition— Harvey: It became a National Historic Landmark. Franklin: National Historic Landmark. Did you participate in any of that? Harvey: Some of the research. There was a whole—you know, B Reactor Museum Association, which I’m a member. There were a lot of other people that did a lot more work than I did out there. There was a lot of work to do out here. [LAUGHTER] And that was a great success. We’re also looking to kind of preserve landscapes within the new national historic park—Manhattan Project National Historic Park. So we did some background research that have led to realizing—like out at the White Bluffs-Hanford town sites, it’s a larger area of significance than what’s actually strictly in the park. Franklin: Right, because the park, as of right now, just includes the landmark and not any—not actually any feet around it. Harvey: Right, and those are the pre-’43, like we were talking about. And you have canals—irrigation ditches, you have remains from the ranches and farmsteads and actually the foundations for some of the buildings. But it goes way beyond the actual little communities of White Bluffs and Hanford. And then there’s a pumping plant out there on the Columbia. So it’s—yeah—and that’s what we’re kind of—that’s what we’re facing now. There is, I guess, I think a lot of agreement, especially Department of Energy, that that boundary should be expanded, when we’re telling the story out there. Franklin: Are there any buildings that were remediated that you really wished had been saved for this kind of—something like a public park or for the public to view? Harvey: Yeah. We don’t have anything in the 300 Area, which was the fuel manufacturing. That’s too bad, because you had Building 313, Building 314 and a lot of other labs and so forth. They were all just—they’ve all been removed. Franklin: Why are those important? Harvey: Well, that’s where some of the first fuel was manufactured. Before the cores were made into what they call slugs, and then they were transported up to the 100 Area reactors for irradiation. So they were both built in ’43, ’44. So, yeah, it’s kind of too bad that one of those at least wasn’t preserved. But they were pretty contaminated in the walls, underground. But at least we did get to document them. But there’s not much left in the 300 Area from the era, yeah. Franklin: Are there any buildings that are still up that have been selected for remediation or are in the remediation pipeline that you wish were saved for their historic value? Harvey: Well, T Plant has an active—is part of the park, but that has an active role right now in cleanup out there in the 200 Area, chemical separation plant. I think that’s what your question is, right? Something that’s still standing now? Franklin: Yeah. Harvey: Well, some of the reactors are left, but they’re going to be mothballed except for B Reactor. I think the issue is more that we’ve got about five, six pre-’43 buildings. Now, the bank is pretty much going to be stabilized, the White Bluffs bank, First Bank of White Bluffs. But we do have some—the Hanford High School and Bruggeman’s warehouse and the Allard pumping plant, you know, they could use a lot of work. So at least efforts should go, because we really need to tell that story about the people that were sacrificed—they had to remove for the war effort. Some of the sons that were overseas and they’d gotten note from the parents that they were no longer here, because we had to leave. Yeah, so that will tell that side of the story, which is really important. Franklin: What about any other reactors that you feel are historic—because I know some reactors are kind of very similar to others, right, like D and F are pretty similar to B. But what about N or FFTF? Harvey: Well, N would’ve been really decent. That was the last one, and it was the dual generation, could produce steam for electricity as well as plutonium. That would’ve been—yeah, I would have liked to see that one preserved. Because that was the one where President Kennedy came out in ’63 and dedicated. And then I think you had just mentioned the Fast Flux Test Facility. And that was completed in 1982 and that was determined eligible in the ‘90s. Once again, the recent past. Franklin: Breaking that 50-year—so-called 50-year rule. Harvey: Yeah, because it was found to be of exceptional importance. Franklin: And why was that? Harvey: It was probably the cornerstone of the peaceful usage of nuclear energy, because it was the breeder reactor program, that I think began in the Carter Administration for commercial fuels. It was pretty significant for that. I mean, that’s why it was determined eligible. And we went in—a lot of these, I remember we went in and took videos and so forth. We have extensive documentation as well as photo documentation. But—and to be honest, I haven’t been out there for a good while. I believe some of it’s still standing. But I don’t know—there aren’t any plans to stabilize it. I think it’s going to eventually be totally demolished. Franklin: Yeah, I believe so, too. How long did you work doing cultural resource work at Hanford PNNL? Harvey: Through 2005. Franklin: Okay. Harvey: And then I went into—I had my own consulting firm for a couple years. I actually worked in Katrina for four months for FEMA. So just—in fact, I remember coming back here in 2006 and helping, I think it was Washington Closure at the time, to document more, or finalize the artifacts. What was going to be preserved or—and then we kind of were eliminating, once again, the artifacts that were either too contaminated or too large to preserve. So I had some work on that. And then I went with an environmental consulting firm in 2007, oh, through 2013, 2014, I guess. And since then, I’ve been pretty much on my own again, at my own consulting firm. Franklin: And are you still working on Hanford-related projects? Harvey: Yeah, in fact I have a contract with Battelle, actually through another environmental consulting firm that has a kind of a master services agreement with Battelle. So through that kind of agency or—I was able to get this job with Battelle. And it’s good, because there’s several properties on the Battelle campus that they want to document—they wanted to do this Section 106, National Historic Preservation action compliance work. And the main campus, which is a perfect example of mid-century modernism, I’m working on right now. Another facility in the process of wanting to demolish, so I did the—basically, guiding them with their cultural resource compliance regulations that they have to comply with. Franklin: Which facility is this? Harvey: That’s the research technology lab, the RTL. Franklin: Ah, that’s right. That’s the one you contacted me on. Harvey: Yeah, it used to be the Donald W. Douglas Labs, constructed in 1996. Douglas United—I should say the Douglas Aircraft Company and United Nuclear kind of did a joined venture and constructed that. They had it until ’71 and then Exxon purchased it and then Battelle purchased it in 1982. It was to do a lot of work on fuel fabrication, the technologies behind that research. Franklin: And so how—do you think that mid-century modern, kind of corporate campus environment will be maintained there at Battelle, or— Harvey: That’s the aim. I think they would like me to write up a management plan, kind of a maintenance guide on. You know, because they’re going to be kind of a repetitive type of maintenance things. They don’t want to have to come back every time to the State Historic Preservation Office or go through the whole process. So if we come up with a guide where certain activities that they have to maintain, whether it’s keeping the existing color palette or replace-in-kind, then they don’t have to come back to go through the whole compliance thing. So we—they realized that it is eligible. It hasn’t been formally determined eligible for the register and now I’m going through that process now. The RTL was found to be an example of commercial modernism. It was constructed, like I said in—actually, it was completed in ’67. So we’re in the process of mitigating that now. And with a memorandum of agreement outlining the stipulations to mitigate the property before it’s—Battelle sells it and/or demolishes it. Yeah. Franklin: Do you find a resistance in some circles to preservation of the modern or buildings constructed in the ‘60s and on, especially associated with the modernist style of architecture? Harvey: Oh, yeah! I mean, when I came on with Battelle in ’93, it was even more resistance. Frankly, even with the Department of Energy, which today is not resistant. But, yeah, there’s—we used to call it the giggle factor. [LAUGHTER] They’d say, you want to preserve that? Is that eligible? Why do you have to look at it? And then sometimes with corrugated metal buildings, we might have to go through the process to at least do minimal documentation. And there could have been, you know, with the National Register of Historic Places, under criterion A, if something of significant event or research occurred in that facility, that kind of outweighs, let’s say, its commonness or common construction, which is actually under criterion C. And that can happen. Franklin: Sure. Harvey: But it has to be integrity. Property does have to maintain its physical integrity to be eligible as well. But yeah there’s always resistance, and we find in the long run, if you comply, it’s a lot more inexpensive, you know, less headaches. Franklin: And it’s also more—correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s also more inexpensive to retrofit an existing building, usually, than it is to tear down a building and then move the materials out and then bring in new materials and construct something. Harvey: In most cases. Now, when you have contamination, radiological contamination, there are issues that certain buildings may be—current owners can’t find a new buyer who could retrofit it possibly, because all the sudden they’re inheriting this type of legacy. [LAUGHTER] You know. So that—and we faced that out at Hanford all the time. In some cases, it’s legitimate, and in some cases, it’s just a way—they want to demolish it and move on. Franklin: Well, I think that—would you say that the PFP is a good example of that, perhaps a building—Plutonium Finishing Plant—perhaps a building that is of exceptional significance, but is too contaminated to preserve in the traditional sense of preservation? Harvey: Oh, right. Yeah, we did document as much as we could, but we couldn’t get into certain areas when we were inside. But we did take a lot of pictures of the gloveboxes and the fascinating technology that went on there. Yeah, in that case—I mean, a lot of legitimate concerns. And I think in many cases, in a lot of the buildings and structures like out in the 300 Area, it was underneath the facilities, there was a lot of—in the pipes, there was a lot of contamination. There wasn’t any fear of us walking inside in street clothes to document it. Franklin: Interesting. Can you tell me about your involvement in documenting the Alphabet Houses of Richland? Harvey: Yeah, we—in fact, I live in a Q house. Constructed [LAUGHTER] in 19— Franklin: Did you move into an Alphabet House shortly after you—when you arrived in Richland? Harvey: Yeah, in 1993, we moved into a B duplex, down by Jefferson Park by Jefferson Elementary School. Those were constructed during the Manhattan Project from ’43 to ’45. And then a year later we purchased—you know, we were renting—we purchased a Q house up further north. I guess you’d say kind of the northeast extension of what we call the Government Home district, just south of Newcomer on Harris, and that was constructed in ’48, the whole neighborhood: Harris, Hetrick and Davison, that neighborhood there. So that’s when I became fascinated, what are these government homes? Alphabet Homes. And I did a lot of reading, and then in 1995, there was a history conference here. A friend of mine who’s an architectural historian, a colleague in Seattle, she grew up here over on Horn, just a few blocks from where my wife and I are living now on Harris. And at the time, she came over and her parents were still alive. So we decided to coauthor a paper on just the government home, focusing mainly on the Manhattan Project when Albin Pehrson, the architect that DuPont hired to kind of design—he’d had a lot of experience in some federal housing projects back in the ‘30s, but he also was one of the architects from the Davenport Hotel. He was out of Spokane. He had kind of a varied resume, so to speak, work history. So it was fascinating, the struggles that he had with the Corps who wanted just the minimal—very minimal. People think—actually our architecture style is called minimal traditional style. There are some classical elements to—architectural elements to the Q and R and S houses and so forth, and the M houses. But the Corps really didn’t—I mean, they would have just as soon had everybody live in barracks. And Du— Franklin: Well, and I think the As—is the A the two-story duplex? Harvey: Yes. Franklin: I think the As especially reflect that stripped-down, very basic— Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: --housing with very little ornamentation. Harvey: Oh, I know! And they’re even—the Qs and Rs—of course the S is two-story, has a little more features, architectural detailing. But—so that really got me going, doing this paper, and did kind of a follow-up then on the late ‘40s. And then you’re getting into more of the suburban ranch-style houses with the later Alphabet homes: the Ts, U, V and so forth. So it’s kind of interesting to see how the town did change and adapted more to suburban tastes as we get into the postwar period. You know, garages were built; no longer had the car compounds where people had shared parking, off the street but behind. And you used to be—access for service vehicles—delivery vehicles in the back. But now everybody has fences and so forth. You can still see places that have those car compounds, that still exist in some of the government home areas. So that’s kind of my introduction to the government homes. Since then—you know, of course there have been a lot of tours. CREHST—the CREHST Museum led tours for a while, and there’s other people involved. In fact, I think this month—next month in March, there’s going to be a tour of one of the government homes. Franklin: Were you involved at the CREHST Museum with the tours? Harvey: Well, the individual, Richard Nordgren, he does a lot. He and I talked extensively, and I gave him some information. Because I learned a lot from him as well. No, I never was actually part of the tours. I’ve given kind of informal—and then all this kind of led to the establishment of the National Register Historic District for the Gold Coast—it’s Gold Coast Historic District, which is about 200 homes. Does not include my neighborhood, because a lot of the houses across the street have been changed for people wanting better views of the Columbia River. Because I’m across—I’m on the west side— Franklin: That also, though, doesn’t include, I’ve noticed, some of the—how do I put this—some of the more blue collar homes, like the duplexes, the As and Bs, but also the—I live in a prefab, a two-bedroom prefab which was brought in kind of against Pehrson’s wishes— Harvey: Oh, right, about 1,800 of them, I think, yeah. Franklin: Yeah, and they were used primarily more for blue collar workers than white— Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: So I’ve noticed even there in the historical record there’s more of a focus on these kind of—the upper end of the Alphabet Houses. Harvey: Right well, see, I think initially Pehrson wanted a mixture of management and operation employees who lived there, involved in the operation. But what happened was the ones that were closed to the river, and that’s how they got the name Gold Coast, because the management personnel, the upper end, during the—well, in this case it would be when some of the homes just at the end of the war or postwar, they wanted these preferred locations. So, Pehrson’s kind of utopian view, mixture, didn’t really hold much water for long. [LAUGHTER] There was a mixture of housing types, but I think in the long run, it didn’t bear that much—he wasn’t able to keep that intact. And what happened after the war, of course, and then with our neighborhood, you got a lot of the professional occupation, the doctors and dentists moved in. And that’s another reason it was called the Gold Coast. And for the area just south of where we are. And now, to answer your question, yes, because a lot of the more blue collar were more in the central part and southwest. I guess we had to pick an area where you had to have at least 60% intact of what we call contributing. There was a lot of leeway: you can replace the windows, but you had to keep the dimensions. Because our house is pretty intact. We have all the original dimensions. We have different window material. So there was kind of that, and I think we ended up about 65% of the 200-plus buildings were found to be contributing. So, like I said, you usually have to have at least 60 in district. Franklin: Did you work on that nomination? Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Oh, okay. So how did you—did you survey each house? Harvey: Well, we had—a lot of volunteers went out. We took pictures of every home. In fact, it was all over the city, not just what became the Gold Coast. But I helped write up the context, the historic context, and reviewed the statement of significance. I mean, a city—there were a lot of people involved. So I kind of assisted on that. Franklin: Did you find the homeowners to be pretty amenable to the effort to list on the national register? Harvey: Yeah, because, well, you see, national register’s more of an honorary. Unless they were going to use some type of government funds for restoration of their homes. Then they have to go through Secretary of the Interior guidelines for architectural detailing and documentation and so forth. To keep within certain attributes, to keep the original architectural integrity as much as possible. But otherwise, it’s mainly honorary. There aren’t that many funds available now. But it also—it’s mainly like if the federal government wanted to come and put a highway through or something. Then, if it’s a historic district like that, then they have to take into consideration, hey, this is a national registered district. Now, local landmarks would have a lot more teeth, like you have in the city of Seattle, you have a lot of neighborhoods that are historic districts that are landmarks. That’s a lot more stringent. And Portland—I mean there’s a lot of communities. Spokane would be the nearest to us. Well, I shouldn’t even say that. I think maybe Walla Walla and Ellensburg. And you can see economic revitalization goes hand-in-hand with—all of the sudden people take pride in, they’ve got a historic home. Now, we did a survey—I remember, we had a public meeting with the State Historic Preservation Office, we had the city, and I would say 85% were not in favor of a local landmarks ordinance. They liked the idea of a national registered district because it was honorary. But basically if you have a house in there, you can change it right now. The chance of it ever getting de-listed, someone would actually have to make an attempt to contact the keeper of the register or the State Historic Preservation Office— Franklin: And change a bunch of houses—change enough houses to—it would actually have to be a concerted effort— Harvey: Yeah, and to actually get it de-listed. Now, who knows, maybe in the future there’s enough chance—now some people, I have noticed, though, have tried to keep the style of homes that are in the Gold Coast District, so that’s good. Franklin: So when you were talking about local listing, is that the same as a certified local government? Harvey: No, that’s—CLG—there’s a lot of benefits to be a CLG—Kennewick is—because they get these grants, block grants, to restore—maybe take off the exterior corrugated metal that was really popular to put on nice brick facades—you know, this was a popular thing back in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. And now they got to—and if you go on through downtown Kennewick, it’s an amazing success story. Franklin: Right, where a lot of that restoration has happened down there. Harvey: Restoration—and you have to follow Section 106 guidelines and Secretary of the Interior guidelines. And I was on the design review board for about five years. So that would be the benefit of being a Certified Local Government. And you have to maintain historic register of properties and so forth, yeah. So that’s different, yeah. Franklin: Did you find that, overall, the people that—when you were working on the national register, the people who lived there in the Alphabet Homes knew and appreciated the history of the Alphabet Home and generally wanted to—wanted to preserve that kind of history? Harvey: Yeah, I think most people even today. I’m trying to think the date when this happened. I think, gosh, it must have been at least ten years ago. Yeah, yeah. We had the State Historic Preservation come over for a meeting and I was on the State Advisory Council on Historic Preservation at the time. So we had them come over and there was a public—we had our public meeting which included the Gold Coast. Yeah, I think there is a lot of—the level of government, they came around. [LAUGHTER] The city government. Franklin: What about the neighborhoods that have traditionally been more renters or lower income, like a lot of the neighborhoods—thinking about where I live in more central Richland that is mostly As and Bs and then prefabs. Harvey: Right. Franklin: I’m wondering—did you—was there ever any surveys made of those? Harvey: Mm-hm. Franklin: Do you think they have a—do you think there’s a historic district to be made there, or there’s enough that it has historic integrity? Harvey: Well, I think we did look at some other areas of the city but that didn’t reach that 60% plateau. And that’s why we picked kind of the area—and then we had kind of that whole theme, that so-called Gold Coast theme. But there are a lot of other cities, communities, across the country where you have so-called blue collar neighborhood or industrial neighborhoods or neighborhoods in transition from industrial—now maybe people coming in and restoring the lofts and so forth, where you do have a lot of pride in that. And you have like automobile rows—they’re looking at Columbia Drive over in Kennewick as part of that. So I think you could still— Franklin: That’s the old state highway, right? Harvey: Pardon? Franklin: That’s the old state highway, Columbia Drive? Harvey: No, that’s the one through the park. This would be—maybe it’s not Columbia Drive is not the right term. It’s just adjacent to the downtown Kennewick, the historic downtown Kennewick partnership. I thought that was Columbian Drive, but-- Franklin: I could be wrong. Harvey: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: You’ve lived here a lot longer than I have. Harvey: [LAUGHTER] But they have a so-called automobile row or stretch, so they’re trying to appeal to that and put in signage that’s more kind of complementary to that era. But I think there are areas all across the country where you have the so-called blue collar, but you might have a higher degree of rentals. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be maintained, but in some places they’re not, so-- Franklin: Sure, oh, and, well, that’s just-- Harvey: Probably, I mean your neighborhood. Franklin: That’s part of the economics of the people that own them versus the people that live in them. If you rent, you have less impetus to do a lot of home improvement. If you’re looking at it as a money-making property, you have less impetus to invest in that thing long-term for its aesthetics and its historical integrity. Harvey: Yeah, that is definitely true. Now, of course if you get into apartment buildings—yeah, that’s different. And you have those in central Richland, in some communities, we have a large apartment building could be eligible for the register, and it’s still all renters in those buildings. Franklin: Sure, yeah. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Ah. Sorry, I’m trying to think. We’ve covered a lot. Harvey: Yeah, yeah, this has been great. Franklin: So what do you currently—so, right now you said you’re currently working on the Battelle campus. Harvey: Right. Franklin: Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to mention? As it relates to Hanford history or Tri-Cities history? Harvey: Well, the more recent development, when President Obama signed the establishment for the Manhattan Project National Historic Park which takes in Manhattan Project properties here and the pre-’43, as we mentioned, as well as selective properties in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. And I got to—I was chosen with Tom Marceau here at Hanford, both of us went back to Washington, DC for the Scholars’ Forum. Which was real big—and you had scholars and people working in cultural resources, historic preservation, at all three sites there as well and of course Department of Energy— Franklin: Who else was a part of that? Harvey: And the National Parks Service. Excuse me? Franklin: Sorry, who else was a part of that forum? Harvey: Oh, gosh. [LAUGHTER] Trying to think of something—the names—the Atomic Foundation, Cindy— Franklin: Cindy Kelly. Harvey: Cindy Kelly. Because she worked here for a number of years, both with one of the contractors and with the Department of Energy. So she’s been very active with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in DC. And, oh, Ellen—Ellen’s last name—she’s out of Los Alamos. Ellen McGehee, she was there from Los Alamos. The Oak Ridge folks, I did not know as well. Franklin: Were there anybody who had authored any works on Hanford—Bruce Hedley or John Finley? Harvey: Yeah, thank you. In fact, John Finley and Bruce Hedley, both from University of Washington were there. They actually were the ones that set up—they commented—they were kind of the commenter on my presentation back in 1995 when we did the government homes. So that’s when I first met them. And then John—they both have written a number of books on the Atomic Frontier, the Atomic West and Hanford. Excellent books. Franklin: What about—was Kate Brown a part of that? Harvey: And Kate Brown was there. I’m glad you keep mentioning these names because—but also we were expecting the author—he wrote little landmark books on the Manhattan Project and the building of the bomb. Franklin: Brian Sanger? Harvey: Well, there was Sanger. He wasn’t there, but he was supposed to be. But there was another gentlemen—ah, can’t think of the name. You keep telling me these names and I’ll remember. But—and then there was the Park Service, a member of the-- Franklin: Who chose the people to be present at this Scholars’ Forum? Harvey: Well, I think each of the three communities submitted names. Franklin: Okay. Harvey: Colleen French with the Department of Energy submitted Tom’s name and myself, and we were accepted. Franklin: Oh, great. Because I’m just kind of—you know—there’s some people that have renown or certain reputations here, and Kate Brown’s is often a name that’s used—doesn’t always have polite adjectives coming after her name is mentioned or her book is mentioned. So I was kind of curious if you knew how she became involved with that forum. Harvey: No. Franklin: Or if there was any kind of cross-currents or anything—any kind of—how were the proceedings of the forum? Harvey: Oh, I was going to say—there was—I mean, we looked at it as the National Historic Park, there’s many stories to tell in the Park Service. Some people wanted it to be a celebratory-type thing. You know, we built the bomb and helped end World War II. And others saying, you know, no, it should be—it’s more of a commemoration. Let—the Park Service is good at establishing the parameter, the context, and then the visitors make that decision. There’s an internment camp—in fact, this was just the 75th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Americans, and there’s an internment camp in eastern California, near Bishop, I believe. And once again, that’s kind of—they’re telling the story that some might say was not a most glamorous part of American history. Franklin: Sure. Harvey: But we’re showing it. And when we talk about Monticello, we talk about the slaves. So the Park Service is really good. And that’s kind of—we struggled with that kind of—the type of themes that we should be—how the Park Service should be telling the story. Franklin: Can I ask how you personally came down on that issue, whether the park should be one that’s more celebratory or— Harvey: No, I— Franklin: Or one that’s— Harvey: I think just a commemoration. I think each—you know, it’s a lot of significance. We all know about the negative aspect of the Atomic Age, but it is one of the most significant events of the 20th century, by far. And it’s had great technological benefits. It also led to a Cold War and now—which [LAUGHTER] is still—with the spreading of nuclear arms is one of the—oh, I would say, one of the most dangerous things occurring in international politics. Franklin: Yes. Harvey: And as well as the contamination aspects, too. Of cleaning up the legacy. Franklin: Of course, which is still ongoing. Harvey: Which is here at Hanford. But at other places, too. You realize you had workers in a lot of Manhattan Project, early Cold War facilities that all of the sudden they’re realizing—Department of Energy—wait a minute, these people were also, I guess you could say fighting in the Cold War. And now you know, they didn’t have any protections at the time, and are we going to care for these people? Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Right I’d like to ask you something that might be controversial, and if you don’t want to answer— Harvey: Okay. Franklin: I’m fine with that. But, this is a question I don’t have—really feel like I can ask very often. There’s a lot of rhetoric, especially here, that—often-repeated rhetoric that dropping the bomb was necessary to ending World War II. However, most historians agree that dropping the bomb was not necessary to avoid the invasion of Japan; in fact, the Japanese had wanted surrender, were willing to agree to let the emperor abdicate as long as we wouldn’t kill the emperor, and that the bomb was dropped to intimidate the Soviets into more concessions in Eastern Europe. But Truman, over the course of his life, inflated the number of American lives that the bomb would save, and he didn’t even mention it saving lives until 18 months after the bomb was dropped. So with that in mind, do you agree or disagree with the statement that dropping the bomb— Harvey: Well, I see both sides. I mean, you talk to people whose sons were onboard ships going to Japan, ready for the invasion. And so it might be hard to convince that family [LAUGHTER] that the bomb wasn’t a good thing. Also, supposedly—I can’t remember the number we had—50,000 soldiers that were prisoners of war. Supposedly they were all going to be—if we invaded the mainland, they were all going to be killed. And so you hear that, and you say, well, it was a good thing. And also, but at the same time, you do a lot—especially Leslie Groves and others figured, oh, the expense was unbelievable expense at the time. And to justify, maybe we needed to drop this bomb, and quickly, before there was peace. And then I’ve heard about Truman, 18 months later, to kind of more justify. And there was a lot of cover-up on the after-effects of nuclear fallout, for want of a better term, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the people that were exposed to it, and generations after that. There was kind of a lot of hush-hush. I mean, obviously, the word got out. Franklin: Right, it’s kind of hard to hide that. Harvey: Yeah, in fact, I went to the signing when we were back for the Scholars’ Forum back in DC, and Sally Jewell, who was the Secretary of the Interior at the time, I think her mom was one of the first nurses that went over there. Franklin: Oh, wow. Harvey: Yeah. So where I come around personally—I know General Eisenhower (who became President Eisenhower), he wanted to have a demonstration. Take contingent or—the government of Japan at the time, the military figure, take them out on a boat and show that okay, we’re going to drop—do the dropping of the bomb. Franklin: Kind of like a peaceful demonstration— Harvey: Right. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know what was going to happen after you drop it. It could have been a chain reaction, you know, you read a lot of—so, believe me, I’m not ducking the issue. I really—I can see both sides. A lot of historians feel it was necessary. But then you read the side that it was kind of to show the Soviets we meant business. And also to justify all the expense during the war. Franklin: Sure, it would’ve—could’ve been seen as this major boondoggle, had all this money been spent on something that had never been— Harvey: Well, right. Franklin: --never been used. Harvey: But I’ve heard Truman didn’t lose much sleep over his decision. Franklin: Sure, sure. Harvey: In fact, I think even Oppenheimer went and met with him, and I guess he—you know, it’s too bad what happened to Oppenheimer, his loss of his security clearance. Which eventually I think he got back later. But it was that whole kind of Red Scare during the ‘50s. Franklin: Yeah. Well, thanks, Dave. I guess what I’m hearing from you is that it’s complicated. Harvey: Yeah. Franklin: Which I think like any good historical issue worth discussing, we often have to leave it with, well, it’s complicated. Harvey: Well, I’d like to actually— Franklin: There’s no easy line. Harvey: --to do more research on it, personally. That’s why this profession’s great. I tell my wife I learn something new everyday, not necessarily just in my profession, either, but even so. You can say that about many professions, but being in the history and architectural history field, just pick up something new to read everyday or research angle. Even stuff that I’m doing now, I’m learning more about the history of the area. Franklin: Well, you know, Dave, thank you for all of your efforts in preserving the history of Hanford. Harvey: Well, thank you. Franklin: And I think we’re all excited to see—the national park coming in really is a game-changer in a lot of aspects, bringing in a lot of legitimacy. And we’re all very excited to see where that goes and hopefully the park boundaries will increase and it’ll really get kind of—you know, the park service will have that space to tell that kind of complicated story— Harvey: Well, you know, it’s the heritage tourism. It’s a boon. That’s why there’s so much support—bipartisan support throughout the state, not just here. But I think—and there’s that Atomic Trail, where people go visit these sites now. It’s— Franklin: We found something that democrats and republicans can agree on. [LAUGHTER] Harvey: Yes, one of the few things. Franklin: Well thank you so much, Dave. Harvey: Thanks, Robert. Franklin: Yeah, my pleasure. <a href="https://youtu.be/C9bRLrIWLWc">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Pacific Northwest National Laboratory B Reactor 200 Area 100 Area 300 Area 314 Building 313 Building T Plant D Reactor F Reactor N Reactor FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1993- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1993- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dave Harvey Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Historic preservation Nuclear reactors Conservation and restoration Description An account of the resource Dave Harvey moved to Richland, Washington in 1993 to work on historic preservation of the Hanford Site. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/21/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F483077cc6df15f1808df334b0814152c.JPG c9f378ad79676f9be70f449b7ae3a4f8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jim Buske Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready, Tom? Tom Hungate: We’re rolling. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jim Busk on September 12, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jim about his experiences at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Jim Buske: Okay. It’s Jim Buske. Franklin: Buske, sorry. Buske: B-U-S-K-E. Franklin: Okay. Buske: And the address? Franklin: No, no, no, no address. And is Jim short for James? Buske: No. My given name is Jimmie. I-E. Franklin: Okay. J-I-M-M-I—J-I-M--? Buske: M-I-E. Franklin: Okay. So, Jim, tell me how you came to the area, to the Hanford Site. Buske: Well, Uncle Sam decided he needed me here. So, that’s how I got here. I was in the Army at the time, and I was due to be sent to Alaska. And I got as far as Fort Lewis and come to find out they were so far ahead on sending the replacements up with the same job number that I had, that they were just dividing us all up and sending us all over the world, really. I ended up, along with, I think, five other soldiers at that time being sent to Camp Hanford, Washington. Franklin: Okay. Let’s—if you don’t mind, let’s back up a little bit. Tell me, where and when were you born? Buske: Oh, I was born in Stockton, Illinois, October 11, 1934. Franklin: Okay. And when did you join the services? Yeah. Were you drafted or was it— Buske: I volunteered. On November 29, 1954. Franklin: Okay. Had you been to Washington before? Before you came to Lewis and then came over to Camp Hanford? Buske: No. Never been to Washington. Franklin: What were your first impressions of Camp Hanford when you arrived? Buske: Well, a whole lot different than it is in 2018. When I first got here, it was very hot and dry. There was—if you didn’t water something, it just didn’t grow. The population was way down from what it is today. Quite an area, actually, today. It’s surprising. But vineyards and things like that were still somewhere in the future. Franklin: Where was Camp Hanford located? Buske: Well, the camp itself? Franklin: Yeah. Buske: Okay. The headquarters—and it was part of what they called 5th Group, which is about the size of a regiment, I think. But being anti-aircraft, which was our mission, we had groups instead of regiments and brigades, and batteries instead of companies. I was in Headquarters Battery of the 83rd AAA Battalion Nike Missile. Franklin: What was your job? Buske: Well, I was a—the Army told me I was a wheeled vehicle mechanic, but I knew better. When I got out to the permanent spot where I was stationed, I was assigned to a grease pit, just changing oil and greasing vehicles. That’s really about all I was capable of, but they thought I was a mechanic, so that’s what they called me. Anyway, shortly after I got there, the dispatcher was assigned to motor sergeant school. So he left and I became the dispatcher. Franklin: Like radio dispatcher? Or, sorry— Buske: No, just a—it’s a paperwork job where you kept track of maintenance and assigned vehicles to certain areas. It was a fun job, really. Franklin: What was the purpose of Camp Hanford and the Nike Missile Program? Buske: [COUGH] Excuse me. Well, of course, Hanford in World War II in 1943, along with Oak Ridge, Tennessee were the two main nuclear—atomic energy development places in the country. Hanford made plutonium for the A-bomb. It was one of the A-bomb types. It was a real weird place, because, to this day, if someone says, where were you stationed, and I say, Camp Hanford, I just get a blank stare. [COUGH] Excuse me. It was just a hush-hush thing. When I got my orders to Camp Hanford, Washington, I thought they were talking about Washington, DC. Being from Illinois, I thought, well, I’ll get a delay in route and stop by home and see Mom and Dad and the siblings. They put me on a Greyhound bus from Fort Lewis and I went over the Cascade Mountains and right into Richland. That was it. Franklin: How much did you know about Hanford when you—and how much did you learn about Hanford when you were stationed here? Buske: Well, to begin with, I knew zero. I found out that it was really a serious mission that they had. It sounds, maybe, grandiose, but we had just an early warning board, they called it. It was a Plexiglas outline of the whole west coast, all the way from the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands, clear down to the border with Mexico. We were the defenders, supposedly, of this whole area, along with several other Nike missile outfits. They were posted—I think there was one up in Seattle at that time and others around. But people didn’t talk about them very much, but they had quite a serious duty to perform. It was pretty hush-hush. Franklin: So your job was not just to protect the Hanford Site but to protect a much larger area. Buske: Correct. Franklin: But you were stationed at the Hanford Site. Buske: Yes, mm-hmm. Franklin: How long were you at Camp Hanford? Buske: A little over 19 months. Franklin: 19 months. What did you do for R&R? Buske: Well, you probably have never heard of the Kennewick Highlands Dance Hall? Franklin: A little bit. We have a little bit about it in our archives. But, yeah, it’s gone now. Buske: When we would get a pass, which you could get every weekend if you didn’t have duty, we’d come in from the area and—actually, right across the road from here, and maybe up or down a little bit, but there was a drive-in movie theater. That was real popular then. Of course, they had their dollar-for-the-carload nights like most of the rest of them did. That was a very popular thing with the soldiers. There was a few bars that were, I think beer and wine bars, that if you were over 18, you could get beer. It was just really—we enjoyed getting acquainted with the local people. They were very receptive to us. Primarily, the biggest share of them by far worked on the Hanford Works, out in the same area that we were stationed in, you know. But you just tried to blend in as much as you could. We never—to my knowledge—never caused any problem or created any trouble. We were treated accordingly. The people took us in real well. We were grateful for that. Franklin: Yeah. Could you describe what a Nike missile site—what goes in, what kind of buildings are there, how big is it, how many men? Buske: Well, okay. Typically, a battery, which is the equivalent of a company, is maybe 150 soldiers at a given site. Their primary mission was to maintain and operate the missiles in the event that they were needed. So maintenance was performed, alerts were held constantly. In Headquarters Battery, we did pretty near all the service work that was required: either vehicles or had all the personnel records and administrative duties. It was small enough to be a pretty close-knit group. Everybody knew their job and did it. And it was more or less almost like a nine-to-five job, except you didn’t go home at night. You just went to your barracks and sacked out. Our barracks were actually 12-men huts. Prefab huts. Which, shortly after I got here, before—I don’t think I’d been here a week, and they had a pretty bad sandstorm. The first morning I woke up and got out of my cot and I stepped right into a sand dune that was on the floor right next to my cot. Luckily they never had too many of those sandstorms. But it was very, like I say, very hot and dry. We were treated good. We didn’t have a lot of harassing and things like that. It was almost like a nine-to-five job, just about. Except it didn’t end at five. Franklin: Yeah. So there was the main headquarters, and then I assume there were sites. Buske: Correct. Franklin: Around. How many sites were there, around—missile sites around the Hanford Site? Buske: Okay, good question. We were Headquarters and we had actually four batteries: A, B, C, and D. I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard this, but D Battery was the one that wasn’t too far from where we sit right now. It was out on Rattlesnake Mountain. I think Highway 240 goes up by that way. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Buske: And it was just as you’re going northwest, it’d be off on your left-hand side. We were responsible for them, but I think actually they were probably over 50 miles away from headquarters—from our company. But you had to—when you cross on the ferry across the Columbia and went up the cliff side, and started north, you went right past C Battery. These were all probably around 150 soldiers per unit. Straight ahead was Headquarters and part of A Battery. But that was just the launcher platoon part of it. The headquarters for A Battery was up further north towards the direction of Moses Lake, but not near that far, but up on Saddle Mountain. And they tried to put the radar units for each battery on high ground so they could cover a lot more sky. Franklin: Sure, sure. Buske: For defensive purposes. So the Saddle Mountain was a pretty high elevation. But they controlled the missile sites down by where we were. Then if you went further down the road about maybe 20 miles was B Battery. Each one of those sites, if I remember right, had four missiles that were actually capable of being fired. Which, thankfully, never were. But anyway. We were really spread out. Franklin: Were you—did you have cause to—did you visit each one, were you rotated through? Where were you stationed, respective of all those different batteries? Buske: Well, in my particular situation, we were all in the battalion headquarters. Franklin: Okay. Buske: So all the maintenance work came to us and we were only capable of a real basic maintenance program. Otherwise, they came back to the rear, to ordnance for overhauls and more complicated repairs. Franklin: Where would that be? Buske: Well, I think, if you’re describing it from here, it would be north on George Washington Way. [COUGH] Excuse me. And you’d come into the base camp and the headquarters were just to the left of—you’d have to turn left off George Washington Way and then head north again, and the group headquarters was, oh, maybe a mile. From here, I would guess maybe around three or four miles away. That was the headquarters for the whole Hanford facility, really. Franklin: For the Army part of the Nike missile sites. Were there any incidences or surprises while you were out here? Buske: Militarily, or--? Franklin: Yeah. Buske: Well, there was one that was really sad. Headquarters of A Battery was up on that Saddle Mountain, but it was just like two-thirds of the battery; the other third were with us down by battalion headquarters. Our mess hall supplied all the food to them, up on the Saddle Mountain. So we had what they call the chow run. As a dispatcher, I’d write out the paperwork and I’d supply—assign the vehicle, and they would haul the food up there usually at noon. It would have enough food for the noon meal and, I guess, maybe breakfast or something. And in between, like, for the third meal, they’d have cold cuts or something like that. But this chow run was everyday about noon or shortly after. The one noon, I wrote the guy up a trip ticket and off he went. About half an hour later, we found out, he’d gone over the side and got killed. I don’t think they ever did really determine whether he was going too fast or he fell asleep or—anyway, there was nothing underhanded about what happened. It was just an accident. The other one that comes to mind was more—looking back, it was more humorous than anything. They had, in probably late summer of 1956, they had a nationwide, maybe global-wide, I don’t know, operation called Operation Crackerjack. It was SAC-based—SAC aircraft, and the airplanes or whatever were trying to attack us like our enemies would do. Our mission was to theoretically not allow that to happen. Shoot ‘em down or whatever. Of course no one fired anything live. But just before that, one of our leading officers was a strict believer in everybody should know everybody else’s job and be capable of filling in when needed, blah, blah, blah. So he had people like me and some other people from the motor pool doing radar work. Which we knew nothing about. [LAUGHTER] Well, anyway, we were in the main radar location and I was assigned to the early morning board. It had the whole post with the Aleutian Islands and everything. It was, oh, about maybe three feet wide and five feet tall or something like that Plexiglas. I had to stand behind that with headphones on and listen to all this information being rattled in my ear. I didn’t catch most of it, and the ones that I did catch, I really didn’t know for sure what they said. But they would give the coordinates of a bogey, and I was supposed to put an X on the board and then write backwards—because the duty officer up on what they called the bridge could see it from his direction and looked okay. But it was all totally confusing to me. And I wasn’t alone. There was several others of us that really loused up bad. Well, anyway, the officer on the bridge, they called it, he was looking down here and I remember finally he said, Buske, what are you doing? And I said, sir, I don’t have any idea. So he said, well, you might as well come up here and sit with me then, because you’re not doing any good down there. So the whole operation went—while I was on duty, I was watching with the officer-in-charge, doing nothing, really. And the actual—I didn’t know it at the time, but a plane flew right over us, and nobody knew who it was. Needless to say, that didn’t bode well with the higher-ups, wherever they were. So I think it was about a week or two later, the orders came down later from higher up that we were going to have this exercise again, and this time we would get it right. And everybody knew what that meant. If it happened again, heads were going to roll. So they held it again in about a month, and it worked like clockwork, supposedly. Nothing got within about 800 miles of us, and everybody did their job. They knew what to do and they did it. But those two, I remember that, especially that Operation Crackerjack. We just laughed about it. Because we knew it wasn’t working well. When people were looking up and saying, what is that up there? Well, it’s an airplane, but we don’t know whose it is! Whether it’s ours or the enemy. That wasn’t supposed to work that way. No. But anyway, it was mostly just a job and you did what you were supposed to do, and tried not to be noticed, really. They always said if you were real successful, when you got out of the Army, one of your commanding officers was still saying, hey, you. He didn’t know your name. They’d say, if that was the case, then you were successful. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: How long were you in the Army, total? Buske: Just two years. Franklin: Oh, just two years. So Camp Hanford, then, was the majority of your— Buske: Yeah. Franklin: --of your service. Buske: Absolutely. Franklin: And when did you leave? Do you remember when you left? Buske: When I left Hanford? Franklin: Yeah. Buske: Well, it was November 28, 1956. Franklin: And where did you go? Buske: Back to Stockton, Illinois. Franklin: And what did you move on to? Buske: For career? Franklin: Yeah. Buske: Well, I got back home and I had been a tool and die maker apprentice when I first went into the military. So I went back to work with the same company, and finished my apprenticeship and became a journeyman tool and die maker. And ended up working for that same company for over 41 years. Franklin: Wow. Buske: It was good duty. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Let’s see here. A lot of my standard questions for working at Hanford don’t always apply here, so let me see what does fit in. What were the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work here at Camp Hanford? Buske: Well, I think we tried to make light of what our responsibilities were. But I know that, in my case, and in almost everybody else that I knew, we were really concerned about what might happen and how to help us defend our country. And, maybe it sounds hokey, but we really believed in what we were doing. We weren’t out to cause trouble, but we didn’t want it to happen to us, either. Korea hadn’t been over with all that long, and there were a lot of combat veterans in our ranks at that time. They were really held in high regard, because they had been through a lot more than we ever would. We gave them credit for that. I remember one of our staff car drivers was talking to me one morning and I don’t know how we even got started on it, but he told how they were overrun one night in Korea. He held up his shirt and showed me. He had a cigar—scar on his stomach in front and another one, he turned around, in the back, where he had been bayoneted in his sleeping bag. The only way he survived was by playing dead. You know, when you hear some things like that firsthand—you know, these are people that could very easily not be here. Our motor sergeant was a real conscientious, very nice guy. World War II veteran. There was a lot of them in our outfit, too. He told me one time about in Europe, he was right on the frontline and they were in a town in, I think, either France or Germany. Anyway, there was a lot of street fighting going on. He got to a corner and when he came to the corner, went around it, right on the other side was a German soldier, just like him. Each one went for their weapon, and he got his first. He shot the other guy and killed him. Of course they had to always search them for any valuable papers or anything like that. He was telling this pretty matter-of-fact-ly, and he said, I found out he was almost identical in age, he had a wife and the same number of kids, boys and girls. He said, it was just weird how we were the same. And it’s just because I was just a little bit quicker it was he that went down and not me. I never forgot that. I thought, how things turn out. A lot of times it’s just a reflex. He wasn’t real proud of what he had done, but he didn’t have any choice. It was either him or me. Anybody that has an experience like that has to be looked up to, I think. Franklin: Yeah, I agree. What would you like future generations to know about working at Camp Hanford, being in the Army, during the Cold War? Buske: Hmm. Well, I think a lot of us wondered sometimes what the reason was for some of the orders that came down. Whether it was just to make work kind of a thing, or whether it really served a purpose. We may have wondered or even doubted, but we did it anyway, because we knew that we weren’t the ones in charge. Somebody else was calling the shots, and when you were told to do something, you tried to do it. I remember, the first Fourth of July I spent out there, there was three of us that had gotten there about the same time. Fourth of July in ’55 was a pretty long weekend, like three or four days, a holiday. Our motor officer, who was a crusty old—oh—warrant officer. He was really a nice guy, but he liked to pick on new people. He told us when they left—when he left to go back for home here in Richland for the weekend, that they’d like all the fence posts around the motor pool facility whitewashed by the time he got back. There was an awful lot of fence posts that were kind of like railroad ties, so they had to be whitewashed on all four sides. I remember, it was beastly hot. And nobody else around to tell us that we had to do this, really. But he left those words, the orders, so we did it. And when he got back at the end of the holiday weekend, he was almost aghast that we had gotten it all done. It paid off supremely, because we were on real good terms with him after that for the rest of my duty. And that’s how I made dispatcher of the battalion’s motor pool. That’s good duty. You got things pretty much easy after that. Franklin: Yeah. Buske: But I mean, we could’ve found a lot of ways and reasons why we didn’t get it done. But we never thought about that. He gave us a job to do and we did it. Franklin: Great, well, Jim, is there anything else you wanted to say about your experiences at Camp Hanford? Buske: Well, Robert, it’s been a long time ago, and there aren’t too many things that I can remember that the locals knew anything about. Because I guess I’ve just outlived them. But I remembered how well we got along with the people here. I didn’t get involved too often with church, but it was—every time I went, I was really welcomed and we never took advantage of them, and they never chastised us. I think they kind of realized that we were there for a reason, and it wasn’t because that’s where we necessarily wanted to be, but that we were sent there. So you do the best you can with what you got. But I think the area was really—it was quite an experience. Franklin: In what way? Buske: Well, you realize you have responsibilities, and I guess you grow up a little bit. You find out that getting away with something really doesn’t solve much. It seemed like it’s always lurking there in the background somewhere. But I don’t know, it was just maturing deal. I got to play a lot of softball and we played in a town league in 1956. We won about as many as we lost. But it was a lot of fun meeting the locals on the ball field. It was a good time. Franklin: Good. I do have one more question. When did you—so when you came out here, you just knew you were coming to Camp Hanford; you weren’t really sure what it is you were going out to protect. When did you learn what was being made out at Hanford and its connection to World War II and nuclear weapons? Buske: Wow. Well, I, for one, was here a while before I realized it was—actually, I think the whole facility then was kind of under the rule of the AEC. Those people didn’t fool around. We always recognized them, because they were the suit-and-tie people. But they were the police that really had a lid on things. And they always said that if you—we could have our civilian car out where I was stationed, but if you were in the car, like, from our unit, we could drive over to Othello on that dirt track road. And they said, don’t worry about if you have a breakdown, because you won’t be there very long until somebody will show up. That they had the eye-in-the-sky airplanes flying around a lot. As long as you were moving, they didn’t pay much attention. But if your vehicle stopped—and I don’t know this to be a fact, but—they said, you’d be noticed right away, and somebody would be out there wondering why you weren’t moving. So it was really kind of hush-hush. It just kind of soaked in on you, I think, really how important it was, what you were doing there. Pretty hard to put into words, but it was, you weren’t in a foxhole, but you were still kind of on the frontline. Franklin: Huh. I think that’s a really great way of explaining it. Buske: Well, oh, why, thank you. This is a new experience for me. Franklin: It is for most people. Well, Jim, thank you for coming down and sharing your experiences out at Camp Hanford with us. We don’t get a chance to interview too many people that were out there, because so many people like yourself who were stationed there and then moved away and didn’t come back. Unlike Hanford workers, many people came here, put down roots here. So I appreciate your information. That will really help us kind of reconstruct that camp which was torn down decades ago when all those sites were decommissioned, decades ago. Buske: One of the things that I did remember, and the standard procedure was, if you were going out to George Washington Way to 5th Group Headquarters and then went a little further to your left as you’re going that direction, you hit the main road, which I think maybe turns into 240 now. And you went out maybe three miles, something like that, which was where the barricade was. When we first were assigned here, we got a temporary barricade pass. Just a piece of paper, really. But you got that while you were being processed, they called it. We heard that we were being checked on back in our home towns, and were we subversive, and blah, blah, blah. Usually it took about a week or a little more, and then you got this permanent card, like a driver’s license, that sort of thing. But that was your barricade pass. And when you came in from the forward area, you were issued a barricade pass—your barricade pass, which is an ID card thing, at your own headquarters. And then when you got back in the rear, you turned that in to a quartermaster or somebody. He took your barricade pass and gave you bedding so you could make your own bed up. And when you got ready to go back into the forward area again, you turned in your bedding and you got your barricade pass back. They put you on a bus and you got out as far as the barricade and an MP came onboard the bus and checked everybody. Because your picture was on there and the whole thing. If you didn’t produce that barricade pass, you were put off the bus. Like I say, it was about three miles out in the desert. And I never knew of anybody that it happened to, but they claimed that somebody got put out the bus right there. And you get back out to headquarters the best way you can. But the situation really was, it didn’t happen twice. But it was really kind of a procedure. And we found out later that we had been checked back home. They had certain people that would ask about your character, who are you, blah, blah, blah. Franklin: Right, interview friends and family and probably even pastors and stuff like that. Buske: Yeah, it was a confidential clearance, they called it. It wasn’t “secret” or anything like that. It made you feel kind of a level above. You passed. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, like even a level above what the Army would’ve asked you for, yeah. Interesting. That’s really interesting. Tom, did you have any questions? Hungate: We haven’t heard a description of the installations. You said there were four missiles there. When were they installed, when were they removed, and what were they like? You mentioned doors opened. Franklin: Yeah, could you describe the installations, what you know about the missiles, when they were there and what they were like, what shape and size--? Buske: Okay. Well, actually, everything was there before I got here. But, like I say, each battery had four of these in-ground launchers, they called them, and they pointed straight up in the air when they were fully operational. Actually, I never got down into below-ground where the missiles were. There were four launchers per battery. So, if you figure with the four batteries, there’s 16 that were ready to go at any one time. And I remember seeing the TO&E, or Table of Operation and Equipment, for the whole battalion. They said at one time we had over a hundred Nike missiles capable of fire, reload, fire, reload. You know, I don’t know how long it took to reload, but it had to have been pretty fast. Yeah, I didn’t know much about any of that stuff when I got here. And I didn’t know much more after I left. Franklin: I know before the Nike missiles, there were anti-aircraft placements. Were those still in operation when you got here? Buske: Yes, they were. Franklin: And that was also part of the larger Camp Hanford. Buske: That’s right. That’s a good point. There were at least three 120-milimeter gun battalions and each one of those had different batteries of anti-aircraft capability. They would go down to, I think, White Sands, New Mexico or someplace for training to take their guns down there—and they were huge, by the way. 120-milimeter gun is a large weapon. And they would bring them back and then set them up and fire them to settle them in, they called it, to make sure that all their readings were correct and everything. And when they fired them, we could hear them, and you could almost count to ten, and way up there, all of the sudden you’d see a little puff of black smoke, like flak, you know. And I’ll tell you, it was up there a long ways. 120-milimeter could really get up there in altitude. Not as high as we could with our Nike, but they had a job to do to. Franklin: But they actually got to fire theirs off, though. Buske: Yeah, yeah. It was exciting for us, because we never got to fire our weapons. Franklin: Well, that’s probably for the best. Buske: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. The overall is pretty good. But it was real good duty, because, like I say, it was small and you knew the mess sergeant and he knew you. Franklin: Is this the first time you’ve been back to this area since you left in ’56? Buske: No, actually, it’s the second. Franklin: Okay. Buske: The first time, we actually went—it was before the state highway went through or anything. But we got out to where the headquarters were, and the way I could tell was—one thing that never changes out there is the horizon. I could look and I could remember seeing what the horizon looked like from a certain spot. And I found the spot, and it also had a few trees around it, which is kind of unusual, too. And I thought, well, boy, no way to really tell for sure, but I think this is where the motor pool was. I got to looking around, and everything was—you get that kind of a weird feeling, you know. Wife was standing there, and I said, I really get a feeling about this, and I’m going to pull some sand here a little bit and see if what I think is there is there. I dug down in the sand, oh, maybe six or eight inches, something like that, and I came to a concrete curb that was yellow on the top. And it was the top curb of my grease pit that I worked in and I had probably painted the top of that curb with yellow paint. This is probably, oh, at least 15, 20 years after I was there. But—oh, a funny thing, maybe as a final, but when I was in that grease pit—like I say, the Army said I was a mechanic, but I knew better. And I had a good buddy that had a truck. It was a civilian-type truck but it was a supply truck or something. He and I were talking one day and he said, my wife’s windshield wipers are not operating right. Do you suppose you could fix them? And I said, well, yeah. It’s kind of a challenge but I’ll have a look. They were vacuum wiper blades, so it can’t be too complicated. So he said, when can you do it? And I said, well, it’s getting to be late afternoon and I’m not busy. Let’s take it in there and have a look. So he drove it in and got it running and I started pulling hoses off to see if that was where the problem was, if the vacuum part was leaking or whatever you know. Well, anyway, I probably pulled off more hoses than I should and when I replaced them I didn’t replace them—well, anyway, it got so bad, his truck wouldn’t even run. By this time, it’s quitting time, and our motor officer—this crusty old warrant officer had a fetish about emptying out the building every evening, so it shows everything was done. Well, we had to push it out and push it back onto the deadline. Next morning, we came in and I went to one of the mechanics that was a real mechanic. He was a good friend, and I told him what had happened. I said, you suppose you could help me out? He said, oh, I don’t see any problem there. So he goes over and he starts monkeying around. And the truck wouldn’t run and he replaced this that and the other. Didn’t take him ten minutes and he had it running like a charm and the wipers were running like they should. And he said, well that’s great, thanks a lot, and off he went. It must’ve been a good week later, I was down the grease pit and all of the sudden, I could hear this cackling and giggling and tee-hee-ing and I remember looking up out of my grease pit and all I could see was legs outside the door. There were quite a few pair of legs out there. I thought, I don’t know what’s going on. But I came up out of the pit and walked out and looked and they’re all standing out there by my door, looking up and just laughing and giggling. So I went out there, and here’s the warrant officer and the motor sergeant, and they’re all looking up there. And I looked. The sign painter for our unit, who was pretty good at what he did, painted this nice, real big sign up there, over my door, said, Buske’s Bay, Drive ‘Em In, Tow ‘Em Out. Everybody was getting a kick out of that, so you can’t fight it. I started laughing, too. From there on, I really got along well with everybody. It was a nice experience. But I kept telling them, I am not a mechanic. They said I was, but I know better. That was a funny experience. Franklin: That is funny. Anything else, Tom? Well, Jim, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Buske: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. When you mentioned this, it pleased me to be able to have a bit of nostalgia with you. Franklin: Oh, good. Buske: It’s fun to be able to reminisce. Franklin: Good, good. Okay. <a href="https://youtu.be/ZetcgDDzSbA">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Camp Hanford Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1954-1956 Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1954-1956 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jim Buske Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nike-Zeus missile Military bases Description An account of the resource Jim Buske was stationed at the Camp Hanford U.S. Army base from 1954-1956. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 09/12/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7dd799360abfc66852f2e8bd64a904b2.JPG 2f19963384c5700bd5650f9f99cc92f2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Steve Buckingham Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: I’m just going to try to remember it— John Stevens Buckingham: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: --as best as I can. Okay. Are we ready? Lori Larsen: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an interview with Steve Buckingham on February 21, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Steve about his experiences working, specifically at the T Plant, on the Hanford Site. And for the record, Steve, could you state and spell your full legal name for us? Buckingham: It’s John Stevens Buckingham. B-U-C-K-I-N-G-H-A-M. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: And you don’t need the John Stevens, but— Franklin: I suppose we could skip it. Buckingham: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Just a quick recap, you did an oral history with us several years ago— Buckingham: Yes. Franklin: --where you talked about your life— Buckingham: At Hanford. Franklin: Your early life, and then your life at Hanford. So this is specifically will be about T Plant because we’re trying to gather as much information related to T Plant as we can, as there’s a push to include it, perhaps, in the Manhattan Project Historical Park, and bring some protective legislation on it and documents like a Historic American Engineering record and things like that. So, Steve, if I remember correctly, you came to the Hanford Site shortly after World War II. Buckingham: Right. Franklin: Correct? And tell me about how you got here. Buckingham: Well, I started at Washington State in 1941, right out of high school. Went from—I graduated from Raymond, Washington. And of course, the war started; the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that fall or winter. I was able to finish my freshman year and my first semester my sophomore year. But after the war started, the campus was just overrun with people looking, trying to recruit candidates for different programs. I tried to get into several programs and finally got into one with the Air Corps; they were looking for future meteorologists. So I enlisted in the Air Corps. My mother wouldn’t sign off on me, because I was still only 17, but Dad signed and let me go ahead. Then just shortly after the second semester started, they called me to active duty and sent me down to Reed College in Portland for pre-meteorology. So I spent a year down there in Reed. Reed was kind of an interesting situation, coming from a rather conservative Washington State College, at that time, to Reed where you could smoke on campus, smoke in classrooms, go up and visit, go up into the girls’ dormitory anytime, very little restrictions. But it was an education, and I must say, Reed has a very fine education. I think the best. We took the standard classes we were taking. We took math, physics, oh, some history classes, and some literature classes. I was there for a year, and then the Air Corps decided they didn’t need any more meteorologists. So I applied again to communications in the Air Corps. They sent me to, oh, officer candidate school in Seymour Johnson Field, South Carolina and I was there for about four months. And then went up to Yale University where I went through communications and received a commission as a second lieutenant in communications in Air Corps. They were looking for people with a pretty good educational background, particularly in math and physics, because they were developing radar at the time. So I applied and they sent me from Yale up to Harvard where I went through a three-month course in electrical engineering. [LAUGHTER] And then transferred down to MIT, where I then worked developing radar for another six months before they finally sent me down to get ready. By then the war had ended. [LAUGHTER] They didn’t know what to do with me. So I ended up at Kirkland Field. All we were doing is bombers coming in from the—oh, retired bombers were coming in; we removed the radar equipment from the bombers before they put them into storage down in Arizona. And finally they let me go back to college. So I had a year-and-a-half of college to finish. And I got my degree with all sorts of majors. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And where did you finish your schooling? Buckingham: At Washington State. Franklin: And what was your degree in when you— Buckingham: My degree was what they called general. But I had majors in math, I had a major in physics, I had a major in chemistry. And a major in English. Franklin: Wow. Buckingham: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Quite a renaissance man. Buckingham: Oh, yeah. But it was fun. I was able to graduate in 1947. Franklin: Okay, so kind of in the beginning of that GI boom. Buckingham: Yeah, the GIs were just starting to come back onto campus. And we came—I got a job here in the analytical laboratory. They were developing the REDOX process. Franklin: And, sorry, what year did you come to Hanford? Buckingham: 1947. Franklin: 1947. And your first job was at the analytical lab. Buckingham: Analytical lab. The REDOX process was really kind of a—it was a new innovation into the technology. Because it was a solvent extraction process, where the old bismuth phosphate process that was the original process developed from Seaborg’s laboratory experiments, was kind of—well, they couldn’t recover the—you know, when they irradiated the uranium in the reactors, they only made two or—I think it was four grams of plutonium for every pound of uranium that went into that reactor. Franklin: Yeah, that sounds about right. Buckingham: So it was—just wasn’t very—and that uranium went back to the waste storage tanks. So it was—they were beginning to try to look for a new way to also recover the uranium at the same time they were getting the plutonium out. We were—the engineers were working very hard on developing this REDOX process. And it was—unfortunately, they were using ammonium nitrate as a salting agent in the solvent extraction process when Texas City blew up. So—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m sorry, could you—I’m not familiar with that. Could you talk a little more about—they were using ammonium nitrate in the bismuth phosphate process? Buckingham: Yeah. That is what is called a salting agent, to help extract the uranium and the plutonium into this organic phase. The organic is methyl isobutyl ketone, was the extractant. The whole theory of it was we could extract the plutonium and uranium into this organic phase, and then in the next step, we could use—change the valence of plutonium and separate the plutonium from the uranium. It was a very good, clean process that was really—one of the very early solvent extraction processes ever developed. Well, this—they began constructing the REDOX plant out there and so the development work was kind of winding down, but they didn’t want to get rid of us, because they knew that we were going to be working on that REDOX process. Franklin: And the REDOX process, that was—was that specifically to recover the uranium and— Buckingham: And the plutonium. Franklin: And the plutonium. Was it to recover the uranium from the tanks, or was it to process new fuels? Buckingham: New fuel. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: All new fuel. Franklin: So it replaced bismuth phosphate. Buckingham: Yeah, we replaced the old bismuth phosphate process. Franklin: And what—that took place in the REDOX facility, right? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Not in the T Plant. Buckingham: Not in the old T Plant. But they needed to put us someplace, so they sent several of us out to being shift supervisors out at both the T Plant and the B Plant, which were identical plants. Franklin: Right. As well as—was the U Plant also identical to— Buckingham: U Plant was identical, but it was never used as a solvent extraction—as a facility for that. That came later. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. I’d like to back up. So you mentioned this ammonium nitrate that was used in bismuth phosphate. Was that also used in the REDOX process? Buckingham: That was the one that was used in the REDOX process. Franklin: Oh, in the REDOX process. Buckingham: The REDOX process. Franklin: Not in bismuth phosphate. Buckingham: No. Franklin: You’d mentioned Texas City explosion? Buckingham: Originally, the salting agent to help in the REDOX process to help extract the uranium and plutonium, they used what was called a salting agent. This is just to help push it into the organic phase. Well, the original salting agent we were using was ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate—[LAUGHTER]—used in gunpowder. And there was this rather horrible accident down in Texas City that—so they had to begin looking for a new salting agent at that time. And that’s when they went from the ammonium nitrate to aluminum nitrate. Franklin: Hmm. Was aluminum nitrate more efficient, more stable, or both? Buckingham: Well, it was not explosive like ammonium nitrate. It was more stable. It worked very well. So they—but there was quite a little bit of work redeveloping the necessity of using the aluminum nitrate. So there was about a year delay in the startup of the REDOX process. And that’s when I was at T Plant. Now, the T Plant, it was kind of fun. We weren’t real hard-pressed because the Cold War hadn’t started yet. So it was kind of laidback then. The people who worked out there—we were working—it was three shifts a day, seven days a week. So it was a—I was on C shift. But it gave us experience working with real material out there, because we were still separating plutonium using the old bismuth phosphate process. Franklin: Oh, okay, good, that’s what I was going to ask you about that. So when you got there in ’47 and you were stationed at T Plant—while the REDOX process was in development, you were still processing with bismuth phosphate. Buckingham: Bismuth phosphate, yes. Franklin: I’m wondering if you can, as easy as you could for a layman, kind of walk me through the bismuth phosphate—what makes the bismuth phosphate process and what makes it unique? Buckingham: Well, the bismuth phosphate process is what—in chemical engineering, if you have just a trace of an element that you’re trying to separate out, you often have to use an additional new inert material that will help increase the volume of the precipitate. And the bismuth phosphate process, essentially what we were doing was precipitating plutonium phosphate, but we didn’t—there wasn’t enough volume, so we added another element called bismuth that would increase the volume of the plutonium that precipitated. Then we’d have to do another precipitation to separate the plutonium out of the—with another precipitation process, to precipitate only the plutonium. Franklin: So first you would kind of bind the bismuth to the plutonium and then pull that out. Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: And then you’d take that much more refined—you know, refined—because you’ve stripped out the uranium, the transuranics, and then— Buckingham: Because if you could change the valence state of the plutonium, which wouldn’t then precipitate. Franklin: And how would you separate the bismuth from the plutonium? Buckingham: We would oxidize the plutonium to—let’s see if I can remember—it was in the four state in the first separation where we were first separation. Then we would oxidize it, we’d reduce it to the three state, which wouldn’t precipitate, then, in the next step. Franklin: What are the states that you’re talking about? You said from the four state to the three state. Buckingham: Oh, that’s the valence state. The oxidization state of the plutonium. Essentially—that’s essentially the way that plutonium is separated from the uranium in all the separation processes. We change the valence of the plutonium from four to three. Franklin: And that refers to the position of the electrons, right? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. It’s been a long time since I’ve had chemistry class. You’ll have to excuse me. You can imagine as a historian it’s been quite a while. Okay. These terms are familiar to me. Okay, so, what kind of equipment would you use to do this work? Buckingham: Well, in the—similar in both the original bismuth phosphate process, of course the fuel came up from the 100 Area in cask carts and they were put into a dissolver. And in the dissolver, we would first have to remove the aluminum cans that the uranium was canned in, in the reactors. Then dissolve the mixture of uranium and plutonium with nitric acid. And this was usually done as several steps. That’s when the brown fumes used to come pouring out of our stacks. [LAUGHTER] Then after it’s dissolved, we would then add this bismuth, dissolve bismuth nitrate to the mixture—to the dissolver fluid and precipitate a mixture of bismuth phosphate and plutonium phosphate. The plutonium was then jetted out to the Tank Farms and then we would redissolve—or we would redissolve that precipitate and precipitate the—change the—oxidize or reduce the plutonium to the three state, which then wouldn’t precipitate in the bismuth phosphate. We’d have to—I think there were—in the T Plant, there were 40 cells. That meant 20 steps of going between the precipitating the plutonium down and precipitating the—just cleaning the plutonium up. And each step, of course—in the original dissolution, the uranium and a lot of the fission products were removed in that first precipitation step. Franklin: The stuff like the transuranics and things—? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: So like the cesium and strontium—what other kinds of fission products— Buckingham: Oh, there’s just a whole pile of fission products that were developed—formed in that, during the irradiation process. Franklin: Like iodine— Buckingham: Iodine, and oh, good grief, a lot of them that—the bad ones was strontium-90 and cesium-137, of course, because they’re highly radioactive. But there was a whole stack of them in there. Franklin: So the plutonium’s kind of buried in all of this, right, and it’s the goal, but it’s one of the smaller products. Buckingham: Smaller products. Franklin: What kind of—you said about 40 cells, 20 steps. What kind of equipment were in the cells? How— Buckingham: Well, in each—let’s see, in the first two cells, there was a feed tank, of course. There was a centrifuge, a continuous centrifuge. And a receiving tank. And I’m trying to think what all went into that second cell. They would work together, and I think the feed tank might have been in the adjacent cell. The walls of those cells were about 15 feet thick of reinforced concrete, because of the radiation. Franklin: Between you and the cell, right? Buckingham: Yes. Franklin: Because you were doing all of this work remotely. Buckingham: It’s all done remotely. Franklin: Right. And did you ever have direct viewing of— Buckingham: No. Franklin: --what was going on in the cell? So how did you—I guess one of the questions people would ask, is how did you know— Buckingham: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: --what was going on, and how did you know if things were working correctly or if there was a problem? Buckingham: They had a microphone in the cell and you could hear those centrifuges turning. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Buckingham: And they made very distinct noise when they finally ran out of fluid. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, okay, so that’s how you would— Buckingham: That’s how you would tell. And those operators got to be very clever on detecting when it was time to go onto the next step. Franklin: How would you transfer material from one cell to another? Buckingham: Everything was transferred with air jets. Franklin: Air jets. I’m having trouble visualizing that. What other applications do you know that air jets were used in—like, how does an air jet work? How would that— Buckingham: Well, it would just—well, it’s like an aspirator. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: I guess that’s the closest you could come to, is like an aspirator. Franklin: Okay. So that would kind of—would it push or pull the material through each cell? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Did it push and pull or did it--? Buckingham: Essentially pushed it from one tank to the next. Franklin: Okay. I imagine that through this process, I know that the highly accountable material was the plutonium, but you would want to sample to make sure that things were going right, and that your—that the amount of plutonium you were producing was matching the calculations of what should be— Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: --what should be produced when the fuel was irradiated. So how would you take the samples? Buckingham: Well, there were samplers between—from every one of these tanks. And it was circulated around through a little cup, up near the surface of the tank. [PHONE RINGING] Buckingham: And between the tanks, essentially, is what they were. And it would—they’d go in and sample it—they’d recirculate through until they thought they had a fair sample. It was for a certain number of minutes and all that kind of stuff. Franklin: I would imagine those samples would be very radioactive. Buckingham: They were sampled in what was called a doorstop. It’s a little tiny pipette. [LAUGHTER] In quite a bit of stainless steel, about four inches in diameter. And there was a little insert inside that that the pipette would go down into. People would have to go in—actually go into the canyon to sample these different tanks at different times. We’d have to sample the receiving tank to make sure we weren’t dumping a lot of plutonium back into—out into the waste tank, and to also get a feel for how much plutonium was being moved and so forth. So, those first samples were pretty hot. They had to be handled behind—we had what was a special device in the laboratory that we would sample those tanks with those pipettes out of. Franklin: Wow. Did you ever have to go collect a sample? Buckingham: Only once. Franklin: I wonder—could you describe that for me? Buckingham: Well, you had to put on coveralls, wear a face mask, we weren’t on oxygen—we weren’t on air at that time. Now they even have to put on air supply. But it was really kind of interesting, because at the back of the T Plant there were these entries into the different levels. You’d have to call the dispatcher to tell her—tell them that we were entering, and they would then start timing you, let you know how much time you had to go in and get that sample, and get in to the doorstop and then get it back out so it can be delivered to the lab next-door. Franklin: And that’s because you would be receiving a dose-- Buckingham: Yes. Franklin: --when you were in there. How much time could you be in the canyon? Buckingham: Oh, you could be in there maybe 20 minutes. 20, 30 minutes. Franklin: Oh, wow. Buckingham: The cells were so thick, the walls of the cells were so thick, even the lids were offset on steps so that you weren’t getting an awful lot of radiation in there, but you were getting quite a bit. And then of course, when you get the sample up into the pipette, moving it into the doorstop, you were getting a bit of a dose. It wasn’t fun. Franklin: You said you had to put on a face mask and coveralls—how thick was all of that? Buckingham: Well, you had to put on two pairs of coveralls. Franklin: Two pairs of coveralls. Buckingham: Two pairs. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: And boots, gloves. Let’s see what other—a hood. You were thoroughly dressed. And then you had to be checked out, of course. There was always an RM person there, making sure you didn’t have anything on you when you came out. Franklin: And RM stands for--? Buckingham: Radiation monitor. Franklin: Okay. Similar to—is that what today would be called an HBT? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Was RM the standard terminology at the time? Buckingham: That was the terminology at the time. Franklin: But same basic— Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Same basic job, okay. I’m wondering, I’d like to step back for a minute and I’d like to ask you about the first time you saw the canyon, the T Plant. I’m wondering if you could describe the building, but also how you felt about it, you know. Your impressions of the building. Buckingham: Scared. [LAUGHTER] Buckingham: That really was. I was just absolutely confounded about the whole thing. Franklin: Why? Buckingham: Well, the building was 800 feet long. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: About 30 feet wide. And a third of it was, or a good portion of it was below ground level. And then a long—one side of it was what they called the operating galleries. And this was where the people, the operators, sat. And they were the ones who—there was also as long as that gallery was where they had the tanks that they fed the new chemicals in for the separation process. It was—there’s then a crane ran the whole length of the building. And the crane was operated behind a concrete wall and it was a lead-shielded crane. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: How did the person operating the crane see what they were doing? Buckingham: Through optics. Franklin: Such as? Buckingham: Just like a telescope. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, wow. Buckingham: And they were canny. Those crane operators were canny. I think they had a second sense of feeling where that crane hook was. But they could see it. Franklin: Did they also use television as well? Buckingham: No, that—television was hardly invented at that stage in the game. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: It was strictly optics. Franklin: Was television, CCTV added to the processing later? Buckingham: Later on, yeah. Franklin: Do you know approximately when that was? Buckingham: Oh, gosh, it wasn’t until—well, they were no longer using the bismuth phosphate process when they finally got television. It wasn’t until, oh, gosh, I would say well into the ‘70s before we even had the idea of using much television. Franklin: Okay. Had you ever seen a building like the T Plant before? Buckingham: Never. Franklin: I’m wondering—you mentioned the brown fumes that came out. Could you describe the stack? How tall was it, and--? Buckingham: Well, the stack was about 50 feet tall, and of course it was part of the ventilation system. Now, the dissolver would—any time you dissolve a metal in nitric acid, you’re going to get NO2 off. The original processes, we did not try to do anything about that NO2. We just booted it out into the atmosphere. You could always tell when they were—we were very closely regulated when we couldn’t dissolve—that was why there was a weather station out at Hanford. If the weather was not good for dissolving, we couldn’t dissolve, or they’d have to drown the dissolver to stop the reaction. Franklin: What would be bad weather for dissolving? Buckingham: High winds. Franklin: Because it would be variable where it would go, or--? Buckingham: Yeah. They didn’t want too much of that stuff to leave the Hanford Project. You know, even after running out there for quite a number of years, there was a big ruckus about all the radiation that came from Hanford causing downwind cancers and all that good stuff. And that’s when they did that very extensive study of how the radiation went from Hanford. There was a row of samplers built for about 30 miles around Hanford to detect—if they could detect anything coming from radiation. And then also that’s when we got into the REDOX process. They decided they would try to recover a lot of that nitric acid. So we put in absorbers so that the fumes weren’t as brown coming out of the process after a few years. [LAUGHTER] And they did a very extensive study of the atmospheric dispersion of stuff around. Gosh, there’s so many studies on all that. And also, down on the river, we had—University of Washington had a fish hatchery where we were studying the effect of any—well, it was started out the effect of the water through the reactors, how it was affecting the fish. And also they were beginning to study what’s happening to the cooling waters and so forth were just put into cooling ponds. [LAUGHTER] We had some pretty hot ducks out there at one time. [LAUGHTER] But— Franklin: Hot how? Buckingham: Radioactive. Franklin: And how did they become radioactive? Buckingham: Well, you know, there’s—we were trying very hard to not discharge anything to these surface ponds. But there were always leaks. And somehow or other, radiation always managed to get into some of these ponds. And some of them became fairly grossly contaminated over the years. And also, that’s when they began looking at the amount of—the effect of groundwater under the separation plants. We knew more about what was going on underground than most people know about what’s going on on the surface. Franklin: Right, because of the worry of contaminating the groundwater, right? Buckingham: Yeah, they didn’t want to contaminate the groundwater. And that was pretty important. Also, where’s the groundwater going? They know it’s going towards the river. And how long is going to take? And certain radioisotopes were moving faster than others. Which was a big concern. So we were doing a lot of studies on that. Oh, I don’t know. It’s just amazing the studies that were going on. You know, there was also a pretty good-sized animal farm down there by F— Franklin: F Reactor, right? Buckingham: F factory, yeah. [LAUGHTER] And also the hot desert, the hot poop out in the desert from the animals that had gotten some—the Cold War got started through all this period of time. It was to get that plutonium out of here come hell or high water. And we were running out of waste storage tanks, and we didn’t have any—this is when we went through a procedure of trying to precipitate enough of the bad active radioisotopes in the waste storage tanks to be able to keep running, keep our space going. Some of these things didn’t really work out too well. But we were making plutonium. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Some of what things didn’t work out too well? Buckingham: Well, some of what—we were precipitating some of the higher radioactive isotopes in the tanks by adding—oh, let’s see, what was it that we were adding? Gosh, I can’t remember now. Oh, dear. We went through so many different processes that it’s kind of funny. Then we also went through the process of wanting to recover all that uranium that we had put out into those waste tanks. Franklin: Right, I was going to ask you about that. Buckingham: That was when we revamped U Plant. Franklin: And that was specifically for recovering— Buckingham: Uranium. Franklin: Uranium. And I’m wondering if you could—I’d like to go back a little bit but end up there, but go back a little bit. You, I imagine, when you came in ’47, you worked with a lot of people that had worked at Hanford during the Manhattan Project, right? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: How many people were still around from the Manhattan Project when you started? Buckingham: Oh, I would imagine maybe a couple thousand. We didn’t have a big crew here, but there were quite a few people here. Of course, DuPont had just left when we came. They left in January, and I came in June or July. Franklin: Okay. And you worked for General Electric? Buckingham: Yeah, it was General Electric was the one who was running the facility at that time. Franklin: And were any of your fellow engineers—had any of them been around in the Manhattan Project? Buckingham: Yeah, most of them. Most of the people we were working with had been here during DuPont. Uncle DuPont. They were very proud of Uncle DuPont. [LAUGHTER] And we were actually still operating under DuPont procedures. Franklin: For the processes? Buckingham: For the processes. Franklin: How long did you continue to operate under those procedures? Buckingham: Oh, I think we must’ve operated under them for over ten years. Franklin: Oh, wow. Was the uranium that was going into the storage tanks during World War II and a little after, was that a concern at the time, in terms of recovering that as fuel and/or worrying about the space in the tanks? Buckingham: Well, it was more concerned about—it was a fuel that was usable. Uranium was becoming a very valuable product at that time, because there was a lot of work going on with power reactors, the building of—looking at the possibility of using power reactors. There were several companies getting into building reactors. This was going to be the new power thing of the future. Franklin: Right. Buckingham: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Because it puts off so much heat, right? Buckingham: Yeah! Franklin: That was the major attractiveness to producing power, would be to generate steam. Buckingham: And we actually put so much radioactivity in some of those old tanks that they were boiling. Those old storage tanks. Franklin: Like, as in the material was actually boiling. Buckingham: Actually boiling. Franklin: Wow. Buckingham: That was from the decay of a lot of the radioactive material. And, you know, we also recovered—went to a recovery of strontium-90 and cesium-137, because these were going to be valuable isotopes that could be used. In fact, there were a lot of the -90 isotopes used to run beacons up north. Franklin: Beacons? Buckingham: Yeah, radio-beacons because of the heat generated from those strontium-90. Franklin: Oh, okay. Those would be used in arctic environments. Buckingham: Yeah, for arctic environments where you couldn’t depend on sunshine in the middle of winter. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Wow. Buckingham: So, we went—that’s one of the things that was kind of fun in my later work, I went into this organization called Process Chemistry where we were looking at all these different isotopes. And there was a whole array of them that we thought were going to be valuable isotopes to use. That’s why they repurposed the old bismuth phosphate process B Plant into recover strontium and—[LAUGHTER] strontium and cesium. Franklin: It’s pretty amazing that they used plants which had been made—I guess when they were made, correct me if I’m wrong, but the final process hadn’t been quite decided when DuPont was constructing the T Plant and B Plant, right? They had an idea but they hadn’t settled on the specifics. Buckingham: No, the only way you could extract something like that—the extraction process was not really new. It’s used in chemistry laboratories. It was an ether extraction. Well, you know, ether is not very friendly material to use. Franklin: No, it’s very flammable, right? Buckingham: Yeah, very flammable. But when they discovered this methyl isobutyl ketone from the REDOX process, it was a whole new field of chemistry that was coming in. Not only usable in nuclear material; it was usable in a lot of metallurgical processes. Franklin: What did you call that? Something ketone? Buckingham: Methyl isobutyl ketones. Hexone. Franklin: Hexone, okay. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m just going to try to write that down as well as I can spell it. It’s pretty amazing that these, T, and B and U, designed for this one process were able to be kind of retrofitted for all of these different jobs. Was that because the uranium recovery wasn’t all that different, or was it because these buildings were— Buckingham: Well, the uranium recovery was actually kind of off-step to the future of the PUREX process which used tributyl phosphate as an extractant. We used just a more dilute tributyl phosphate as an extractant in the uranium recovery process. Franklin: And PUREX was kind of the final process at Hanford that—like, it was kind of the final evolution of that, what had started with bismuth phosphate, right? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. And that PUREX process, correct me if I’m wrong, was used in other facilities? Buckingham: Now it’s used all over the world, yeah. And it was actually invented here. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Right. Because we have the building that bears its name, right? Buckingham: Yeah, right! Franklin: I wanted to ask you a few more questions, some of the ones that John had written—John Fox had written about T Plant. But I had one question before that. When you’d finished—when the material had gone through the cells— Buckingham: Yes. Franklin: --and you’d separated out the plutonium, what was that final—and I’m talking about when you first got here, with the bismuth phosphate process. What was the final product? Buckingham: Well, it goes through all these stages in the old bismuth phosphate plant. And then we transferred it over to the 224 Building, which was right behind the plant. And instead of using bismuth phosphate to precipitate the material, we used a lanthanum fluoride precipitation. And this was a little bit cleaner and a little bit more straightforward. Then that material from the old lanthanum fluoride precipitation was essentially a—well, we precipitated it as a hydroxide, plutonium hydroxide. Then dissolved that and shipped it down to the old 231 Building, where it was then just plain concentrated down to make a kind of—well, it wasn’t a paste exactly, but it was a very concentrated solution of plutonium nitrate. Franklin: It was some kind of—like a thick liquid? Buckingham: Very thick liquid. Franklin: Like a sludge? Buckingham: It was essentially a sludge. Franklin: Interesting. Buckingham: And that is what was then shipped down to Los Alamos. Franklin: When was the decision—when did we switch from shipping the semi-liquid to the solid puck or the powder forms? Buckingham: Well, it was—the plant down at Los Alamos was undersized. And they needed a bigger plant to make a solid form, and that’s when they began building the Dash-5 Plant. And good grief, that started in—seemed to me like that started in the ‘50s. Franklin: Okay. So I want to go to some of John’s questions and I’ll try to skip them if I feel like we’ve already talked about them. Buckingham: Sure. Franklin: So how long did it take to run a batch through the T Plant canyon? Buckingham: Oh, it took maybe a week. Franklin: Okay. That’s all? Just one— Buckingham: About a week, yeah. Franklin: So it was shorter than what it took—the time it took to irradiate the fuel in the reactor. Buckingham: Right. Franklin: And is that why they didn’t—why T Plant could handle the material from the three reactors? Because I remember they’d built the three reactors in the Manhattan Project, and then built three identical canyons— Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: --but only T Plant ran the bismuth phosphate process, correct? Buckingham: No, T and B Plant. Franklin: T, oh, and B. Okay. Buckingham: Yeah, the two plants. They didn’t need U Plant. Franklin: Okay, it was U Plant they didn’t. Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Because it took about, what was it, like 30 days to run fuel through the reactor? 30 to 90? Buckingham: Yeah, I think they were in the reactor 30 days. Franklin: And then cooling time. Buckingham: A little bit of cooling time. But we were able to—the two, B and T Plant, were able to handle all the output from the three original reactors. But then they began building more reactors. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What reactors were under—what reactors were at Hanford when you first got to the Site? Buckingham: B, D and F. Franklin: And then the other six were built while you were working? Buckingham: Yeah, then they began—oh, the began to build a replacement for B— Franklin: D. Buckingham: And that was C Reactor. Franklin: Oh, C, right, okay. Buckingham: And then they began building the super reactors, K-E and K-W. [LAUGHTER] Then they began building N Reactor for the dual purpose. So. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And then somewhere in there is DR. Buckingham: DR. Franklin: And H. Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. How long did the process take—I guess, I’m trying to—so this follows the how long did it take to run a batch through the T Plant question. I think this is a sub-question. How much more time in the 224 and 231 Buildings? Buckingham: Just a few days, actually, in the 224 Building. Franklin: And what was the 224 Building? Buckingham: Well, that was where we then went from the bismuth phosphate to the lanthanum fluoride. Franklin: So that was kind of like a finishing— Buckingham: Yeah, it was finishing the bismuth phosphate process. Franklin: Did that building have another name besides the 224? Buckingham: No. 224 is all we ever used. Franklin: Okay, and then 231 was a further finishing? Buckingham: That was where it was just concentrated to—that was the final step. Franklin: Okay. And did the 231 have another name, or was it just 231? Buckingham: Just 231 Building. Franklin: Okay. Gotcha. Buckingham: And it went from there into the shipping containers that they shipped it to Los Alamos then. Franklin: So did it take an additional several days in each building? Buckingham: Yeah, just several days. Maybe could’ve taken a week or so. But they had to start—I don’t think it took much more than a week to get it through 231 Building. Franklin: So, a week—conservatively like a week for each? Buckingham: Yeah, it was—well, there were steps that they would go through and you didn’t have to wait until they finished one step to go—another step could be coming in right away. Franklin: Okay. I’ll just put a week or so. That’s a pretty—so the entire process, we could say, would probably be somewhere in the realm of two to three weeks— Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: --to take the irradiated fuel and have the shipment ready for Los Alamos? Buckingham: I would say it would take less than three weeks. Franklin: Less than three weeks. Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Interesting. How many days were there when you couldn’t dissolve the fuel sludge because of weather conditions? Buckingham: Oh, it wasn’t too bad here. You know, the climate here is not that bad. It’s just—I would guess that there was probably, in a year there might be less than two months. Franklin: Okay. Buckingham: Total. Franklin: Sure. Buckingham: Because it seemed to me like we were constantly—I don’t know whether we were cheating or—[LAUGHTER]—sitting on the edge of—and I don’t know who ever really decided why we couldn’t dissolve. Franklin: Oh, that was my next question here, was who—how was this decided? Buckingham: I don’t know if it was the meteorologist decided. I have no idea who made that final decision. Franklin: Gotcha. How could you tell when each step of the process was completed? You mentioned earlier about the centrifuge noise. Buckingham: Well, the— Franklin: How—sorry, go ahead. Buckingham: Well, in the—they would have to—it took quite a little while to move clear through the old bismuth phosphate process. I would say that it took—it could take up to—it’d take a good hard week of 24-hour days in there to get clear through. If you took one batch and ran it clear through. But, you know, all they have to do is get out of that first two cells and they could bring another one in. So, they were following on very closely. We did— Franklin: How did—oh, sorry. Buckingham: Go ahead. Franklin: Oh, I was going to say, how would you tell in the later cells when it was time to move that material on? What other types of tools did you use? Buckingham: By samples. Franklin: By the sampling? Buckingham: Yeah, by the sampling. And also the point at which—they could tell pretty well when they finished that lanthanum fluoride, they could tell when to move to the next position where they were then precipitating the hydroxide. Franklin: Okay. What about in the T Plant, though, in between cells, how would you know when it was time for the air jets to move a particular batch through? Buckingham: Well, they knew the volumes that they were moving through because they used things that told the volume of what the volume of the tank was. There were bubblers in the tanks. And they could tell pretty well when one step of the process was over with and they were going on to the next step. Franklin: Because you had mentioned earlier that they would use microphones near the centrifuges to tell when the centrifuge was kind of out of liquid because it would emit this particular tone. And so they would also use other measuring devices to tell each volume and things like that? Buckingham: Yeah, they knew the volume of the feed tank that they were pumping out of, and the volume of the waste tank that was being received into. They could—there were ways of doing that. Franklin: How would you read that? Would that be in the operating gallery? Buckingham: It was in the operating gallery. Franklin: And how could you read that volume through 15 feet of concrete? Buckingham: They used what they call bubblers. They’re two pipes going down into the tanks that they could measure by the air pressure going in how much—what the reading was on the—that all showed out on the chart up in the operating gallery. Franklin: Oh, so would it be the pressure of the air— Buckingham: The pressure of the air. Franklin: --hitting, going into the tank would tell you the volume and you could get the volume. Ah, I see. So that was a way, I suppose, to keep an active measurement, but also to—if you have air going in, you don’t have anything coming back. Buckingham: Right. Franklin: Right, so you’re not introducing radiation anywhere in the operating gallery or something like that, okay. Buckingham: No, no. Franklin: Because everything—correct me if I’m wrong—a big concern was kind of keeping everything contained but also having—was pressure a concern in the cells, for example, having a pressurized environment where if you had a leak, the air would rush in and not rush out? Buckingham: Well, of course they were under a slight lower pressure than the outside air pressure, because they had fans sucking the air out all the time. And they went through—later on we had a pretty good filtering system. Before, they were just using—they had just pits with fiberglass filters. Franklin: And later on they went to HAPA filters. Buckingham: Went through—yeah, we went to better filters. Franklin: Interesting, okay. How reliable was the instrumentation? Buckingham: I would say it was very reliable. Because they were using just standard equipment that was used in all sorts of industry around the world. Franklin: How did the introduction—this is my own question; I don’t know if it’s going to fit in here, but—how did the introduction of transistors and things change the layout of the operating gallery? I imagine that that would’ve changed some of the components used. Buckingham: I can’t remember that it actually changed it very much. We would get a little bit better instrumentation coming in, and— Franklin: Was there any special instrumentation designed for this process? Buckingham: I don’t think so. I think we just used standard equipment that was used in any—like, in the oil industry. You know? Just standard. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure, sure, sure. You mentioned that you entered the canyon once to take samples. Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: How often, though, did crew enter the canyon? Yeah, how often did people take samples? Buckingham: Well, I would say they had to go—we were working on 8-hour shifts, and during an 8-hour shift, I think they made at least one entry a shift. Franklin: Okay, one entry— Buckingham: But it could’ve been a little, few more than that, depending on our pressure of getting something out or— Franklin: And you said they would typically stay about 20 to 30 minutes in the canyon? And was there a strong cut-off? Buckingham: I don’t think so. I can’t ever remember anybody complaining too much about being in there too long or— They kept pretty good track of it, of course. Franklin: Right, well, I’m sure it wasn’t a place where people would want to go and hang out all day. Buckingham: No. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: How often did you need to change or replace jumpers in a cell? Buckingham: Not very often. Franklin: And, actually, let’s back up, because I realized we hadn’t really talked about—I’m wondering if you could describe a jumper and what it is, what its— Buckingham: Okay, now, in each cell, there would be tanks or equipment. And on each of these, there was a nozzle, many nozzles. If, in fact, you looked into a cell—and then, these connect to an identical thing on the walls of the cell. If you look into one of those cells, it almost looked like looking into a bowl of spaghetti. And the crane operator could go in and remove these jumpers as needed. And it wasn’t too terribly often that they would have to go in. If a piece of equipment would fail, they would have to pull it out. To do that, he would have to know which jumpers to take off. [LAUGHTER] They have to be taken off in a certain pattern, because some of them would be down hidden, down underneath. But, I tell you, those guys were clever. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Well, especially doing it through optics, too. Buckingham: And we would—we took a few large samples, too, out of the samplers. And they would—the crane operator bring a big cask in and set it next to the sampler. Then when he needed to get to pick the crane up, he would get the hook swinging, so he could get it and snag the bale on the big sample and pull it out. Franklin: Wow. Wow. Buckingham: I rode with the crane operators one night, just for about two hours, just to see what they were doing. And they were good. Franklin: What kind of equipment did they use in the cab? Was it a typical kind of crane, or was there any special equipment? Buckingham: It was just pretty much a simple kind of crane. But there were—let’s see, what—there was on the crane itself that operated, it had an impact wrench, two hooks. I can’t think of anything else that they had in it. But the impact wrench, they’d go down and be able to get onto these jumpers. And be able to—that was the way they got these, when they had to replace anything. And it was really rather unique situation. Franklin: So in some ways the jumpers were kind of—they were like the piping between the cells, or kind of like— Buckingham: They were the piping between the cells, all the electricity, all the instrumentation, everything had to come through those jumpers. Franklin: But what was being treated didn’t go through the jumpers, right? Buckingham: No. Franklin: That went through the stairs. Buckingham: Well, if it was going from one cell to the next cell, it had to go through one of the jumpers. Franklin: Oh, okay, so the jumpers were kind of like dual-purpose, that they carried, like you said, the electrical cables and things like that, but then other jumpers would also carry— Buckingham: Liquids. Franklin: --various liquids through. Would they carry just the precipitating agents, or would they carry the fuel, the irradiated— Buckingham: The irradiated stuff. Everything. Franklin: So you really needed to know which jumper was carrying what. Buckingham: Yes. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Were they clearly marked as to which were hot-- Buckingham: Yes. Franklin: Or like wet and dry jumpers? Buckingham: Well, not particularly, hot, wet and dry, but you knew what jumper did what. Franklin: Okay, it was pretty clear to the crane operator what— Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, gotcha. And how long would it take to change or replace a jumper in a cell? Buckingham: Oh, I would say they could do it about—I would say within half an hour, they could do it. Or half an hour to an hour, they could do a lot of changing out in a cell, depending how complicated the equipment was that had to be moved and that time. Franklin: Yeah. Okay. How did you dispose of contaminated jumpers? Buckingham: They’d be put into a burial box. Franklin: Describe a burial box. Buckingham: Well, as I recall, they were usually—depending on if it was a very radioactive jumper, for example, they would try to put it into a coffin-like container, like a—but it has to be something that they can pick up and move out of that canyon. So it can’t be too awkward. As I recall, it seemed like just a lot of them were plywood. Franklin: Oh, wow. Buckingham: Depending on how much radiation. Of course, they could be flushed out in— Franklin: And where would that be stored, where would it be buried? Buckingham: Out in the burial ground. Franklin: Okay. What was the burial ground like when you started at Hanford? I imagine it’s probably different from the burial grounds today. Buckingham: I don’t think so. I think they were the same. They were out there near the separation plants. They were just big trenches. They would, depending on what was being disposed of in some of them, they actually brought them in on railcars. Built a siting out there for all the failed equipment in as close as they could get it to the pit, and then use bulldozers or something to pull it over into the pit, and start backfilling it. Franklin: Hmm, okay. Buckingham: You stayed out of the area when it was being done. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Did any items removed from the cell contaminate the canyon floor? Buckingham: Yes. But that was always something that, they tried not to do that, of course. Franklin: When that happened, what would the procedure be to— Buckingham: Well, then they had to—if there was any contamination that got out of the cell itself, it had to be cleaned, cleaned up. Franklin: How would it be cleaned? Buckingham: Oh, could be sprayed down with water or acid or something. Flushed out. I can’t remember any time that there was anything seriously lost out of any of the cells. But it could’ve happened. Franklin: Okay. Who kept track of the amount of product so you could tell if the yield was within acceptable limits? Buckingham: There was a bunch of people down in headquarters that did that. I don’t have any idea who did keeping track of it. The engineers didn’t. Franklin: Okay. But I’m sure you furnished your sample results, or—were the sample results when you took samples, were those used to determine the amounts of—because I imagine, that would be a primary concern, right, would be the proper amount of plutonium was making it through the process. That would—because they would—for each fuel element, you would get so much plutonium out of that. So you would want to recover as close to 100% as you could. Buckingham: As much as we could, right. And I don’t know who kept track of all that stuff. There was—it went into the operating offices up in—and there was somebody in there that did something with it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Were there ever any unusual incidents worth mentioning while you worked there? Buckingham: Well, yes, one time during a windstorm, a steam pipe fell. That was one that was a little exciting because it ruptured when it fell. And let’s see. A lot of those, you know, a lot of those jets were run by steam instead of air, too. Let me think if there’s anything else. Oh, we had a pretty bad—blew a bunch of ruthenium out of one of the stacks one time and we had a lot of contamination around the old REDOX plant on the ground. Franklin: How did the ruthenium go up the stack and leave the facility? Buckingham: Well, ruthenium is pretty volatile. It was a problem. It was one of our radioactive isotope problems for REDOX facility. Franklin: Oh, but that’s specifically REDOX and not T Plant? Or did that happen— Buckingham: It wasn’t so bad in the T Plant. We didn’t seem to have any real serious problems there that I can recall. Franklin: How long did you work at the T Plant? Buckingham: About a year. Franklin: Just about, so ’47-’48 timeframe? Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: And then you went to the REDOX plant? Buckingham: Well, REDOX was just on the verge of getting started; they were working on it. Then I went down and just worked on 300 Area in what they called the standards lab for about a year. And then went into the process chemistry. Franklin: After bismuth phosphate was—because bismuth phosphate was kind of retired as a process when REDOX came online. Buckingham: Yup. Franklin: Correct? What other missions did the T Plant have in its life that you know of? And were you involved in any of them? Buckingham: I wasn’t involved in any of them. I think it essentially—well, Battelle ran some experiments up there, but I don’t think they were using the plant; I think they were using what they called the head end. It was where they were checking ventilation kind of stuff. So it was used for—a lot of it was used for ventilation studies. Franklin: Was the head end where the fuel elements came in, or— Buckingham: That’s where the fuel elements came in. Franklin: Where the train would back up and— Buckingham: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else you wanted to say about T Plant? Buckingham: Well, I like to always—when I was doing tours, I would tell people that there was only something like four grams of plutonium in each one of those fuel elements that was put into T Plant. So it was really a—they had to add this additional chemical to make it—to help separate the plutonium out. Franklin: To kind of find it, right, in all of the— Buckingham: Yeah. And the process worked successfully. Also, you know, when you stop to think of all that engineering that went into that scale-up, it’s really kind of mind-boggling. Because we just didn’t really know how things were going to go. [LAUGHTER] I— Franklin: Did you—oh, sorry. Buckingham: I think that the mere fact that they were able to do it is a— Franklin: Would you consider it comparable to the engineering feat of building the B Reactor? Because—is there a comparison there, because there had been a small graphite reactor that was scaled up to be the B. And is the same kind of true with T? There was this laboratory process that was proven, but had not been done on that scale. Is that a comparable— Buckingham: That’s comparable, yeah. They didn’t—I don’t even think they had a laboratory at Oak Ridge that they were doing anything with this scale on. Franklin: Is the T Plant kind of the—kind of the same—what’s the word I’m looking for—kind of the same thing to chemical engineering as B is to nuclear reactors? Would you say it’s a milestone? Buckingham: I’d say it was a milestone, then, because, well, there was almost every chemical process you could think of that was being used in it. Franklin: Right, and it played this really crucial role in this process. Right? Because it feels like the reactors are kind of—you know, they get a lot of the coverage, but this chemical separations process is crucial. Buckingham: Oh, good heavens, yes! We had to get that plutonium out of that element somehow or other. You just don’t go in and pick it out with a pair of pliers! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to add about T Plant or—reflections on your year spent at the T Plant? Buckingham: Well, mine were really pretty minimal, and being just in the laboratory out there doing the analytical work, it was an experience. [LAUGHTER] It was the first time that I will say that I was using some of my experience that I received in analytical chemistry at good old Washington State College. [LAUGHTER] In fact, I went to tell—went over to visit one time, and I mentioned it to my analytical professor, I told him, he says, now I understand why you were such a stinker in the lab of having things well-organized and in place. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: You hadn’t quite appreciated it at the time, right? Buckingham: Yeah, because, you know, we were using micro—you couldn’t use a large sample. You had to use—we were using very small samples for everything because they were so damned radioactive. Franklin: Right, so you really had to have everything calibrated properly— Buckingham: Properly. Franklin: And well-organized. Buckingham: And you were very careful with everything. You had to have a neat desk, a neat bench, to get anything done. It was an experience, I will— Franklin; Great, well, Steve, thank you very much for coming. I know it was only a short period of your work at Hanford, but thank you for going into such detail. It’s really important to capture this information and make the case for preserving the T Plant. Buckingham: Well, I feel like there’s so many little odds and ends that are just being forgotten. I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done here over the years. It’s just—to me, it’s just something that’s unbelievable. Unbelievable in science. Franklin: Right, yeah. Well, testing out all of these new processes. Buckingham: And the other scientific work that was being done here on the radiation and the movement of radioactive nuclides around and everything—gosh, we did a lot of interesting things. We had wells dug out there by the weather tower that we were trying to study what it was doing down under the ground. I think we knew more about what was moving around— And I feel kind of angry when they start belittling some of the stuff that was done. It’s—it just—in the whole study of the environment that we’ve done around here is, to me, is unbelievable, the work that they’ve produced. And the transportation of radionuclides in the plants that’s still going on. Franklin: Well, Steve, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about T Plant. Buckingham: My pleasure. I think I kind of jumbled a lot of stuff around. Franklin: No, I understand—I think I understand what was going on there, finally, a little bit better than—because I tried reading the documentation and it’s a little—I appreciate you putting it in a simpler form that, you know, even a historian can understand. [LAUGHTER] <a href="https://youtu.be/fP_QO-P7Jg4">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview REDOX T Plant B Plant U Plant F Reactor PUREX 224 Building 231 Building B Reactor D Reactor F Reactor C Reactor K East Reactor K West Reactor N Reactor DR Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1947- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Steve Buckingham Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Plutonium Uranium Solvent extraction Chemistry Radioactive waste disposal Description An account of the resource This interview with Steve Buckingham is part of an effort to record the history of the T Plant, a facility that processed irradiated fuel from the B Reactor. Using the bismuth phosphate process, T Plant operations were able to extract plutonium from spent fuel rods. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available 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. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/21/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F40dfecfcfb14b42ffd68426733942f40.jpg ed6e594965bb469d8310a1facdddd049 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dennis Brunson Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: All right. We are ready. Dennis Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Dennis Brunson on October 18, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dennis about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Brunson: My name is Dennis, D-E-N-N-I-S, Brunson, B-R-U-N-S-O-N. Franklin: Great. Okay, so the best place to begin is the beginning. So when and where were you born? Brunson: I was born in LaGrande, Oregon. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: In 1943. Franklin: And how did you come to Washington? Brunson: My family moved my junior—beginning of my junior year of high school to LaCrosse, which is up towards Pullman. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: My dad was a foreman on a cattle ranch. Franklin: Hmm. Brunson: That’s where I— Franklin: Was your dad in the cattle business for most of his— Brunson: Yeah, he was a farmer and we owned a meat market in eastern Oregon. That’s how I got up here. Franklin: Okay. And then you went to high school in LaGrande? Brunson: No, in LaCrosse. Franklin: In LaCrosse, sorry. Brunson: I married my high school sweetheart, who was a year ahead of me. I was a football player, and I had some success at playing football, and had been given an offer to play football at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, back in the day when they had an outstanding football program. On my way to that end, I damaged my neck severely in a football game—my last football game in high school, and I could no longer play football. But I was already—had plans to go to CBC, and I followed through. So I came to CBC, and I took a class there that was a special class that Boeing had initiated, basically, to produce illustrators for Boeing Company in Seattle. They didn’t have near enough technical illustrators. So I went through that program and found that there was a pretty high need for illustrators, and they used them here at Hanford as well. So my wife worked for General Electric, and her boss at the time and my future boss played golf together. We had planned on going to Seattle to start my career over there, and ultimately, I was hired to come to work at Hanford as an illustrator for Vitro Engineering Company. Franklin: Okay. And so what kind of projects did you work on while in this first job at Hanford? Brunson: Okay. I did a lot of—because I was an illustrator and artist, I was put in the piping department, which was a large section, because they were retooling the Hanford site at that time to process chemicals. My first job, basically, was as-built drawings. I would go into zones where the pipefitters had recreated the new version, and I would go in and follow blueprints to make sure that what went on the final drawings was the way it was built. And oftentimes, there were things that the designers couldn’t see. So they would get someone like me to go in and sit and draw all these things out, and double-check and make sure that it was as-built. That wasn’t always an easy task, because some of the zones we were in were very hot. And we would have to draw with coveralls on, and head gear, and gloves. It was a slow process. Franklin: How would—so obviously, all that gear can be cleaned, but what you’re drawing on, then might also soak up radiation as well? Or--? Brunson: Well, there was a possibility that you could be contaminated, and they were very careful, which I was thankful for. I always had a radiation monitor with me. If something in the atmosphere was airborne, he knew about it, because he had an indicator. We would get out of there. That happened a few times, but it wasn’t all that bad. Franklin: What kinds of—did you work all over site doing these as-builts, or is there any building or buildings that come to mind? Brunson: Well, in the 200 Area mostly is where I did that. In the T, U, and B Buildings, I think they were, at that time, they were retooling the Canyon buildings, or some of the cells for processing thorium. That’s what, basically, what we were doing. When I wasn’t doing as-built drawings, I worked as an illustrator and a design draftsman. I was trained well to do that, and I really enjoyed it. Franklin: When did you start this first—when did you start at Hanford? Do you remember what year? Brunson: Yeah, it was 1964. Franklin: 1964. And how long did you work as an illustrator and doing the as-builts? Brunson: For that—during that phase of my career, it was two years. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: I worked there two years, and then I went back to my wife’s family farm, and we leased one of my father-in-law’s ranches and tried to make a living raising wheat and sheep and cattle and all of that. Franklin: What was the reason for that change? Or, why—why did you— Brunson: Why’d I leave Hanford and go back to the farm? Franklin: Yeah, why-- Brunson: Well, it was an offer that I couldn’t refuse. My father-in-law was having health issues, and he came to me and said, hey, I need some help. So we did what we had to do. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: And we tried to make a living, but—you know, I was glad that I had a connection at Hanford. Because in 1970, we came back and moved to Richland and started with WADCO Corporation as a technical illustrator. Franklin: WADCO. And what does—do you remember what WADCO stands for? Brunson: Well, it depends on who you were talking to. It was Westinghouse Advanced Development Corporation, but the locals here called Wild Ass Development Corporation. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Brunson: Because they had a way of getting things done. Franklin: Ah. Brunson: My reason for being there—I was hired as an illustrator, because they had taken over the FFTF design and management. It had been in thought process for several years prior to that. They took over, and there were services that were provided to the contractors here. But they had a difficult time—Westinghouse, or WADCO had a difficult time getting what they needed in the timeframes that they were being asked to deliver. So they had to go out and get some service people of their own to keep that flowing. That’s how I came in. I was the first illustrator they had. Franklin: First illustrator. And I noticed a lot of the material you brought in today—which we’ll show some of that later—I noticed a lot of that pertains to FFTF. Brunson: Yes. Franklin: So it seems you were married to that—that was a large part of your illustrator, or graphic design work, was for that reactor. Brunson: Yeah. When I started with the WADCO, and when I—that melded right into Westinghouse—it was the same parent company; they just changed the structure. I went from there until Boeing took over. That was 17 years. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: So I did that for 17 years. That’s the reason I have—my very first job at WADCO was another gentleman and I were asked to go down to Safeway and buy a 50-pound sack of flour. We went out to the desert, and there was a post out there where the center of the reactor core was. This was before they scraped anything away. We made a big giant X in the sand, and made it nice and tidy so that from an aerial photograph, it appeared to be a giant X. X marks the spot, for this—that was prior to the—for the first excavation. So that was the first thing that we did—I mean, that was noteworthy. The next day or two after they had photographically recorded that, they came in with the earth moving equipment to start the lay-down of the bottom of the reactor. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: And so that’s something that I did [LAUGHTER] that was unusual. Franklin: So you were there right at the genesis— Brunson: In the beginning. Franklin: Yeah. Literally at the center of the— Brunson: Center of the project. Franklin: Center of the reactor. So what other kinds of work did you do in that 17-year span for WADCO? Brunson: Well, I started out as an illustrator, and we worked night and day, seven days a week. Forever and ever and ever it went on. It was a wild ride. But we produced visual aids, slides and viewgraphs, and posters for poster sessions. And a lot of them. In addition to that, we also created an ongoing report of activities because we were building something new that had never been done. So we had, in addition to the graphics department, we had photographers and editorial staff, and the typing pool, and all of the support that is required to put out reports—technical reports. It was a large group. We were asked to create a history as we went along. That was—we were part of a national lab, and it was—that was something you had to do. It’s in record form somewhere, if our computers can read it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I believe a lot of that material is actually in hard copy in our collections. Brunson: Yeah. It is, yeah. Franklin: I’ve gone through a lot of FFTF boxes. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: So you were the first person in this department, then. So how big did this department end up becoming? And did you take a supervisory role? Brunson: Yes. At one time, we had around 25 people in that particular graphics department. I started out as an illustrator, and then was promoted to senior illustrator, and then supervisor, or art director. And then in a short while, I was promoted to manager of media services, which included the graphics department and photography and audio-visual, which was one tight group. As time went on, over a few years, I was assigned other management in the communications department. And that’s what I did. Then when we—after 17 years, when Boeing came to town, things—when we went into Boeing, I worked—managed several departments. The photography, audio-visual, motion picture group. So anyway, I’m getting off track. Franklin: No, not at all. Brunson: That’s kind of the trail that I had through the process. The entire time that we were working there, I’ve seen other groups that they provided a service, but were never considered, or they never felt like they were part of a team. That was the one nice thing about that graphics and photography departments—you were part of a team. We were involved with just about everything that went through the company. We were appreciated by the management, because they’d have been in trouble without a good group of people who were cooperative and willing to work every night, and into the wee hours of the morning, and still come back the next day and smile about it. And it was fun. You have to remember that people like in those kind of service departments, by and large, they’re people that are getting paid good money to do their hobby. Franklin: Right, right. Brunson: So the photographers loved it. They loved the challenge of going into a hot zone and taking pictures. It was something they looked forward to. It was something they could learn from, and create new techniques to do a good job. So that’s a pretty good base for contented employees, if you can have that. We were fortunate that most of us were about the same age, and we had fun, we had potlucks, we did all the things, we were rewarded for our efforts by the company, by the management. So it was a feel-good—we felt good that we provided service. I brought here 40 years of samples of work that we did that is proof. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And it’s something that the people who were in those type jobs can take this to a potential new job, say, this is what I do, here it is. And it’s something that you can look at and see. Most all of us retired or are retiring from that line of service—everybody’s gotten older, of course. And now everybody runs the computer. That’s the way it—that’s how it worked for us. Franklin: Right. Yeah, a lot of your material—a lot of those materials are in the Hanford Collection. Brunson: Yes. Franklin: And are identified as being very historically valuable. So I think that’s a testament to you—to the work of your group. Brunson: Yeah. Well, the models—you have so many fantastic models in your collection. And I don’t know that you have more than what I saw in the walk-through the other day at the open house. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: I suspect that you have more of them somewhere, because there was a lot of them that we produced. Franklin: Well, what’s in the collection right now is everything that’s been identified to be put in the collection. If there’s models somewhere else, they just aren’t part of our collection, so the DOE hasn’t put them in the collection. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: I hope there are, too, because they’re very—they have their own preservation challenges, but they’re very engaging. Brunson: Yup. Franklin: People really like the models. So you worked for Westinghouse for 17 years. Brunson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So that would have been from ’70 to ’87. And then saying ’87 is also significant, because that’s our kind of shutdown of production year. Brunson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So who did you work for, or—describe that transition to your new— Brunson: From Westinghouse to Boeing? Franklin: Yeah. Brunson: That was—in my eyes, I was very, very disappointed that we went to work for Boeing. We were given away to Boeing as part of the contract. Boeing was given all of the services: photography, video, graphics, printing, publication services—those were all part of the deal. Westinghouse gave—Westinghouse and Boeing partnered. The Westinghouse part of it, they took a bunch of labs from Battelle—or gave some to Battelle—I’m sorry. Battelle had a wonderful photography department and graphics department. They, along with the Westinghouse services, were all given to Boeing. Boeing—it was Boeing Computer Services—and the manager there wasn’t all that familiar with what we provided for the site, and wasn’t all that interested in finding out. He didn’t last very long, but the new management came in and they provided—they were good. They were a good company to work for at that time. But they—because of that, people like myself—I went there as a manager of the graphics department, and was quickly asked to go work and put out a big fire at the publications, printing and reproductions services group, which was a large group. So I was there for a year, managing that group. When the manager of photography and video, which was 65 people—professionals there, he decided to retire early, so I was asked then to go take care of that group, which was a challenge. I really liked it. It was a real good challenge. We had several large groups throughout—down this part of Hanford. We were asked, basically, to reduce that by half, as far as the square footage and all that. So we did a lot of consolidating and all that. And at the same time that that was going on, we were sort of downsizing. It’s when the digital world suddenly was upon us, and we were challenged. We had one of the nicest color labs, in the Federal Building, that was in the Northwest. It was fabulous. And we had the large black-and-white lab in the 300 Area. Franklin: Sorry, can you just describe what a color lab and a black—you mean for reproduction or for photographs? Brunson: For photographs. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: It was quite complex. And what I guess—I can give you an oversight of that, but it would really be great if you can get someone—Dan Ostergaard or someone like that—to sit in this chair and give you a real version of the macrographs and things that they did, as it relates to fuel—the nuclear fuel production. It was a whole new world, and it was an unusual world that they lived in. But by and large, we had photographers—and this was a collection of probably ten really high quality, well-educated technical photographers that provided service for the site. That included hot cells. We had permanent staff in the 200 Area that provided really hard work, as far as recording things in cells where they were doing testing and what-have-you. We had a couple guys that flew aerials every week. They would fly and take pictures of the development of our—whatever was happening on the site. We had—the black-and-white lab was in 300 Area, and they produced all of the negatives, they processed, they did a lot of the printing. They did color printing as well in the small scale. But in the Federal Building, we had a full-blown color printing process that went on there. You could do photographs that were six feet wide and 40 feet long. We had that ability. That work was done mostly for public relations type activities. I mean, that was—they did a lot of macrographs, and that’s—you take a fuel pin, or a piece of fuel—carbon—put it under a million-volt electron microscope, and enlarge that pin up to like four feet wide, and it’d be done in sections. We had folks in the lab that would cut all these things apart and put them back together. It’s kind of hard to describe unless you have a picture of it. But they ended up being this big macrograph that they would then re-photograph and reduce down, and that was—they used that for the research on what happens to nuclear fuels when it’s irradiated. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: So it was a technical process. Photography and graphics both were the last people in the line when something had to be—a report had to go in, or somebody was getting on an airplane to go to D.C. or Virginia, or Europe or someplace for a critical meeting. They’d change and change and change right up to the last minute, and then dump it on us. And our challenge was to produce something that met their needs in the remaining wee hours of the morning. Franklin: Mm-hmm. You mentioned it earlier, so I’d like to go back to it—can you describe—because the digital revolution, right, affected us all in terms of our computer use, but I imagine especially it would have affected the photography and graphic arts departments. Brunson: Yes. Franklin: So I’d like you to kind of talk about those—that change. That whole transformation of that technology. Brunson: That was a process that we all went through, depending on what seat we were sitting at the time. I’ll start with graphics. In the graphics department, we had assigned a young lady the job of gathering the data for our first computer systems. She was looking at things on the PC side and on the Apple side. At that time, the Macintosh had software that was user friendly. We all—we went that way with the Apple—Mac. Franklin: In many cases, they’re still often the— Brunson: Understand. Franklin: --computers of choice for graphics and audio-video. Brunson: Certainly. But what we ran up against, especially with Boeing—Boeing saying, no way, we’re not going to go with anything Apple. You can kiss your Apples goodbye, because we’re not going to go that route. But they didn’t have the software development on the PC side that met our needs. So we’d keep putting them off and putting them off. I know some of their departments now are all back on that side of the fence. But that went on in the graphics side, but on the photography side, it was a real struggle, because our photographers came from the old school—film—and fortunately we had a few guys who were advocates for the digital end and helped us stumble through that. It was a rough journey. But it changed everything we did. We—a group of 75 people—there are now zero photographers at Hanford that we know of—that I know of. They’ve all went by the way of—they’re extinct. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right. And the technology now is—you might not get the same—always the same quality— Brunson: No. Franklin: --but now that everyone has a camera for most purposes that you can document a lot of the history out there. Yeah. So how did—so on the graphics side are you talking mostly about CAD software? Or is that—what kinds of software did you— Brunson: Well, we used— Franklin: Did you use for the graphics software? Brunson: We used FreeHand and Photoshop and those types of Illustrator-type softwares. [SIGH] I’m drawing a blank here. You can cut this out, I guess. Can we stop just a sec? Franklin: Yeah, sure, of course. Brunson: Okay. Get my head on straight. Franklin: Yeah, no worries. Brunson: Where I was going. Ask me the question again. Franklin: I was just—what kinds of software did you primarily use in the— Brunson: Oh, okay. In the graphics side. Franklin: In the graphics process, yeah. Brunson: It was, on the Mac side, it was FreeHand, was our base—when I was heavily involved with it, that was the base. On the PC side, we used Corel Draw, and we used Illustrator and those were kind of the basic ones that I was familiar with. Franklin: When did you feel—because computer power has almost exponentially increased since the invention of the microchip. So when did you finally feel, from a professional standpoint, that these computer technologies were on par or had surpassed a lot of what had been done, then, by analog technologies? Or did you ever feel that it was that way? Brunson: Yeah. When I was at the end of my career—I left there in 2008—by about that time, we were overcome by good technology. Before that, some of the new guys that came in who were really well-trained, it was—they made computers do things that you wonder, how in the world did they do that? You were kind of glad you were getting old. [LAUGHTER] I’ll give you just a brief—at one point when I was with Lockheed, I was asked to go to work on a proposal in the Washington, DC area for the FBI. We were there most of the summer, about 35 days, 40 days, I guess. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: I had familiarity with—a lot of experience with FreeHand. So the last thing I was told before I left was, oh, by the way, they don’t use Macs. They use Corel Draw on PC. I looked at him and I said, I’ve never done any Corel work. Well, you better get started! So I’m getting on, packing my suitcase to go put my life on the line in Virginia or Maryland. So I had a real learning curve, the first week there. And I made it. I got so that I really liked the program. But it was—everything’s about the same, except it’s a little different. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, you might—the basics are probably pretty easily transferrable, but there’s the details and special features. Brunson: Yup, that’s exactly it. Franklin: So how long did you work for Boeing, and when did Boeing transition? It went from Boeing to Lockheed? Brunson: Boeing to Lockheed. Franklin: And when did that— Brunson: I think that was nine years later—I think I worked for Boeing for nine years before Lockheed came to town. I think. [LAUGHTER] I have it written down somewhere. Franklin: Right, no, that’s understandable. And you worked there until May 2008? Brunson: 2008. Franklin: Can you talk about the—so you worked for Westinghouse—Westinghouse Hanford, Boeing, Lockheed Martin—can you talk about the—I mean you talked a little bit about the attitude between the change in contractors, but was that a—was there kind of like a culture change as well? Brunson: Oh. Franklin: And did your group have to kind of readjust, or were you sheltered from the larger storm of contractors, contractor change? Brunson: Well, we—in a group like—in some groups it was no problem at all, no hassle, nothing to worry about. In our groups, we worked at a level in the company where we were part of—we were part of all the stuff. So when we lost our mothership so to speak, there were hurt feelings and there was a lot of unknown canyons to go down, as far as—we worried about it. We worried about it, that these changes breaking us up and tearing us apart, and it always seemed to do that to some extent. The Lockheed was different than the others—Lockheed Martin—because they were still tied to Lockheed Corporate. There was a Hanford and a Corporate. And half the stuff that we did, we were working for Lockheed Martin Corporate, but we were here. It was—there were a lot more challenges for our organization, and it was more contractor-supported than it was Hanford-supported. I was kind of the Hanford guy. Franklin: Right. Brunson: For years. I was an art director, where most of the old Hanford numbers—everything would come to me, and we would then, you know, get it done, and get it filed correctly and all of that. But there were times, like when I went to work for on this FBI proposal, that that was purely Lockheed Martin. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: So that gave people like me a chance to learn other things and do other things, and it made a better person out of all of us, because we got to do things that—we were tied to the Hanford fence previously. So I don’t know if that answers your question or not. Franklin: Yeah, I think that answers it really well. Brunson: But you have to remember, whenever a contractor came in to take over, there was a proposal. You know, the Department of Energy or AEC or whoever we were at the time, they said, hey, you guys have been doing this work for x number of years. We want to see whether we can get it done cheaper. So every time that happened, every time somebody else took over the contract, there’s things that were lost that we were used to. Whether that was good or bad—most of the time you thought it was bad, because that’s not the way it’s always been done. Just fear of change. There was a lot of downsizing that went on. So groups that had had 65, 68 people in them, suddenly they were down to 20. That meant people went somewhere else to work. So there were layoffs. Franklin: Right, because as you mentioned, a lot of the point of this bidding and contracts was to get the work done at the lowest price. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: So there’s an incentive there to cut costs when and where you could. Brunson: Yeah. When we transferred—I’d been at Westinghouse 17 years, and I provided quite a bit of work for the proposal. My manager, who was [UNKNOWN], she was the manager of technical communications at the time—she went back to Pittsburgh and worked for almost six months as part of that team. I took her job during that timeframe. We were so excited that we won—we won the bid—and come back and find that—sorry, guys, you’re not going to be Westinghouse anymore; you’re going to Boeing. That was very disheartening to those of us who had been branded with the Circle-W on our butt. We were disappointed and feelings were hurt. Franklin: Right, right. Brunson: It caused all kinds of trauma for a lot of people for a short time. Franklin: Speaking of branding, for work done on the—did each contractor have its own kind of corporate branding that it used on all its own publications, used at Hanford? Did you have to learn a whole new set of corporate graphic identity each time? Brunson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: Oftentimes—and there were also—Department of Energy had their own branding, if you will. So there was always a little muddy water about the use of logos and the use of the fonts that were used, the different kinds of fonts, and the colors, and all of that. It was an interesting journey. I’ll put it that way. Franklin: Brand identities, almost sacred. Brunson: Well, it was. Westinghouse, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin all had extreme control on their—they had someone at headquarters that had an eye on everything we did, because we were always getting our hand slapped. You can’t do that. Franklin: Well, let me tell you, it’s the same here. Brunson: Yup. Well, that’s-- Franklin: Everyone’s interested in preserving their brand identity. Was the majority of your work—or I guess maybe can you describe the balance of your work—was it public, for public consumption, or private consumption, or a mixture of both, the work that you did at Hanford? Brunson: It depends on at what phase of my career. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: There were times in the early part of the career that everything that I touched went into a report or a presentation for the site. Franklin: Okay. So for internal consumption? Brunson: Internal. As time went on, some of that—at that time, most of it was, you know, you had to have a Q clearance to be there to begin with. Most everything was pretty private because, on FFTF, that was a new technology and we didn’t do an awful lot of sharing with the public. But then, as time went on and you started doing other things in the career path, you got to do things that were more fun. Public presentations and work for the science centers and things like that, and displays and what-have-you. Franklin: Did your group do work for the Hanford Science Center? Brunson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. How involved were you with the Hanford Science Center? Brunson: As required. We had projects that we would work through. There were several contractors that provided the same service. FFTF, we did a lot of models, as you already know, for FFTF because it was all new. It was new technology, it was a new thought process, and it was new. We had a lot of visitors from throughout the world. We developed the Science Center in the 400 Area out at FFTF that ultimately became the CREHST museum. They moved that building down, downtown. Franklin: Was that the same building that Allied Arts is in—that’s the former CREHST, right? Brunson: No, that’s—CREHST is just a couple notches down. Franklin: Sorry, I’m pretty new to the area. I moved here after CREHST had closed down. So the CREHST building, though, is a former site building? Brunson: It was built on at the 400 Area on a little ridge overlooking the reactor. Franklin: Oh. Brunson: It was put up in a hurry, and we built beautiful displays in there. You could go off—you could drive out there without a badge, and you could go in and go through the Science Center, the Visitors Center, we called it. FFTF Visitors Center. And it told the entire story; we had visual presentation, we had like six projectors that showed these—you could sit through a 30-minute 35-millimeter slide presentation with sound and all that. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: So that was—and that’s where most of those models were ultimately ended up. Some of them were actually in the reactor building itself, where visitors would come in and you could use—you couldn’t go in there because it was hot, but you could look at this model and they could point out various activities that were going on. Franklin: Did you do any work at all at the CREHST museum? Brunson: Personally, I did not, but our staff did. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: Mike Reisenauer did a lot of work for the museum down there. He built a lot of displays at Lockheed Martin. Franklin: Right, because I know that some of the items in our collection from that CREHST Museum were donated by Lockheed Martin. So that’s why I thought there might have been a— Brunson: There were a lot of the things that were in the basement there, which you never got to see, but there was a lot of material that we had created for other displays in the Lockheed Martin Center. We had a building out at the Richland Airport that was—we had a complete model shop in there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: And that’s where a lot of that stuff was manufactured. Parts—I wasn’t—I never did work in there, but we were—we managed that. It was what it was. Franklin: Right. Brunson: It was as required, we did it. Franklin: Right, right. Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to mention? Brunson: Well, one of the things that I thought about in coming out here was that in the beginning, prior, you know, in the 50s—the 40s and the 50s, there were very few illustrators. There were very few technical illustrators who knew what to do. There were a few, but on the Hanford site, that often was—that type of work was performed by sign painters. That was a whole new world. It was—a lot of the big visuals back in those days were done by the sign shops. There were a number of sign painters at Hanford. I never did find out how many there were, but each area had two or three or maybe about as many as five sign painters. Franklin: Yeah, we have a lot of signs in our collection. A lot of hand-painted signs. Brunson: Yeah, but a lot of them—I mean 99% of them—weren’t painted on a board or on a piece of metal. They were painted on a tank or a wall or a series of pipes. They became pretty crafty. Sometimes there was a little head-butting that went on between the crafts, you know—you guys can’t do that. Well, yeah, we can. Look, we did it. Well, you’re not supposed to. Well, no, you’re not supposed to. So there was some near-issues with union—or labor and non-labor activities. But the early sign painters were really good artists. The ones that we formatted—or that we faced with, they were really good artists. They were hardly ever recognized as such. Franklin: When did that profession—when did the sign painters start to kind of fade away on the Hanford site? Brunson: Well, they still have them, but now they all have the digital—everything’s digital, and vinyl cutting. I mean, it’s kind of like a graphics shop now. Franklin: Well, I imagine that would’ve been folded kind of into graphic design. Brunson: Yeah, but it never—to my knowledge, it’s never ever—you know, there’s these guys, the ones with x’s on their stomachs and those that have zeros on their stomachs. To my knowledge, they’re still a separate entity. Franklin: Interesting. What kinds of tools did you use as an illustrator when you were doing these drawings and things? What kind of—did you have access to a pretty wide array of tools, or what? Brunson: Well, yes, we did, for the time. At the time, we did. In the early days, we had typesetting machines that had—it was the black-and-white film and we had fonts that were big, and you’d spin it around—if you were spelling something out, you’d spin it around, and then you’d expose it, and it would be exposed to a tape that was going through a photo bath which was all self-contained. It would come out the other side in these long strips—you might have 50 feet of it. There was always problems with the process, too. But we would dry that—or it would come out and it would dry. Then we’d put it through a machine that was a waxer. It would wax the backs of it. Then we’d put it on our drying boards—big Hamilton drying boards, with a long straightedge on it, and we’d cut out all these letters. Then we’d lay them up on the board a line at a time, and clean them up, and then send it to photography to have a photomechanical transfer, which was a black-and-white print. So, a-ha, here it is. Or you could get that same—like the film that I have over here, that is a clear photo—it’s a positive, film positive. And then you can either lay that over another graphics that was airbrushed, or you can paint the back of it, and that was the one that we found on the shelf back on our tour through there of the interim K storage—an illustration. That was an evolution. We went from doing airbrush drawings that was very, very time-consuming. I brought my airbrush and some of the tools. And it was kind of a one-time deal. Back then, to be an illustrator, an artist, you had to be an illustrator and an artist. You couldn’t fake it. You had to know what you were doing. So if you made a boo-boo, you were in trouble. And if somebody who was a good illustrator, but they were clumsy and sloppy, they didn’t last very long, because you couldn’t afford to have him redo it and redo it, you know? So that took a lot of pretty good artists out of the picture, because they couldn’t do what was required of them. Franklin: Right. Well, this sounds like it would be a great time to take a quick break and set up to view some of the materials that you brought. Brunson: Sure. Franklin: To kind of illustrate—literally—your work. Brunson: Okay. Franklin: So we’ll just, we’ll shut it off and then we’ll— [VIDEO CUTS] Brunson: Well, I’ll give it a shot. I’ve done this a few times over the years for schools and what-have-you where I have the thing in my—I have a big studio, I have it all laid out. It’s kind of awkward this way. But basically, an illustration is done—or was done at that time—our client, an engineer, would contact us and come in with the stack of drawings where they needed an illustration done, and what they kind of wanted as the end product. And what we would do is assign it to an illustrator, and he would start by doing a rough pencil sketch after looking at the blueprints to say, is this kind of what you want? Yes, that’s what—he’d come back, and after an initial rough, and then he would start ploughing through all the data. Basically, its drawings were to scale and oftentimes a cutaway to show how it worked. But it had to be accurate, and it had to be the right scale, which was kind of a unique part of the job that we did. The way we would ordinarily lay it out would be we would use all the tools we had in our tool chest to lay it out and to draw it. We would use mechanical pencils. This is a pencil sharpener. We would lay out the drawing, we would ink it then, with—once it had been approved, we would transfer it to product that was—or paper or vellum that was of high quality, or even Mylar. And then we would ink it with fine pens that would—haven’t used these for several years. [LAUGHTER] But they were varying size ink pens. Very accurate and very easy to work with. These have been around for a long time. I’ve owned this set since the early ‘60s. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: But when the illustration was laid out and done, and the engineer took a look at it, we would ask him to tell us what he wanted on a copy—a blueprint copy, to put the words on it that he wanted on it, the title. And in the beginning, the titles were normally put on with a paintbrush. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: And oftentimes red tempera paint, like we used to use in grade school, you know. It worked easy and it went down well and it looked nice. Any really fine illustrations—I should say the fonts and the wording, oftentimes if it was really important, we would use this setup, which is a template that has an indentation, and we would put one of these type of pens into a little bug. This is called the bug. And it would line up in the track. We would follow this—it’s difficult to show on here, but the line would—you would follow the lettering—I don’t know, is this going to show or not? But it would—you’d be producing a—it would be—you’d lay it on—let’s— Camera man: Can you move it around? Franklin: Maybe we can—can you flip this part of it? Can you put this over there? Brunson: Do what now? Franklin: Hold it like that. But like—maybe hold it like that so they can— Brunson: Well, yeah, that’d be wrong, but that’d be putting it down below. It’s difficult. Ultimately, what it amounts to is that you’d have a—it would be laying down on a surface, and—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, sorry, we’re not really set up for the visual displays. Brunson: But anyway, this— Camera man: If you don’t mind, maybe I’ll just get closer. Maybe that will work. Emma Jo Rice: Okay, perfect. Maybe flip it and tell him to use that? Or what do you think? Camera man: Let’s try just to get closer to it. Rice: Okay. Camera man: So I have to—just a second here. Yeah. Move that out of the way. Okay. Brunson: That do it? Well, this, basically is a stylus that follows the shape of the letter, and above up here, a pen would be laying down the letters one by one. You’d move this around until you developed a sentence or a word, a callout. So this was—it looks awkward, and it looks like it’s time-consuming, but it isn’t. In reality, it goes real quickly. And there’s—sometimes there’s boo-boos, if you aren’t watching yourself, you’ll misspell something. It’s easily done. But that was one of the—this was a nice advance, because we used to do it all with a red sable paintbrush. That’s how we’d put the lettering on the illustrations. So this type of information was giant leap forward. Then once we started getting photo paper, that enabled us to—technology just kept advancing this about as fast as we could keep up with it. And we’d buy stuff, and before the year was out, it was obsolete because something else had come along. So thank goodness, it enabled us to provide a better end product. This was just basically an illustration of—we have a photograph, a colored photograph, of one of the illustrations that shows this. I don’t know what more to say about it than that. Franklin: Okay. No, that’s great. So maybe now we’ll—do you feel comfortable, now that we’ve shown this, do you want to move on to the photographs? Brunson: Sure. Franklin: So what we’ll do then is you’ll sit where I’m sitting, I’ll kind of come around to the side. We’ll get the music stand up, get it focused on the stand, and I’ll come and bring some of our materials over here. And then we will-- Rice: Does that go down any more, or just tilt it? Camera man: That works. Rice: Okay. [INAUDIBLE] Brunson: I don’t even know who that was. Rice: I think that should be okay. Brunson: Can you— Rice: It’s actually positioned—it seems so simple, but it’s really [INAUDIBLE] What do you-- Brunson: Yeah, that’s— Rice: If you want to— Brunson: No, we can— Franklin: [INAUDIBLE] to where you’re at. Rice: Sure. Franklin: Oh, no, I’ll just be behind. Rice: Okay. Franklin: Right here. Okay. Are we ready? Camera man: Yeah, yeah. Let’s go ahead. Franklin: So this is—why don’t you describe this illustration first. What it was, where we would have found it. Brunson: Okay. This was part of the fuel development activity that was an ongoing process at Hanford for nuclear fuel. I picked this one out because it was an attractive illustration. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: There were techniques that were used on this work where I—in this particular way of putting lettering on. You’ll notice the lettering, that the callouts that identify it and the title on this, those were all—this was about a 32 x 40 inch illustration. It was a black-and-white cutaway illustration in perspective. And it was then transferred onto an illustration board, and it was airbrushed. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: Which was a time-consuming process. This whole—an illustration like this would probably take a week, a week-and-a-half to do. And it maybe changed several times during that whole process. This was an advanced technique, because prior to using these type of tools, this was often done with a paintbrush. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: Which didn’t have the same sharpness and same quality. This is a very attractive illustration. Franklin: It is. Brunson: And it’s very well done. It was, again, an airbrushed illustration. Franklin: So then, just to reiterate, the lettering on this illustration was put on there by the same method that you demonstrated there with the stylus and the guide. Brunson: Yes, that is correct. Franklin: And so that allows, I imagine, for a lot of kind of quality control over, and consistency— Brunson: Yes. Franklin: --throughout the illustration not to distract from the information being presented. Brunson: And the bad thing about doing the lettering on something like this: after you’ve already done all of this, and spent a week in that process, to have a boo-boo with the paintbrush or a bug, it was a disaster. You had bad dreams about things like that-- Franklin: Oh, jeez. Brunson: --if you’re an illustrator. Franklin: So one of the next ones, kind of a personal favorite of mine, one that’s in our collection of the FFTF, I’d like you to talk about this publication. Were you in charge of the design of this? Brunson: Well— Franklin: Oh, here, can we— Brunson: I wanted to see what was in it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: And see—I didn’t even—yeah, these were— Franklin: Did you do the cover of this? Was this part of your group, or--? Brunson: Yes, yes. Yeah. Franklin: Okay. So kind of describe if you can remember, kind of the thought that went in—this is a very kind of futuristic-looking, digital—but with this kind of realistic photo dropped on it. So kind of maybe describe the kind of the thought process behind this cover. Brunson: Well, it—I didn’t personally draw this—or lay this out. David Beckley, I think, was the illustrator that did, and he was very, very talented. This was in celebration of the first three years of FFTF in operation. It was kind of a bragging tool, if you will. It had—there was—one, it was expensive to do. Back in those days, it was expensive to do something like this. And it borderline pushed the edge for what was legal to do, as far as colors and all of that. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: But internally—this, of course is an aerial view of the FFTF Reactor that we put in there. Same illustration. And basically, went through and set all sorts of—oh-ho, there’s an illustration that I did. Well, not only did I do it, but nearly every other person that worked on the FFTF project had some dealings with this, because it changed so many times. But this is an illustration that I did. There was another illustrator who did this little section, this building here, Ron Wick, who retired recently from Supply System. He helped with that, and I did everything else. We submitted it, and it won an international award. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: But it was—this was just basically a recap of the construction milestones and the various activities as they were being—these major components as they were being installed. So it was a classic—this brochure won an award as well. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: For that time. Franklin: Yeah, it’s very visually appealing with its photos. Was the cover—was that done with—was that a—did computers create this cover, or was this kind of analog reproduction of kind of a digital—I guess that’s— Brunson: Yeah, it looks digital, doesn’t it? Franklin: Yeah, it looks kind of very Tron. Brunson: This is probably the third or fourth version, and I think those kind of things evolved. This was a good product. We were all proud to be part of that association. Franklin: Okay. So the next one is another one that we mentioned. We’ll see how we can get this to stay. Might have to come and—oh! All right. Wow. Brunson: Well, that’s pretty well— Franklin: Yeah. It might make it there for a minute. Actually, I’ll probably-- Brunson: We could probably—well that—I think that shows it pretty well. Franklin: Yeah, it sure does. So why don’t we talk about that—so this is the illustration that you said won an award. Brunson: Yeah, it did. And it was done—this was drawn and, of course, like I said, we did so many variations of this drawing. It was inked and this part here, the building itself, was a film positive. It was a giant, clear film with black lines on it. And then we painted on the back of it with acrylic. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: And it was kind of what Disney’s cartoons did. That’s where we kind of developed this thinking of that aspect. It made life a lot easier. It was so much faster than airbrush. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: So this is kind of a step up from airbrush. This was 32 inches wide by 40 inches long. It’s actually out of that proportion. This is an illustration of this core that was also 40 inches long. Franklin: Oh, wow. Brunson: And these were 40 inches long. And we did all of these illustrations, time and time again. The background here was done with opaque watercolor. And then this unit was laid on top of that. That’s how it was done. It was—at that time, that was kind of the state of the art. Franklin: Right. Sounds like there’s a lot of different techniques that go into this, different processes. Brunson: And this was all done with sponge. I mean this part down here was just a sea sponge and various colors of dark and light paint. Franklin: Oh, wow. Brunson: And the sky—the actual original, the sky was a little nicer than it is here. But that’s, of course—that’s kind of the setting. So this was in Nuclear Engineering as their centerfold of the year— Franklin: I’ll show that cover real quick. Brunson: --for International Nuclear Engineering. Franklin: Oh, that means you’re top billing right there, the FFTF Foldout. Brunson: Yeah. I was always proud of that. We all were. Rice: That’s a hand-painted title? Franklin: So this is a hand-painted title here? Brunson: Yeah, this is a paintbrush. Red sable brush. You just hand-lettered to make sure that you’ve got it. You lay it out on a piece of paper so you know exactly the center of it and where it’s going to be, and then go in with a light pencil and pencil it in so you had your spelling correct. Because it’s pretty—I’ve even misspelled my name a few times, when you’re concentrating on doing it. So that’s just me. So it was laid out in pencil and then you just hold your breath and start painting, after you’ve scribbled on a piece of scrap for a while to get the feel. If you didn’t do that every day, it was kind of pot luck. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And down here, again, these were done with the bug. Franklin: The stylus? Brunson: Yeah, with the stylus. Rice: So why were some of the titles hand-painted? Brunson: Well, one, they were large. Rice: Mm-hmm. Brunson: You know, some of them were this tall on these illustrations. There wasn’t really any other way, at that time—that we had—that you could create that. Rice: Mm. Brunson: So that was just part of the timeframe. Franklin: That one’s great. Rice: That’s awesome. Franklin: So let’s do—talk a little bit about this. Brunson: Yeah, this was interesting. This—Hank Krueger was one of our cartoonists for years out there. Had a very distinct style and a personality that was—it was great. He was really a character. The Hanford News was, like it says, serving the Hanford family. It came out once a week, and it had all sorts of information in it regarding the state of Hanford. This was a Christmas—it was actually security—it was a security statement about where’s your badge? Franklin: Yeah! Brunson: I’ve kept this for years and years. I’ve shown it a lot. So it always tickles me to see it. Because everything about it has something to do with safety. And that’s how you could justify doing something like that. Franklin: Mm-hm. Brunson: Because an illustration like this doesn’t happen overnight. It took a little—it costs a little to do that. But the Hanford News, for years, the whole back page of it was ads. It was kind of like the free ads that are in the Tri-City Herald today, you know. So there was always a lot of interest in buying a boat or duck decoys or an end table or something. Consequently, it kind of distracted from the work being done on Fridays. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Brunson: So they normally wouldn’t produce—they wouldn’t hand it out until quitting time on Fridays. Franklin: Oh, okay, right, yeah, that makes good sense. So here we go. This might be a little small, but here we have some of the ads here. Right, so cars for sale, wanted. And these were all for—did it cost to, or were these all free ads? Brunson: These were all free ads. Franklin: Oh, okay. Brunson: But you had to be on site. You know, for sale, and wanted, and trade, and free, and commuter pools. So it was a great service. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And all the contractors got it. So it was a great deal. Franklin: Right, yeah, I can imagine that this would have been important. Brunson: But that was part of what we did as well in the graphics department. Rice: [INAUDIBLE] the next one? Franklin: So, here we go. So this photo has you in it right? Brunson: Yeah, that’s me. Franklin: Over on the, second from the left? Brunson: Yeah, I’m the non-president male. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, this is a picture of the president of Westinghouse Hanford Company. His name was Al Squires. This is the team that we finally pulled together after years of actually working on it, the Final Safety Analysis Report. FSAR. It was a major, major activity regarding the safety of the operation of FFTF. Franklin: Wow. Brunson: It was a big job and a lot of people supported it. We had a special activity where they thanked us and gave us cake or something. [LAUGHTER] This was the team that was in charge of the management of it. Franklin: So—this one? Rice: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Rice: [INAUDIBLE] Franklin: Yeah. This is kind of different. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: And all of these—all of the things we’ve scanned—all of the items Dennis brought, and then others we’ll make available with the interview on our website. So why don’t you tell us a bit about—this seems a little bit different from— Brunson: Well, there was a time when the PRTR Reactor building in the 300 Area, it was the Plutonium Research Test Reactor. It was a little domed building in the southeast part of the 300 Area. They decided this would be a great place to do work on the Star Wars activities. They were actively pursuing this when we got a new President, and it all went down with one big flush. But during that timeframe, we had a lot of illustrators that got to do some neat drawings about potential activities in space. So it was indeed a Hanford— Franklin: Project? Brunson: Project. Franklin: So the new President you’re talking about, would that have been—so it was George HW? Brunson: No, it was before that. It was back in the Carter days and times like that. Franklin: Oh, okay. Okay, so this predated the Star Wars—Reagan’s STI. Okay, but this was some of the-- Brunson: Yeah. We got excited about it for a while, but we just—it didn’t pan out. So that’s— Franklin: That’s pretty exciting. Rice: Yeah. Franklin: Pretty exciting picture. So this here—let me— Brunson: I don’t know if you can see that—no, that’s-- Franklin: Summary Description of the Fast Flux— Brunson: This is called a HEDL-400. HEDL was Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: We were basically in charge of the Fast Flux Test Facility. Franklin: Does 400 correspond to the area? Brunson: It is—well, I assumed that it did. It was the 400 Area. But inside, that’s—this is the—that’s the negative for that FFTF—the big one— Franklin: Oh, okay! Rice: Cool! Brunson: And they handed this to me in celebration. That was in 1981, when this was produced. Pat Cabell was the editor-in-chief, and I was sort of his whipping boy. Doing illustrations for all of the—and putting the book together. Are you able to see that? A lot of the illustrations in here, I did a lot of these illustrations. And a lot of us in the groups did them. But this is the interim decay storage facility that you have an illustration for over here. Franklin: Right. That’s right here, yeah. Brunson: This was the black-and-white version of that. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: That illustration that you have was done with the film positive and we painted on the back of it. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: I put a six-foot-tall cowboy down here in the corner to show scale. Franklin: That’s how large this is. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: Okay, great. Brunson: So this basically is the bible of FFTF, as far as how it’s constructed and how it was finalized. It’s kind of an as-built. Franklin: Okay. Oh, great. Do you have the Ron Kathren— Rice: Oh, yeah, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. That might be a good one to—I don’t know if we want to go through every single one. Brunson: No, that wasn’t my intent. Franklin: No, but we will make all of those available. Rice: Did he go into detail about how that whole thing was produced? Franklin: This one? I believe so. Brunson: Yeah, pretty much. Franklin: The airbrush and the— Rice: I didn’t quite catch that. I know the other ones— Franklin: So, how do you—Husco--? Brunson: Huscoubea. Franklin: So this is kind of Tri-Cities history, and-- Brunson: Yup! Franklin: WSU Tri-Cities, but also Hanford, in the way of the Joint Center for Graduate—so why don’t you talk a bit about the Huscoubea and your contribution to— Brunson: Yeah, this was—there was a fellow who—his name was Trent—who worked at WSU. Frank Trent was his name. He was a maintenance guy, and he was an artist. He was asked to come up with a critter that was part husky, part cougar and part beaver. They were initially going to use it for the first graduation—the diploma—as kind of a logo. And he struggled with it, and then he came to me and said, hey, can you help me? So I came up with a black-and-white version and they liked it. So he then came back later and they had me do an oil painting of it. So this is part of an oil painting that’s a little bit larger—I mean, shows the river bank, and the river in the distance and all of that. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Brunson: And it hung here at the college for years, and I think somewhere it’s still hanging. I hope. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And so here’s another. Brunson: Oh, yeah. Franklin: We’ll have to come up here—and so—a little more. This is Professor Emeritus Ron Kathren who’s been interviewed by us, and Herbert Parker Foundation, long-time health physics professional and proud Coug, holding the oil painting of the Huscoubea on our 20th celebration, which I think would have been in 2008 or 2009. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: So this was the final painting, then. Brunson: That’s the painting. Franklin: --that was done. Brunson: It hung in this building upstairs, as you came in. For years and years it was there. Yeah. I used to come out here for art classes at night and on the weekends. It was—it always hung there and I was always so proud of it. It was an unusual illustration. Franklin: Yeah. It’s probably maybe the most unusual college mascot-- Brunson: [LAUGHTER] Rice: Yeah. Franklin: --I’ve ever seen. Brunson: It didn’t last for long. Franklin: Okay, so this will be our last one here. Both of them? Rice: Well, the hand drawing probably. Franklin: Okay. Rice: I don’t know if it will show up, though. Oh, okay. Franklin: It looks like it will. So this obviously isn’t a final, right? Brunson: No, that’s considered a rough. Franklin: Okay. Brunson: That was—we did an ongoing—that was a main—a big part of our activity at Hanford in the graphics department was safety and security. Franklin: Right. Brunson: And it kept a lot of people employed, because they’re always wanting something new to—it was very—they were real serious about safety and security, which is great. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, when you’re dealing with nuclear reactors. Brunson: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. And the Hanford safety record is very well-documented. Okay, well that’s great. And—that, yeah. So, Dennis, thank you so much for coming. Brunson: Well— Franklin: And sharing your story and walking us through the process. Brunson: This was fun. Franklin: Oh, great. Well, thank you. Brunson: I could probably keep this up for a couple hours! [LAUGHTER] If you didn’t have something important to do. <a href="https://youtu.be/pXttl755HyE">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area T Canyon B Canyon FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 300 Area Hanford Science Center 400 Area PRTR (Plutonium Reclamation Test Reactor) HEDL (Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1964- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1964-2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dennis Brunson Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Technical illustration Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear reactors Description An account of the resource Dennis Brunson moved to Richland, Washington in 1964. Dennis worked on the Hanford Site from 1964- 2008. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/18/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. Relation A related resource <a href="http://hanfordhistory.com/collections/show/12">Oral History Metadata</a> https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9824ec8966bf981ce8951152b797944e.JPG bf9b93cefcb51ac53d04c8b194cee864 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Walter Braten Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Walt Braten on January 18, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Walt about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, could you state and spell your full name for us? Walt Braten: Okay. I’m Walter James Braten. And it’s spelled B-R-A-T-E-N. Franklin: And Walter is--? How do you spell “Walter”? Braten: W-A-L-T-E-R. Middle initial J for James. Franklin: Thanks. And do you prefer Walter or Walt? Braten: Walt is fine. Franklin: Okay, great. So, Walt, tell me how you came to the Hanford area. Braten: I had been working at a job that became more and more less-satisfying and I was looking for something else. I went into a gun store and talked to the people I’d been visiting with. I said, where’s so-and-so? And they said, well, he’s gone to work for Hanford. He’s got a great job. And I said, really? Tell me about it. And so he told me to come to the Federal Building and look into becoming a patrolman. So I did so, and after a time, they called me and asked me to come down for an interview, and then hired me. As a Hanford patrolman. But they have classes for people to prepare to be patrolmen, and it wasn’t going to start for some weeks. They said, would you like to come work just any old job we can scare up until the job opens—the training starts? So I said, sure, and I became a delivery guy, running around delivering phone books and all kinds of stuff. And then the training started. And we had several large books of how a patrolman should dress, how long their hair should be, and all the details of their job. After going through all that, we had also a lot of physical training. We had to climb a ladder that was held up by cables and that spooked some of the would-be patrolman. And carry heavy weights and run a certain distance. I did all that. And they hired me. So then I had a training session and it was physical and also information. I had to run a mile in a certain length of time and all that. And I did all that, even though I’d been working at desks for years before. I wasn’t quite as zippy, and I was a little older than most of the other would-be patrolmen. And I had a pretty good time, and I enjoyed the job. Lots of shooting and knowing what we should do and not do in a radiation area. Then I was hired and at first, I was—I think they called it a red badge or whatever—they didn’t give me a gun until I had some training. So mostly I just let cars in and out of the plant. I had to look at their badges, look in their lunchbox, look in their purses, look in their trunk and wave them on. And that, you can imagine, that got pretty boring. But they had other jobs, like tactical response team and traffic and working at the computer, person in charge of letting people in and out of the plant, making plutonium. And also they had a boat, a jet boat on the Columbia, and they had a helicopter. And I applied for everything. So I worked traffic, and I worked running the computerized protection for the Z Plant. And generally had an interesting time. Franklin: Okay, what year was it that you started out at Hanford? Braten: Oh, gee, I don’t remember. Franklin; Do you remember the decade? Braten: Pardon me? Franklin: Do you remember the, like, kind of a guess or like a timespan, what decade it would have been? Braten: Well, see, I’d say I was in my 50s. And I was born in 1930. Franklin: Okay. Braten: So—and then I stayed about 15 years. Franklin: Okay. Braten: At Hanford. Franklin: So that would’ve been like the late ‘70s, early ‘80s? Braten: Yes. Franklin: Okay. So you became a patrolman in your 50s. Braten: Right. Franklin: That is kind of an—older, I think, than the average person who—kind of, new patrolman. Braten: Yes. But I was able to do it. And I had a degree in—a bachelors—and I was accustomed to working with people in the other jobs I’ve had. So I had a good time. We had to be very careful and not make mistakes and let someone in who shouldn’t be in. And on everyone’s badge, there was information on their level of security and which plants they would be allowed in, and some other things. So it was imperative that we keep the security. Because this is extremely important; it was plutonium. We had to beware of the enemy, of course. Probably knew as much about it as we did. And we had to be aware of the love triangle where somebody wants to kill somebody at the plant. That had happened in another plant, many—out of state here. Franklin: Are you talking about the—oh, the lady—Karen Silkwood, is that--? Braten: No. Franklin: Okay. So—sorry, explain this “love triangle” thing a bit more. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of this. Braten: Well, if somebody is involved with someone not their husband or wife and the party being cheated on could decide to kill himself and the Romeo. This is what one person did, I was told. And they had a mess to clean up. Franklin: Do you know where that had happened? Braten: I was told it was in Idaho. Franklin: Oh, okay. So— Braten: This is all gossip. Franklin: Sure, hearsay. Braten: And then there was the disgruntled employee who’s going to be fired and wants to be vengeful and destructive. So we had lots of drills in the middle of the night. After I got on working as a traffic person—I liked it because I could run around. I had certain places I had to check. But they’d announce, intruder at certain place. And I would immediately accelerate, tell them I was coming. They had patrolmen involved in certain positions and jobs in that situation. At first we didn’t know if it was real, and then they made it real—let us know that it was a—I mean, let us know that it was a drill. Because we were going in loaded, with M-16s and pistols and shotguns and—for real. And we’d have some exercises. They brought in some people out of state with lasers on the weapons, and we could shoot at each other and disable and “kill” the other person. This was excellent training. We had a good time doing that, except when they’d have me walking around to be the first guy to get shot. That wasn’t fun. Anyway, our jobs were much like night watchmen at times, going through the buildings, making sure someone hadn’t left their coffee maker on or water running or anything that shouldn’t be happening. We also were checking for breaches of security. We had some file cabinets that had combinations on them, and they contained secret documents. If I went in the office and tried the handle and pulled it open, that was a breach. And we’d have to call the supervisor to come in and inventory the contents and so on. So that made us popular, too. Franklin: Did that ever happen? Braten: I didn’t find any. We would pick up their desk blotter and look under it, because we were told some people wrote their combination there. So we tried to think, as human beings, open the desk drawer if it was not locked and just look. That kept us busy all night. In one of the plants, they had a flood and the water brought up radiation out of the tile. And when I went in, I had—they called it SWP. They had booties and clothes and we went in and I managed to get my feet contaminated. They called it getting crapped up. Franklin: Yup. Braten: That delayed the normal routine. Periodically, we’d have an hour in the middle of our day to exercise. They tried to keep us physically fit and aware. And doing it right. There were dangers, of course, with contamination. If we went on top of any of the buildings, we had to get surveyed, because the bird droppings were radiated, would contaminate our shoes. We just had to deal with this existence of something invisible, odorless, tasteless, but it could kill us. Franklin: Sure. Braten: I enjoyed the job. We would examine the people driving in with their glove compartment and trunk and whatever. And when the busses came in, we’d hop on. Many of the people were asleep. Sometimes, I’d say, welcome to Disneyland West, and wake them up. I have to look in your purses and check your badges. One time, I looked at a guy’s badge and there was a woman’s picture on it. And I said, what’s this? And he said, oh, I got my wife’s badge. She’s got mine! So, we helped him go into the outside of the place he wanted to go in, to the guard’s station, where his manager could come up and write him a temporary badge. And his wife somewhere was going through the same process. We had some problems with people sneaking in, back when the coyote pelts were valuable. The animals on Hanford were tame, and they would come in and shoot them. So we patrolmen had to roam around in the dark and try to catch them. We never did. But I think two patrolmen managed to bump into each other in the dark. We had a helicopter that was French, had a heat indicator, could fly over and see people or animals. That helped a lot. Franklin: Were there any breaches or anything while you were working as a patrolman? Braten: No, not really. We were warned that the peace people would might sneak in and try to make a scene. But that never happened. That I saw. I don’t think it happened at Hanford. Mostly, it was people who were lost. They’d come into the Hanford Barricade and to the T where if they turned left, they’d go down to the Columbia, and turn right, they’d come back into town, or straight ahead into the Hanford Area. We had one guy show up—I didn’t deal with him—who was bound and determined he was going to go straight ahead because he had gone straight ahead, and by God there was a ferry in there. We told him, no, he couldn’t pay his toll. If he’d go out, turn right, and go down to the Columbia, and if there wasn’t a great big bridge, please come back and tell us. He didn’t come back, so he must’ve found bridge. But ignored the “come back and tell us.” Sometimes people would show up and dancing about really needing a restroom. They’d want to come in our guard shack if we’d let them. We weren’t supposed to, but often we did. We were well-armed and—I felt safe. Franklin: Kind of hard to turn down someone in need of a restroom. Braten: Some young woman about to have an accident. Franklin: Yeah. Braten: We had to use our common sense. And then I worked traffic for a while. Took training, breathalyzer training and radar training. Franklin: Was that traffic on the Hanford Site? Braten: Just on the Hanford Site. The management downtown would just have a cat fit if we stopped anybody outside the Project. They didn’t want us getting involved. We had to leave Hanford and go over to where there was a pump station, and there’d been some vandalism. So those working patrol would have to drive over there and look around. They were getting alarms downtown, and so we’d all rush out there. Turns out, it was an owl’s nest, and the mama owl would fly in and out and trip the detector system. So that was an example. Crawling around in the cactus and whatever, wondering what’s ahead was kind of tense. But it was just an owl. Franklin: You said you had to search people when they came in and out of areas. Did you ever find anything—oh sorry. Braten: We had a thing, you now, that would detect metal. And, well, sometimes people would mistakenly leave things in their cars. I opened a guy’s car once and there was about a metric ton of ammunition and stuff. Of course, you don’t enter Hanford with ammunition, guns, cameras and so on. And he said, oh, my dad’s a reloader and he borrowed my car. Well, he had to take—he or somebody had to take all that stuff down to the Federal Building. And he’d had to go down there later on to explain why and get it back. Another time, somebody had some guns, he’d been out shooting. One time, a guy had a flare pistol. A guy tried to leave once with his pickup truck full of sheet lead. I said, what are you doing? He said, well, I’ve got a pickup truck and it’s icy now and I wanted some weight to hold me down to get home safely. I’ll bring it back. I said, no, you can’t take all that lead out of here. Put it back. Stuff like that. Most—one guy had a missile. Turned out it was a model of, I think it was under Rockwell—a model that he’d taken off somebody else’s desk and was trying to sneak it home. That caused some excitement when we called in, there’s a guy with a missile here. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Braten: Once I hit a deer while on patrol and disabled a car, and I had to call that in. And I said, this is Braten working 2-4 and I hit a deer. And there’s a silence, then all kinds of excited communication: are you all right, where are you? And it was embarrassing. But anyway, somebody came and examined the scene. They later sold that car in their junk car sales they had at Hanford. That was broad daylight, and the deer just jumped up in front of me and ran across the road. Must’ve been unhappy and wanted to commit suicide. Anyway. There were times of a little excitement. Sometimes we had brush fires that were really dangerous. We had to control them and maintain security. People would park along our fence and take naps. And I’d see them; I’d have to wake them up and see what they were doing and send them on their happy way. That’s very—normally very humdrum. Franklin: Yeah. Had you heard about Hanford—so, you were not born—you’re not a native of Washington. Braten: No. Peoria, Illinois. Franklin: Peoria, Illinois. And when did you move to the state of Washington? Braten: Let’s see, it was in the early ‘60s. Franklin: Okay. Braten: I came out here to work as a missionary in Toppenish with the Native Americans and the migrants. Franklin: Okay. Braten: That’s how I got here. And I taught public school. Franklin: Had you heard about Hanford before you came out to this area? Braten: No. Franklin: No. Had you heard about the—I assume you would’ve heard about the Manhattan Project? Braten: Yes, yes. Franklin: When did you first become aware of Hanford? Braten: When I talked to that friend about a job that he had, an acquaintance had, that’s the first I’d heard of Hanford. And with my experience of being a juvenile parole counselor, et cetera, they might hire me. And I had—of course, I had a degree. So that’s the first I heard of it. I knew nothing about it. Franklin: When did you first learn as to what was being made at Hanford, and did it ever worry you to be working so close to atomic material? Braten: No. I learned what was going on when I hired on. And they gave us extensive training on contamination—surface contamination, airborne contamination. How could we get hurt, what we had to avoid. And if an area was marked, omit. Don’t pick up anything. If you see a big piece of rope or a mask or whatever, don’t pick it up. Notify the people who knew how to deal with potential radiation. So I knew nothing about it until I came. Franklin: What was one of the most challenging aspects of your work as a security guard—patrolman, sorry. Braten: Running. We had a captain who believed in running. I teased him and asked, Ralph, don’t you want anybody who’s going to stand and fight? He was an ex-marine from the Vietnam era. Anyway. Running was a challenge, a physical challenge. I could shoot. I was refused as a Navy chaplain because of my vision. But at Hanford, I shot expert, day and night, with the pistol, the rifle and the shotgun. That was no—that was fun. That was no challenge. But running was. Some of the training was a run, fall, shoot, run, fall, shoot. And I just couldn’t keep up to become a tactical response team member. I could, a regular patrolman. But that physical was the most challenging. And paying attention, not getting bored. Not getting lax. Not getting sleepy in the middle of the night. Franklin: Yeah, I imagine that would be very difficult, especially when you’re—what kind of shifts were you on? Were you on mostly nights, or did it vary a lot? Braten: Well, this was horrible. And totally unhealthy and everybody knows it except Hanford, apparently. We’d change shifts every week. And not in the same order as day and night. So we’d work a week in graveyard, and then a week in days or a week in swing, and year after year. It was really difficult. Oh, and we had a couple days off on what they call long change. That was hard to be rested. Franklin: I would imagine trying to switch from day to graveyard or vice versa with just a weekend to make that switch would be really trying on you. Braten: Well, occasionally—I don’t know what the other patrolmen did, but occasionally I’d show up on my day off. [LAUGHTER] And they’d either send me home or let me work. Franklin: That’s funny. What was one of the most rewarding aspects of your job as a patrolman? Braten: Well, occasionally, I’d—when I was out running around outside, I’d be able to help people who were stalled. The thought that I was doing something for our country. We were in the Cold War, back when our presidents negotiated, and we were making plutonium. And we and the Russians were playing chess. If you do this, we’ll do this. So don’t do this. And it worked. We didn’t have World War III. We had a lot of skullduggery and little brushes here and there, but we avoided World War III because we were well-armed. We had missiles in the air. We had weapons that would blow the smithereens out of wherever we dropped them. We had all kinds of missiles and submarines and in silos and in ships. I felt that I had a part in that, that I was protecting America. That was rewarding to me. Franklin: You eventually found a different—you quit being a patrolman. And how did that come about? Braten: They examined us physically every year and they gave us a psychology test. They didn’t want people running around with guns who had a loose wire in the nuke plant. Franklin: Makes sense. Braten: Yes. Well, at one of the tests, this doctor said he thought I had stress asthma, that if I was running around in an exciting time, I might have to stop and cough. I never experienced that, but they wanted me to stop being a patrolman. So they said, we’ll find you another job. Of course, they didn’t; I had to find a job. And I looked into quality control, which is about as popular as being a patrolman. You’re telling people they’re doing something wrong or have to stop sometimes because they have goals to benchmarks and stuff to achieve. And I enjoyed that. And that’s that packet of certificates I showed you. At first they trained me by follow-him. And then they got real busy and sent me to hundreds of classes, and one long one, about a year, about how to examine wells, if they were good. With the different kinds of wells. So I enjoyed that, being a quality control person. Franklin: Around what time did you become a quality control person, do you remember the era or—you know. Braten: Well, it was—let’s see, when did I leave? I left when I was 62. I was born in ’30, what does that make it? Franklin: ’92? Braten: Somewhere like that. Franklin: Early ‘90s? Braten: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Okay, so— [WOMAN OFF-SCREEN]: But you quit in ’93. So it was the late ‘80s. Braten: Oh, it had to be before that, if I left at ’93. Franklin: Yeah. Braten: Okay. Franklin: My bio here, it says—okay, so, you spent several years then as a QC. Braten: Right. Franklin: Which is what they call it. Braten: And I wanted to change because I thought I could make more money in communications. They sent papers around advertising the various openings. I went for an interview and the lady who interviewed me thought I was well-suited. I had a degree in English and speech and all this other stuff. And after we worked together a very short time, she decided she didn’t like me. It was—my feelings were the same. Anyway, she said I could apply for another job. We weren’t supply for another job for something like six months or a year, but she said I could start immediately looking for another job. And I finally retired. But then they called me back periodically to work as a QC again. But at my inflated wages. So that was great for me. Franklin: So you got the QC as the communications wages. Braten: Right. And of course, I was getting my pension, too, from having retired. So I worked various weeks when they wanted me and needed me in quality control. And I worked all the plants and places where they’re making models and experimenting. That was interesting, I learned a lot. Franklin: Did that work take you pretty much all throughout the Site? Braten: Yes. Franklin: At that time? Braten: Patrol did, also. Franklin: Right, so you have a pretty good knowledge, then, of the whole— Braten: Yes and no. I was in all the plants; I knew what went on. But if Russians tried to torture me to tell them how we made plutonium, I couldn’t tell them. Everything was still in that wartime need-to-know. You needed to know your job; you didn’t need to know the whole thing. And that was a mistake. I didn’t pay attention; I should have and learned all the other things. Because the security was lessening all the time and I could’ve done other things. They had jobs for locksmiths and laundry and—you know, everything. Map-making. So it was a pretty good place to work; you just had to mind your Ps and Qs. Franklin: Yeah. Can you describe a typical workday as a quality control officer? Braten: Well, I’d come roaring in from where I lived in Yakima or Sunnyside at the last tick of the clock usually. I would check in and see if there’s anything pending that I needed to go right away. Then I would go over to wherever we were working and suit up and go into the hot zones and look around. I’d be a pair of eyes and look for things to do, to look at. Every box where they made plutonium had gloves, lead-lined gloves. Each glove had a date on it and had to be changed out within a certain time. Well, sometimes, I would go into these areas and pull out the glove enough to where I could read the date and do the whole area and find gloves that were past their due date. They called these snapshots surveillances, and they could be solved either satisfactory, unsatisfactory corrected immediately, or unsatisfactory. And nobody liked the unsatisfactories. So I’d write up a surveillance and right away send copies to the people I should. Also, we had steel drums containing contaminated tools and other items. And these were—I had to inspect the drums when they came in to make sure the inner lining had a zinc coating. These, then, would be numbered, the lid and the drum. And when they had radiated material—radiation-contaminated, they would put a big bag in it and put the material in it. It wasn’t supposed to have liquids and some other things. And then they would seal it and then the outer rim had to be torqued and put pounds. And then a little pop-valve was torqued in inch pounds. I had to watch them while they did it, and the torque wrenches had to be calibrated within a certain time; I had to look at that. And sometimes tell these well-paid operators what they were supposed to do. As you tighten the ring, you’re supposed to hammer it with a mallet, and tighten it and hammer it. I said, now you hammer the ring. And he took the torque wrench and went, wham! I said, no! So we had to get another torque wrench while that one was recalibrated. So I did hundreds of those. And they took them out to a big pit and lined them up and then covered them with I don’t know how much dirt. They’re supposed to last hundreds of years. We also had attempts to create places where they could last even longer than that that were thwarted various ways. Anyway, so, I was busy inspecting drums, I was busy doing—if they called over and wanted somebody, they had a new job going in, and I had a little stamp with my number QC that I carried around. And I’d have to go in and watch them while they did this job. I’d look at the work order, what steps they were to do, and where I was supposed to verify it, and then I would. And then I’d stamp it and initial it and date it. So I did a lot of that. When the plastic shop made—they called it a greenhouse because it was made of plastic. It wasn’t green, but you could see through it. They would seal that to the front of a glovebox where they were making plutonium, unbolt it and open it up. And we were on supplied air, or tanks, and they would fix whatever needed fixing. Sometimes—one time, they had a broken front of the thing made of some kind of thick—it wasn’t Lucite, but of that sort. It had a couple of ports, a port down here, and where you could reach in and work. They came, I watched them while they drew up a plan of it. And I stamped that off. When they announced it was ready, I went in, they took off the front, had everybody sealed, you know. And they got the new one and they had turned the model over and the holes were all in wrong places. And this stuff costs a mild fortune. So they had to put the broken one back on, seal it all up, measure it and make sure, and then go make one right. That was an interesting time. They couldn’t blame me, thank God. Another time they did blame me. Somebody decided I should carry a Top Secret stamp and in the various steps in the making of these hockey pucks, plutonium, I had to watch while they made it. And when it first came in, I stamped the paper—the card that went with them, Top Secret—or Secret, not Top Secret. It was supposed to stay with that item. Well, the operators and managers had never had that to contend with, and they didn’t care. A whole bunch of those tags got lost. Well, anything marked Secret that gets lost, we have people from God in Heaven and whatever, in demanding to know what happened. So I had to go all over to wherever there was plutonium stored. When they made it, they put it in a double bag and then a tin can and you could feel the heat when you took hold of them. You couldn’t feel the radiation, but thermal. Well, I must’ve examined hundreds of them, exposing myself to find those. I found them everywhere in a little red wagon they used to haul them around, and on the floor, and on the wall. When they summed it up, they blamed quality control— Franklin: Of course. Braten: --for the security breach. Which I thought was a crock. Anyway, no one cared what I thought. I was a grunt. So that was quality control. We were a second pair of eyes, we were trying to help them do it right. We were sometimes unappreciated, but—oh, another time, they had some counterfeit bolts that were marked as though they were hardened enough to hold a great weight or twist or torque. But they were counterfeit; they were from China or somewhere. And they were mild steel and they would break. We found them on hoists, man-lifts, we found them everywhere. And for a long time, that was my job, going over and everywhere there was a hex head bolt, look at it. And you could tell the counterfeit by the counterfeit stamp, the way they arranged the markings. So we had sacks and sacks of them, and they said they were going to have us send them somewhere. Finally they said, junk them, we don’t want them. And we had a ton of those things. But we replaced every one of them with an accurate bolt. They apparently had gotten in the aviation industry and all over America. Franklin: Oh, wow. Braten: So we would test things. They had a container for shipping plutonium pellet—they call it a pellet or whatever. They’d drop it and see if it would break and so on. So we were doing, anytime they were testing anything, testing the elevators with weights, testing the hoists. We’d put on a hardhat, like that was going to help if anything broke. And watch them. So anything they did, quality control was there. They were very, very concerned about confined spaces, because people have died—one suck of breath and they die. You got to wear supplied air and have somebody watching you, or you can’t do it. So I’d have to go, and there was a supplied air job, standing up on the surface and watch. Also, they had boxes on all kinds of machines to turn it on and off, and they had a way to turn it off and then put a lockout device on it so somebody couldn’t come along while the guy was inside working and turn it on. They were lockouts. Well, they had a lot of education on it, and they had all of us QCs roaming, watching every place that was being worked with the lockout device on. And we made everybody keenly aware of that. We didn’t hardly find anything like that wrong, because they want to protect themselves. We went behind the scene for accidents. High voltage box blew up and melted copper and stuff blew all over everybody around it. They would send us films about the Valdez and every other—the place where the poisonous gas got loose in India. They’d examine every accident, why did it happen, how could it have been avoided, and they would show us those films to try to forewarn us of how it could be avoided. We had a person scalded because this area had been shut down and it was turned on. For some reason when they shot the steam in, it blew up and scalded a guy. They examined, very carefully, any accident, because they were very security-conscious. They didn’t want anybody hurt. Some of the Navy guys came in, nuke people. Of course they thought they were great stuff. I was dying to ask them, how many people a year get killed in the Navy by accidents? How many people at Hanford? None. So if you’re going to tell us how to do it, we’ll consider it. We didn’t have a choice, though. They were high muckety-mucks. You know, irritating things. We had fun with the PAC system. We could hit a number and talk in the phone and all over the area, we could say we need a QC at a certain point, and we’d all hear it. Sometimes people would mess with that, too. But anyway. Less I contaminate myself— Franklin: [LAUGHTER] What were the most challenging aspects of being a QC at Hanford? Braten: Doing it right. I didn’t have the eyes of eagles, and sometimes I had to look at a tag or something from, through a walled-off area and see it. So I thought of bringing a small monocular, binocular. I usually was able to do it. But I had a little trouble seeing some of the things. And I had to keep in mind what were the steps, what was I to do. And that was challenging to do it right, because I felt like, well, somebody told me that if a QC knowingly okays something and it’s not okay and somebody gets hurt, I could go to prison. Well, that made me highly motivated, even more than I’d been, to do the job right. Not because of punishment; because I wanted to. It was sometimes a challenge to interpret and to deal with some of the personnel. Most of them, we had fun with. I mean, not hilarious, but we treated each other like people. Occasionally, a patrolman would get badge-heavy and ruff, ruff, ruff. But most of us realized we were working with our friends and neighbors. We were going to do the job, but we weren’t going to jump down anybody’s throat. Franklin: What about the rewards? What was the most rewarding aspect of being a QC? Braten: I guess it was being part of a team that was doing something worthwhile. We had excellent rapport with our other patrolmen, mostly. Once in a while there’d be an oddball, but we were carefully screened and then have the written, and examination with the psychologist every year. If we screwed up, we heard about it. We could get time off, we could get fired. So I thought it was good to work there, with good people doing something worthwhile. There were irritating things. There were rattlesnakes out there and a few other hazards. But running into a deer when you’re driving 80 is really exciting. Or an owl with your windshield. You had to be careful, stay awake. Franklin: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about some major events that took place while you were working at Hanford. Braten: Okay. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could tell me how Chernobyl impacted Hanford and the community and your work there. Braten: Well, we were told—somebody told us, I don’t know TV or Hanford, that we should take iodine tablets. We were keenly aware that this stuff was circulating in the clouds, radiation. We kept close tabs on what was going on. We didn’t have to have much to do with it; we just had to deal with it. The most troublesome was the blowup of Mt. St. Helens. It dumped stuff that was the size of tiny, you could breathe it, to beach sand. We couldn’t stop with our duties and we couldn’t not drive. We had to put filters on our air filters, and we had to drive our cars in there through that. So I put filter material over my air intake and hoped I wouldn’t ruin my engine. We had to be careful driving in that poor visibility. On places it was ruining the paint on our cars and whatever. But we had to come. That was keen—we had to come. Whether it was a holiday or a graduation or whatever, we had to be there. So, it made us, whatever, committed, you might say. Maybe with a little grumbling, but committed. Franklin: How did your job change at the end of the Cold War, when Hanford shifted from production to cleanup? Braten: Well, I had changed jobs, of course. But there was an air of freedom and relief. Because we knew we’d be a target if there was war, or even without war, for espionage. Anyway, I think we went into a cleanup mode. They had tumbleweeds out there, lots and lots of tumbleweeds. But they were contaminated. What they were going to do was collect them and burn them. Well, they couldn’t burn them, because it would put radiation in the air. Then they brought in bales—like farm machines, to bale them. So what they did was, there’s a lot of sand out there, they built walls along the roads with these baled tumbleweeds to keep the drifting sand from drifting over the road and needing to be cleaned up. We dealt with the radiation and the potentials, and tried to lead normal lives. We found out the drinking water in our headquarters in 2-West was possibly contaminated. So, they had that changed with bottled water. And I didn’t know what they did then. There were interesting quirks. We had a big company picnic every year. That was fun. We’d get together and put races and picnic. And occasionally the management would call us all to a big meeting, and they would bring in buses and send us all somewhere downtown. And management would tell us what they wanted to tell us. The theory was they were helping us be onboard and take ownership—that was a big word. They were telling us what was going to happen. We really didn’t have any say-so in it, except yes or— Franklin: Right. Braten: But I liked working there. Occasionally I had problems, but I perhaps shouldn’t discuss them. Franklin: You can if you want to. Braten: Just—some of the—sometimes somebody in management would fuss at us without cause, just because they could, I guess. We, in patrol, were told that we were paramilitary, and saying pseudo-military just to have fun. But we had excellent weapons and excellent training. And we took pride. Some people would call us rent-a-cops. People who didn’t want to obey simple rules. You’re going to work there, you’re going to be searched. You’re going to have to obey security. And I felt like saying, you know, you should go to work for McDonald’s. They don’t have to put up with this stuff. But they’re getting super pay and they begrudge every day, every time they came in or left. At Christmastime, people would bring in, for gift exchange, wrapped gifts. As they came in, they had to unwrap it and show us what’s in there. You want to feel like a Grinch. Franklin: Should’ve just brought the gift and some wrapping paper. Braten: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. That’s funny, though. I could see how that would be tough to do gift exchange in a secure area. Braten: Right. Franklin: Yeah. Could you describe the ways in which security and secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Braten: Well, of course, as a patrolman, that was part of our job, to see that the rules were obeyed. The badges we had that told all the stuff, we weren’t supposed to wear them out in public or be photographed. It was Hanford. It was secret. I had no trouble—I didn’t want to blab about anything. We had somebody in management in security that blabbed. Somebody came in and said, hey, my sister down in California says you got Uzis now. We didn’t tell anybody. Oh, another thing, the security around the plutonium plant, we didn’t tell our wives what was going on. But one of them gave a newspaper report and even brought reporters through. And I thought, what?! Anyway. It wasn’t for me to question. I just wondered in my mind that it wouldn’t be the way I’d run a war. Franklin: Different standards, I guess, for different levels of management. Braten: Oh, yes, most of the management was really good. Just once in a while, somebody’d be a cross patch. We weren’t always angels, either. Franklin: I’m sure. Well, you could talk about it now, because what are they going to do, I mean, fire you? You know? Braten: Burn something on my lawn or whatever. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I don’t think they’d do that. I think they have bigger problems to worry about right now. Braten: Well, it was handy, though, when we were going to Europe, my wife and I, for a vacation, I could call Hanford at a certain number and tell them where we were going. And they could say, okay, and they would say, well, when you’re in this country, beware of this, this, this. So they gave us a heads up about potential dangers. Franklin: Mm. Kind of like the State Department publishes those periodic reviews— Braten: Oh, do they? Franklin: Yeah, of different activities, like, meant for tourism. Like, if you’re going to this country, beware of x, y, z. Braten: Gee, I didn’t know. Franklin: Oh, yeah. It’s on their website. Braten: We just went for a big trip a couple years ago. Franklin: Oh, okay. Braten: Anyway. Franklin: My last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Braten: Well, mostly you hear complaints about radiation release. People who moved in down wind and felt they were contaminated. My feeling is they should’ve known we were not making popsicles. But anyway, I guess I’d like them to know that we filled a niche in history where we helped prevent World War III. And that we furthered research in nuke medicine and a whole bunch of good things evolved from Hanford. So, I’d like them to know the good things as well as the contamination. We have to deal with the waste and we have to deal with radioactive materials and for a long time, it has to be secure. So I’d like to know some of the good that we did. Franklin: Great. Well, Walt, is there anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up? Braten: I guess not. I liked the jobs. I was grateful for the jobs, I was grateful for the pay. They gave us lunches when we had to lunch over—forced overtime. They gave us uniforms, did the laundry, you know, a lot of nice things. And a lot of training. I appreciate that, and I think we did a job that America needed to have done. Franklin: Great. Well, thank you, Walt, I really appreciate your taking the time to interview with us. Braten: Well, you’re welcome. Thank you for being interested. Franklin: Okay. Yeah, very much so. <a href="https://youtu.be/5MKr2OtELwU">View interview on Youtube.</a> Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1978- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1978-1993 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Walter Braten Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear reactors Nuclear waste disposal Description An account of the resource Walt Braten moved to Richland, Washington to work on the Hanford Site as a Patrolman. Walt worked on the site from 1978-1993. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01/18/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F2dfabc7cdd127876e2887c8b732f24cc.JPG 28eb938062eb4770c1b8f122a4933867 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Tom Bennett Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Tom Bennett on September 18, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Tom about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Tom Bennett: Full name is Thomas J. Bennett. T-H-O-M-A-S. Middle initial J. And then Bennett, B-E-N-N-E-T-T. Franklin: Great, thanks. And do you prefer Tom? Bennett: I go by Tom, yes. Franklin: Okay. Bennett: Unless it’s academic circles. Franklin: I’m fine with—casual’s fine with me. So, Tom, tell me how and why you came to the area to work for Hanford Site. Bennett: I graduated from UCLA in 1964. My goal was to get a long ways away from the Los Angeles area. The final choice was between Houston where they were doing the man on the moon which was another five years before that happened, and Hanford, which to me, it was exciting because it was nuclear energy. Franklin: What was your degree in? Bennett: Engineering. Franklin: Engineering, okay. Just basic engineering? Bennett: Yeah, well, UCLA thought they were way ahead of everyone. In your junior and senior year, if you were an engineering major, you had to take two courses in electrical engineering, a course in nuclear engineering, a course or two in mechanical engineering. They tried to spread everything, because someone had done a study and they observed that people who were a mechanical engineer, five years later they were working as a civil engineer, and vice versa. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bennett: So they tried to make it real broad. And then I went to University of Washington, I got a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and then a doctorate in civil engineering from WSU. Franklin: Oh, okay, and when did you finish up at WSU? Bennett: ’88. Franklin: ’88, oh, okay. But you weren’t in school—were you in school that entire time? Or were you working? Bennett: No, I worked at Hanford from ’64 to ’70, but I took ’67 and ’68 off to get the master’s degree from University of Washington. And then I went over to WSU between ’87 and ’88 to complete my doctorate. Franklin: Okay. [CLEARS THROAT] Sorry. Tell me about your work at Hanford. What did you do? Bennett: Well, I started off in the 300 Area. You had to—they had a trainee program, I think it was. You had to work someplace while you got your security clearance. We had the badges. The first one was a red badge, then a yellow badge, then a green badge is when you finally had your Q clearance. I worked at 300 Area; I remember working with Bill Bright and Carl somebody. They had a machine there that they took plutonium in a gassed-out container and then they had a smasher that would—when it was red hot and it’d been out-gassing for an hour or so, they’d have the smasher come down on it, and they wanted to get 99% theoretical density plutonium. Franklin: So you mean to like turn it into a solid? Bennett: Well, it was already a solid. Franklin: Already a solid. Bennett: But they heated it up to red-hot and a little tube came out the top and then they cut the tube off, and the smasher came down and crushed it. So, good thing it didn’t blow up, too. Franklin: Yeah! What amount, were we talking grams, or— Bennett: About a kilogram. Franklin: A kilogram. Bennett: I think. Because if they get too much, it goes critical on you. Franklin: Right. And what was the purpose of that? Why— Bennett: I don’t know. Well, a guy by the name of John Burnham, I think it was, it was his idea to do this smashing. He got all kinds of credit for it and awards and so on and so forth. It was his pet project. I wound up working there to start with. Franklin: What did you do there? Bennett: Watched. Franklin: Just watched, just observed? Bennett: Pretty much, yeah. Franklin: Okay. I wonder if you could tell me about the—talk a little bit about security, since you mentioned Q clearance. Security and secrecy, what was that process like and how long did it take? Bennett: I think it took about six months, but I didn’t know anything about clearances when I came here. But you had three different colored badges, one was when you start and then you get partially cleared. You get another color. And the green was the final security clearance. I believe they were called—what, do you have—you’ve talked to other people about this, haven’t you? Franklin: A little bit. Bennett: What do they call those clearances? Top secret or something like that? Franklin: I don’t—yeah, I’m not a clearance expert. Bennett: Yeah, one of the first colors was yellow and one was red, and then green was when you finally could go out in the Area and work. Franklin: Right, okay. So what did you do after you got your clearance? Bennett: I had three or four of the three-month assignments. One of them was at the 300 Area with the crusher or smasher. And then another was at N Reactor, I believe. It was the new production reactor at the time. And I think I had one at B Reactor operations. Because I remember they put me on—they had ABCD shift. And you worked six days and then seven swings and then six graveyards. And you got one-and-two-thirds days off between swing and night and then after you did the graveyard, you got four-and-two-thirds days off to come back and start the ABCD shift over again. What I remember about that was I could not adjust to it. Some of these guys had done it for 20, 30 years and they got along fine. I could not adjust to the graveyards. Franklin: And that’s where you would be there overnight, right? Bennett: Well, you’d be there from midnight ‘til 8 in the morning, or 11—well, it took an hour to get out there and an hour to get back, so whatever your shift was, you wound up doing ten or 11 hours. Or if you have, I don’t know what, half hour for lunch, maybe it’s 12 hours to do eight hours. Franklin: Wow. Bennett: It was more than the eight. Because the ride out was an hour and the ride back was an hour on the buses. I know I was not real happy with the salary, because it wasn’t as big as I thought I was worth. But they said, well, Tom, you can ride the bus for 50 miles for a nickel. Oh, well, if that’s the—I assume that was the economy, so that the money I made would be a lot. Franklin: Where did you live when you worked out there? Bennett: 2009 George Washington Way. Franklin: And what was that, was it a house or apartments or--? Bennett: It was a house. I meant—I tried to find it on the way in, but I didn’t—I was past it, the 2300 block before I saw it. I’ll see if I can find it on the way back out. But first I lived there, and then later on, I lived at 2404 Concord, I lived at 1408 Perry Court, and eventually bought a house. Franklin: Did you live in any Alphabet Houses? Bennett: F Houses? No. Franklin: Any Alphabet Houses? Bennett: Yeah, I know what, B, B, D, F. No, I lived at 2404 Concord—2009 George Washington Way was the first one, and then at 1408 Perry Court for a while, and then eventually wound up at 2404 Concord, and that’s the one I bought. Franklin: Oh, okay. So when you were working out these graveyards at B Reactor, what was your job, what were you doing? Bennett: What I remember is, since I was kind of a trainee, I’d go through the records. It was really fascinating to me to read about the early days when they started Hanford up, they had no idea what was going on or how big it would have to be. Enrico Fermi was out here. The old guys were here then that had been here when he was here, and they called him Henry Farmer. But interestingly the older guys were doing the work and the young guys were telling them what to do and how to do it. Franklin: Really? Bennett: Yeah. Franklin: And why was that? Bennett: Well, this was during the war, World War II. People had to have jobs. If you were in the Army, if you were young, you were in the Army or the Navy or the Air Force or Marines. And if you were older, a lot of them, I think 50,000 people came up here to work at Hanford. They had a big camp out there someplace, fenced in where you lived. Well, what I remember doing was reading the historical records about when it started up. I know it was because of Fermi that first they were going to have just the circular—well, B Reactor, what is that, 1,004 tubes? Franklin: 2,000 tubes. Bennett: 2,000 tubes? Well, originally we were going to just have circular form, because that’s the most efficient. But Enrico Fermi made sure that they had the corners, the tubes. And sure enough, the, I believe it’s zirconium that when they started up, everything went great and then all the sudden, phew, everything went down. Franklin: The xenon poisoning. Bennett: Xenon! Yeah, the xenon poisoning. Fermi figured that out. They figured it was xenon. They put more, they filled up the rest of the tubes, the corners, and that was enough to overcome the xenon to get things going. And you’ve been out to B Reactor, haven’t you? Franklin: Yes. Bennett: Yeah, and you see how big that thing is, and they built that, what, 60, 70 years ago? It was quite a deal. Franklin: It was. I’m wondering if you could describe a typical work day out at B Reactor when you were out there. Bennett: Well, I’d ride the bus out there. The older guys on the bus, they played cards all the way out there. I thought, these guys are kind of crazy. But then six weeks later, I’m playing cards right along with them. I learned how to play pinochle. I didn’t know anything about, virtually nothing about cards. But it cost me quite a few nickels but I did learn. I got to be as good as the rest of them after a while. I thought it was kind of weird, because these guys would play cards all the way out, during lunch they’d play cards, and they’d play cards all the way back, for nickels. Pinochle for nickels. Eventually I was in there with the thick of them. I do remember at N Reactor, a fellow named Milton Lewis. He had been a teacher at UCLA when I was there and I ran across him again. They had three guys there. One was Milt Lewis, another was Warren Macadam and the third was Roy Shoemaker. And the workers there nicknamed them the Shoe, the Jew and the Shrew. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] I’m wondering—stories about the bus are great. What was your day-to-day job at B Reactor, besides reading up on the history, what were you tasked with doing out there? Bennett: Well, it was cold operations. They ran the reactor, they sat there and watched the reactor go. From time to time they’d have to refuel it, and I’d watch that, be on the front face. Like an idiot, I wondered what was inside the tubes, so I looked inside one when it was empty. And then I realized, there’s probably radiation coming out of that into my eyes, probably not a real good idea. But I’m a young kid, 23 or 24, not knowing anything. But that was— Refueling was one of the things. Around back—well, when the tubes or the fuel elements, when they’d been irradiated enough, they pushed them out the back, they went into a little pool that was 20 feet deep. And you’d go around back—not while they were discharging them, but afterwards, you could go around back and you could look into that 20-foot pool and you could see the glow. It had a greenish-blue glow from the irradiated fuel elements. And they’d sit there for a while, then they’d take them to the 200 Area and process them. Interestingly enough, 2,000 pounds of uranium would make two pounds of plutonium, or maybe one pound. I mean, it was extremely small percentage. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bennett: When you think of the 200 Area where they did all those separations, how much—well, they put the things in double-shell tanks, now those tanks are rotting, it’s leaking into the Columbia River. All this is still going on and it’s, what, 60, 70 years later. Franklin: Did you ever go out to the 200 Area at all? Bennett: No. Well, I drove by it every day on the way to work. Franklin: Sure. Bennett: But I didn’t go and look at it. I knew they had tunnels. When they built it, I remember from reading a long time ago that they were going to have to use remote control to handle these things, so they used a remote control to build it. Then how deep were those troughs, those trenches? Were they— Franklin: Oh, I don’t remember off the top of my head. Bennett: I remember reading about it. They were long. Franklin: They were very long. I think they were something like 20 feet deep and then 40 feet wide. They’re all cells and they’re all—yeah. Bennett: Almost a mile long or whatever they had, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Really, really long, yeah. Like several football fields. Bennett: Right. Franklin: Yeah, huge. So you worked at 300 Area and then N and then B. Did you work anywhere—and how long did you work at— Bennett: Each assignment, I think, was three months long. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bennett: And I think I had three or four of them. Franklin: Then what did you do after that? Bennett: I worked at—I believe I worked at N Reactor. And then I left in ’67 to go over at University of Washington to get a master’s degree. Came back in ’68. And from ’68 to ’70, I’m pretty sure I was at N Reactor. And that was exciting. They were producing power as well as plutonium. Franklin: Yeah. What was your job then at N Reactor? Bennett: I was called nuclear engineer. I worked for Roy Shoemaker. There was seven or eight guys in the group. What I noticed—because I noticed that all the new engineers that came in, in six months to a year, they were gone. I was just aware of it, sort of in passing. Then after I went and got my master’s degree and came back, instead of working for the old guy, he’s gone now, Shoemaker is, but he’d been an engineering instructor at Oregon or Oregon State, one of those colleges. When I came back, I worked for Paul Cohen. He was a young guy; he was 30, 35, something like that. He had a fairly good-sized group. I think—this was back in I think the 300 Area, it was downtown. I worked for him. And the contrast between working for Shoemaker and working for Cohen was like between night and day. I understood why all those guys left Shoemaker after I worked for a good supervisor. I was a brand-new kid fresh out of college; I didn’t have any experience, didn’t know who a good instructor—or good teacher from a good—what do you call it, supervisor from a bad one. But after I had two supervisors, I realized why all those guys left after they’d been there not very long. Franklin: And what was it about Shoemaker versus Cohen that made it—made people leave so early? Bennett: Well, one of the things was Shoemaker had a pet. He’d give the same assignment—like a college professor—he gave me an assignment he gave his pet. And I remember, I was fairly good at math, so I figured out an exact solution to this thing. And this other kid, the pet, he did an approximate solution. He came out to my office—I was out in the Area a little bit. It was a different building. It wasn’t the N Reactor building; it was an outbuilding. He came out there, because he had an office inside, and he wanted to know all about my performance of calculations for such a thing. Eventually I figured out he wanted to know what I’d done because I’d done a better job than he had and he was the pet. This didn’t go over well with him. Franklin: Oh, so kind of playing favorites, playing people off— Bennett: Well, he’s playing favorites but the un-favorite did a better job than the favorite did. So the pet didn’t like that. Franklin: Yeah, I bet not. Bennett: But then that didn’t happen with Cohen. Cohen was a very good supervisor. Franklin: And you worked with Cohen at N Reactor as well? Bennett: No. I wish I could remember—wish I had those sheets that I lost, because it would tell me where I worked and when. I can only remember three of the four assignments; I don’t remember what the fourth one was. Franklin: That’s okay. Bennett: It’s been 60, 70 years. Franklin: So when you say nuclear engineer and working with a group of people, what kind of job is that? Is it a lot of calculations work, are you in the control room--? Bennett: Well, one of the things we did, we had a—we put a bunch of thermocouples in the back of the reactor in a tube. We wanted to get the heat distribution. It was a tube-in-tube fuel element. They had about an inch diameter tube that went down the middle, then they had some struts, and then they had another tube outside it, which was kind of an interesting arrangement, so they could get water flowing between the two tubes. We wanted to get the heat distribution of that, so we set up the thermocouples to measure the heat, and then figured out how hot it was getting and we could use that to improve the design for the next generation. It was that type of work. That’s one assignment I remember. Franklin: Oh, okay. Do you remember any other assignments? Bennett: No. Franklin: Okay. Bennett: I did like doing the math, though. Figuring out that—you get the regular dimensions and the tolerance, plus and minus, so you figure out all the variations and how much difference there can be from smallest to largest and how much fluid would go through it and what the approximations are. Franklin: Cool. And then after ’70, did you leave Hanford? Bennett: I went to WSU to work on a doctorate. Franklin: Oh, okay. And when did you start that? Bennett: In ’72, I believe. I think I was there from ’70 to ’72. Do you remember, Mary Ann? Okay. Because I worked from—I went to work in January or February, no, late January of ’64, and I worked there until ’67. Then I went over to University of Washington, ’67, ’68. Came back in ’68 and ’68 to ’70, I worked here at Hanford. And then ’70 to ’72, I taught at WSU. I taught statics, dynamics and fluid mechanics during those two years at WSU. Franklin: Okay, and that’s while you were working on your doctorate? Bennett: Right. But they gave me a title, pre-doctoral teaching associate. I taught those three courses. And took classes, too. Franklin: Okay. And then you finished your doctorate in ’72? Bennett: ’70—no, ’88. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bennett: Yeah, I didn’t—how—what—I’m trying to remember why I didn’t—there was a reason I didn’t finish it in ’72. I’ll think of it later and tell you. Franklin: Sure. And then were you at WSU that entire time? Bennett: No. Just ’70 to ’72. And then I went to—I took a one-year temporary teaching assignment at a community college, Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake. I went there for one year, because Big Bend had finagled themselves a contract in Germany. What they did was they taught Army guys, well, servicemen, they gave them classes so they could get their—before Big Bend went there, they got GEDs. Big Bend had the bright idea of instead of giving the Army guys GEDs, they’d give them actual high school diplomas. This brought a lot of money in to the college. Because, you know, high school diplomas are a lot better than a GED. I used some of that money to start a circuit writer type program. Between ’72 and ’79, I think it was, ’78, I taught computer classes in 17 different high schools all the way from Cooley Dam in the north to Connell in the south and east and west from Quincy to Washtucna. Franklin: Oh, wow. Bennett: Remember I talked to you earlier about when you first started? My first year of doing those computer classes, I thought I’d really done a good job. And I looked back at it three or four years later, I was ashamed and embarrassed at how little I’d done the first year. Once it caught on. And at that time, Big Bend had a music teacher named Wayne Freeman. He had some kind of contacts with Hollywood, and he’d bring in people from Hollywood. They had what they called a play. What did they call—do you remember the names of those plays, Mary Ann? Mary Ann Bennett: Musical production. Bennett: Musical productions. The first time he brought Leonard Nimoy up and he played Oliver, played the lead role in Oliver. For eight or twelve years while Freeman was the music instructor, he brought these Hollywood-type people up. And they’d have a play, they had a 700 or 800-seat theater and it was packed for all four or five performances. Franklin: I was going to say, I imagine that’d be a pretty big deal for Moses Lake. Bennett: Oh, big deal. And that was the time I was doing the high schools and I’d have my high school classes come down to it and they just—they loved it. It was great. Franklin: When you say computer, were you working with mainframes and that kind of thing? Bennett: That’s what they had started off with, upper-left-corner-cut carts. You’ve seen them. Franklin: I’ve seen them. Never had to use them, but I’ve seen them. Bennett: Well, I would carry—I had a pickup truck. I would take the key punch machines to the high schools, and the kids would punch out their cards. I’d take them back and run them through the computer, and take them back with the output. And then they’d go back until they got them to run. That was a big deal then. But that was, what, in the ‘70s? It was long before they had the personal computers. Everything was mainframe. Franklin: Yup. So did you ever come back to working at Hanford? Bennett: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bennett: No. I did that high school—what was really interesting to me was the only kids in these high schools that would take these classes was the top 2% or 3%. The kids that would go on to Harvard or Yale or BYU or some big type, University of Washington. These were really, really bright kids. I knew that they were smarter than the kids I was teaching at Big Bend. It took me a while to figure that out, too. Because I realized later that all I had was the top 2% or 3% of each high school. But I knew—why is it these high school kids are smarter than my college kids? Well, because they’re the top of the line. Franklin: So what were some of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Bennett: Well, being involved with what ended World War II was a big thing to me. Because my dad was in the Philippines getting ready to take part in the invasion of Japan, which they figured, if that did happen would’ve been a million casualties. What was it, the Civil War only we took 750,000 from both sides in four or five years. I mean that would’ve really been bad because of the atomic bomb because of the crash program. In some of the reading I’ve done, what they essentially did was they took 50, 60 years of automatic research and condensed it into two or three, and the result was the atomic bomb. Franklin: Sure. So that was very rewarding to you, to be involved in kind of the continuation of that? Bennett: And what I thought—I thought it saved my dad’s life, probably. Franklin: What about the most challenging aspects? Earlier you mentioned that the graveyard shifts were pretty challenging. Bennett: Yeah, that was challenging. I couldn’t—I realized I couldn’t do it. I thought I was Superman, but I’m not. Franklin: Was there anything else that challenged you out there? Maybe the structure or some of the work or--? Bennett: Well, I thought it was exciting to do that type of work. And I enjoyed it and liked it. Franklin: Were you there when—no, you got there in ’64, so you weren’t there when Kennedy visited. Bennett: No, no, I wasn’t. But he had been out there. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Any memories of like the social scene or local politics in the Tri-Cities and Richland when you got here? Bennett: I remember a guy named Mike McCormack. He lived right behind us. Near, a block or so from George Washington Way. But he eventually got elected to Congress. I don’t know how long he stayed. Do you remember? Have you heard of him? Mike McCormack? Congressman Mike McCormack? Franklin: I’ll have to take a look at that. Bennett: I know he was in the state house and state senate and then he got elected to Congress. In the ‘70s, I’m pretty sure. Franklin: Okay. I’m wondering if you could describe ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Bennett: Well, I did read a lot about the—when I was doing those three-month assignments, there was a good deal of focus on security. Like I said, it took several months for me to get my clearance. You had to go through gates and somebody would check. If you didn’t have your pass, you didn’t go through the gate. That was for every place. Franklin: Did you ever forget your pass? Bennett: No. But I do remember when I was on these assignments, because I was a trainee, I did not get holiday pay. So during one graveyard shift, I was home sleeping and I did not work that day because they’d have to pay me time-and-a-half. But at 3:00 in the morning the guys out there called me, wanting to know how I was doing. You know, that type of humor. You sleeping okay, Tom? We’re getting paid holiday pay, you’re not. Franklin: How come you didn’t go back to Hanford after going to WSU? Bennett: Well, I took the one year temporary assignment at Big Bend. And like I said, they had the money from Germany. So I spent the next six or seven years teaching high school kids at like 17 different high schools. By then I was pretty much associated with the community college and I worked there until 1990. I left to get my master’s degree and somebody else took that program over and it collapsed. And I just taught at Big Bend until 1990. And then—I’m trying to remember what I did from 1990 to 2000. Mary Ann: You ran for office. Bennett: What’s that? Mary Ann: You ran for office. State representative. You ran for office. Bennett: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I didn’t—but that didn’t—that was just one run. What work was I doing? Mary Ann: You worked at Boeing. Bennett: Oh, that’s right, I did from ’79 to ’81, I went to Boeing, worked there. They were developing the 767 and I got to be senior engineer in tool design. That was really fun, working for Boeing. I loved that. Franklin: I bet. Bennett: When I went there, they just built this great big huge building. Somebody said, come on, we’re going to tour the building. So I went on a tour of the building. It was empty. At Hanford, they had all these programs, they’d schedule when it’s going to happen, they get stretched out, stretched out, stretched out. Something that was supposed to take two years would take ten. At Boeing, there’s an empty building, they’re going to do the 767. That was 1979, I went to the empty building. In 1981, airplane number six was rolling out the door. They have their schedules, they keep them. They said, if you don’t get your assignment done, you will stay there until it’s done. The one guy had to stay there for 36 hours. I went and talked to the supervisor. He wasn’t any good after 15, 16 hours, why’d you keep him 36? The supervisor says, Tom, do you know how much Boeing has to pay every day they are late delivering an airplane? I had no idea. $50,000 per day for a late plane. You have an assignment, you get that done or you stay until it’s done. So that was a different attitude and atmosphere than I’d had at Hanford. Franklin: Interesting. I guess that’s kind of the difference that a private company would— Bennett: Commercial. Franklin: Yeah, commercial company would take on a project versus— Bennett: You get an assignment, you get it done. Franklin: Right. I should’ve asked this a lot earlier, but I’m just kind of curious, how did you hear about Hanford? When you were in college and you were looking at places to go work, how did you hear about Hanford? Bennett: They had a job fair at UCLA. No, no, wait a minute. I went to—I think it was in Canada, there was a job fair I went to. That’s where I found out about Hanford. Which was back in United States and in Washington. Franklin: Right. Bennett: Which was where I lived anyway. Franklin: So they had like a booth or something there? Bennett: Yeah. Franklin: That would’ve been General Electric at the time. Bennett: Mm-hmm, it was General Electric at the time. But I went to a job fair, that’s how I found out about it. Franklin: Okay, interesting. So my last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Bennett: Whatever you can get out of them. Franklin: What? Bennett: Whatever you can get from all the people that worked there. I’d like them to know that. Franklin: Okay. Bennett: Are you going to do a summary of this when we’re all done? Franklin: What--? Bennett: Of your own? Franklin: What do you mean? Bennett: From what you’ve learned. You’re learning a lot of things, interviewing people like me. Franklin: Oh, yeah, yeah, I do. Bennett: And you’re going to put it together like Ken Burns did with his Vietnam thing? Franklin: Maybe. These— Bennett: That’s what I’d like to have them know, is your Ken Burns approach to this. Franklin: Okay. Well, we collect these and create—we do this more to generate primary sources, then researchers go through our archives of these interviews and draw what they want. It takes a lot of time to set these up and do them, so I don’t have as much time for writing as I would— I guess I’m asking you, if you kind of give me the opportunity to tell future generations what was the most important thing about being at Hanford during the Cold War? What would you like them to know about working in plutonium production during the Cold War? Bennett: It was exciting and dangerous at the same time. And like I say, I’m just one real small piece in it. I’d like to have them see the big picture. Franklin: Sure. Did you ever feel any danger being, either occupational or working at a site that was so important for the national defense effort? Bennett: Well, I do remember when we worked at the assignment where they smashed the hot thousand-degree plutonium when they compressed it. One day the alarms went off, and they all went off. Franklin: The radiation alarms? Bennett: Yeah, the radiation alarms. And Clarence Munson, I remember he was there, I asked him, what’s going on? He said, well, maybe we’re all crapped up. That was the expression, crapped up, for being irradiated. I think that the alarm had just misfired. But it was—everybody was scared for a while. Franklin: Sure. Did you have protection on, or were you just wearing a dosimeter? Bennett: No, you wore white. White. You had to have a radiation badge and then you had a white coat and you look like somebody in a hospital. Franklin: Right. Did you ever have an instance where you did get crapped up or a small amount or were contaminated? Bennett: Well, when I worked at N Reactor, I had several what was like fuel elements on my desk, I used them for paper weights and stuff. I didn’t realize there’s probably a lot of zirconium in those things and that’s not good for you. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bennett: So I probably got some exposure to zirconium that I didn’t need. I used them for weights. I thought I was young and strong and I’d do like that with them. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s funny. Funny in kind of a— Bennett: Stupid way. Franklin: Yeah. Well, Tom, thank you so much for coming and interviewing with us. I really appreciate you taking the time out. And thank you for sharing your stories about Hanford. Bennett: Okay. Franklin: Did you have anything else that you wanted to add before we— Bennett: I’ll probably think of all sorts of things on the way home. Franklin: Okay, well, you can always send us an email. Bennett: And if I can find those papers that describe everything I did at Hanford, I can probably go twice as long as I’ve gone now. Franklin: Sure. That’d be great. Maybe you can— Bennett: Now, who—where would I go to get that, do you know? Franklin: Oh, to get copies of the papers? Bennett: Copies of my—somebody kept track, because they gave them to me at one time. Franklin: Oh, goodness. I don’t know. We’re just—here at WSU, we’re kind of on the outside looking in. Bennett: Okay, where’s the inside now? Franklin: You know, it’s all run by Department of Energy. MSA is the main contractor. But I just—I don’t know— Bennett: Where’s the Department of Energy headquarters? In the big building downtown, the Federal Building? Franklin: Yeah, yeah, Jadwin, yeah. Bennett: Jadwin. Okay, that’s probably where I should go. Franklin: Records, yeah. That would be, that’s where I’d start. Bennett: Do you have a card? Franklin: What’s that? Bennett: Can I have one of your cards? Franklin: Sure. Yeah, we can get you that. Yeah. We good? [VIDEO CUTS] [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Bennett: When I was in the 300 Area, they had these fuel elements. Anyway, the guy had two of them, and he said, here, Tom, take these. So I was going to put them together. This was a trap. They had a guy on each side of me. They grabbed my arms like this. They said, if you had put those together, you’d see a blue flash and be dead in ten days. That was the type of coarse humor—kill a guy. Franklin: Jeez. That’s a really serious thing to joke about. Bennett: It is! Well, I didn’t—and that’s part of the reason I did so much study when I was doing the rotating things. I wanted to find out what— Franklin: What could kill you? Bennett: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Mary Ann: There was also the beryllium. Bennett: Yeah, well, it was beryllium? What did I say, zirconium? Well, it’s beryllium I think gets in your lungs and screws you up. Franklin: Yeah, yes it does. Bennett: And they use beryllium to assemble those fuel elements. Franklin: Yes. And they use them in the can monitoring units as well. Bennett: Yeah. Franklin: Yup. We have one of those in our collection and it took quite a lot of paperwork to get it to be released. Because—I mean, it’s inside a spring—you’d have to take the thing apart to be exposed, but, yeah, it’s—beryllium’s not something to play around with. Bennett: True, true. Franklin: Okay. Bennett: Yeah, I’ll go over to Jadwin and find out. Franklin: Yeah, yeah. <a href="https://youtu.be/alBP3Gpds0g">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area N Reactor B Reactor 200 Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1964- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Tom Bennett Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear engineering Civil engineering Nuclear reactors Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear power plants Description An account of the resource Tom Bennett moved to Richland, Washington in 1964 to work on the Hanford Site. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 09/18/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fddb4db3c62c60689139f55445db0af3b.jpg 98b8ca0aa60801a6fe319d88a15c2b43 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Edward Beck Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 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. <a href="https://youtu.be/cy9XisqownE">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview HEHF (Hanford Environmental Health Foundation) N Reactor 222-S Laboratory 200 Area 200 West T Plant Tank Farms B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1989- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Edward Beck Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Animals in research Industrial hygiene Radioactive contamination Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear reactors Description An account of the resource Edward Beck moved to Richland, Washington in 1989 to work at the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation (HEHF). 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 07/31/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Faa1003ff17632ae0ae464a2e9db9f111.JPG 12ab3d1f4ce99cc9fe66593f8bf4bb23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed James Bates Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with James Bates on October 3, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jim about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? James Bates: Okay. James M. Bates. J-A-M-E-S, B-A-T-E-S. Franklin: Okay, great. Thank you. Bates: It’s not difficult. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: No, but you just, you never know. So tell me—so, you’re from the area, right? Bates: Yup. Franklin: Okay, so usually my first question is, tell me how and why you came to the area. But you were born— Bates: I was born in Pasco, went to school in Kennewick, graduated from Kennewick High in 1970. My dad, when I was in junior high school, brought me out to the Battelle Northwest groundbreaking ceremony. My dad was involved in local politics quite a bit; in fact, he eventually became mayor of Kennewick for several years. But he got me interested in the lab when we came out to the groundbreaking ceremony and the discussions of what was going to be going on in the labs kind of caught my interest. I mean, I was in junior high, so there was a long time to change my mind, but I kind of stuck with that as my goal. Graduated high school, went up to WSU, joined the mechanical engineering department. Got my degree, got a job offer from Battelle, came to work one month after graduation, stayed here 35 years. Franklin: Wow. So did your father work for Hanford, or was he just kind of— Bates: No, well, he was—right after he got out of high school, back in the late ‘40s, he worked on construction of some of the waste tank storage, the single-shell tanks. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bates: He worked out there about two years. But he eventually got diverted into auto parts and managed the NAPA store in downtown Kennewick. So that’s where I worked in the summers, doing inventory. [COUGH] I’m fighting a cough right now, so. Franklin: Oh, sure. And so what was your first job when you came out to Battelle? Bates: Well, they had what they called in those days a science and engineering rotation program. It was where you hired in and spent three to six months in various departments where they had openings. I actually started in the facilities department. Good bunch of guys there, still friends with a lot of those guys, and worked there about four months. It gave me a real good chance to learn what the lab was all about. I was modifying facilities for various sections, groups, departments, as project needs changed. So I got to know a whole lot of people around the lab. One of the departments that caught my attention was the fluids engineering section. When they had an opening, I transferred in there and stuck with them for 34 more years. Franklin: Wow. So I’m wondering if you can—just because I’m kind of a layman when it comes to this—if you could describe to me, what is fluids engineering and fluids dynamics? Bates: Well, understanding fluid flow, phase change, pressure drops, Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid behaviors, like I mentioned, multi-phase flow. All of that played very much into understanding the water cooling aspects of our production reactors out here. In fact, I got on board when they were trying to upgrade NPR, the New Production Reactor, which was actually N Reactor. We were trying to bump the performance, the thermal output of that reactor, as well as the production capability. So we had a chance to refurbish a lot of the old thermohydraulic loops that were used for designing the fuels on the old production reactors, the B, C, D Reactors. We upgraded that facility and began to do a number of tests related to the N Reactor. Critical heat flux correlations, these sorts of things, which helped them improve the fuel design for the reactor. Franklin: So, if I’m understanding, you kind of drew on the work done to increase the productivity of the single pass reactors. Bates: Yup. Yeah. Franklin: And transferred that to the closed loop system of the N Reactor? Bates: Yeah, I mean, we did work—factory did work on some of the work on the steam generators used that were eventually used to power the civilian power plant out there. But I mean, this test loop chases its roots way back to before I was born, 1950, ’51. They had loops out there to help them with reactor design. They kind of fell by the wayside in terms of use until we refurbished them, got them back online. But we had a high pressure loop out there capable of full reactor conditions, 2,500 psi, 650 degrees. We had five megawatts of power available to us through both rectifiers and motor generator sets. We used electrically—resistance heating to simulate the nuclear fuel rod bundle thermal output. So it was quite interesting for a young guy, just out of school, used to working on tabletop-scale experiments. I mean, this loop was 100 feet long and 100 feet high. [LAUGHTER] Pretty impressive to me. Franklin: This was located on the Battelle campus? Bates: At the old—no, this was out at the 189-D area. It was a reactor support building in the D Area complex. Franklin: Okay. Bates: So it involved a—when I was out there sitting in my chair at the loop, I was 50 miles from home. It was quite a long commute. Franklin: Yeah. And so by this point, all the single-pass reactors were shut down? Bates: Pretty—not completely. They were getting into those issues of thermal output and getting state permits. I can remember one time, in fact, we lost our permit to even do the thermal discharge from our test loop in the middle of a critical program. So how are we going to cool this thing without any river water at our disposal? So what we came up with was we pumped the river water out one pass through our loop, stored it in the old emergency cooling tanks out there that were in the 190 Tank Building. Gave us 5 million gallons’ capacity to store until we got our discharge permit back. Then we opened the valve and let it back out. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, that’s to return the water to the river. Bates: To return the water back to the river, yeah. Franklin: Was that permitting process kind of part of the growing environmental movement? Bates: Oh, yeah, very much so. When I first hired on, Hanford kind of had free reign on what we could do out here. We didn’t even pay for power. I’d fire up five megawatts of power supply and there was no meter on it. I wouldn’t’ve wanted to pay that bill, but— Franklin: Yeah, right. And where was that power coming from? Bates: It was coming off the grid out here on the Site. We had a big motor generator set—I forget how many horsepower it was, like 200 horsepower—that we used to turn AC power into DC. DC power being much better for this electrical resistance heating that we were doing. And we also had silicon-controlled rectifiers, SCRs, we called them, that about 4 megawatts out of that unit that turned AC power into controllable DC power. I remember every time we had to come online, I had to call the guys at the substations and say, we’re throwing the breaker. Get ready, we’re coming online. Because if we didn’t give them warning, it looked like something was failing, and we’d shut the substation down. Franklin: Oh, because of the immense amount power to be drawn. Bates: There was a big power draw all of a sudden. Franklin: Because that would look like a massive— Bates: Some kind of a surge going on that was unexpected. So we had the phone number pasted on the wall there, before you throw the switch, call these guys and let them know we’re coming online. So it was a—when that motor generator set was running, it was pretty impressive. Sounded like a jet engine running, just off to the side of the control panel here. In fact, I think that’s why I have hearing loss, over sitting there next to that thing for so many hours. Franklin: Sure. Yeah, I bet there’d be a different industrial hygiene— Bates: Oh, well, we didn’t have any noise surveys in those days, when our health people finally came out and did a survey, they said, man, that’s about 108, 110 decibels. You shouldn’t be spending more than two hours a day in that environment. And I says, well, let’s see, I’m 14 hours and going for today, so. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really loud. Bates: Oh, it is, it is really loud. I mean, we sat there with hearing protection on just to keep from getting a headache. But there was no requirements for limits of exposure or how many hours we could spend in that environment. Franklin: Wow. I’m wondering if you could talk about how that permitting—that level of safety and permitting increased during your time out there. Bates: Oh, it was orders of magnitude. Basically, when I first hired on—in fact, I brought the documents—we wrote our safety documents and we ran them—basically, our operating procedures and what the hazards were. We wrote that all down, and we got it approved by Gordy Halseth. He was the single safety officer for Battelle in those days, he and a couple secretaries and clerks. I mean, if you go out and compare that to the size of the safety department that’s out there now—there must be probably 50, 60 people now doing that same job, just because of the increasing requirements. Basically, in those days, we’d invite Gordy out and give him a tour and get him to bye off. One signature, and we were on our way. The stuff we were doing—I mean, this is 2,500 psi, 620 degrees—is dangerous. We were careful because we knew it was dangerous, not because somebody told us we had to be careful. [LAUGHTER] So, you know, if somebody tells you that stove is hot, you don’t touch it. You don’t have to have it written down somewhere and sign off on a procedure. But, yeah, the changes that went on increased the efforts required to get project plans approved, safety documents approved, hazardous materials documents approved. All this became a much larger fraction of what we had to do in order to do our experimental work. So I got a little frustrated with it towards the end of my career, because it was just taking so much time. The ultimate objective, as stated by our safety people, was zero accidents. I kept saying, there’s no such thing. Probabilities play in, and things are going to happen. I told them, the people working for me, the most dangerous thing they do all day is drive to work, statistically. So I said, do you want me to tell them to stay home? Well, that’s not what we’re after. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Could you see, on the flip side, though, could you see any tangible benefit to that increase— Bates: Oh, yeah. If you read the old records of how much the production reactors warmed up the river, for example. When all of the production reactors were online, they could warm the entire Columbia River up by four to five degrees. Which, when you go out there and watch that river flowing by, that’s pretty amazing. Franklin: Right, and that could have some real cascading effects on different ecosystems. Bates: Oh, yeah, yeah. And of course, you mentioned the once-through cooling. When a fuel element ruptured, you began to wonder what was going into the river. Franklin: What other kinds of improvements or changes did your work lead to with the reactors, single-pass and then the closed loop? Bates: Oh, for example, we worked on improving the pressure drop performance of the spacers that hold the reactor rod bundles together. Any time you got a pressure drop through there, it’s a loss of energy, essentially. So we were trying to improve the performance of the spacer and the mixing behaviors downstream of those spacers. Because if the flow characteristics aren’t proper and you don’t get proper cooling to the rod, you’ll get a hot spot, and that limits how much you can ramp the power up. So, both the physical and the fluid dynamics of that flow were very important to how much power you can get out of a fuel element. So we worked on that a lot. In fact, these pictures I’ve got show huge control panels where pressure drop was what we were measuring. We used to use old mercury manometers in those days. Franklin: What is that? Bates: It’s where you measure, like, for example, a barometer. The old mercury barometers used to measure atmospheric pressure by how far it pushed a mercury column up in a tube. Well, if you put high-side pressure, low-side pressure and see the difference in that, you can determine how many psi pressure dropped. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bates: So the electronic transducers were just beginning to come onto the market. Which we eventually replaced all of that with. Franklin: And what is that, just something that electronically measures the pressure? Bates: Yeah. They use piezoelectrics, for example, is one way of making a pressure sensor. I got to live through all of that, where we went from manually recording manometers on a panel into our log book to tying it into an Apple computer-based data acquisition system and doing it all electronically. You got to remember, when I went to work out there in 1974, there were no desktop computers. My slide rule got a workout the first couple years. [LAUGHTER] And then eventually the company came through and gave us all HP calculators. Which were just beginning to come on to the market. Franklin: How did that change your work? Just that one tool, that one tool change. Bates: Oh, drastically. As an old school engineer, the thing I noticed, comparing it to the young engineers coming on board, when you work with a slide rule, you have to keep, basically, order-of-magnitude answers in your head. I mean, the decimal point doesn’t show on a slide rule. So you got real good at anticipating what a reasonable answer is to an engineering problem. The young engineers that were coming in that were all digital or computer, they’d come in and show me the answer. It was off by four orders of magnitude. I said, that can’t be. There’s no heat transfer coefficient that high. You know? You got to keep in your mind what a reasonable answer is. I’m afraid that that tendency still exists today in our computer-based engineering world. Franklin: So you’re saying, then, that kind of precision of the calculator took away some of that educated-guess work. Bates: It took away that, like I said, the engineering judgment. You start believing all the numbers the computer spits out with no basis to reject them as reasonable or unreasonable. Some of the older engineers I worked with, like Dale Fitzsimmons and Frank [unknown] and that, these guys were working out there working about the time I was born. They had the ability to do on the back of an envelope, so to speak, very good calculations. Things that we wouldn’t even attempt to do today. Obviously they were approximations but they gave us design parameters so we could go out and buy pumps and things to do the job. We just didn’t have all that software. In fact, the very first computer that was used out here was an analog computer that used manual jumpers on an array of resisters. Franklin: Wow. Bates: It was very crude. But because there’s an electrical analog for heat transfer, you could mock up a heat transfer experiment electronically and get some basic answers. Which we always had to confirm experimentally. Franklin: How long did that practice continue of generating basic answers to then confirm— Bates: Oh, I mean, right up until the time I retired, we were still doing very detailed studies on turbulence—I mean, turbulence is something computer models can’t model very well. Every turbulence model out there is empirically derived from experimental data. There’s no first principles that can model the chaos of turbulence. And that’s very key to heat transfer, for example. So, even with some of the reactor design codes that are being used now—which other people in our group were responsible for developing the COBRA codes, the VIPER codes—these probably don’t mean anything to you. But in the nuclear industry, they’re key to designing and analyzing accident conditions and so forth. A lot of the empirical models that are in those codes came from our experimental work. Franklin: Are those acronyms, COBRA and VIPER? Bates: Yeah, yeah, yeah. COBRA, I’m trying to—Coolant Boiling and Reactor Accidents. I’ve got it, it’s in the old history documents here. They became words to us over the years; you kind of lose track of where they came from. Franklin: This might be an off-the-wall question; I’m just kind of curious. We have a—I found a box of archival material the other day that referenced something called a TRUMP computer program. Bates: Yeah, I remember TRUMP. Franklin: Okay. I’m wonder if you could— Bates: That wasn’t something I was familiar with, but it was competitive with some of the things we were developing. Our group over the years split and merged many times, but we always had an analytical branch and an experimental branch. There was a lot of things that went on during the split in terms of code development, but we in the experimental group weren’t in the meetings with on a daily basis. Franklin: Why did they split and merge so many times? Bates: Oh, it was basically a growth and—when funding grew and it got too unmanageable, it was a logical way to split the group into two management. Because section leaders couldn’t manage 50 people; I mean, that gets a little cumbersome. So we’d split it into two 25-peron groups for a while. Then the funding would dry up and we’d merge. We also, as did every company in the country, we went through the management style-of-the-day process, where we grew management and contracted it. Someday I always wanted to go back through my org charts and chart how many management people there were at any given time as a function of time. It changed a lot. I even got—boy, when was it? Late ‘80s, I guess, early ‘90s, I got asked to manage a group. I did that for about four years. But I found that management was a totally different animal than the technical work I liked to do. So when the opportunity came when they wanted to merge, I gave up my management position very willingly. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s great. I’m wondering if you could kind of track or tell me how larger national events play—kind of affected your work. I’m thinking of the drawdown of the Carter administration? Bates: Yeah, when Jimmy Carter said, basically, no more nukes, that was a huge transition for us. I was working on a program at the time related to understanding liquid metal breeder reactor natural circulation cooling. I’d spent three years designing, building and getting ready to run tests on this very specialized test section. We were some of the country’s experts at that time in laser Doppler anemometry, which is an optical technique to measure fluid flow. Franklin: Sorry, could you say—laser Doppler— Bates: Yeah, LDA for short. Laser Doppler anemometry. Franklin: Anemometry, okay. Bates: Yes. In fact, when I first came on board we were putting together LDA systems from components we bought from Edmonds Scientific. I mean, big lenses and stuff, and we’d build all the mounts and it was kind of a do-it-yourself. We were doing things very unique at the time. Franklin: And you were using this to measure—because I see on my bio sheet here, working with lasers and tools to measure coolant flows, right? Bates: Yes. Franklin: Measuring heat and— Bates: We put a mockup of a reactor inside of a test section with quartz windows in it so we could shine through. I built quartz windows that were good through 1,000 psi of pressure so we could measure at-reactor conditions. Some of the first measurements of that—in fact, I published a paper on some of this and got accepted to an international symposium in Portugal. I went over and presented what we were doing. It was pretty neat. I got put in the bound volume of proceedings. It was a very fun experience. But LDA was kind of my first love for about ten, 15 years of work. In fact, LDA became so popular as a research tool that there were several companies started to sell those systems. Thermal Systems Incorporated, TSI, out of Minneapolis. They consulted with us quite a bit on how to improve systems. Eventually marketed complete operable systems you could buy out of a catalogue, as opposed to our home-built systems. Franklin: Kind of taking what you were doing and standardizing it or kind of— Bates: Yup, yup. Franklin: That’s really interesting. I mean, who doesn’t want to work with lasers? [LAUGHTER] Even today, I think people still do. Bates: It’s cool stuff. I wish I had some of those pictures that—I’ve been retired ten years and a lot of my stuff has kind of disappeared. But we’d have the photographers come in and take a picture of all the mirrors and lenses and things we’d lined up on a layout table to make this LDA system work. It was pretty neat stuff. Franklin: So I want to go—just ask you—so the LMBR, the liquid metal—you were doing work then to support the FFTF. Bates: Yeah, and then Jimmy Carter said, no more. Well, in a matter of three days, I went from fully funded for three straight years on this program to having zero dollars. They called and said, end of program, box it up and send it off. Most of it went to excess; some of it got transferred to another lab. And I had to find something new to do. So one week later, I went from working on liquid metal breeder reactors to working on solar energy storage. Franklin: That seems like quite a—it seems like-- Bates: It was traumatic to me. And our whole group underwent a similar transition. Franklin: How can you move to solar energy storage? Bates: That was popular in those days. Alternative energy—price of oil was creeping up. Franklin: Still is, though, kind of, right? Bates: Well, still very interesting. A lot of these things we were the first to look at them as alternatives. Some of those now are becoming standard grid power. Solar cells, for example. That was a little—our fluids group didn’t work on the solar cells area, pretty much; that’s the electronics people. But we were working on solar concentrator mirrors and developing proper fluids to circulate through those things and capture the thermal energy, run it through a turbine and produce power. Franklin: Oh, wow. Did that research ever amount to any industrial application? Bates: Oh, there were experimental facilities around the country that utilized that technology. I don’t think it ever got to as large a scale as some of the solar cell farms that exist now. You know, they got five-megawatt farms, ten-megawatt farms. The solar salt pond concept that we were working on was a good idea but it had a lot of technical difficulties. One of them being materials. Those brines are very tough to contain and very corrosive, and the materials get very expensive very fast. You got to use—stainless steel isn’t good enough; you got to go to the Inconel nickel-based metals. Pretty soon, the economics don’t make sense. Franklin: You can do it in a laboratory— Bates: You can do it in a lab, but the scale-up process is difficult. Franklin: Right. So, you mentioned that you used LDA for ten to 15 years or so. Bates: Yeah. Franklin: And I’m wondering, what came after that? What did— Bates: Well, like I said, once they commercialized those systems and—we did a lot of work for Electric Power Research Institute, which was a consortium of utilities to how to improve reactor performance, improve safety— Franklin: And this was for energy reactors, right? Okay. Bates: Yes. These are energy reactors, commercial reactors. Franklin: Commercial reactors. Bates: So we got very much involved on the non-government side of reactor research. At the time, Battelle had a contract that allowed us to not only work for the government, but work for the private side, what we called our 1831 contract. Franklin: Right. Yeah, I’m familiar with that number. Bates: So we could go out and sell to—we actually marketed to the various reactor vendors to do research with these tools that we’d developed, primarily for the production reactors. We did research for Westinghouse and Babcock and Wilcox, and most all of the reactor vendors at the time. So it was a good business. Worked hard. When you get on the private side, the budgets are more constrained and the schedules are tight. Many a time, we’d put in 24 hour days. We’d take our sleeping bags out to D Area and grab two-hour cat naps as we were— Franklin: Oh, wow. So you were still working out in D Area then—would this have been in the ‘80s and ‘90s? Bates: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Up until—I forget when we closed the building there. They told us they were going to knock down—starting the Site reclamation process, and we had to get out. I wrote Madia a letter to say, these are very valuable tools you’re throwing away and they will never be recreated because they’re too expensive now. But it fell on deaf ears and we basically walked away from that facility. We did recreate some test facilities in the 336 Building in 300 Area. It was a big highbay building that was left over from the days of the Fast Flux Test Facility. I was responsible for building a big waste tank storage simulation facility in 336 Building where we started developing tools to monitor tank levels and tank mixing and tank retrieval. We tested some of these robotic concepts for going in and retrieving tank waste, which are being used now. I mean, the tank retrieval going on right now has a lot of technologies that we investigated in the 336 Building at a reduced scale. Franklin: Oh! Bates: So it’s pretty rewarding to see some of that stuff. Also, Vit Plant, we were in on the early days of the mixing concerns of the tanks in the early days related to the Vit Plant and the treatment of the tank waste. For example, the pulse jet mixer problem, which is still very much in the news, holding up portions of the design. We did a lot of pulse jet mixer studies in 336 Building. I read these technical articles that are still coming out and they’re still doing some of the very same things I was doing back in the late '90s. Franklin: Right? Bates: These problems are very difficult. Nobody’s ever tried to mix fluids—well, the kind we’ve got out in these tanks. Very complex. Franklin: Yeah, I don’t know a lot—what I know is there’s many different characteristics, like there’s solids and semi-solids and they all have very different— Bates: They behave—what they call non-Newtonian fluids. When you start worrying about transporting non-Newtonian fluids and transporting the solids fraction in that fluid, like the plutonium particles and other radioisotope particles, these things settle out in the wrong places, you got problems. Franklin: Right. And a lot of these things will react to heat in different ways. Bates: Oh, the chemical—the tanks, we used to refer to them as a periodic chart soup. I mean, they’ve got a little of everything in them. And just the characterization of that waste is a very difficult problem. Franklin: Sure. You mean how to— Bates: Understand the chemistry that’s going on. I mean, you probably remember the SY-101 Tank with the hydrogen generation problem. That’s something that we worked on. Franklin: Actually, I’m not familiar with that. I’m wondering if you could tell me about that. Bates: Oh, it’s one of the old double-shell tanks. They started noticing that the level was going up on occasion. And then it would go back down. Well, what was happening is, due to a chemical process, thermolysis, they call it, hydrogen was being generated in rather large bubbles in that tank waste. When the bubble got big enough, it would burst to the top. The headspace in the tank would go above the flammability limit for hydrogen and if there were a spark from whatever source, you could have a rather major disaster. Franklin: You could have a tank blowup, basically. Bates: Which did happen in Russia. I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of their—they had some incidents like that. Franklin: Yeah, they had a major incident in the ‘50s, right? Where they had a-- Bates: Yup, I don’t know the exact date, but they had a-- Franklin: Yeah, where a cool—a waste tank blew up— Bates: They ruptured a tank, right. Franklin: Yes, and it killed a lot of people. Bates: Well, of course when DOE found out that they had these hydrogen events in these waste tanks, it was all hands on deck, we got to solve this problem. Franklin: Right, we’ll likely have the same— Bates: Right. So a lot of our computer models got diverted to modeling that situation. We on the experimental side got excited about coming up with mitigation techniques. How can we improve the mixing? How can we prevent this hydrogen bubble buildup problem? That consumed us for a number of years. Franklin: Yeah. Was it solved? Bates: What’s that? Oh, yeah. SY-101 was eventually solved and the hydrogen release problem was mitigated. Franklin: What was the solution? Bates: Well, I think—you’re going back, really testing my memory here now. Probably better to read some of the technical reports on this, but they did a lot of transfers in and out of the tank. Add liquid, bring contents of several tanks, get the chemistry to a more acceptable condition, and improve the monitoring and the mixing. They basically got it to where the hydrogen is still being generated, but it wasn’t being stored and released in these periodic events which can lead to—you know, if you save up the hydrogen for a couple of months and release it all in a single event, the concentration goes up drastically. But we came up with mixing techniques that allowed it to do a slow release and keep the concentrations down. Franklin: So it’s still building hydrogen— Bates: Oh, yeah. Franklin: --but it’s not in these massive bubbles that then— Bates: Well, that thermal generation of hydrogen is always going to happen. The chemistry can’t be changed. But you got to prevent it from building up to concentrations of concern. So hydrogen generation is a problem they’re dealing with in building the Vit Plant. They don’t want any incidents like that to be occurring in the process lines of the Vit Plant. Franklin: Right, because they have heat there. They could conceivably spark it. Bates: Well, yeah. You don’t have to necessarily heat it. I mean, these isotopes self-heat. [LAUGHTER] They will generate hydrogen. So that is very much on the radar screens of everybody doing design work now. But we were in on the early days when the problem first came to light. Franklin: Did that problem—sorry if you mentioned this, but did this problem come to light—that came because of discoveries here at Hanford, not because of the Russian incident. Or was it kind of—did they kind of inform each other? Bates: The Russians didn’t publicize much of what was going on. I mean, they didn’t write technical papers that we could reference. So it was a problem that was understood—I mean, the chemistry and the generation of hydrogen was understood, but the physical characteristics of the waste and how it could retain this hydrogen in bubbles, that was all pretty new stuff. Franklin: Okay. Bates: We had to understood the mechanisms by which it was happening before we could go about coming up with a fix to prevent it from happening. Franklin: Sure, sure. Bates: So, took a lot of—there was a lot what I call grade-five engineering going on out there to understand this problem. We had chemists and physicists and engineers all collaborating on a daily basis to, what’s going on here? And we got to solve this problem and it can’t wait. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m wondering if—I’d like to ask you about a couple more events and how they impacted you or if they did. I’m wondering, did you ever work on any of the WPPSS reactors or do any work for WPPSS? Bates: Oh, I did work for them. We did some, for example, I was in routine business for a while of doing flow meter calibrations, and they have a lot of large flow meters out there. Out at 189-D, we had what we called our low pressure loop with very large pumps. We could do flowmeter calibrations there in the lab up to couple thousand GPM. Franklin: What’s GPM? Bates: Gallons per minute. Franklin: Oh, okay. Bates: In fact, at one time we did a flowmeter calibration for the City of Los Angeles that we needed a million gallons per minute. We fired up a couple of the old K Reactor river pumps. This flowmeter was in a pipe that was six-and-a-half feet in diameter. This was largescale engineering. And actually did a flowmeter calibration for the City of Los Angeles so they’d know how much water they were pumping into their domestic water supply system. So we got involved in all kinds of little tangents, because of the capabilities we had. Franklin: I’m wondering how Chernobyl affected you and the Site? Bates: [LAUGHTER] In my mind, Chernobyl was the beginning of the end for graphite moderated reactors. The emphasis was on shutting those things down. Franklin: Right. And that’s what was at Hanford. Bates: I lived through Chernobyl and I lived through—I was working when Three Mile Island happened. Franklin: Oh, right. Bates: I got to go back and visit Three Mile Island about three or four months after it happened. Franklin: Why was that? Bates: Trying to understand how that happened. And, as you know, I think it finally boiled down to operator error. They closed some valves that shouldn’t’ve been closed because they didn’t understand the thermohydraulics of the reactor. So once we understood that and could simulate it with our codes, they started doing extensive training to the operators so they understood how this worked. Trained their whole—changed their whole training procedure for reactor operators. Made a big difference. [LAUGHTER] They needed to understand the very—the subtleties of what was going on in a reactor. If the operators had got up and walked off, the reactor would’ve been fine. The automated systems would’ve done the right thing. They overrode some of those and caused a problem. Anytime that we—we had enough expertise in our group, anytime there was a reactor problem, we usually got involved. Even the Fukushima tsunami damage over there, some of our people went over there and spent time with the Japanese helping them to resolve—look into that problem, what could be done about it. So a lot of history in our group in helping the world with nuclear problems. Franklin: Yeah. Did you ever get to—did you ever go to the Ukraine or Russia after— Bates: No, unh-uh. A good number of our people did. We certainly got involved with some of our personnel in the Chernobyl encapsulation project where they were trying to put the big dome over the reactor to prevent the further spread of the contaminants. I forget the name of that project; again, there was an acronym. But, yeah, our people got involved in that, too. Understanding airborne transport of contaminants and particulates. There’s still efforts going on in that area. That problem is not going away anytime soon. Franklin: How did the transition between production and then the signing of the Tri-Party and the beginning of cleanup, how did that affect your research and your efforts? Bates: Well, we had a lot of good tools developed. I mean, a fluid is a fluid. Nuclear waste is a very interesting fluid. Just trying to come up with simulants for it is very difficult. We spent years trying to develop formulations that can, in a cold environment, allow us to do testing with properties of fluids that are similar to what the waste exhibits. That’s a difficult problem. Many a day, we were out there mixing up different batches of waste simulant. It’s a very dirty job because it involves a lot of fine particulates and clays. Many a day, I came home, red dust head to foot. [LAUGHTER] But we eventually came up with some very good simulants, and they’re being used not only here onsite but other labs doing similar research. So those were interesting days, too. Franklin: How was morale onsite with the switch from production to cleanup? Bates: Oh, obviously when you put—for example, like that project, I put three years of my life, night and day, long days— Franklin: Are you talking about the FFTF project? Bates: Yeah, where I was working on the natural convection cooling of—basically, an accident condition analysis of LMFBRs. I mean, I traveled to vendors all over the country and worked with them to develop hardware and come up with special pumps and instruments. I designed a test section with sapphire windows in it. Each of those sapphire windows was $10,000 and I needed like 20 of them. We only installed two or three of those windows and the balance of them got shipped off to excess. I mean, that’s not good for morale. [LAUGHTER] We had to have the sapphire because of the frequency of the lasers we were using to do the LDA work. You can’t use normal glass, or even—and quartz wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the conditions we were testing, so we had to use synthetic sapphire. Yeah. So, I had to work with the vendors to come up with the production techniques and how to machine these into our special shapes. Anyway, I had half-a-million dollars in hardware that was ready to run a test and I never got to run a test. So, yeah, there were similar stories all around the lab where it was this transition was very difficult. Franklin: You mean the end of the ‘80s transition from production to— Bates: Yes. The end of the ‘80s, the death of the nuclear industry so to speak— Franklin: The ending of the Cold War. Bates: The transitioning—yeah, the end of the—as some of our folks used to say, once the Soviet Union proved to be such an unreliable enemy, when they split up and the wall came down, and production became less important, and the environmental movement of course. We had to clean up this mess. That was a transition for all of us. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Was there a lot of enthusiasm for this new job? Bates: Yes! As you get into it and find out just how complex it is. I mean, it’s not like opening a can of soup. I mean, you got to understand the problem first and that takes a lot of research. Then coming up how we could best simulate it, how we can model it, both computationally and experimentally, a lot of challenges. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. I’m wondering, how did that transition affect the Tri-Cities as a whole? Bates: Well, Tri-Cities, you know, has undergone numerous transitions. The biggest one was when they shut down the WPPSS reactor construction. Housing prices tanked and tens of thousands people leave town. Franklin: Because there were supposed to be three reactors here, right? Bates: There were supposed to be three, right. The remnants of the other two are still out there. In fact, I’ve been involved in numerous visits out there of saying, what else could we do with these things? I mean, there’s all kinds of pumps and piping. We were looking at it for additional test facilities. Franklin: Oh, okay. Because they just walked away from construction, right, when it defaulted? Bates: Yup. Yup. Yeah. Several monuments to stupidity out there. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I like that. Oh, that’s good. I love hearing about these things from people who were out there. Bates: You can imagine being an engineer out there working on getting a new reactor online and saying, oh, never mind. You can go home; we aren’t going to do that now. That’s hard on people. You commit your lives to it and now you got to go find something else to do. Franklin: Right, and you wonder if that’s really the best fiscal choice. Bates: Yeah, oh, yeah. Franklin: Because you spent all this— Bates: Well, I mean, in hindsight, would it have been better if we had had those reactors online and we didn’t have to burn as much coal and oil? Now that global warming is the big concern? I think there might have been some different things done. Franklin: Yeah, that’s kind of always that tension. I know the nuclear industry, that’s one of their main talking points now is that it’s carbon-free. Bates: My best example I always bring up is France. They’re 85% nuclear. They’ve closed the fuel cycle with reprocessing. They don’t have too much of a concern about generating their carbon footprint in the power production industry. We could’ve been there, too. But we made some wrong turns. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’m wondering kind of two questions back-to-back, kind of one’s a flip of the other. What were the most challenging aspects of your work at Hanford over your 35 years? Bates: Challenging aspects, oh. Because we’re a research institution, we’re always doing things for the very first time. Anytime you have to invent the hardware to do the research, that’s—you can’t just open up a catalogue and order three of item A and three of item B and go do your test; you have to design it first. That puts a lot of pressure on you when the budgets are fixed and the schedules are fixed and you’ve got to come up with an answer. That’s the nature— Franklin: In fact a lot of the stuff you’re building then gets later put into catalogues, right? Bates: Oh, yeah. We generated quite a number of patents and so forth in the process of building these things. But nobody ever factors in the fact that this has never been done before, and you want me to give you a fixed budget, a fixed schedule, to get this job done? I found that tough. And I’m sure people today are still challenged with the same difficulties. Everybody wants to know when you’re going to be done and how much it’s going to cost. Franklin: Any notable successes or failures in that aspect of kind of building this hardware for the first time? Bates: Oh. You learned a lot from your failures. Franklin: Yeah. I’m wondering, is there an example that comes to mind? Bates: Oh. Phew. Well, the one I always remember that was kind of traumatic to me is, I mentioned those sapphire windows we were building. I was doing a test for basic energy sciences in Washington, DC, trying to understand a basic concept called thermal [UNKNOWN] vapor generation. This is where, for example, in a reactor blow-down condition, where you superheat a liquid and you wanted to understand how the process of turning that flash into steam. Well, I had to get visible access to my blow-down venturi nozzle. And I built one of these sapphire windows. It was about 20 inches long, three inches wide. Cost me—I forget what the number was, $60,000 a copy for these windows. I took it out of the box. We had special silver plated gaskets designed. I put it on there, put the frame on, tightened the first two bolts. Cracked it right in the middle. [LAUGHTER] I went down—first I went home, because I was done for the day. The next day, I went back and went down and talked to our machinist down in the optical shop, and I says—I forget his name; I think his name was Doug—what can we do here? He says, well, I can take those two broken pieces and turn them into two smaller windows. So I went back and redesigned the test section with two small frames. It was cheaper to rebuild the metal parts than it was the windows. And we made that one window into two small windows and proceeded to get the test done. But [LAUGHTER] those are the kind of days where you go, yeah, we should’ve checked the dimensions on that retainer before we tried the assembly. I trusted that the shop had gotten them right, and they were slightly off. So you learn lessons there. I never broke another window. Franklin: I bet! [LAUGHTER] Not at $60,000 a pop. What were the most rewarding aspects about your work? Bates: Oh, what I found was coming to work every day, up until—you’re always working on something different. I didn’t get stuck in a rut. For example, Boeing made me a job offer that was very lucrative, but I found out I would be designing landing gear struts. And I just thought, could I do that for 30 years? I don’t think so. Franklin: Was this at the beginning of your--? Bates: Yeah, this was at the beginning of my career. The reason I went to work for Battelle is because of the variety of the work they were doing. My example I always used to tell our—when we were actively hiring and brining interview candidates through is, I said that simultaneously I was working on liquid metal fast breeder reactors and peanut dryers. I worked half the week on peanut dryers and half the week on fast breeder reactors. Franklin: Like for industrial—like, agro business to dry peanuts. Bates: Yeah, like, salted-in-the-shell peanuts. Getting the moisture out of those things is a difficult job. And especially trying to do it and conserve electricity and natural gas in the drying process. Franklin: So that would’ve been some of that 1831 work. Bates: That’s some of that 1831 work, yeah. So I had to put—I had two different hats. Doing that simultaneously was sometimes a little traumatic to switch gears. But that kept it interesting. There wasn’t a day I didn’t come to work where I thought, there’s something interesting to do today. There’s not many jobs you can have that are that way. Franklin: That’s great. Bates: In fact, I shed a few tears when it came time to retire. Franklin: Yeah, so I wanted to ask you about that. You retired in 2008, and what was the impetus for—because you’re still a young guy. So what was— Bates: Well, my wife and I love to travel. We’ve been to Europe, I don’t know, 18 times. We love the history and that. Trying to squeeze that in with a 40- to 60-hour work week is pretty tough to do. When we first got married, we said, let’s set our objective on trying to retire early so we could do some things while we’re young enough to enjoy it. So it was tough. I had two sons, and trying to put all that money away and meet that objective to retire early was tough. We stayed in our old house and didn’t upgrade to a new and bigger house like everybody else. But we made it. Best decision I ever made. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Do you miss the work sometimes? Bates: Oh, yeah. In fact, back a few years ago, I was kind of hoping to go back to work. But the rules were that I couldn’t go back to work until age 62 once I took the retirement package. They had rules in their contract that they couldn’t rehire retirees. Those have since been changed; I could work now. But we’re kind of lacking in experimental facilities out here now that I would be interested in working on. I still tell my old section manager that if you ever get the budget to rebuild some experimental facilities, I’d be happy to come out and help. [LAUGHTER] But just don’t ask me to write a safety plan. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, red tape. So I guess two questions left. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy about what you were doing at Hanford impacted your work. Bates: Oh, I mean, secrecy—when I first hired on out there, it was still very hush-hush. Everybody out there had a Q clearance in those days. And we worked on some things that we couldn’t write papers on. We were doing a lot of leading-edge stuff, but we didn’t go off to the conferences and present our findings. We got involved in the tritium production, supporting production. That was a very big project. But, boy, very closely-controlled. Classified computers, classified phone lines, classified fax machines. I mean, communications were very tightly controlled. Franklin: What did you do for the tritium project? Bates: Oh, there were some thermal aspects that our group got involved in. I mean, I can’t—even now, I can’t talk about a lot of this stuff. I mean, just because I retired, it doesn’t King’s X my security requirements. We worked on some stuff for the military that related to weapons; we worked on stuff for kinetic projectiles—I mean, this is really interesting stuff. Made my day. But we couldn’t go out and write papers about it and put it in the general literature. So it’s much different than a university environment where it’s publish or perish. If we published, we’d perish. [LAUGHTER] So, a lot of people we hired—we hired some, not retired, but professors that wanted to come work in research. It wasn’t an easy transition for them to come into the classified environment, where you have to be so careful. We had a couple people that just never did make the transition. Franklin: That’s still a constant tension within university research, when it deals with—for Army applications or things that are export controlled, there’s always that—the export control office fights with the—and how freely—that kind of tugs at the essential purpose of the university, which is to create and disseminate information. Yeah. Bates: I got a little exposed to that as an undergraduate research assistant up at WSU. Professor Clayton Crowe up there was working on some experimental simulations of underwater rocket launchers related to ICBM rocket launchers from submarines. We were trying to mock up some of that stuff. I got a briefing on how much we could say and couldn’t say about some of this stuff we were working on. That was kind of my introduction to working in a, it wasn’t what I would call classified, but it was certainly sensitive information. I was able to handle it; I tried to take as much satisfaction I could from just what I was personally working on. I didn’t want to—resume building wasn’t what I was after. Some people don’t have that same priorities, I guess. They want to make themselves look good rather than just enjoy the work they’re doing. I mean, publishing is still encouraged, highly encouraged. That’s the only way we really got of advertising our abilities out here. Franklin: There’s kind of a tension there, too. Bates: Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, you know, over the years, I’ve probably published 20, 30 papers. And enjoyed going off to the conferences and interacting with our peers and learning new things. For example, there was a yearly LDA symposium held in Portugal. We usually had somebody there for about the first five or six years that that conference was held because we were doing leading-edge stuff. It was fun to share the information with people. Franklin: And probably fun to go to Portugal, too. Bates: Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s worse places in the world. The first time I went over there, it was really interesting. Bottle of water was a nickel and a beer was a nickel. So you can guess which one I drunk. Franklin: Right. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, that’s great. [LAUGHTER] My last question—of course, not, like—on your off time, right? Bates: Oh, yeah. In fact, we went over and did—the conference was over the 4th of July holiday. I actually presented my paper to 2,000 people on the 4th of July. So, I took a comp day the next day, and we went and tour Lisbon. Franklin: Fun. My last question is—what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and working in Tri-Cities during the Cold War? Bates: Being a lifelong resident of the Tri-Cities, I’ve not known any different. It’s not like there was any kind of trauma involved with moving here and seeing the big nuclear symbols and the Richland Bombers. That’s just normal to me. And I think if I were to tell somebody, it’s a very stable community, it’s a very healthy community. There’s a lot of interesting things going on. And what we’re doing out here has the ability to diversify into many different areas that make a difference. I’m sure by the time we’re done with the Vit Plant, 50 years out in the future, we’re going to be doing some things with that technology that will impact commercial aspects of our economy in all kinds of ways. But when you do leading-edge stuff, you make a difference. So I guess that would be a short summary. Franklin: No, that’s great, thank you. Bates: I think there’s a lot of personal satisfaction in that. Like I said, when we were doing the early days of LDA, it was an idea that came out of University of Minnesota, and we got one of their PhDs to come out here and go to work for us and bring that knowledge, and we continued to develop it and make it better. It eventually became a commercial market, selling literally hundreds of these systems to research institutions all around the country. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. So it goes from a concept to a standard tool. That’s where I got my kicks, anyway. Franklin: That’s great. Well, Jim, thank you so much for coming and talking about your work. Bates: Yeah. Okay. Franklin: It was really amazing. Bates: Okay. Thank you. Franklin: Yeah. Awesome. Bates: Go Cougs! Franklin: Yeah. Go Cougs. <a href="https://youtu.be/5UAoeTFmc8A">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor C Reactor D Reactor N Reactor 189-D Area 190 Tank Building FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 336 Building 300 Area Vitrification Plant WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1952- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1974-2008 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with James Bates Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Kennewick (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Mechanical engineering Nuclear reactors Nuclear power plants Radioactive wastes Radioactive waste disposal Nuclear reactor accidents Description An account of the resource James Bates was born in Pasco, Washington in 1952 and grew up in Kennewick, Washington. James worked at Battelle Northwest from 1974-2008. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 10/03/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F4482eb9cc8865dfcc1b2696f3ddb6cf9.jpg 108617a13f2edd12e51e5d10624b874a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Douglas O'Reagan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Del Ballard Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Del Ballard: I’m not accustomed to this, so you get what you get. Douglas O’Reagan: All the better, all the better. Sometimes we get some rehearsed answers, that is fine. But all the better if somebody gives me something that they haven’t exactly honed their exact phrasing on. Ballard: We just put together one for the BRMA history—history of BRMA. That was all written out, so it was—but I’m amazed at how much insistence they have at no corrections, no—[LAUGHTER] Pretty trying. O’Reagan: Okay, great. So let’s start off here. First of all, would you please pronounce and spell your name for us? Ballard: Well, my first name is Delbert L. Ballard. Leo for center. D-E-L-B-E-R-T, B-A-L-L-A-R-D. And I go by Del, commonly. O’Reagan: All right, thank you. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral history interview here on February 18th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Mr. Ballard about his experiences working on the Hanford site, living in this community. First of all, can you start us off just—walk us through your life in sort of a brief term before you came to this area. Ballard: Well, I was raised on a dryland wheat farm in Montana, so I know what work is all about. And I was a student in a little high school that was only seven of us in our graduating class. So I was sort of a country boy, and went to college at Montana State University. And I graduated from there in 1951. Just prior to that, the General Electric Company, of course, had been there to do interviews. They were scoping for—recruiting for engineers and I was a civil engineer graduate. There was other recruiters through, too. I had an offer from a San Francisco shipyard, and another from the Soil Conservation Service in Montana. But I wanted to get a job with GE. So I’d had the interview, but no really positive award or recognition that they were going to give me an offer. They were interviewing a large number of people. So graduation day came around and I still hadn’t gotten a letter from GE. But the mail came that morning, and lo and behold, there it was. So I was really pleased at that. So my initial job right out of college was coming to Hanford and working for General Electric Company as a rotational training—in the rotational training program. They had hired that year, the previous year, actually ’49, ’50 and ’51, they had hired about 300 or 350 tech grads. And I was one of the later ones getting here; I didn’t get here until July. So most of the good jobs were assigned. But in the rotational training program, my first assignment was a rather mundane assignment to the transportation department. Next one was a more interesting job with the inspection department. That was over in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, Hanford was undergoing I believed what they called the Korean expansion. The Korean War was underway and in full force at that time when I got out of school. As a matter of fact, I thought I was going to be drafted, but I tried to enlist and—I’m diverting here a little bit, but—tried to enlist in the Air Force to be a pilot, but my eyes weren’t good enough, so I got rejected for that. [LAUGHTER] So when I knew that the GE job was a deferred job, I thought, well, that’s an alternate I’d just as soon pursue. So anyway when I got here on the rotational training program, that’s what it was. Individuals were assigned to different locations for training purposes and for filling job needs. The second assignment was, as I said, inspection department in the shipyard in Bremerton. At that time, they were fabricating—the shipyard was fabricating the biological shield blocks for the C Reactor. It was one of the expansion efforts at Hanford, increasing the production capacity. So that was an interesting job over there at the shipyard doing inspection and learning a lot about inspection techniques and components and so forth. Another month after that, I was rotating around the Seattle area inspecting other components that were being manufactured for the C Reactor. C Reactor, as you know, was the one that was built right alongside of the B Reactor out at Hanford. It started up in ’53, I believe. But out of the rotational training program, I was assigned into construction area out in the 300 Area. They were fabricating laboratories for building the laboratories out there. Radiochemistry, radiometallurgy, pile tech, machine shop, and a library at that area of the Hanford—300 Area was just under construction. So I got assigned to help in the field engineering in that job. It was an interesting project. I learned a lot there in that job. And from there I went into other project engineering work, including in later years, the K Reactors were under construction and I was involved in laying up the graphite of that reactor, K East Reactors. I stayed in project engineering with GE all my life—or all my employment time was with GE. They left here in ’64. Yeah, Battelle came in ’65. Two of the projects that I followed after K Reactors, one of them was the critical mass lab in the 300 Area, which was a facility for evaluating critical shapes and sizes for plutonium missiles. It was a research job, research facility. That project was a lump sum construction and plant forces for the completion of putting the process equipment in. The next job I had was the High Temperature Lattice Test reactor in the 300 Area. That’s a reactor that probably hasn’t gotten much publicity. It was a small graphite reactor. But that was a job I was very proud of, because I was the sole project engineering function at the time. The design was done by an organization that was just brought on as GE was being phased out. It was the Vitro Engineering Company. They had a detailed design of the job, and the construction was done lump sum, and then J. Jones did the reactor installation. I can tell quite a bit of detail about that reactor, if you’re interesting. [LAUGHTER] But it was an experimental facility also for evaluating different lattice spacings for graphite moderator reactors. It was electrically heated—it operated up at 1,000 degrees centigrade, so that graphite, looking through the peepholes in the reactor, you could see white hot graphite, which is sort of an interesting thing to see. But that project was not large in comparison to today’s funding levels. But it was a three- to four-million-dollar project. I finished the job and closed it out with less than $200 left on the books and no overrun. [LAUGHTER] So I got a commendation for that job, which I was quite proud of. But from there, then I diverted into other project engineering jobs. One was in Idaho Falls. We had a test facility over there, putting in test loops in the engineering test reactor. That was closer to reactor operations type work. We had to modify an operating reactor. But that was some of my interesting project years before I got into jobs later on, which was the FFTF and the FMEF. Fuels and Materials Exam Facility. I always make the statement that every project, or every job that I worked on up until the FFTF was completed and put into operation. Every project after FFTF was shut down and closed down before it was completed. [LAUGHTER] So that was kind of a breaking point for me. Hanford, of course, reached its peak in production, and I can talk something about that as far as reactor operations is concerned. But I wasn’t really in operations, I was in engineering, and had jobs all over the Project. So I never was tied down to one location. It was interesting. So I had an interesting career in a lot of different projects. I enjoyed my work, and had a good time and a good married life and I can go into that, too, if you wish. O’Reagan: So you say you were with GE this whole time? You didn’t switch over to different contractors as they came in? Ballard: Well, yes—no. I just with GE until they left. O’Reagan: I see. Ballard: And then Battelle came in ’65. So I was with Battelle for ’65 until ’70 when Westinghouse took over the Breeder Program. Initially, Westinghouse was just brought in for the Fast Flux Test Reactor, to manage that. And I happened to be working on a development job. That’s one I haven’t mentioned yet. [LAUGHTER] When Westinghouse came in, I was assigned—that was my first manager job. I had a group, or a section in the 321 Building in the 300 Area, and a job which was identified as the hydraulic core mockup. And we designed, built and operated models to evaluate the design configuration for the FFTF. So we built water models to look at a lot of different features: the reactor vessel arrangement, and the core arrangement and the structure. And the inlet planning and outlet planning. We built several models. The two biggest ones were the inlet model, which evaluated the sodium distribution in the inlet planning and feeding characteristics for the fuels channels. I worked on that job for seven years. And then during that time, of course, FFTF came under construction. Our group actually influenced the design which was being done by Westinghouse back east. There was a lot of the features in the arrangements and shapes of the vessel and the flow distribution and the core that was determined by that hydraulic core mockup test facility. Then when they started putting the reactor together, I was assigned to construction out in 400 Area. I spent the whole year inside the reactor vessel, helping the engineer put the parts together. One of our humorous comments about FFTF was, from our perspective was FFTF, do you know what that stands for? Yeah, it sounds for feel, file, to fit. [LAUGHTER] Fill all the tight tolerances and all the arrangements necessary to make everything fit and throw it together. It was well-engineered and well-designed, but it was still—engineering problems had to be resolved in the field. So that was another interesting project. Following that, then I spent seven years on the FMEF, the Fuels and Materials Exam Facility, designing and coordinating the design—the management of the design, which was done by an off-plant architect engineer. And there, again, that was a project that was not completed. It was shut down when the Breeder Program was curtailed. So, following that, I could go into more details where we did for various and sundry work, but it was all toward the new mission for the Hanford site, which was cleanup, starting in that field in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I retired, officially, in ’89. But I worked consulting for four years after that. So my career actually spanned from 1951 to 1994. O’Reagan: How disappointing was it when FFTF got canceled? Ballard: Pardon me? O’Reagan: Was it disappointing when FFTF got canceled? Ballard: It was very discouraging, yes, that they were going to close it down. When they drilled a hole in the core support structure, like drilling a hole in my heart. [LAUGHTER] Matter of fact, I’ve got some pictures to show that I was the last person in the FFTF vessel before they closed it up and started it filling it with sodium. Matter of fact, after that closure—after the photograph that I have, I’ll be happy to show you—they had an accident with the fuel charging machine which went up to the top of the travel and the upper limits which failed and it dropped down on the core and broke some of the components that I was so—[LAUGHTER]—proud of getting installed properly. Core support structure. And we had to go in there and do some repairs. But then I, after that, I left the FFTF and went to work on the design of the FMEF. [SIGH] O’Reagan: Did life sort of change day-to-day when you switched these contractors? How different was it working for these different companies? Ballard: The only change that I could see was the difference of the color of the paycheck. [LAUGHTER] As a matter of fact, when we transferred from—let’s see if I can remember which contract that was—was it GE to Battelle or Battelle to Westinghouse? I don’t remember, but the end of that day, we were terminated and I happened to be at a party down in one of the local pubs which I didn’t very often frequent. But somebody said, who do you work for? And I said, at the moment I’m unemployed. Because that was the day we left one contractor and started with the next one. But the transitions were quite smooth, I would say. I mean, of course, policies changed and your managers changed. At one time, in a two-year period when Westinghouse came in, I think I had 13 different first level and second level managers above me change without in those two-year period. So there was a lot of personnel changes. But a lot of us working closer to the ground floor, there was very little change. O’Reagan: So, let’s back up a moment. What were your first impressions of Hanford and the area? Ballard: Well, I came here in the summer—it was in July. I got here on July 3rd of 1951. I was assigned to the barracks out in North Richland—women’s barracks as a matter of fact. That’s when all the dormitory rooms were filled up in Richland for the men’s dorms. So I was assigned out there for my quarters. The next day, I learned that you didn’t have to drive the buses around, you could ride the city buses or the plant buses. Plant buses, to ride to the area was five cents, and city buses, I don’t remember whether they were five cents or free. I rode that bus the next day that I went to work, and it was 105 degrees that day. And I thought, my lord, what have I gotten myself into? [LAUGHTER] This is horrible temperature! But I was young and willing to accept anything that came my way, so I guess I didn’t think it was too serious a problem. O’Reagan: How aware were you of the mission of Hanford before you came here? Ballard: Very little, probably. I knew that it was working on the war effort, but at that time, nobody really—well, yeah, I guess it was known they were producing plutonium or weapons for atomic weapons, but as far as the details concerned, I knew very little. As any engineer—young man right out of college might be. Because I didn’t know what the plant—the structure was. But they gave—they told us and we got the information from the co-workers and the other students. It was quite interesting, because all the youngsters that were working, everybody—not the majority of people, but a large percentage of them—were fresh graduates. The older bunch were the 30- and 35-year-olds working on the site. That’s when I met my wife shortly after that in ’53. But we were married in ’53. But I met her in ’52 at a social that was put on by YWCA, Young Women’s—YWCA organization. They had church-sponsored dinners one night a week and that’s where we met. So we’ve been married for 62 years now. O’Reagan: Were there a lot of those sort of social events? Ballard: A lot of those that happened. As a matter of fact, the organization—I was the third set that the president and the secretary of that organization got married. [LAUGHTER] She was the secretary when I was the president of the organization. [LAUGHTER] Which was sort of comical, I guess. O’Reagan: What sort of things did you and your wife do in your spare time in the ‘50s and ‘60s? Ballard: Well, I guess bridge playing was one, and social events. We went—there was—they had a group that she was involved in called the Fireside Group that had functions and went camping and things like that. But we played a lot of bridge then. O’Reagan: Where did you live? Ballard: Well, I was living in the dormitories, of course, when we were married. I lived in North Richland in the women’s barracks for a short time until the rooms became available in the dormitories in Richland. That’s where I was living when we got married. Of course, housing was another whole story. You had to put your name on a list to get a house. They were all assigned by the government. All the housing was, of course, controlled and owned by the government. So you had to get your name on the waiting list to get a house. We were fortunate; we got a duplex, a C house up on Wright Avenue. I got that assigned in less than a month before we were married. So when we were married, we had a two-bedroom duplex house up there available. That’s where we moved in and lived there until 1957 when the government decided to disperse the property. They started selling vacant lots in 1957. We were a junior tenant in the duplex, so we couldn’t make an offer on the duplex. The senior tenants had the right to buy the duplex. So I was quite aggressive in my ownership philosophy, decided to buy a lot. We purchased the lot on Newcomer, the first property that was sold. And we built a house. I started building in March of 1958. As a matter of fact, we built—our house was the third privately built house in Richland. We had a house and were living in it before Richland was incorporated. They incorporated the city in July of ’58. That was of course the second official designation as a corporation because Richland, of course was a corporation—I mean an incorporated city before the government took it over in ’43. We built that house and I have pictures that I brought of the fact it was one of the first ones in Richland. And we’re still living in the same house. I don’t know what that says, but [LAUGHTER] I guess stability for one thing. O’Reagan: Were you involved in local politics at all? Ballard: In what? O’Reagan: In local politics at all? Ballard; No, not really. They asked me a few times if I wouldn’t run for the city council, but I never did. No, I’m not a politician. I didn’t want to get involved in that. O’Reagan: So you described a number of different jobs you were doing over the first two decades or so that you were here? Could you walk us through, at least for one of those, what was sort of an average work day like? Ballard: Well, let me see. There was one—I guess all of them were similar in a lot of respects. I was doing—on those jobs, I was doing project engineering. And that meant the coordination of, and the I guess you’d call it management, although there was, of course, the organization like GE, there’s so many levels of management that comes through that it’s a little hard to say you managed it, because you have so much supervision and overhead actions that are taken on a project, for example. But on most projects, the engineer—the project engineer would write the project proposal based on what the technical department would have as input for a required facility, for example. Like the high temperature lattice test reactor, the physics department had specified the programs that they were involved in would want to look in more detail at the lattice spacing in graphite reactors, for example. So they would write a document which would specify what their objective was and what their basic criteria was for that facility. And project people would issue—maybe take that and issue an order for another group to do the detailed process—conceptual design, or do it themselves. We’d do it sometimes on small projects. We had projects all the way from modify one laboratory all the way up to a whole facility. So it’s hard to describe the same process for all of them. But it was office work, engineering work. Some of the times I was in a design group where we actually doing detailed design work. But most of my work was in the project engineering field where we were seeing the work done by others. Or specifying details or managing the people that were doing the detailed design work. But it was office work, and of course when construction started, that’s when the project engineers were more in control, because they were directing the contractors as far as the field work was concerned. It was always an interesting job, an interesting challenge, I thought, preparing contract bid packages. Office work, lots of times the projects were out in the field, of course, out in the Area. We’d drive government cars to go to work. That was an advantage. Of course being in engineering rather than operations where you had more control of your time from the standpoint of individual management. Because we’d use government cars for transportation. We didn’t have computers in the early stages, obviously. When they came out with DSIs, Don’t Say It In Writing, that was a big move, too. [LAUGHTER] But certainly a lot of progress and a lot of technology changes over the years. O’Reagan: How much were security or classification a part of your work? Ballard: Well, it was certainly in overview all the time. All the documents, if a job had classified work on it, you had to get the documents classified, and follow the restrictions for those particular elements or documents, whatever’s involved. Most of the time, of course, construction was not too rigidly controlled or administered, I guess. In later years, because the, for example, research work was not really high classified. Most—a lot of it wasn’t. But it was something that was always there. Of course the badging was always—I remember one time incident I had which was funny—rather humorous. I was in a meeting out in one of the hundred areas, in a back room in some building and we were having a discussion. All of the sudden a door burst open and two patrolmen came in and said, where’s Del Ballard?! I’m over here. [LAUGHTER] Hey, come with me! They took me by the arms and whisked me outside and outside the badge house. I said, what’s going on? What’s the problem? They said, you don’t have a badge! I said, what do you mean I don’t got a badge. I looked at it and it was somebody else’s badge—name on it. They had given me the wrong badge! [LAUGHTER] So they were, I guess, vigilant in their control. But some of the times you thought it was a little overreach. It was always there, that’s for sure. O’Reagan: You mentioned a couple jobs not necessarily at Hanford—I think you said Idaho Falls at one point, or other locations around? Ballard: Yes, we had a project—I guess I sort of skipped over that—in the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho Falls. The fuels people here—research people—wanted to do some testing in the Engineering Test Reactor with certain issues or problems that they were trying to develop from the fuel technology. So we put in two high pressure loops over there. Again, I was the project person on it. I didn’t do the design work, I did the procurement and the construction management. Philips Petroleum was the operating contractor over there at the Engineering Test Reactor. So I went over there and saw that those loops were completed and put in place and in operation. It was in 1958. I spent, well, most of that year over there, back and forth. My wife was really unhappy, because that was the year that we had started our house. So I had—coming home on weekends and trying to keep that sorted out. Because we had a foreman working with the carpenters building the house. So it was kind of stressful for her. Yeah, and then I had to go back for the next year after that for some cleanup work on the project. It was another project that was managed by Hanford, but installing a reactor over there. O’Reagan: I’m curious how sort of insular Hanford was, versus how much it was common for people to get advice from outside of the Area, or to travel to different facilities and learn what they were doing, or share what you were doing with others? Ballard: Well, I think that’s probably more prevalent in the technical field than it is in the construction area. Yeah, there certainly was in a nuclear complex, there was—and we did have travels. I did visit some other sites. Occasionally the laboratories on some of the projects we had. But most of that was done by the technical department, not the engineering department. O’Reagan: How much has the community changed, and in any particular ways during the time you’ve lived here? Ballard: Well, it’s gone from a small community to a much higher-traffic area than it used to be. But the people say it’s still pretty mild. Of course I’ve traveled to Los Angeles quite a bit; I had relatives in Los Angeles. And I’d grow accustomed to that mainly down there too. But it’s still—the Tri-Cities is still a nice place to live, I think. It doesn’t have a lot of the big city hubbub that other places do, but it certainly has changed a lot from what it was when I came. My wife came in 1944. Of course that was when it was sand and dust piles and no trees and no grass. It was a lot like that when I came, too, although it was developing. But the first few years that the Manhattan Project workers were here, they had some pretty rough goes. Of course the government would operate a city was an entirely different situation than we have now with private ownership and private management of the company—or local management of the company there. When the government operated the city, it was—you’ve heard these stories before, I know. Even lightbulbs were changed by the employees of the government. [LAUGHTER] So that was a big change. But when we got married we were renting from the government but as soon as they sold the houses we built our own and were on our own. So we’ve lived pretty much as a private city in all of our married life. So that hasn’t been a major change. O’Reagan: Anything else—nothing else in particular I’m fishing for here—did anything else come to mind, as far as changes in, I don’t know, spirit of work at Hanford or changes in the communities? Ballard: Well, the government management of the Hanford site has certainly undergone lots of changes, much as our society has, I think, over the last 50 years. When GE operated the plant, I felt and a lot of us felt that the program was defined in general in scope and the contractor was given a block of money and there they went. They did the job. They didn’t have the oversight or the detail management or the daily exchange as much with the government, I think, as they do now. I think that’s been a change in philosophy or change in detail of management more. A lot of it is because the public’s been more closely involved. Like the different committees that are involved in the oversight with the DoE that they didn’t have at that time. Of course when the Manhattan Project started, it was even further away than that. Nobody outside the Project knew what was being done. They were building the atomic bomb and nobody knew was done except the organization involved in it. Now, anything the government does it’s public knowledge and has 100 different reviews over a period of a decade before they get anything done. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Of course all these decades we’re talking about here are during the Cold War, and nuclear weapons are wrapped up in a lot of that and nuclear power. Was that ever something that was on your mind, or that were you aware of? Or was that just something that was going on far away? Ballard: No, I think the Cold War and the conflict with Russia was well-known because of all the cautions and concerns about the atomic weapons and people—during the crisis that peaked in the early ‘60s and we were in hard conflict with Russia. A lot of concern about what might happen. It was a different era and there was a lot of awareness of the potential that there could be a nuclear conflict. O’Reagan: Did it ever impact your life, or your wife’s life more or less directly? Ballard: Well, I don’t think we—we thought we were protected, we thought we had the national security to take care of it. And I guess we didn’t really worry about it—it was something you didn’t really dwell on, I don’t think. Although they told the students and the kids—some people did build bomb shelters. My neighbor, Dr. Petty, they had one at their house under the lawn in the front yard. When they built the house, they put in a bomb shelter. O’Reagan: [INAUDIBLE] Ballard: Nobody knew about it but them, but I knew about it. [LAUGHTER] O’Reagan: Did you ever see the inside of the shelter? Ballard: I never was in it, no. But I know it’s there. O’Reagan: Let’s see. So I guess we’ve sort of covered this. Could you describe the ways in which security and or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work? Ballard: Well, I guess from the work that I did in the engineering specifications and drawings and documents that related to projects, we had to worry about the classification on them. You had to worry about the access—access to different projects at different facilities. Of course you had to have the right clearance. So it was a restraint on work in some respects. But it wasn’t a major impact, I don’t think. O’Reagan: In more recent years—well I guess I don’t know how long—you’ve been working with the B Reactor Museum Association and other groups interested in the history of the local community. Can you tell me how you got involved with that and sort of the history of that? Ballard: Sure can. I retired in ’89. And then as I said, I went back to work on a part-time basis. But during that period, the Environmental Impact Statements had been written, and the mission at Hanford was changing from production to cleanup. All the documents and all the philosophy that was being disseminated was, we were going to tear everything down and dispose of everything in the Project. I was the representative to the Tri-City Technical Council. It was a group of only local affiliate—all local agent—sections or groups from the technical society’s engineering—civil, mechanical, electrical, nuclear, women’s organizations—all the technical organizations had what they called a Tri-City Technical Council. And we met monthly and addressed the issues for technology dissemination or issues that might affect the community from what we might recommend or so forth. From that group, we learned—we knew what the DoE was getting into, transition-wise into the cleanup of the site. They were going to tear everything down. And we said, well, we don’t want that to happen to some of these historic facilities. The B Reactor, for example, was the world’s first production reactor. And it was very consequential from the history, both of our nation and the world, as far as that. And also the kick-off for nuclear power. So we said, we ought to do something about that. So we formed a committee. I was one of the people of that committee. And we met in July of 1990, was our first meeting. We talked about an organization and how we might form a group that would lead toward the preservation of B Reactor. We decided to form an association. So we had an attorney draw up our bylaws and we formed an organization called the B Reactor Museum Association. We got our state corporate action—I forget what word they use to describe the initiation of the organization in January of 1991. But I consider the organization being formed in 1990. And our objective was to educate the public about the historical significance of B, and to do what we could to preserve the reactor, to see that it was preserved. To gain access and to develop exhibits and so forth for the exhibits. So that was where we started, was way back in 1990. And all during the decade of the ‘90s, we were meeting and fighting with the Department of Energy because they had milestones after milestones that were established on the cleanup and disposal of all the reactors. B was put into the list later on, but it was always on the list for cocooning, as all the reactors would be. We got those milestones extended over the years. And finally, with persuasion and meeting with legislators, Sid Morris and I met with Sid Morris and—I don’t remember the year now, but it was one of the first times that he was sympathetic for the theme that we preserve the historical relic. And of course, later on Doc Hastings. We had many meetings and persuasions with all the legislators. Of course, Cantwell and Murray got on board over the years. It later progressed into the fact that we want to have a study to see if the Parks Service could preserve it. One time during the late ‘70s, I believe it was, several people thought that the REACH would be the only chance of preserving the B Reactor. They would be the ones that would sponsor the tours and provide for the access and so forth. I said, no, I said, I don’t believe that. I said, I think we want to get the Parks Service involved because I don’t know that even the REACH is going to have the muscle to do it. So we got meetings with the legislators and we got a study authorized for the Parks Service study. That was after two or three years of trials and tribulations. It was finally approved. When the Parks Service first came out—you’re probably aware of the fact that they didn’t have—they just had Los Alamos as the sole main site for the park. And we said, that would never sell. It had to include all the sites: Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford. So they revised their study and made it a three-site park. It was eventually approved and then later legislation—Doc Hastings and Cantwell got the park legislation authorized. BRMA of course has been involved—has been the agency chipping at their heels all the way through all this. [LAUGHTER] We finally got credit for it. For many years, they didn’t really recognize BRMA as the organization that made it happen, but I think we had an awful lot to do with what made it happen. O’Reagan: Were you ever associated with any of the other local history-related groups? Ballard: Well, yes. We were affiliated with the CREHST museum. We worked with them and the REACH also. But we were the ones that were pushing—BRMA—the B Reactor specifically. We still have a lot of partnerships. We had memorandums of understanding with DoE and the CREHST and with—I guess we don’t have one with the REACH but we still meet with them. Matter of fact, they’re working on this new exhibit for the Cold War exhibit. Of course they’ve got—there’s four of us from BRMA that are on those meetings, but there’s a lot of other community leaders involved, too, obviously. And that was what happened is we were the—BRMA was the organization that was in the trenches early on. But later on, the whole community and the region and the legislators all got on board. So there was a lot of emphasis and support for getting it preserved and getting it converted, or made into a national historic park. Have you seen the plaque out there at B Reactor that says we’re the ones that initiated the plan to preserve it. So, yeah, I’m quite proud of that. I was one of the founding members of the organization. O’Reagan: Why did it matter to you? Ballard: Well, it’s important, I think, to preserve the history. It’s a significant part of the nation’s history. And if it’s going to be educational for the—a good place for the students, the young kids to come up and learn what the nuclear industry’s all about. I still say—and I’ve said for twenty years—that—I don’t know how many years down the road it’s going to be, but I think nuclear power’s going to be a major source of energy. Commercial electrical as well as all the other fields—medical and research. It still has an important place to play in our total nation’s history, I think. And we need to know how it started and what problems it caused. Let’s not generate those again. O’Reagan: What would you— Ballard: So that’s the story that’s going to be told in the park, and I think a lot of people—that’s some of the emphasis. People come out and see the comments in the paper, all the negative comments. Well, that’s true, but the story’s still there and needs to be told. O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War? Ballard: Well, I don’t know. It was a challenge, I guess. The success—I’m glad that we developed the bomb rather than Hitler. Like how Fermi said, he said when he was working on fission in Italy in the late ‘30s—the 1930s, yes. He always said he was eternally grateful that he didn’t learn how to control fission then. He said if he had have, Hitler would have started the war with them, rather than us ending the war with them. So I think they need to know what the conditions were at the time that the Manhattan Project was built and what the world was undergoing at the time. O’Reagan: What else should I be asking about? What else is there that we should discuss? Ballard: I don’t know! I think I pretty well spilled everything I know. Unless—I don’t know. I could mention about my—as you know, I was not here during the Manhattan Project. It was over when I came in 1951. My wife and her family was a different story. They came with DuPont in 1944. So her dad was a DuPont employee and he came out here at that time and saw the conditions in employment problems that they had at that time. He was a machinist and had actually directed the tech shops out there for many years. So he probably—that family has more history of the Manhattan Project than I do. Mine is just history. It was—I’ve had an interesting career and I guess I’ve enjoyed it here and it’s been a wonderful place to live. I think it will continue to be if we have people that keep our city from growing into something that it shouldn’t be. [LAUGHTER] But I guess I don’t have any new subjects to talk about unless you have new questions. O’Reagan: I think—that’s my list for now, but thank you so much for being here. Ballard: Well, it’s been a pleasure. O’Reagan: All right, great. Tom Hungate: I had a question. O’Reagan: Please. Hungate: One of the jobs you had—you had a wide variety of jobs; all of them sound fascinating to me. Ballard: Oh, they’re interesting, yes. Hungate: One caught my ear, because I’ve seen these. Tell me what it was like when you said you worked on the K Reactors to lay—you said you were laying up the block. Tell—describe what that process was. Ballard: Well, I wasn’t involved in that deeply as a lot of the fellows were. I can’t remember his name right now, but the primary engineer that had the graphite technology. That graphite was machined in the 101 Building. Well, actually the old reactor’s was in the old 101 Building in White Bluffs. They built a new building, the 2101 Building in the 200 East Area which was specifically for the graphite machining and layup—test layups. Those blocks were built to very tight tolerances. The graphite came in in square blocks from the manufacturers and they had to be machined to the final configuration. Those tolerances were very, very tight, like plus or minus two mils or five mils at the most. The blocks were basically four-and-three-quarters inches by four-and-three-quarters inches by 40-some inches long—the main block. After they were machined to very close tolerances, they were test stacked in the 2101 Building, laid up ten tiers to be sure that the tolerances of the assembly were precise. And from there they were packaged on pallets in sequence that they would go in, in reverse sequence, so when they took them off they were ready to be stacked up. And then they were shipped—brought into the reactor vessel, lowered down into the open process area in the center part of the core and pulled off the pallets and just stacked, piece by piece. There’s pictures available that you see of the old reactors. There may be some of K Reactors too, I don’t know, but show inside the reactors when they’re laying up with the blocks. Of course everybody’s in whites. Your cleanliness control’s very important. And of course, obviously, sequence was very, very important, to have all the blocks in there. But from my perspective, I just watched—I wasn’t doing the work, I was just part of the process that was putting them in there. It was very closely controlled and very temperature controlled—well, no, I don’t know about the temperature. The building was under limited temperature control. But the cleanliness was strictly controlled, and the workers of course had been assigned with each pallet that came in, they knew where it went and how it was to be laid. But that was the same process that was used in all the reactors for graphite layup. But that’s amazing, the way they built those things. You have all the penetrations, like—I can’t give you the numbers. K Reactors were bigger than the old original reactor. The original reactor had 2,004 process tubes. You probably all know the story of that, too. [LAUGHTER] But what I started to say was, the alignment of the holes in the blocks, of course, had to line up with the holes of the penetrations of front and rear faces precisely when they put them in. So it was like putting a watch together on a 40-foot-square [LAUGHTER]—40-foot cube. Very precise work. O’Reagan: Were there any mistakes? Ballard: Pardon? O’Reagan: Did you ever see any mistakes? Ballard: Well, no, but if there were they were corrected as they went, because they had two or three levels of inspection verified that they were going in properly. There may have been some, I don’t know. I was not in direct control of that job. I was more on the K Reactor, I just was in oversight. I don’t remember what my position was at that time, but—the B Reactor, for example, you know what happened there when they started it up? It died because of the xenon poison. They didn’t have enough neutron flux levels to override that poisoning effect. That’s when they had to add the additional fuel channels outside the original 1,500 that they had that the physicist said was adequate to drive the reactor. So that was an interesting job. They had to—the later reactors, they had more knowledge of what the requirements were. So the design wasn’t—it didn’t create a problem on initial startup like B Reactor did. O’Reagan: We were trying to outline or highlight—what sort of innovations came out of Hanford, what sort of inventions did you see—what new knowledge or techniques did you see created at Hanford? Ballard: Well, there again, you need to talk to the physicists and chemists and people that were in the fuel design areas. There were so many changes made to the fuel designs. They went from—of course these were only applicable to the graphite reactors the modern fuel originally were eight inches long when the distortion that occurred in the graphite, that was because of the structure change due to the radiation in the graphite. The channels were distorted to the point where some were so crooked that the eight-inch channel—the fuel wouldn’t go through the channel. SO they went to four-inch people—four-inch long fuel assemblies in some of those bad channels. And then of course another knowledge was the design of fuel assembly, you went from strictly external core where they just had an annulus of water around the outside cooling the fuel assembly. It went to a center core; they had internal cooling—a flow channel through the center of the element. But as far as the physics of the elements, they went from totally natural uranium, originally 238, all naturally derived with 0.7% 235. They went to some enrichment in the reactors to increase the power level. But there was physics changes all along, as far as being able to control and just knowledge of impurities and what the effects were in the nuclear physical—the physics involved in the reactor. But of course, then the Breeder Program, we didn’t talk about that. There’s a lot of advancements made there. FFTF was a marvelous machine and it produced a lot of new information from greener technology. That FFTF was—I spent ten years on development—seven on development and three on construction, so. But I wasn’t—I’m not a physicist and wasn’t into the technology as much as the people—I was more into construction, design and construction. O’Reagan: A lot of knowledge there, too, that you—hands-on knowledge. Ballard: Well, I always pride myself on being able to fix problems. We had a lot of things on assembly or putting the stuff together that just—problems or interferences or arrangements that weren’t thought of in design that we were able to resolve in the field, and that’s why I got into—I’ve been building houses for Habitat now for the last 15 years. [LAUGHTER] It’s a little different from putting reactors together, but I get a lot of comments from the instruction people in Habitat. This is not a reactor; we don’t need to have those tolerances. [LAUGHTER] But I say if you make it right, it looks a lot nicer and it goes together better. O’Reagan: All right, I guess that’s the list of questions I’ve got. I guess we’ll end it once again. Ballard: Okay, well, appreciate. <a href="https://youtu.be/-GxJwHtD_CQ">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview C Reactor B Reactor 300 Area K Reactor K East Reactor FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) FMEF (Fuels and Materials Exam Facility) 321 Building 400 Area 2101 Building 200 East Area Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1994 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Del Ballard Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Civil engineering Nuclear reactors Breeder reactors Description An account of the resource Del Ballard moved to Richland, Washington in 1951. Del worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1994 and was influential in the formation of the B Reactor Museum Association. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/18/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F6b4db4212c37a7652631b305e2cbff9a.jpg 0651c8b24a396c46ba1ed5ace42bbf05 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Donald Baker Location The location of the interview Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history interview with Don Baker on April 5, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Don about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Don Baker: My name is Donald E. Baker. It’s spelled D-O-N-A-L-D, initial E., last name B-A-K-E-R. Franklin: Great. And do you prefer to go by—I should’ve asked you before—Don or Donald? Baker: Don is fine. Franklin: Okay. Baker: Either one, I’ll respond. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. So, Don, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Baker: Well, I had heard very little bit about Hanford. But early in the school year, June of—well, it was probably March or April of 1951, an interviewer from Hanford came to the University of Idaho. And I was a graduate student there at the time. I was interviewed for work over here, and then eventually ended up hiring on. I reported for work in Richland on early June of 1951. Franklin: What was your graduate degree in? Baker: My graduate degree was in chemistry. I was part of a group of probably over 200 recent graduates that came in that year, hired on with General Electric. General Electric was the contractor at that time that was in charge of the entire Hanford Project. Franklin: Wow. Okay. Did you have any idea—did you interview for a specific job at Hanford, or--? Baker: No, I didn’t. At that time, really, there was not a lot known to the general public, because it still was a very classified operation that they were running here. So, I just assumed that with my background in chemistry that I would find some interesting work here. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Baker: And I certainly did. Franklin: Yeah. Did you have any other job offers, or had you interviewed in any other places before you--? Baker: No, I really was interested in knowing more about this. This would probably have been my first preference, and definitely after I knew more about it, I knew that I had made a good choice. But the conditions here were, shall we say, a little rustic at that time as far as living conditions. When I reported here, I was offered living accommodations in a barracks-type dormitory building in north Richland. I was there for approximately, oh, maybe two or three weeks. During that time, we were given orientation, lectures and so on. And at the end of that two or three weeks’ time, I was offered to do some work in off-site inspection. Now, offsite inspection was a group of engineers that were following contracts where equipment was being built for Hanford. Quite a ways away from chemistry, but nevertheless, it sounded like an interesting opportunity for me, because it could give me an opportunity to see just what the real world was like, as far as how equipment was fabricated. So, after being here for only about three weeks, I packed my bags and was off to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a plant that was fabricating approximately one-cubic-foot containers for some work here at Hanford. This was in a foundry-type place where heavy vessels were fabricated. This particular company was known for their huge beer processing vessels that the tanks were made for making beer that were glass-lined. They were made out of carbon steel, and then they would go into a huge furnace where a glaze was put on the inside of the tanks. That was quite a ways away from the type of work that Hanford was requiring them to do. They were making approximately a one-cubic-foot vessel to extremely tight specifications that the people found hard to believe or understand when they first started the job. It was a stainless steel tank that had an off-center pipe in it. It was made to very tight specifications, dimensionally to within one-thousandth to three-thousandths of an inch. And it had a special fitting on the top to connect to equipment that it would be used on here at Hanford. It had to be leak-tight so that it would only leak approximately one cubic centimeter in 30 years. That’s tight. And also, cleanliness specifications that were really unheard of. After the container was fabricated, it would be fired in a huge tank-like furnace with hydrogen present. That would turn this into a shiny metal vessel. From that point on, it could not be touched with bare hands. This was really, really difficult to impress on the people that were fabricating, because they were used to handling anything with whatever old leather gloves they had. Because there was to be no fingerprints or anything like that on there, and it was to be completely clean. Well, that went well, because as soon as they figured the inspectors that were back there would reject anything that they saw was handled without white gloves, they caught on in a hurry, and we had no trouble from then on. The job was completed, and they did an excellent job on making these containers for us. The next assignment that I had after that—that was about three months that we worked on that particular contract. I then went to an aluminum company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were making aluminum process tubes that would be used in the reactors out here. It was really interesting to me to see the way that they proceeded to make these. They would start out with a billet of aluminum, oh, maybe three or four inches in diameter, with a hole through it. By successively pulling that aluminum through dies, they would reduce it from the original dimension down to a process tube that was approximately an inch-and-three-quarters in diameter and roughly 42 feet long. Not only was it a long tube, it had ridges at about 4:00 and 8:00 to support fuel that would go in there and allow for water circulation all the way around the fuel. So as they would draw this, these little ridges would gradually go down until they were exactly where they were. And also there could be no twist in this, so if the ridges were at 4:00 and 8:00 at one end of the tube, they needed to be at the same location at the other end of the tube. But they were very experienced in dong this type of work, and they proceeded to do a fine job for us. After the tubes were inspected and approved for shipment, they would slide like a cardboard sleeve over the outside to protect them, and then these were placed in long wooden boxes. Now, we hear a lot about recycling, but at that time, it wasn’t in everybody’s vocabulary. But they needed some wooden boxes and somebody out here at Hanford said, you know, we had had some previous orders of these tubes, where are the boxes? And they said, oh, these boxes have been surplused and somebody comes in and they have an auction out there and bought them all up. Well, it turns out that the very boxes that we needed were in a surplus yard out in West Richland. The people here, recycling on their mind, contacted that person, bought them back from him after he had bought them here, shipped them to the plant that was manufacturing the tubes back in Pittsburgh and they loaded them up. Then they had to go in a special rail car. Normally, boxcars have side-opening doors. This had to have an end-opening doors on it, so that the tubes, forty-some feet long could be put in this 50-foot box car. Then a bulkhead was built in the end of the railcar in there so the load could not shift. It was stacked to probably about eight, nine feet high in the boxcar and shipped out here and unloaded out here on the plant. So it was interesting to see how they proceeded to do this. This would’ve been in 1951. Interestingly, that was about the time that commercial household aluminum foil came onto the market. It was much in-demand, especially for the holiday season in December there. The employees and people of this plant could buy a thing of aluminum foil at the company store there when it wasn’t available commonly in the supermarkets and so on. But some of these things, you know, we take for granted now that they’ve just always been there. But this company was making all kinds of things, including process tubes for use at Hanford. Franklin: Interesting. Baker: Then, after that project was completed in three or four months, I think, that we were there, I was assigned to another one in Ohio. The process tubes on the reactor go in through a steel tube that is called a gun barrel. This gun barrel is approximately, I would say maybe seven or eight feet long. It had stepped areas on it so that radiation could not stream out of the reactor; it would be stopped by the steel, different intervals long there. Again, this was something that had to be made to within at least a one-thousandth to three-thousandths clearance on every dimension. It was made of steel. The company that had the contract to make these could not fulfill their contract. They failed, and the contract had to be taken away from them. They were months behind, and they had created a huge pile of scrap and that was all to show for their experience. So the contract was canceled, and it was given to another company that was doing work exclusively for the US Navy. In fact, they even managed to get some of the special tooling that was only available that belonged to the US Navy, and it was applied to our job. They put the job—they got busy on it and came through beautifully, and they were able to use these. Because the construction, really, it was essential. They couldn’t put the process tubes in the reactor that was being built at this time until these components were in place. So, it was pretty straightforward once they got the right people working on the job. Again, they came through and provided what we needed out here. So, this pretty much takes care of my first year of employment here. I came back to Hanford, and I was at that time, I still did not have my security clearance. So I was assigned, though, to the B Reactor area and worked with an engineer there on an efficiency study for the power plant. Some of these seem a ways away from chemistry, but, nevertheless, we did do chemical analysis on the combustion products from the coal plant. They were looking for just small improvements on the efficiency, because coal was a big expense for here as far as producing steam. The steam was needed to heat the facilities out there, but it was also used as part of the high pressure pumping system for the reactor. They had an electric motor, and on that same drive shaft was a steam turbine. So if the electric motor lost its power, the steam turbine would pick up the load and supply high pressure water to the reactor until it would get cooled down. So it was a backup for loss of electric power as well. So I worked at that, and about six weeks after I started in on that project, my security clearance came through. That’s what I’d really been waiting for and I got notice of that in the morning, and in the afternoon, the engineer I was working with, my manager, took me over and showed me B Reactor for the first time. And, of course, I was quite impressed with what I saw. It gave me a chance, too, to see where some of these components that I had observed being made across the country, where they were being used out here at Hanford. So after we finished the steam plant study—and by the way, we found out that they were doing a good job as far as the operators. There wasn’t much that we could uncover that would improve their operation. The thing that really made a difference was with the quality of coal that they were buying. If they bought coal that was of low quality, cheap, they didn’t get good results from it. So that was kind of what we learned from that. But at least we knew that no further improvements could be made as far as we could tell. After that, I spent some time, oh, three or four months with the reactor operations group. Then, I was offered an opportunity to do work on graphite research. Graphite had become a really, really big problem. It was going to be limiting the life of the reactors, and they could see that that was exactly where things were headed. This was, again, in 1952. So, they had two large groups of people, a graphite research and a graphite development group, that were studying what to do with this problem. Meantime, DR Reactor had been built, because they could see its lifetime was fast approaching end-of-life, and the plan was that they could then just switch the water plant when D was shut down over to DR and just move on from there. Well, as it turned out, with all this intensive effort, they found ways that they could minimize the expansion that was incurring in the graphite. Up ‘til that time, they had been keeping it nice and cool with helium atmosphere, you know, and everything. As it turned out, the graphite was really being damaged more by those low temperatures than allowing it to go a little higher in temperature. Because every time a fission reaction would occur, a very energetic neutron, over 2 MeV neutron would be generated, and this would interact with the atoms in the graphite and cause it to swell. So by operating at a little higher temperature, you began to relieve some of these problems. But there was a tremendous amount of research that went into there. We would be putting—I was then with a group that would be putting samples in the reactor, taking them out at six weeks to two month intervals, and measuring them in the 300 Area laboratories, then returning them back to the reactor. This way, we were able to learn a lot about what was happening and how to make the reactor measurements so that we could improve the operating characteristics of the plant. In addition to physical measurements, expansion and so on, they measured the conductivity. This was one of the areas that I got pretty heavily involved with. How well the graphite would conduct heat determines, to a large extent, what the temperature’s going to be in there. So, typically, the traditional method was to take a large cylinder of graphite, put a heater in it, and measure temperatures in it as a function of power input and all that. So, it was about that time that somehow or other, I ran across some work that was being done at a US Naval research laboratory in San Francisco area. So I contacted the physicist down there and asked him about it. He invited me down there. He says, I can’t tell you exactly how or what we’re doing with this, but he says, I can show you our equipment and you can take it from there. So, it was a different approach and exactly what we needed to measure the thermal conductivity of graphite from the reactors out there. What they used was putting a pulse of heat into a very small piece of graphite, smaller than the size of a dime. They would put a pulse of heat in there and then measure how fast that heat pulse traveled through this thin sample. From that, you can derive the thermal conductivity. Just what we were looking for. We were able to build equipment that would go into, from the front face of the reactor, go into an opening in the reactor where the process tube had been removed. The saw would rotate 90 degrees and remove a plug of graphite from the inside of that graphite channel. Then we would take that into our lab, slice it up into pieces, and we could tell exactly how the conductivity was changing from the area where the cold processing tube was in contact with the graphite, to out to the edges of the graphite blocks. This provided us a lot of data that hadn’t previously been available. So we built the equipment here to do that type of measurement. They were using flash tubes as the pulse heat source, but it was flash tubes that would be used for aerial night photography. So these were pretty powerful flash tubes. But approximately a year after we started using that technique, lasers were developed. Then we started using pulse lasers, which were a big improvement. From then on, it was pretty much a standard way of measuring conductivity on small samples. In fact, because that capability was available here, one of the things that had been done was to recover a large amount of technetium. Now, technetium is not available in—normally, it’s an element in the periodic table—I don’t remember just which number, now—but all of it that ever was available, if it was, had since decayed. I think it has about a 4-million-year half-life. Very long half-life. But it is a fission product, and they were able to process enough fission products to come up with technetium that could be converted to the metal. And one of my engineering friends out there worked on this project for quite a while. So we got to talking one day, and I said, what are the chances that I could get small piece of that technetium? He said, just fine, we could make that available to you. So, I was able, then, to report for the first time the thermal conductivity of technetium and report it in the literature. So, I really had some interesting assignments along the way. Much of the work on graphite was documented in a book called Nuclear Graphite. It was compiled, edited, by Dr. Richard Nightingale, brought together a lot of information on radiation damage in graphite material. This led into—well, I’ll go back a step there. Battelle came on the scene in 1965. So my employment then changed from General Electric to Battelle. Franklin: Because you had been working at Hanford Labs, right? Baker: Yes. I was working at Hanford Labs at the time, so that part of it went to Battelle, the research side of it. We continued to do graphite research until about 1968 or ’69. At that point, Westinghouse was given the contract to do some preliminary work on the Fast Flux Test Facility. We had a pretty good handle on the graphite problems at that time. There were still, though, questions on materials for using them in a much higher flux environment in the Fast Flux reactor. So we were assigned the task of doing some testing with boron carbide. Now, boron carbide is another interesting, very high temperature material. It has a melting point of about 2,350 Celsius. Incidentally, the graphite—to go back a step there—is made from petroleum coke and petroleum distillates, some of the byproducts of processing petroleum. When it’s just in the form of coke, it’s similar to the charcoal that we might use in our barbecue. But if it is mixed with other carbonaceous products, made into graphite, and then heated up to 2,700 to 2,900 degrees Celsius in electric furnaces, it will turn it into this material that is used for electrodes in electric furnaces. Electric furnace melting is common in the steel industry. When it came time to produce all the graphite that was needed for the reactors out here, already in industry there were a lot of people who knew a lot about graphite, because they had been in the process of making this into electrodes for many years. So then we—to get back—we moved into the boron carbide research, and work was done at testing facilities in Idaho. The problem with boron carbide is that it produces a helium—an alpha particle, a helium atom for each neutron that it captures. Boron-10 is an excellent absorber of material to use in controlling reactors. But it does have the disadvantage that it produces gases. So, the boron carbide is made in the shape of small pellets about half-inch in diameter. When they’re processed, some of the helium is retained in the crystal structure of the boron carbide pellet, but the rest of it is released into the steel pin that contains it. So, eventually it pressurizes the pin and limits how long a control rod will operate. So, our assignment was to figure out under what conditions the helium gas was released and what improvements could be made to make the boron carbide control rods last as long as possible. There was also another thing that was unknown at that time, and that was if a tube should fail, and if there was sodium flowing past it, would it wash out the boron carbide pellets that was in there or not? Well, we actually set up an experiment to do that. With some facilities back at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, they were able to flow sodium over a simulated failed pin and we could examine what happened. So, this was the type of work that involved high temperature materials that turned out to be the career that I worked on. It was chemically related, but very materials-oriented. I found it to be a fascinating career to be associated with. It really was something where there were a lot of problems and a lot of challenges. So we were able to supply the answers to a lot of that. So that worked pretty well continued up until the mid, oh, about 1986 or so, when I became involved in a group that was doing experiments in the FFTF. There was a need for information on fusion energy at that time, as to what kind of materials could be used in what they called the blanket of a test machine that was being designed. So, we were able to work with Canadian scientists and Japanese scientists on coming up with a design of an experiment that would be placed in the FFTF. This was probably one of the most difficult, most challenging experiments that I had in my whole career working at Hanford, because the experiment was fully instrumentated so that you could follow everything that was happening, and yet it had to be completely failsafe, so that if the experiment failed, the reactor could continue operating without shutting down. We succeeded in designing the experiment. The Canadian scientists were extremely helpful in designing part of the tritium recovery, because tritium is what we were producing in these tests. Every bit of tritium had to be recovered. We had a large glovebox, it was about 12 feet high with multiple glove ports. We’d reach in at different levels and operate valves and equipment inside of it. Many challenges, and it operated absolutely perfectly the whole time, and it provided a lot of data. Battelle was responsible for compiling, reporting the data at many conferences. The experiment continued until, and an experiment was in place when Hanford received the orders from the Department of Energy that the FFTF had to be shut down and we had to terminate our experiments at that time. But it seemed like we really got a lot of important information as a result of the experiments that were done. It turned out to me to be an exciting career to be involved with. So that kind of summarizes quite a few years of interesting work at Hanford for me. Franklin: What was the tritium used for when that was being created? Baker: The tritium eventually was used for the weapons program. But it was more of a byproduct of a material that was being used for control rods. Because control rods were used in all the reactors out there. Since it could build up pressure inside of the tubes, we needed to know how much. There even was some work that we were involved with in putting a metal sintered—like an escape valve—on some of the pins so that as the gas would be produced, the helium could be released without allowing sodium to go back in. But it was not highly successful and we gave up on that after not too much experimental work. But the combination of sodium being a reactive metal, as it is, we had a lot of challenges, too. Oh, another interesting part of the graphite work that we did was, in addition to looking at dimensional changes that were causing the graphite to expand and contract, in some cases, too, after a certain point, it would contract. So, you had peaks and valleys in a channel through the reactor. They tried to go in and bore that hole out so that it would be easier to slip a process tube through. And in some cases, they were successful, but the graphite, after it’s irradiated becomes extremely hard. They had to use carbon tools to even kind of—we use carbon tools all the time in the laboratory; otherwise, metal saw blades just wouldn’t do it. We had to use diamond blades to cut into it, it was so hard. But we also were interested—once they learned to use a gas mixture: a mixture of CO2 and helium to adjust the temperature. This was the key to controlling the expansion that was limiting the life of the reactors. Once we started using that, then we needed to know, in a radiation field, will carbon dioxide react at a different rate with carbon? Because at a high temperature, CO2 plus carbon will produce carbon monoxide. So we put together our own high-radiation-level cobalt source in the 300 Area. I went out looking again, it was the recycle route. We found a surplus tank that had been used for—was going to be used for some separations processing work, but it was no longer needed. It was about eight feet in diameter and approximately 15 feet tall. We found a building in the 300 Area where we could dig a hole that deep. In fact, we dug it a little deeper than that, and managed to prepare a tank-type facility to make Cobalt-60 irradiation source. The tank was just about even with floor level; went down 14 feet. Filled with water, and had a barrier all the way around the top of it. Filled with distilled water, because we didn’t want to have some of the corrosion products that will happen if you have aluminum in contact with mineral water. But loading it with cobalt was another challenge. We started out with about 15,000 curies of cobalt, which gave us a pretty good source. But it wasn’t what we really needed. So over approximately three or four years, we were able to increase that to 630,000 curies of cobalt-60. That is a lot of cobalt-60. At that time, it was probably the fifth largest cobalt facility in the United States. It had produced radiation levels of approximately 17 million roentgens per hour. It was—without the water shielding over it, the radiation would’ve been lethal in fractions of a second. But, with 14 feet of water shielding us, we could look down at the blue glow, and we would have our experiments suspended above that would go down into one- or two-inch tubes, right down to within an inch or two of the cobalt. The cobalt rods were approximately 16 inches high. The cobalt was made locally, out in the K Reactors. Transporting it was another interesting challenge. We would ship it in from the reactor area in a lead-filled container cask. The container—the cask would be located down into the water, the lid removed, the cobalt elements would be placed into it, the lid would be placed back on the container, it would be brought to the surface of the water, then with all that—it was approximately 40 inches in diameter—with that much lead around the cobalt, we could approach it and they would put very secure bolts in the top of it. But then, it would be removed from the water, and we had an eight-hour time limit to get it from the 100 Areas down to the 300 Area and into water again. Because there were limits on how much heat could be absorbed in the lead shielding. So we had a crane capable of lifting several-ton cask that was set up ahead of time. A section of the roof on this building was removed, the cask would be lowered down through the roof, down into this water-filled tank that we had. We remotely took the cap off, took the cobalt-60 elements out, and we had our own cobalt-60 source for examining materials to see what the effect of gamma radiation would have on the materials. Quite interesting. Whenever they had that shipment, patrol cars would be stationed at each railroad crossing, and the patrol cars stopped the trains while the trucks went through. Franklin: Wow. Baker: But it was planned in advance, and everything worked fine. Franklin: What kinds of materials were you testing next to this cobalt thing for gamma radiation exposure? Baker: We were testing such things as camera lenses, for example. But mainly its justification was to see whether the cobalt—the gamma radiation would enhance the reaction of carbon dioxide with the graphite. Would there be more reaction going on as result of the gamma radiation present than not? What we found was that it wasn’t really significant; it was primarily a temperature-controlled reaction. So we already were aware, pretty much, of what the limitations on the graphite temperatures would be. We had thermal couples to measure—and there were thermal couples also that were built into the graphite moderator stack at the time the reactor was built to measure the temperatures. But on one occasion, we did make a periscope—one of the other engineers that was working in this graphite group made a periscope that fitted into the front face where a process tube had been removed, and it matched up against the seal where this gun-barrel-type-arrangement that penetrated into the graphite stack was. That slid in there, and the light, the glow from the graphite went down a series of mirrors, was reflected back to the other one and back again. So we had a periscope that we could physically use an optical pyrometer and measure the temperature of the graphite using that kind of a device. It was probably the first time—first and only time—that we were able to look into an operating Hanford reactor. But the engineer that was involved with that was a very talented individual. He came up with something that no one else had thought of doing up until that time. Franklin: Wow. And what year would that have been? Baker: That was probably in abut 19—somewhere in the late 1960s. Franklin: Late 1960s. Wow, that’s really quite amazing. Baker: Yeah. No, it was probably earlier than that. Probably early ‘60s. Probably around 1960, ’62, something like that. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. So cobalt, then—cobalt’s a gamma emitter, correct? Baker: Yes, it is. Franklin: So 14 feet of water, then, was enough to blunt the gamma rays, to be able to observe that? Baker: Yes, it was, mm-hmm. It absorbs that radiation. It’s an ideal material because you can look down there and see what you’re doing. You have to have long tong manipulators to work with things, but it has a very penetrating gamma ray that’s emitted, I think it’s around 1.5 MeV. So it’s a very energetic, very penetrating ray. Some gamma rays are—beta particles, for example, do not penetrate like a gamma ray would. But it has a short half life; as I recall, it’s something around five years? 5.7 years, I’m not sure of that. So, half of it would decay. After we’d made the final really big load, we had 630,000, that was pretty much maxed out, as far as the amount of cobalt in that facility and they just continued to use it, probably for at least 25 years after that, exploring effects of gamma radiation on various materials. Franklin: Because then after a certain point, so much of it would’ve been decayed that it’s— Baker: Yeah, a certain amount of it would be decayed. But it still was being used at a time when they started to—well, I guess the cobalt had been removed; the facility was there when they were cleaning up Hanford. Now that facility’s been completely removed, the building and all traces of it, now, I think are gone. But it was used for quite a while. Franklin: That glow you were talking about, that’s what’s called Cherenkov’s radiation? Baker: That’s is the—that’s the name. It’s due to the interaction with the structure of the water, the absorption produces a blueish glow. Have you ever seen that? Franklin: Not naturally, no. I’ve seen photos of it. Baker: It’s beautiful. Now, I think that the reactor, possibly, at WSU, it is a form of a trigger reactor, is it not? And I think that there probably is a similar glow with that, with the reactor that’s over at the Pullman campus. Franklin: Oh, wow. I’ll have to—maybe I’ll get the chance to see that someday. Baker: Sometime when you’re over there, it would be interesting to drop by and have a look at that facility. Franklin: Yeah, it sure would. So you said that you worked on this project with the cobalt and everything at FFTF up until the mid-‘50s, right? And then what did you do after that, after the project— Baker: Well, it was about 1969 when it went into the boron carbide work. The boron carbide work continued until 1986. At that time, I became a part of the group that was doing the design for the joint experiments with the Canadian and Japanese scientists on blanket materials, absorbent materials, for use in the FFTF. That’s when we started designing that facility. I think what made this work so interesting was that usually we were in on the design phase of it. And then followed it through from the fabrication of the experiment, getting all the approvals, safety approvals and so on, actual construction, inserting the experiments into the reactors, starting them up, and collecting the data. So we could see, from start to finish, how the project went. I think this had a lot of value, because that way there was feedback. You could see how you might have done a project in a different way, and it would suggest other ways of doing things. I think, many times, a designer may not have that privilege of being able to see the end result and knowing whether the decisions made in the design were the best ones to make. So I found that that was really an exciting part of doing the work to see something through from start to finish. Franklin: You’ll have to forgive me because I’m not a—I just want to make sure I’m following and understanding everything correctly because I’m not a nuclear scientist. When you say blanket materials, what is a blanket material? Baker: A blanket material is the material that was proposed to go around a fusion energy machine. Now, fusion energy has been—its advances have been very slow and very difficult to come by. But right now there is a fusion machine that is being built in France. But they need to confine a plasma to get the fusion of deuterium and tritium, or various elements at the low end of the periodic table, to fuse together to release energy. The fission energy comes from the process of fissioning elements at the high end of the periodic table. In fusion energy, the work that is being done, they are proposing that there would be an intense field of neutrons present, and that some of these neutrons could be absorbed in what they call the blanket. The blanket was the area immediately surrounding where the fusion is taking place. So we were just doing materials, evaluating them, to serve as materials that could surround—that would be in the area surrounding a fusion energy device, and absorb these neutrons, thereby making some tritium that could be circulated back into the fusion machine so it could be making some of its fuel. Products typically—lithium, when you bombard lithium with neutrons, you will produce tritium from that. So many of the materials that have been proposed have followed the use of lithium. So the work that we were doing in FFTF was examining potential materials that could be used in a fusion apparatus. Franklin: So that’s not shielding, then, that’s materials to help, I guess in a way, moderate the reaction, but capture that tritium to recycle back into the— Baker: Exactly! That’s a good way—it would be a way of producing more fuel that could be used to fusion, yes. Franklin: Because fusion is bringing the atoms together, right, which produces an immense amount of energy— Baker: That is true. Franklin: So is that blanket material there also there to capture that enormous amount of energy? Or is that just to capture the other atoms made by this fusion? Baker: It’s more, I think, to capture the neutrons to provide a feedback of process for fuels to make more tritium atoms to put back into the process to keep it going. Franklin: Oh, wow, wow. Baker: So that was the purpose of working on those materials for that. Franklin: Oh, that’s really fascinating. So now we’re just—France, you said, is building the first fusion reactor. Baker: Yes. There are other nations—I’m not sure which nations now are involved, but France has been behind this for a long time. Interest by the United States lagged for a little while, oh, probably ten, 15 years ago. They had cut back some on the support for that. But then some advances were made, and it looked like it was really something that the United States should be involved with, so they are still a participant in the fusion energy research that’s going on. Franklin: How long did you work on this blanket material project with Canada and Japanese scientists? Baker: Well, it went from 1986 until, I believe the FFTF reactor was shut down in 1992. So that six-year period was when we were working with the Canadian and Japanese scientists. The Canadians had much experience in tritium work, because they use heavy water reactors. The heavy water reactors do produce some tritium in the process. So some of us took classes up there in how to safely handle and capture tritium. What the Canadians came up with, their contribution to this project was that in the FFTF, when we would be irradiating these materials and making tritium, we would be able to adjust the temperatures and look at how fast the tritium was released from the material, depending on the temperature and what other gases were present. This sort of information. All of the tritium that was produced, it had to be—it was swept out of the reactor, a helium line went in with extremely high—less than one part per million of impurities in the helium, because we didn’t want any activation of any impurities in the gas to be swept out of the reactor. And that gas, the sweep gas, that went down over the samples, came back out, went into all the instrumentation that was in this large glovebox. So, we had to capture all of the tritium that we made. None of it escaped to the outside at all. So the Canadians came up with highly efficient materials that were combination of zirconium and some other elements to capture that tritium. They would actually form hydrides or trihydrides as a combination that they would react with and tie it up so that it was a stable compound. It would—since the tritium has a very soft beta emission, we would typically have maybe a couple thousand curies of tritium in a tube that was approximately an inch-and-a-quarter in diameter by about 12 inches long. But it was completely shielded; you couldn’t detect any information on the outside of the capsule, yet it contained huge amounts of tritium. But it was all captured, and that’s what the glovebox—it contained all of the materials, the chemical materials, that were needed to capture the tritium. Franklin: Wow, that’s interesting. So the hydrogen would be able to sweep up, basically, the tritium and become tritium-laden, then? Baker: Yes, that’s right. The helium— Franklin: Helium, sorry. Baker: The helium would sweep out all the tritium. In some cases, if we used a little bit of hydrogen mixed in with this ultra-high-purity helium, then we’d be able to sweep it out much faster. It seems like the materials would react with our samples and we would sweep it out so we would see rapid releases of tritium from the material. Which was important information to have, because if you’re going to extract this from a fusion machine, you might want to know how to get it out of your compounds faster. So those experiments continued on, then, until FFTF shut down. And then I worked for about three more years after that on instrumentation for the waste tanks out at Hanford. Much of it was involved with that tank that would periodically release bursts of gas. Franklin: The burping tank. Baker: The burping tank, yes. That was instrumented, too. They had various kinds of gas instrumentation installed right there at the tank. The controls for it were in a trailer park right next to the Tank Farm fence. So we had continuous monitoring on that. I was involved in some of the operation and maintenance of the helium gas analysis equipment. Franklin: Oh, wow. Baker: So I worked on that until I retired then. Franklin: And you retired in 1995? Baker: ‘95, yes. Franklin: So, what, 44 years. Baker: 44 years I had worked out there. I can think of nothing in the way that I really want to change. I always felt that we were working very safely. I feel that we really had a good knowledge of what we were doing at the time. Franklin: Sure. I want to come back to a couple things you mentioned earlier. Maybe just ask you more about the social/cultural aspects of living in Richland. So when you mentioned you’d moved into a dorm for your first few weeks here in north Richland, which I imagine—those were dorms for the Hanford construction camp, right? Baker: Yes, they had used some for that and some for other workers, because all of the housing, even in downtown Richland, was controlled by the government. So you got on a list and you got high enough priority, then you could move to a more desirable location. So by the time I came back after traveling around the country for a year, I’d moved up on the list and was eligible for a dorm in downtown Richland. These dorms were built on Jadwin between Swift and—what’s the next street north of there? Not Symons. Franklin: Williams? Baker: Williams, yeah. The dorms were located in that general area there. And then there were some other dorms for the women employees that were down approximately where the Albertson’s store is now. Franklin: Right, right. We have photos of those. Baker: Those were the two locations fro those. I was in the dorms for only, oh, maybe about three years. Or, not the dorms. Yeah. The single dorm rooms. And then I was able to get an apartment on Gribble Street. There were some apartments along there, and I rented an apartment there for a while until I then later bought my own house in Richland. Franklin: Your dorm—so, were there mess halls that went with the dorms, or were you—did they have kitchens? I’m wondering if you could describe the dorms for me, kind of how that living arrangement worked. Baker: The dorms were single occupancy rooms. You know, as a matter of fact, there may still be one of those in use in the City of Richland. Franklin: I’ve heard there’s one off Jadwin. Baker: On Jadwin. It is—where is that, I can see it— Franklin: Someone told me— Baker: It’s on Van Giesen. Franklin: Van Giesen, right, right. Baker: I think it’s on Van Giesen between George Washington Way and Jadwin. Franklin: Yeah, they said it’s by the 7 Eleven. Baker: Yes, there’s a 7 Eleven on the corner of Jadwin and Van Giesen, and about halfway down that block, on the north side is one little building. I think it still may have rooms for people that rent that just want a dorm-type room. Franklin: Interesting. I drive that way home everyday. I’m going to see if I can find it. Baker: I’m going to look again, too. Look and see if it’s not still there. Franklin: Because those would’ve been the Alphabet House dorms, right? I think they were the J— Baker: No, I think they were—even—they were mostly—Ms and Ws. There was an M-1, M-2, M-3. I lived in M-5 for a while. And the women’s dorms were similarly numbered W such-and-such. Franklin: Right, the Army gets very creative with its naming system. Baker: And there were some restaurants and cafeterias in Richland. One of the cafeteria-type operations was on that corner, just across from where the Federal Building is right now, at the corner of Knight and Jadwin. It was on the southwest corner. They had a large eating facility in there. But that was pretty much the way that—the dorms were all right. One of the things that I do kind of remember there, you know, you’re going to have a mix of all kinds of people in a dorm like that. Well, one of the occupants decided he was going to make some homebrew. So he brewed up this and then put the caps on it and everything. He had his own bottle capper. And then he put them under his bed in the room. Well, this tends—especially if you haven’t processed it right, it will generate some CO2 gas. Franklin: Yeah, it will. Baker: In the middle of the night, these started going off, almost simultaneously, more than one. So as the cap would blow off, the beer would come out, it would soak all the bottom of the bedding. When you walked down the hall, you would think that you were in the local tavern, because it really smelled of—so, he could no longer hide the fact that he was making some homebrew in his dorm room. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Did you say—you mentioned that there would be all kinds of people in there. So was it a mix of blue and white collar workers or people of all different jobs? Baker: Yes, it was. It was kind of a mix of blue and white collar, mm-hmm. It really was. Franklin: And it would’ve been all single men, right? Baker: All single men. And single women. Some of the women worked at the hospital, they worked in the schools in Richland. But, yeah, that’s pretty much the way it was. Franklin: I wonder if you could describe to me your first impressions of Richland, coming in in June of ’51, coming into this government town where there was no private property and everything was government-owned. Baker: Yeah. Well, it was really foreign to my way of thinking. But it seemed like—there was real effort, once the property was sold. People could buy their homes and businesses were encouraged to come in to make it more normal. But it was not—it was unusual circumstances to be in. And you really didn’t have the freedom of choice, shall we say, as to what you could do. You knew that if you were in the government housing that you were only qualified for certain types of housing, depending on how long you’d been here, your marital status, whether you were single or married, whether you had children. If you had more children, then you were entitled to a house with more bedrooms. People just kind of adapted to what the conditions were at that time. There really were a lot of young people at the time that were living here that were attracted to this area. They were a very enthusiastic group. There were a lot of social activities, groups that even to this day still exist. There was a ski club that was very popular with the young people. Sometimes they would take off for, especially a three-day weekend. We could get on a train at Pasco, go to Spokane and switch to another train, and go over to Missoula, Montana and ski at Big Mountain at Whitefish. We would arrive over there about 5:00 in the morning and go out and have a full day on the slopes for a couple days. Then jump on the train, get back in. That first day back was kind of rough, though, because we were getting in early in the morning and have to get to work at 7:30 in the morning. But it worked out fine. Other times, there were bus trips, chartered buses took us to Sun Valley for skiing, some of the mountains up in Canada. It was really a lot of fun. Border crossings were fairly simple at that time. You’d come back and they weren’t supposed to—they were only supposed to bring a certain amount of alcoholic beverages back from Canada because of the alcohol laws in the State of Washington at that time. So when we’d be coming back, typically, a border security officer would step inside the bus and look and say, well, did you have a good time up here? Yeah, we had a good time. Okay. That was the end of it. They wouldn’t check to see whether everybody was within the limits allowed or not. But you never knew when they would check. But the security was very much unlike how it is now as far as border crossings. Franklin: Yeah, kind of a different time, huh? Baker: Yeah, a different time. Franklin: You mentioned there were a lot of young people. Did that strike you, that there weren’t a lot of established families at Hanford? That most people here—because you had to work at Hanford to live in Richland. Baker: Yeah, that seemed—but I think—the town was pretty full. It was an unusual condition, but it seemed like there was always so much going on with this group of people, that they made things happen for themselves. I recall—this was back in probably the early ‘50s, we had an engineer join our group working on the graphite. He was from the Boston area. That man continually complained. There’s nothing to do, there’s this, there’s that, I don’t have, I can’t go to see the latest operas, I can’t—and we said, you know, there’s a lot to do here—and there was. But he complained so much, people reminded him occasionally: well, you can always go back. And certainly, sure enough, he only stayed here about three years. He couldn’t take it. He was the type of person that needed that big city environment to exist. It just wasn’t the place for it. And so he left. And the area was probably better because we didn’t have him around complaining. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Was the Uptown finished by the time you got here? Baker: It was underway—it was just kind of being developed, yeah. The stores were going in and they were gradually—but it was about that time when the Uptown was being developed. But there was a lot of—still, a lot of sagebrush around. Even when some of the ranch houses were built out on the west side along the bypass highway right now, they would frequently run into large groups of rattlesnakes that would be locally in one area. They would have to get rid of them. There were some things here, you know, that you wouldn’t expect. But rattlesnakes were— One of the things that they had to be careful even in the 300 Area, if some of the buildings had a crawlspace underneath where the maintenance personnel would have to climb under there to work on waterlines and steam valves and other things, and they had to be extremely careful, because there was—Well, one time right in 306 Building, I was working out there one evening. Working late. I was on the second floor, and the only other person was a janitor who was working on the first floor. All of the sudden, I heard this scream, and I thought, what is going on?! Did somebody break in and attack that janitor? I knew it was the janitor. She was absolutely panicked. She was up against the wall in one of the restrooms that was downstairs. The entrance to the restroom door was within two feet of the outside door. A rattlesnake had come in from the outside and made its way into the restroom. She went in to empty the waste basket; she picked it up and she was facing this rattlesnake. She froze and just let out this scream. I went down there and saw what was under control, and she couldn’t hardly talk. So I said, well, we have a way to handle such situations. Don’t worry. We called the person that really—when this sort of thing happened, there was always somebody in the power plant there—the steam plant, that could help out. The person was really an accomplished snake handler. He came over with a plastic bag inside of a wastebasket. He approached the snake, put the wastebasket and plastic bag over it, gently pulled the plastic bag up around it, captured the snake in the plastic bag, and proceeded to walk out the door with this rattlesnake. The last that ever happened. But, oh, that janitor and I, we often joked about that incident. But at the time, you know, it was very serious. Franklin: Oh, sure. Baker: But the outcome was fine. [LAUGHTER] The snake was returned to its desert environment. Franklin: Right, right. Well, I mean, they were—they did predate humans here, so— Baker: Oh, yes, yes, and there were a lot of snakes. Well, in fact, I belong to a mountain climbing group that typically every January 1st would climb Badger Mountain. They still do. On January 1st. One year, we went out there, and it was kind of a warm sunny day. We were all surprised to see a rattlesnake sunning itself out on a rock on the top—very top of Badger on that January 1st day. So, I couldn’t believe it, but I actually saw it happen. So you do have to be a little careful, I think, to this day, climbing Badger, not to venture off too far from the trail into areas unless you have high boots on and are prepared for encountering a rattlesnake. Franklin: Wow. No thank you. Baker: Me, either. Franklin: What other kinds of social activities did you partake in in Richland? Baker: Well, one of the activities that I really got involved with was what was then called the Richland Opera Group. They put on one or two Broadway-type productions. I usually worked behind the scenes: sound, lighting, that part of the stage group. But I appeared, I think, in two shows in a walk-on-type situation as part of a crowd scene. I think that was in Fiddler on the Roof, was one of them. But anyway, that was a really good group of people. In fact, it happened to be the place where I met my wife. She was playing in the orchestra at the time. So there were activities if one wanted to—you really didn’t have to search very hard to find interesting things to do. There was no lack of things for me to do. I didn’t have the feeling at all like the Bostonian, that I needed to get out of town to find some entertainment. Franklin: When did you meet your wife? Baker: Pardon? Franklin: When did you meet your wife? Baker: It was probably in the late ‘60s. First she was frequently playing in the orchestras and I was working on the shows. So that was the place where we met, was through the light opera group. Very—it was a fun group and entertaining group. You never were quite sure how the shows—there were some shows that involved a lot of children, like The Sound of Music, they would double cast the show, because in one case I remember just about two weeks before the show was scheduled to go on, the measles—there wasn’t all the vaccines then, and one of the kids in the group caught the measles. But they were over it by the time the show was ready to go on stage for the audience. It was something that—always some surprises along the way. Franklin: Right, kind of shook everybody up. Did you ever buy an Alphabet House or live in an Alphabet House? Baker: No, I didn’t. I had considered it at the time, but I bought one of the newer houses, then, when I finally got around to buying. I lived in the apartments down there for probably about eight years or so, and I thought, oh, this is kind of stupid. I might as well be living in a house of my own and I could do what I wanted with it. So that’s what I did. I got busy with that and became a homeowner. But there were still the interesting things, a lot going on if anybody wanted. I got involved with amateur radio operations, became a part of that group, and served with some emergency communications preparations groups. To this day, the amateur radio operations are a part of the emergency center that we have in south Richland down there to serve as a backup. Because in many times, they will have the equipment battery operated or even generator operated power sources that can be used for emergency communication. Because I think a lot of people feel overconfident with their cell phones nowadays, but cell phones, after all, also require electricity to run. Franklin: They do, indeed! Baker: Oftentimes, the amateur radio can get through when other communications may fail. It was part of the technology challenge, I think, of some of these things. I went ahead and studied and progressed through the range of licenses that you can get to be licensed. Had my own station and so on. I get busy with other things like my work. But still, I am a licensed operator and have some equipment to get on the air with that. Franklin: Oh, cool. Baker: Yeah, it’s—like I say, the things—it seemed that I tended to move toward the more technical aspects of even the recreation and the social, where it was the technical side of the light opera shows that I participated in. But I always found—I never lacked for something to do. I always found something that was interesting to do. Franklin: Did this radio service start out as a civil defense measure? Baker: Well, it dates back a long, long ways, where the certain frequencies were set aside more for experimentation so that operators could come up with new equipment, new developments, antenna improvements and that sort of thing. So continuing to this day, there are certain frequencies that are set aside. As times have changed, and we’ve gone more to digital communications, there is a digital mode of communications that I’m working on right now to try to get that on the air that involves very little power. If you could imagine something two to three watts, barely the amount of power that it takes for a nightlight, and use that power on a transmitter to talk to Europe, is I think something that I want to do. And it’s being done all the time right now. But that’s the sort of things—you know, again, there are people that continually work on contesting to see how many others they can talk to, whereas others are looking at the equipment, and how to improve what we have. So, there’s something there, even if you want to, you could do digital TV. There are some frequencies set aside for amateur radio experimenters in that field as well. Franklin: Oh, cool. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: --company? Baker: The Savanna River—oh, yeah, the company that was— Franklin: In Milwaukee— Baker: A.O. Smith. They’re the ones that make the water—I think to this day they, they make glass-lined water heaters. They used to. Franklin: You’re saying A-O or ale? Baker: A. O. Letter A, O, Smith, S-M-I-T-H, was the company. The other—Alcoa was the company in Pittsburgh that I referred to. Franklin: I’ve heard of—Alcoa’s a big company. Baker: Oh, they’re big. Yeah, generally they went to experienced contractors that they knew could do the job for them, they would do a good job. Franklin: Oh, sure. Baker: You know. And some of them were difficult— Franklin: We ready? Okay! Just a couple more questions. I’m wondering if you—I want to ask you a couple milestones in Tri-Cities history. Do you remember any of the Atomic Frontier Days parades or Richland Days parades, and did you go to any of those or— Baker: Oh, maybe a few of them. It seemed like the Atomic days parades didn’t last too long. It seemed to quickly became a Tri-Cities area event. Then with bringing the boat races in and so on, it was something that was more that the whole Tri-Cities event. Again, it was perhaps an unfortunate event. I was working with radio operators, again, providing emergency communications at one of the boat races. This was probably back in the late ‘60s, perhaps. Unfortunately, there was a lot of drug activity going on at that time. I was attached to a Red Cross first aid group. Someone in a group came and asked for help from the Red Cross that someone had crawled under a car, and somebody else had jumped on the hood and had come down. The person had a head injury from this person jumping on the car. The Red Cross person evaluated the situation right away and wanted to call an ambulance for help. The friends would not agree to this, because the person was on drugs. They said, if you call them, he’s going to be charged with drug usage. They held off, probably for at least a half an hour. They finally relented and said, well, maybe we’d better just take a chance and call and have it checked out. And they did. But after that, the boat races never had the attraction for me. I was really disturbed by the action of some people that would endanger the life of a friend just to protect them from a drug charge. I never participated in any more radio activities with the boat races. That was the end of it for me. Franklin: I’m wondering if—do you remember the JFK visit in 1963 to dedicate the N Reactor? Baker: Yes, I do remember that time. It was very exciting to have the president here for that. Franklin: Were you there that day? Baker: I did not go out to it, but we saw the caravan moving out. It moved right past the 300 Area and went out to the dedication ceremony. But, yes, that was an exciting time for the Tri-Cities, for sure. Franklin: What do you—what about, were you here for President Nixon’s visit, as well? Baker: I don’t recall much of that. But as a part of my amateur radio activities, I had attended a Northwest convention in Seaside, Oregon. They have one of those every year. We had a speaker there that had been the radio person on Air Force One for several presidents. I think he had served in that position for over 30 years. He told us that he was on the flight that took Nixon to China the first time. Franklin: Oh, wow. Baker: And he said that he got a call in the middle of the night. He said, Air Force One has to be ready to go all the time. Any time you want to go. He got a call late in the evening and they said, be ready to go, we’re leaving in something like two hours. And we’ll be at the airport or wherever it was supposed to be. And he said, well, what kind of clothes shall I take? Can’t tell you. Anything I need to do? Just be there. Even the person that will be on the plane with the president didn’t know where they were going until he was on the plane with the president and discovered that they were going to China. That’s how secret that particular operation was. But he traveled with several of the presidents and he had some really interesting tales, as you can imagine someone that served that long, and had an interesting job. Franklin: Yeah. I wonder if you could ruminate, maybe, on the Chernobyl accident and how it affected the community here and how people—or how you reacted to it and how others in the community reacted to it. Baker: Well, we were really—we didn’t know that much about the Russian reactors. We knew that they had graphite-moderated reactors, the same as we had. There was a great concern, because one of the topics that I did not mention earlier was that in the process of graphite being damaged by neutrons contacting the atoms in the graphite crystalline structure, sometimes the atoms would be displaced. Graphite has a crystalline structure, a layered structure. So sometimes atoms would be displaced, and this would eventually cause some of the overall expansion that we were seeing. These atoms, as the temperature was increased, could return to a more stable lattice position, and in the process release energy. This energy was called stored energy. Now, there was an incident in stored energy that happened at wind scale. It only went for a small area in the reactor, and then it kind of self-propagates for a while, and then it terminates, depending on the conditions. But we knew that there was a chance for one of these temperature excursions. I believe that, well, it was related, too, to the Chernobyl incident, because they had some temperatures that went up quite high in that incident, and undoubtedly some of it was as a result of graphite damage—the energy being released. So we had monitored that situation in Hanford reactors for a long time. So some of these samples that we would take out of there, we knew that there was very little concern at that time of releasing stored energy, because we had raised the temperatures enough in the reactor that this was no longer a problem. It’s only when the graphite is operated at a low temperature that stored energy becomes—can become a serious problem, and one that you have to be aware of. So the Chernobyl, we were aware of what was going on. But it had a little different dimensional situation. It had some unfortunate design characteristics that weren’t—looking back now—the best thing to do in the design of a reactor. But there was great interest here in seeing whether we would have any problems related with graphite. And it turned out we didn’t have to do anything differently than we had been doing for years before that. Franklin: But this stored energy, if enough of it was in the reactor, could cause—could release enough heat where the reactor itself could overheat? Baker: Definitely. That is the case, yes. Franklin: I see. Baker: There was a small reactor, I think a Brookhaven reactor, and that was an air-cooled reactor. So it didn’t operate at high levels for a long time, but nevertheless, it was definitely a concern with the people reacting that, because it’s the low temperature, long time periods that will cause that stored energy-type damage. Franklin: Interesting. Wow. Baker: Yeah. Franklin: One of my last questions. So, you were—I think your career is really remarkable because you came here in this kind of early ‘50s when the construction’s ramping up, and then you saw the eventual draw-down and probably the fight to save the different reactors, N and FFTF, and you were still working here when the decision was made to shift from production to cleanup and that whole mission changed. I’m wondering if you could describe your overall feelings and recollections on that shift between cleanup and how it affected you and how it affected your coworkers, the people you worked with. Baker: Yeah. Well, I think that we could see that with the shutting down of the reactors that the place would be entirely different. It was hoped by many people that there would be more power generating facilities built here by Energy—WPPSS at that time. But that wasn’t to be. I think many of us were encouraged to see that something that should’ve been done much earlier in the way of processing the waste was finally going to be recognized and people could move forward with that task. The approach that they’ve taken has been a long one and a very costly one, but they are making progress to converting that waste from a liquid form to a solid form for storage, and I think everyone is very happy to see that happen, wants to see it proceed as quickly as can be. But as far as the research opportunities, even though there were budget uncertainties along the way and as we see the reactors were shut down, it seems like there was always something else for us, a next step to see in the way of the research side. Like the FFTF work, and Battelle was steadily increasing their staff on research and doing other types of research, both government and private. So it still seemed like a good place to work and be and this area has so much to offer. It really does. And so most of us didn’t give too much thought in moving immediately because we were afraid that the place was going to just deteriorate and go back to sagebrush. We could see that there was more ahead for the Tri-City area and stayed here and enjoyed it until now. Franklin: So are you saying that there was a general feeling, at least among some of the workers, that the cleanup—that dealing with the waste problem should’ve been tackled earlier on in the cycle? Because you said you were happy that something which should’ve done earlier was finally being done. Do you think there was a general feeling that that should’ve been handled earlier on than kind of waiting—making that the main focus should’ve happened earlier--? Baker: I think a lot of people felt that way. Because everybody knows that there was a finite lifetime to these tanks, and they were well beyond their designed expectancy, you know, that they would be a suitable place to store waste. So I think that they were really wanting to see this proceed. The facility that they’re designing out there is extremely complicated. Savanna River has been vitrifying waste for quite a while, but on a smaller scale. It will be good to see the facilities out here finally end up producing solidified waste for storage, because it definitely needs to be done. We can’t keep it in the liquid form forever like that, without expecting deterioration in the tanks and so on, the very sorts of problems that we’re experiencing right now. Franklin: Sure. I wonder, how did you—living and working at Hanford through so much of the Cold War, did you ever feel an immediacy of the Cold War on your work, or did you ever feel that your work was linked to different events in the Cold War? How much of a presence of that was in your life? Baker: Not really a lot—we didn’t really think too much about that. Our focus was more short-term, perhaps, solving the problems at the time. The one of getting the graphite expansion, which was limiting the life of the reactors, was a big, big effort to solve that. So on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think that the result of this and its tie-in with the Cold War—didn’t seem to have a big impact on the people that I associated with. Franklin: Mm. And my last question, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War? Baker: I think that they should know that, personally, I felt that I was working in a very safe environment. I did not feel that I was endangering my health in any way during that time. Sincerely, they had very ambitious schedules going on to meet, but nevertheless, it was always done with safety in mind. I think that bears it out, because we have had excellent safety record here. So I feel that I was probably safer working here than in some industrial environments. I really do. Franklin: Well, Don, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time— Baker: You’re welcome. Franklin: --to come and talk to us today. Baker: Yeah. Franklin: Great. <a href="https://youtu.be/oHe1y9saIWg">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor D Reactor DR Reactor 300 Area FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 100 Areas N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1995 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Donald Baker Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) West Richland (Wash.) Chemistry Nuclear reactors Radiation Description An account of the resource Donald Baker moved to Richland, Washington in 1951. Don worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1995. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 04/05/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F46791ed421590b711a395ad8efbaf06d.jpg 92c08336667442429afb1c8754d9f1dd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Eugene Astley Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Eugene Astley on December 5th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Mr. Astley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. And for the record, can you state and spell your name? Astley: Yeah. Eugene Astley. That’s E-U-G-E-N-E, A-S-T-L-E-Y. Franklin: Great. So let’s start at the beginning. Tell me how and why you came to the Hanford site. Astley: I was working in General Electric back in Schenectady in the research labs. Loved my job there, but in 1954—the winter of ’53, really, it was like 30 below, and I decided to walk into work. That wasn’t going to work. Hated the weather. So, when I walked in the building, I walked up to the top, and walked in the boss’s office and said I want to give you a month’s notice. I’m leaving. I cannot stand this weather. Summer’s even worse. [LAUGHTER] So, I was sitting in my office and a couple weeks later, when Dave McGlenagan[?] who’s the recruiter for the laboratory walked into my office and said, are you Eugene Astley? I said, yeah. He said, I understand you’ve given notice to General Electric Company, and there was a notice put out to all subsidiaries and whatnot that they thought this person should be retained in the General Electric Company. We have a project out at Hanford. I said, yeah. I said, you’re not talking about taking me out there in that damn desert, are you? I was raised in Portland, Oregon. I mean, nobody lived in that part of the world. [LAUGHTER] So, he talked me into coming out, and then they explained that they had a group called design, and they were thinking about perhaps adding a new production reactor, which would be the ninth one, I guess. Yeah, the ninth one. And that the physicist who had been in charge of doing—was on this particular design team, which they called a core design, had left. So they wanted me to fill that position. I’d never before worked in any such project or reactor or anything. I told them, I don’t know anything about reactors. And they said, well, you did your master’s degree in studying gaseous diffusion, which is the basis of all the theory we’re using for reactors right now. And you’ll find out, except for terminology, you’re an expert. [LAUGHTER] So I came. And so then I slid into this design group, and then the idea of the production reactor—new one—came along. They asked us to design a concept. We were a group of about eight people. And I was the chief physicist of all the physics on the work. We got going on that. I came on up with the idea that this really ought to be different from the Hanford reactors as we know them, because it ought to be a dual-purpose reactor, one that produced electricity. And I said it’s going to be about 3,000 megawatts thermal, and we can probably produce around 1,000 megawatt electric, which would be a great addition. That’d bring in a lot of income, and it would pay for—more than pay for—the operation of the plant. So you’d be getting your new plutonium free. Of course, GE management thought that was great. So that’s the way it went down. And then about, I think, two years later, when we were well into the design and pretty well doing it, it came to the attention of the Atomic Energy Commission more directly about what exactly would the design look like. As soon as the word dual purpose came out, they said, what do you mean by that? We’re going to produce electricity. Uh-oh! So, it turned out that Bill Johnson and Al Grenager and I were then called back to testify before the DOE—the AEC first and then Congress. Because the democrats were controlling—they thought it was a great idea. Republicans were against any government getting into the power business. They already had too much with TVA and Bonneville. So they were dead set against it. So we testified on what a great thing would be for helping to lower the costs of plutonium. We were still in the Cold War, so we thought it was still needed more. So I came back, and about three weeks later, down came the word that there was a compromise made politically, so that we would be allowed to produce enough power to run the reactor only. But that in view of the fact that things sometimes change, we want you to also design it so that at some later date when they decide producing 1,000 megawatt electrics would be feasible, go ahead and design it as a dual purpose anyway. But design it so that the first operation would be like lower temperature water, 350. Of course, that just blew our mind, because that was absolutely stupid. [LAUGHTER] I mean, because you had to design the thing to operate with 700 or 750-degree water. So that really increased the cost of things and what you could do and what you didn’t have to do. But nobody had ever designed a turbine to run at 350 degrees. Okay? Because the pressure’s so low, you end up with a monster. When you walked—when we finally built that thing, you walked in it, people that had designed turbines would ask, what is that? It had no relationship to anything anybody had ever conceived. You walked in, looked at the turbine, what’s that? [LAUGHTER] And of course at those pressures, the steam you’re producing is very wet, which is also deterrent. And you have to redesign the buckets to collect the water and drain it off. I mean, it was an abortion. And it made it very difficult to design. So it took special precautions, it entered into physics that I had to start designing some new physics and mathematics to handle the damn problem. Because they turned out that—at 700 degrees, if you have a tube burst, then the pressure comes out and wants to blow the stack apart. So, the first thing the engineer said, we got to groove these graphite blocks so there’s a place for the steam to go on out, and then we’ll bleed it out of the reactor and dissipate it in a very large area. But all of the sudden now, from a physics standpoint, now I’ve got neutrons wanting to stream out that way. That had never been handled before, so I had to figure out how to handle that from a physics standpoint. It turned out to be mathematically difficult. We didn’t have—you know, the computer we had was a 650, which was about 1/1000th as much as the computer in your cell phone. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you know? No memory. It was horrible—mechanical-type thing. Franklin: Right. With tapes—the reels. Astley: Yeah, punch cards. Franklin: Punch cards, right. Astley: So then I’d have to get in and say, okay, I’ve put this thing in bucket number 5A, and where am I now? I’m over here, so I should spin the thing this direction so I’ll have a shorter time to get back to the memory spot. I mean, this is by today’s standards, this is below most computer people’s mind, thinking that’s what you’re doing. Actually had to tell the drum which way to spin? Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Astley: You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: Anyway, we got that, we finally did design that. It was in dead run for a number of years and produced enough energy to do itself. But of course it got shut down before anything ever came of producing electricity. But that was a good case of where philosophies between the two political parties actually designed a reactor. That’s just—not good? [LAUGHTER] I can understand where—because I was republican also. I can understand where they were coming from, but it still made sense from the standpoint of saving money for the country. Franklin: Right. Astley: You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So I thought it was a good thing to do. And I didn’t think of it in terms of really putting the government further into it. But they were afraid that it would set a precedence for all further government operations and that type of thing. It would be invasive from that standpoint. Franklin: So their opposition was more ideological, and you perhaps had a more kind of practical viewpoint— Astley: Yeah, yeah. Franklin: --on that. How did you solve the problem of the neutrons bleeding out? Astley: I did it by going to cylindrical. At that time, you really had two choices, spherical or cylindrical. I got to looking at cylindrical geometry, and then I remembered from my graduate work that the engineers used cylindrical—I mean their theorists did. And that instead of, in physics where we’re using spheres, you use Bessel functions, and they were using Hankel functions. And I’d never really used a Hankel function. But they’re just as powerful for cylindrical geometry as Bessel functions were spheres. So I used that kind of a mathematical approach and cobbled up some—and then imposed upon it a radial geometry at the same time to make the math work. So it was kind of interesting, because what you did was increase the albedo and lost a lot of neutrons out, which then was important. You know, what did our shielding have to look like, and how much more does that make it that we have to enrich the fuel to be able to sustain the fission? Franklin: Oh. Did the reactor ever operate at 700 degrees? Because I know they put the steam generating station—the WHPSS station— Astley: Well, what they did was they didn’t build the second part of the turbine. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: They just built the turbine to be able to do its job. Franklin: Right. Astley: And then later they could come on in with the normal turbine and move the old one back and go with the new turbine. Franklin: And did that happen? Astley: No. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: Never happened. It was still politically impossible. Franklin: Do you kind of connect it with that reactor—do you remember JFK—were you present at JFK’s visit? Astley: I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. Franklin: I’m sorry. Connected with the N Reactor, were you present at JFK’s dedication of the steam generating facility—the steam processing facility? Astley: Yeah, I think so. I barely remember that, you know. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: That was not part of anything that I designed. I told them what the parameters had to be, but it was up to the engineering part. Different group of people. Franklin: Okay. So, tell me about the Fast Flux Test Facility and how you came to design that. Astley: Okay. Well, then, I had—in 1960 then, I was promoted out to handle all the maintenance and maintenance engineering for the eight reactor operating—operating reactors. At that time, when they pulled me and said they wanted to do that, I said, you know, I’m a physicist. I’m a theoretical physicist, in fact. I’d done some experimental work, but I really am not a guy who knows much about maintenance. And they said, precisely. That’s your problem. We think you have real management capabilities; you need to learn more about other things. [LAUGHTER] So they said, it’s our opinion that to a certain extent the pressures on the reactor manager are so hard to never shut the reactor down, and when it does shut down to get it back on its feet, that the maintenance tends to be a little bit more crude than we would like. And we’d like to have a little more technology put into it. So that sounded a little more interesting. [LAUGHTER] But I ended up with like 1,000 pipefitters and millwrights and machine shops and stuff like that that I was in charge of. That was my first experience with dealing with the union. Franklin: Okay. Astley: Which was a broadening experience, certainly. Franklin: I bet. Any notable experiences when dealing with the union? Astley: Not good ones. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Astley: They—one of the problems there again was politics. The unions were very strong with the democrats. So if you were tried to get hardnosed and have a strike, you just—the top management got a call immediately from the president or vice president, that type of stuff, saying, we understand that, you know, what you’re trying to do, shut down our production? You can’t do that; give them what they really want. That was their sort of philosophy. So they ended up with a lot of—which was very difficult for me, because I was also then working with these people. And when you up in the front face when a tube failed—leaked—then you had to pull off some big bolts on the thing that held the tube in. And then you had to pull the tube out, so the union argued that handling the tube was pipefitter work, but handling the big phalange was millwright. So you had to have both kinds of people up there at the same time, taking radiation, when one guy would have been able to do it. Then of course, they say, well, we’re all suited up, so we’ll just wait while the other guy does his thing. So he had 50% work. So those kind of things went on, that it made it difficult from a management standpoint, because we had very strict rules about how much radiation people could take. You had a daily limit and a yearly limit. So one of the problems I had was trying to manipulate the forces so that I didn’t ever overexpose people. The front face had a lower radiation level than the rear face. So the front face would be like ten MR per hour, and the rear face might be 200 or 300. So that was also a logistical problem that was—I don’t know how many people thought about those kind of things, but those are important, you know? We had a three-R limit for everybody, so, the problem was then that when we got to the point that it looked like maybe we’d either have to hire some people, then I went over from another manager running the reprocessing plants, I could borrow some of his people to even out the radiation exposure. Franklin: Wow. Astley: So it was those kind of problems at that level that were very difficult, and later on were even more difficult, because it turned out that there was a—they redesigned the tubes, which had little—a round tube with little things on it poking up where the fuel could be centered—not really centered, because you needed more flow on the top than the bottom. But they redesigned those and redesigned them wrong. So they ended up getting them up too close, and the top of the tubes, the temperature of the water was too high so it started to erode all the tubing. At some point in I think it was 1963, we had to re-tube six of the reactors, which was 12,000 tubes. At that time, it took an hour-and-a-half to do one tube. Franklin: Wow. Astley: You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: And they said that we can’t do that. You got to get that down to like 30 minutes. So I ended up inventing a device for them that worked real well. When you have aluminum tube, you put a phalange on it. So you can put a gasket and seal it. To do that, the millwrights would go on up with three tools and put the first one in and bang it with a small sledge, which would do it. Then they’d do the second one a little more and the third one. And the problem was that some of the millwrights were very strong, and so the third one they’d really rap it. Those tended to crack. Franklin: Oh. Astley: So they had a lot of time like that. So I invented a—which turned out to be kind of fun, because of the problems involved—but I got the idea that—I’d been studying something, and I read at that time that if you move metal fast enough, it wouldn’t know it’s been moved, so it’d be stress-free. Wouldn’t crack. So there at that time for the weapons program were putting an explosive charge in and blowing a bubble on something. So I thought, hey, why don’t I do that. So I thought, I’ll modify a .45 automatic and have a blank. That gas pressure—which I read up on—was enough then to—if I had a rubber thing back in there, a mole, I could go in and pull the trigger and—shew—you’d have your phalange. 20 seconds, not an hour-and-a-half. So that blew the whole thing apart. We managed to get down to 15 minutes a tube. Franklin: Wow. Astley: That thing—that worked. But then, of course, as soon as I started to talk about this, safety people got involved. And then, even worse, the security people. Because, you said, you’re going to talk about bringing a loaded weapon on board with ammunition? We don’t do that. Only guards are allowed to have weapons. [LAUGHTER] So I think it took me two months to finally persuade whoever all’s involved that I could bring this in. And then it turned it out that I had to have a special safe to put the gun and the bullets—even though they were blanks and all that. And then we had to have a guard, that every time we took it out would go on up on the front face to make sure that somebody didn’t use the weapon somehow or other to kill somebody, or—you know, it was, I mean, little things like that that got to me. Kind of difficult for theoretical physicists to deal with. Really wasn’t—[LAUGHTER]—something--my feeling was, what a bunch of bullshit. I mean, trying to get a job done! And we got it done, and then everything was confiscated and done something with. Franklin: Wait, was there a specific—did you give a specific name to that tool? Astley: I just called it an explosive installing tool. And the word explosive didn’t get me off to a good start. It was very descriptive, unfortunately. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I could see how— Astley: And for that I was awarded one share of General Electric stock. Franklin: One share? Astley: One share, right. Franklin: Wow. I assume that’s split into a couple more by now. Astley: I think so. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, there I was out there running maintenance when I got this call. Of course they knew my background, so—in fact, I was in charge of core design before they pulled me from being a physicist to being the supervisor of the core design group. So I had a lot of experience in that area. So they brought me in and Albaugh told me that he wasn’t sure where we wanted to go, but he said, I’ve got kind of a thinking here. He said, I really think that the way things are going, that the next reactor’s going to be a fast reactor—a breeder reactor. And so it sounds just off the top of my head, he said, that maybe that’s something you really ought to take a hard look at in this study. With only two weeks to do, I went to the library. For some reason, all’s I remember is the microfiche or something they called it, I don’t know. But at any rate, started running my eyeballs out on these things where I’d be looking at things that’d been photographed and trying to read about fast reactors. So I finally came to the conclusion that at that time—I found that Oak Ridge, which was the head of all fast breeder reactor stuff and running the Idaho operations, had EBR-I running as a test reactor. They had proposed to Congress that they wanted to build another one called FARET—F-A-R-E-T. About the only thing different about it and ERB-I is that they copied everything, except they changed the lid so they could get in and refuel easier. I thought, that’s a mistake. As long as you’re going to build a reactor, you ought to try to also make it more facile for doing its job of looking at exposure of fuels and materials. Also, it had such a low flux level that essentially what they had was if they had wanted to take ten years, find out what happened to this material in ten years, it took them ten years. It seemed to me that what you needed to do was get the flux up by at least a factor of ten. And then we could get ten years’ worth of experience in one year, and be real serviceable to the industry. So I then came back into Albaugh—this was after about a week—and I said, here’s what I think. But, I said, to go further any more, I think, so see whether this is possible to make something ten times as fast with the technology we got, I said, I really need to put together a concept. I said, I can’t do that by myself. I need an engineer to help me. There’s a guy on your staff that actually worked at Fermi Reactor, which is a fast breeder reactor built by—out of Chicago. Edison? Edison Electric, maybe. Can’t remember what—anyway, the head of that thing wanted to always lead the parade. They built it and didn’t understand the graphite swells as it—so that was a big fiasco, because after about—you know, I don’t know, six months or a year the whole thing cracked apart and couldn’t be run anymore. So I got a permission to do that. Then Albaugh said, well, go ahead and put together three or four people, whoever you need. And he said, but I can’t pay for it; I don’t have that in my budget. So he said, I want you to just go out wherever they are and talk whoever the manager is into loaning you somebody, and they pay for it. And I said, okay. But, he said, remember this is all secret. You can’t tell them what this is for. Franklin: Why was it secret? Astley: Because nobody knew General Electric was going to leave. Franklin: And what year was this again? Astley: That would have been ’64. Franklin: Okay. Astley: I’m sure—maybe they were thinking about it in ’63, I wasn’t in on it. But by the time I got knowledgeable about it, it was like July ’64. Franklin: And that was before most of the employees knew, right? It was still pretty secret at that time. Astley: GE was pulling out, period. Franklin: Right. Okay. Astley: So they were—I think there’s like, maybe three or four people of theirs—a couple at DOE, the highest guy running it and the next guy down. So it was a real super-secret project. So it was kind of awkward to go into a guy a couple levels higher than I was and sit down and tell him I needed to use his—like, Les Finch was an example of what I considered to be the best engineer on the planet that I knew, that I needed him. But I couldn’t tell him what for. You know? [LAUGHTER] It was—when I told Albaugh, I said, I don’t—gee, I’m not even sure that’s possible. I can’t tell him something. He said, well, he says, no, you’ve got a reputation for being the best pirate at the Hanford anyway. So you ought to be able to handle it. [LAUGHTER] And I did. I got together a group of four or five people. They then gave me a couple months. So it took me about 60 days of this group and we came up with a concept. I turned the patent in on it, got a patent on it. Then we actually came up with a design. In fact, I have a thing, it’s about this thick—when I left there they gave me a montage that essentially shows the reactor and all the kinds of parts that we devised. It was a beautiful thing by a designer I had on there that was an incredible draftsman. Did everything in ink, never made a mistake. Franklin: Was that Dennis Brunson? Astley: Beg your pardon? Franklin: Dennis Brunson? Astley: I didn’t get that. Franklin: Was that Dennis Brunson? Astley: No, it was Andy Anthony. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: Incredible guy. I mean, he did everything in ink, and he did it once, he did it fast. And he had an incredible ability to visualize three-dimensionally. So he would sit on my meeting, and we’d discuss, and I’d discuss what the core had to look like. Which, I’ve said, okay, we need more room, because that’s the big problem. We’ve got room on the top face of this reactor. And when I was down having lunch one day, I ordered a milkshake, and then I saw her lift up the thing to pull the straws out. What happens then is that the straws fold out. Okay? So you have a matrix of straws, which—I got back thinking about that. That’s a way to get the things apart and still have a dense core. Okay? Franklin: Ahh. Astley: So we designed the core that way. We only had to tilt the tubes like about eight degrees. That gave us a lot of room up there by the time you got up to where you wanted to work. So that was part of the design. That didn’t turn out to be—it wasn’t allowed to go through. The reason was that we were left alone. The head of the—I don’t know—well, I’ll tell you, because, I mean, what can they do? [LAUGHTER] We ended up with a big political problem within the AEC. The guy that was heading the AEC was in bed with Argonne, because they were the breeder reactor. So the fact that we came on in saying we wanted to build a reactor at Hanford and replace the FARET was absolutely objectionable to him. So I was called back to talk to him and explain what we were doing, why we were doing it, why the FARET wasn’t any good and whatnot. So he listened to the whole thing, I go back home. Three days later I get a letter—telegram from him saying stop and desist all work on the FFTF, whether it be private funds or public funds. Franklin: Wow. Astley: Okay? So I sat down with Fred and he said, well, why don’t I see what I can do. So he called his friend who was this guy’s boss, who had—I can’t—I got a moment where I can’t remember his name. Very famous physicist out of California. But he and Fred had been roommates together getting their Ph.D. And Fred’s wife had married his secretary. [LAUGHTER] So he called him up and he said, well, that’s interesting. So he called the AEC—the head of the commission itself, who are a group of congressmen that ran everything. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Astley: One of the congressmen happened to be interested in our concept. So he called us back there and he and Fred and I sat for about four hours talking about what we had in mind. So then we told him about—showed him these facts. And he said, well, I’ll take care of that. So what they did was fired him! Franklin: Wow. Astley: Okay? [LAUGHTER] Then word came down: continue with your work. And gave us a deadline for getting in a proposal and all that kind of stuff. I was left alone, totally, for a year. No guidance from the AEC. We were totally on our own while they were hunting to replace him. So they finally replaced him with Milt Shaw, who was Admiral—was he an admiral then? No, I think. Yeah, he was an admiral then. Admiral Rickover? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So he came on in then. And then it took him a year, putting a staff together as he thought he needed it, along the Rickover-type thing. It was actually two years into the whole thing where we had finished the preliminary design. I was in the midst of putting out proposals to get the architect engineers in, when I got called back there to meet Milt. Then about two or three weeks later I came back and made a presentation where we were. And he said, no. He said, you don’t understand the problem. And I said, what problem is that? [LAUGHTER] He said, politically it’s very difficult right now to get the money I need to go forward with a prototype breeder reactor. So what I’ve got is this reactor. So I’ve got to make it—we want to make it as close to a prototype breeder as we can. And I said, if we do that, it’s going to sacrifice 90% of its ability to do the kind of work we really want to do for studying materials, which is our proposal. So we won’t be—the flux will be lower, and we’ll be back to looking like a modified or better machine than EBR-I. But I said, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. He said, I understand your technical problems. That hasn’t anything to do with the problem. I can only get so much money. I said, if we do that, we can’t do this reactor for the cost that we’ve pledged to do. I said, I have no idea what it will be costing, but it’s not going to be around $100 million. I said, it could be $200 or $300 million, I think. He said, well, you know, your thinking isn’t important to me; I’ll take care of that problem. So we finally received orders that we couldn’t skew the core. He said, who’s ever heard of a commercial reactor with a skewed core? He said, that doesn’t make any sense to me. You want—I said, it’s only eight degrees. I don’t think that’s going to make a bit of difference. Well, he said, we want the core straight. So, then he said, now, in order to do that, the people who really know how to do that is Westinghouse. You know, the whole background was Westinghouse—his background. So he said, put out a—why don’t you go out for proposals to design the core to at least three different people including Westinghouse. And then he said also take a look at Idaho, which was essentially part of the same group of people. Then said, and throw General Electric in. So I was forced to do that, which meant that we were that back starting at scratch. Two years’ worth of work down the drain. So that went on—I guess that was in late ’67. So by ’68, we had that work done, redoing everything. And then he said, okay, now—the next thing he said is we’re going to have to put all the sodium exchangers and whatnot inside the dome, because that’s what we’ll have to do with the prototypes. And I said, that’s going to make the dome be bigger than any dome anybody’s ever built in the world. I said, we can’t just say we’re going to do that until I get a chance to talk to people, like Chicago Bridge and Iron is probably going to have to do the job, or the Japanese. Don’t want the Japanese, he said! Okay. To find out if they can do this. You’re talking about equipment, and your equipment can only do so big. So I went back and talked to them, and found I was right, that they couldn’t do it. But that they could build a piece of equipment to do it, provided that the AEC wanted to pay for it. So I came back to him, and I said for $50 million they can do it. He said what’s the $50 million for? A machine. You’re handling these huge things, and they got to be cylinders. They don’t have any equipment—cranes and everything. So he said, okay, well, that’s no problem. So that’s the way it went. It kept going that way. In late ’68, I finally hired Bechtel to do a cost estimate for me on where we were. It came out about $455 million. [LAUGHTER] So I wrote a letter to Shaw and told him, the costs on this project are totally out of bounds. I said, every time we turn around, I get instructions from your staff to add this or add that. It just keeps going on and on and on. I don’t know where we’re going, but I said, for my study, we can probably go back to $150 million to $200 maybe, and keep most of the things you want. But, I said, you got to stop your people coming in and asking for anything without having a meeting back there to decide whether this is something we can afford or is really important. I said, you just got to stop everybody coming out there with their gut feelings and druthers. Okay? Well, as you can imagine, that didn’t sit well. I got called back there. He just really dressed me down. [LAUGHTER] Everybody later told me the whole floor evacuated it was so loud, him yelling at me. Franklin: Wow. Astley: So I came back and thought it through. Then I came in by Albaugh, who was the director of Battelle and told him—I mean Saul Fawcett, who was the director. And I told him that I really felt at this point, the costs are so far out of control, and I showed him the letter I got, that we needed to withdraw from the project. Now, this is nowhere in anybody’s record, so I don’t know what you want to do with that information. It caused a meeting, and then finally, Fawcett and Albaugh and I went back to the board of trustees and told them why we wanted to do this, and they gave us approval to do it. We then set up a meeting with AEC. Came back there, and in the meantime, Shaw had gotten so irritated at what I’d done that he decided that I wasn’t under proper control. So in the meeting, he said, what I want to do now at this meeting, see, I want to reorganize like I’ve done down at so-and-so. The laboratory will still be responsible for funding—handling the funds, paying the paychecks—but Gene Astley will then report directly to me, running the lab. So Battelle had nothing to do with any of the technology—anything else—just handling—so he said, you’ll still get your fee, et cetera. And Fawcett finally said, I think I can—if you’d let me say a few words here, I think we can get over this problem immediately. So Shaw said, yes, okay. He said, we’re formally asking you to find another contractor to run the project. Shaw said, you can’t do that! And Fawcett said, why can’t I do that? He said, because that’s not what I want. And he said, furthermore, why do you want to withdraw? He said, we have a tax problem. And we felt that—my understanding—I’m not sure whether we did or didn’t. But at that time, we were a not-for-profit. Not a non-profit, but a not-for-profit. There’s a distinction. You can—you’re allowed to pay people bonuses and things of that nature, but—so then he also said that it’s not entirely clear to us that that’s in keeping with the Battelle will. So then Shaw said, okay, fine. He said, that’s it. We’ll find one. But he said, no matter who we find I want to reserve Gene Astley for—if it turns out to be Westinghouse or GE or whoever, that he then be available for those outfits to hire him so he could continue to—so even though he got really pissed at me—[LAUGHTER]—he still wanted me. And Fawcett just stood up and he said, I’m sorry, but Gene Astley—we have other needs for him, and he is not going to be available. So that ended the meeting. So then they found—and he went to his office—Shaw—and immediately called Westinghouse, and didn’t go out for bitter or anything. Just turned the whole project over to Westinghouse. Which is very irregular. Franklin: Yeah. Astley: You know? So they sent a crew out there and it was kind of funny, because the guy that took over, he was talking with the paper and he said—they said, isn’t this going to be a problem with a big transfer right in the middle? You resign? He said, never fear. And I won’t name his name, but he says, so-and-so’s here, happened to rhyme—[LAUGHTER]—he got replaced about six months later. So that’s how the FFTF got going. It did turn out to finally be constructed. Its flux level’s very low. I think it might have been just slightly higher than the EBR-II. But it did a lot of work, ran successfully. Never had a problem—safest reactor in the world. They did retain all the safety features. One of them was a very important one. I don’t know whether you care about this, but the fast reactor, you know, if you have—somebody pulls all the rods out in a thermal reactor, the power level goes up pretty fast. But it’s not an explosive thing. It just goes up enough where it melts everything down. Franklin: Right. Astley: It doesn’t really explode. But in a fast reactor, that’s not true. When you pull all the rods out of a fast reactor, the power level goes up in seconds. Franklin: Wow. Astley: Microsecond. Okay? Dynamite takes to the—so it’s faster than a dynamite, okay? So that is a major problem design. So what that means is, mechanically you can’t do a damn thing. Nothing can respond in that period of time. Just to detect it takes you longer than that. You know? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So the question we had with the FFTF was what do we do about that? It was funny—one winter I came—I went to work and I put up the garage door, and there was water and ice all over the floor. My water heater had been in the corner, put in the garage, and it was so cold, and the door had been open, left a little bit, and it froze the damn thing. So the safety valve went off. And when I got back, I thought, you know, that’s a good concept. So when this thing happens, this huge explosive force—and I had calculations to go on by the Army, who was doing experiments on what it takes to blow up cylinders and spheres and stuff. So I had a lot of data on what kind of explosive force. So I said what we need to do is have a safety valve of some kind, so when that goes off, the first force blows it open. So we’ve destroyed it; the core’s now going to get hot, it’s going to melt down, but we know how to handle that. But the explosive we’ve got to be taking care of. So I said, I don’t know how—how do we do that. Well, this engineer I had came up with a beautiful idea. He said, well, what I can do is design the bolts that hold down the lid so that that force will pass through the elastic limit and they’ll break and the lid will fly off. Perfect safety. And it’s simultaneous, almost. The pressure gets too high, and it blows. Perfect. So then all’s you had to do is design a big concrete container around it with enough volume to take that expansion. And then we had a core catcher down there that we could cool so that we wouldn’t do the China syndrome where it melts down and goes to China, so to speak. So those kind of things were all put into it. We had a couple physics things to go on at those speeds that were esoteric, but that also helped to cut that explosion down. [VIDEO CUTS] Eugene Astley: Coefficient. Camera man: I’m ready. Robert Franklin: Ready. Can you start that from the beginning? Astley: Huh? Franklin: Can you start that story from the beginning? We’re rolling. You were at a meeting with US and Russian reactor designers. Astley: The Russian was up there explaining the fundamental design of their new reactor group, which included the design of the Chernobyl. He explained what they were doing, and it was obvious to me then, you know, that—in our reactors we under-moderated them because then you get a negative temperature coefficient. So the reactor hopes to—tries to shut itself down. Theirs is going to make it worse. Okay, so, I can’t get up and say anything about this, because if I do, one of the—they say, why are you doing that? Well, I can say, you know, to have a negative temperature coefficient. But I’m not allowed to help them. And furthermore, if you under-moderate, you increase the production of plutonium. And the fact that those physicists didn’t figure that out, it blows my mind, you know? Fermi figured that out. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, in this meeting, then I stood up to ask them a question. And immediately, the guy that’s standing behind him walks up and takes the microphone. Now, this guy gave a speech in really quite good English. And he says, I’m sorry, we’ll let you know that although he can speak English pretty well when he’s practiced it to give the English speech, he really doesn’t understand English very well. So I will interpret for you. So, he answers my question with nonsense. He doesn’t know anything about anything. [LAUGHTER] And so there was no exchange. And then later we had a meeting where you have some drinks and you can mingle around and I hunted this guy down again. And immediately this same guy shows up. So he’s going to conduct the conversation between us. Franklin: Right. Astley: Anyway, later on, that was the Chernobyl. And it had the positive temperature coefficient. Of course it went blooey. You know? Our reactors weren’t like that, but very difficult to explain that to public. Gain any believability. So the scatter was still there. Then we whittled down the reactor. But there was no radiation, because even those reactors were—all our commercial reactors were built with negative temperature coefficients. It’s a safety problem. Everybody in the commercial world was either trained here at Hanford or back at Westinghouse at [UNKNOWN]. So that was sort of long ingrained to us to try to make it as safe as you can be. And that you don’t want to melt something down. That’s an economic problem, not a safety problem. But that’s never been—we’ve never been able to convince people that have a gut feeling that it’s an atomic bomb. And those are the people who prevail. Because those words are much more receptive to get attention of the public. Franklin: Yeah. Astley: Then I guess, as maybe you’re a historian of a type? Well, here is the thing that I think, if there’s one thing in my life that still peeves me—when I got moved from GE, I had a Super Secret clearance. Not just the Q, but one above it. Because I knew how much plutonium we were making and how many caps we were making, bombs we were making, that kind of stuff. And so I had gone out of the library when I had this N Reactor, and looked for—searched things. And I saw some stuff by Fermi. And so I got two of his workbooks, brought them back and started looking. And he had a couple of ideas—particularly one that helped design the control rods, because a control rod is so black. You know, it absorbs all of its neutrons in about that much. And we didn’t have any diffusion—[UNKNOWN] didn’t work for that. And he had some ideas about how he might approach that and how he did approach it. And then he went on to talk about a bunch of other things. You know, ti was all his own handwriting. And he’d scratch out and say, dumb idea. Now, he’d go on and it was a beautiful thing to read. So, when I went to GE, I tried to check those out and take them into Battelle, to take them. But I had lost my clearances. Said, you can’t have them. But if you get a clearance—so when I went over there, I applied for clearances and got them. Six months later, I go back, but some kind of a thing came out from AEC that a certain date type things were no longer considered classified, so burn them. So they burned. Franklin: They burned Fermi’s personal notebooks? Wow. Astley: That irritates me. Franklin: Yeah, that irritates me, too. Especially because I’m an archivist. Astley: Yeah! Franklin: I deal with people’s personal matters and archival material. That’s really a tragedy. Astley: Yeah. But you know, one of the geniuses of our time. Wouldn’t have probably made it without his help, his guidance. You don’t preserve something like that? It’s pretty irritating. Franklin: Yes. What year—when exactly did you come off the FFTF? You said that Westinghouse took over FFTF; were you off the project then when Westinghouse came on? Astley: The which Franklin: Sorry, when— Astley: Oh, when they were breaking up? Franklin: No, you mentioned you were designing FFTF and then Westinghouse— Astley: Took over. Franklin: Were you off the project then? Astley: I asked to get off the project, and— Franklin: Okay, and what year was that? Astley: Probably early ’69, I think. Franklin: Okay. Astley: And so it just happened that the guy that was running the other department, a big one, decided—he was a statistician of note in the world, and that’s really what he liked, and it was really distracting. He didn’t get enough time to work on his own stuff. So at the time that I became available then, a friend who also knew this was going on, and so there was a spot for me to move on, still reporting to him. So I took over, applied theoretical math, applied theoretical physics, world economics, that type of stuff. It suited me pretty well. Franklin: And that was at Battelle? Astley: At Battelle, right. Franklin: Okay. And what other projects did you work on after FFTF? Astley: Well, then I left Battelle in ’71 and joined Exxon Nuclear. Franklin: Oh, okay. Astley: And became vice president of Exxon Nuclear making fuel. Plus a lot of other things. And during that time, then, I started up the Exxon Nuclear centrifuge program, and also the laser enrichment program. I had both of those. And both of them did very well. The centrifuge project got enough so that we actually bid and won a contract with—I can’t remember whether it was still AEC or—I’m a little confused on timing between AEC to DoE. Can’t tell you. Franklin: Yeah, sure. Astley: One of those guys asked three different organizations to bid on making 50 centrifuges at a cost, fixed price contract and deliver them to Oak Ridge. So they could determine whether or not somebody other than Oak Ridge could make something or [UNKNOWN]. So we bid on it, fixed price. Built them, delivered them within six months. That was our first large [UNKNOWN] They were then put into Oak Ridge and into their cascades, and they were running—they ran for a whole year when they decided to then implement the next stage, which was to build 5,000 of them. In the meantime, Boeing and Goodyear were still negotiating with AEC. And saying that, hey, these are too developmental. No way can we built at cost. So they came out with a new bid. We bid on it. We were the only ones that had any manufacturing experience on centrifuges. We put on a fixed price bid again for the 5,000. And Goodyear and Boeing finally gave up on bidding the 50 and had the same problems with bidding 5,000. Then they opened up the bids and we were eliminated on the basis that we didn’t have manufacturing experience. That we were Exxon, we were chemical engineers, et cetera, whereas Boeing and Goodyear were hardnosed mechanical people. So we were knocked out of that bidding. So my project was shut down. Which was rather hard to take. Since we were, at that time, still at—our centrifuges we made for them up running well, gave them no problems. They started up, they were never shut down in that year. And we had better statistical data than Oak Ridge did on the ones that they had had made. So that knocked us out of that. At that time, we—and I had already gone to the board of directors of Exxon and sat in their thing and got approval to go forward with a $1.5 billion project. Two phases--$900 for the first phase and the rest for the second phase to build an enormous centrifuge phase, which would then put Exxon into the commercial enrichment business, instead of the government. And our prices were going to be 30% lower than theirs, which I thought was a good thing for the American public. But it wasn’t. Franklin: Why wasn’t it? Astley: Because President Carter was in charge. I had a friend of mine who was on—a good friend—who was one of his cabinet. I asked him one day, I told him how we’d got cut out. And I said, I can’t understand that. I mean, what’s wrong? What made that decision? Couldn’t have been [UNKNOWN] And he said, well, don’t tell anybody—and he’s died since, so he’s not in jeopardy—but he said, I sat in the cabinet meeting and it was explained to us by the head of the AEC at that time what the situation was. And they felt that they wanted to work—they were going to award us the contract immediately, but contingent to negotiate with the other people. So then Carter said, who did you say? And they said, Exxon. And he rams his—bam! Exxon’s already controlling the damn energy of the world, I don’t want them meddling in the reactors also [UNKNOWN]. Find some way to disqualify them. That’s what really happened. There’s no record of that. Franklin: Yeah. Astley: So it’s not very—I guess you’d call that the height of hearsay. And then about four months later, they shut down the laser plant. And we came in at that point, the boss offered the AEC to continue to operate that, since it was very promising. And it was going to make [UNKNOWN] like 30%. You know, that’s even better than centrifuges. And he offered to operate the plant for a dollar a year, just like DuPont did at the beginning, and continue the thing. And then he said, when the plant first gets on its feet, I’d like to be paid back for the $80 million I’ve invested in this in the operating profits. AEC said, no. We don’t want you involved in this. So they went and said, [UNKNOWN] buy out all your equipment for ten cents on the dollar and we’ll transfer it down to California. Because they’re also experts on lasers. So they shut that down. And a lot of politics involved behind the scenes on this whole nuclear business, which it seemed to me that I had a little black cloud that way. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, there’s kind of a common thread running through a lot of your stories. Astley: Yeah! But that was really the—to try to explain how that laser enrichment worked is a little difficult. Franklin: I’m sure. Astley: For somebody that isn’t technically trained. Franklin: That would be me. Astley: Yeah. That’s all. But that was a beautiful project. But I had already gotten—and then I also had already gotten [UNKNOWN] to go forward with the first step of a fairly large prototype for $50 million. So I had the total board behind me. And in fact, when I went in front of the board of directors at [UNKNOWN], I was supposed to give a thirty minute talk. Because I had to go to the board because I was asking for $1.5 billion. If it had been less than a billion, I could have gone to the management staff instead. That would have been too small for Exxon to worry about at the board level. The only company to do that. In fact, they’re allowed to round their income tax off to the nearest dollar. I think probably things have changed, but—anyway, during that, at the end of an hour and a half, and I’m still talking about this project. Finally, the chairman puts up his hands. Fellows, he said, we’ve kept Mr. Astley here for an hour and a half. He was only supposed to be thirty minutes. I don’t think any more questions we’ll learn any more. And he’s told us everything; we should have enough information at this point whether to go forward with this. And [UNKNOWN] who’d just come back from being Treasurer for whoever was—I don’t remember who it was then—Ford, maybe? Ford, probably. Yeah, I’m sure it was Ford. He’d taken a leave of absence to be Treasurer and came back. He’d just—finally he says, you know, to the chairman, he says, Mr. Chairman, we have enough information to go forward. Let’s show these goddamn AEC people how private industry can do the job. [LAUGHTER] So I got my money. But it didn’t prove to be a giant sinkhole for Exxon. But those kind of things were going on that made my life interesting. Franklin: Yeah. When did you leave Exxon? Astley: I left Exxon in ’83. They were going direction—they wanted to get out of the nuclear business. And they didn’t mind continuing the fuels business because we had such a good reputation for—I think we bid on business since at least ten years. Never had a fuel failure. Anybody who ever produced, which nobody else in the world could claim. And we knew how to make fuel. I was heading up the fuel plant here in Richland at that point and the one in Langer, Germany. But I had other projects going which were very successful and they shut those all down to concentrate simply on fuel. So I’d sort of worked that, and about that time I got a call from Sandvik and they, [UNKNOWN] he said, I’m retiring, and I’d like to talk to about taking over for me. And so I did. It sounded like a good [UNKNOWN], you know? I guess my feeling was it was going to be a lot more fun to be a big fish in a little puddle. So I went in ’83 and retired from there in ’91. During that time, here’s the technology that we—you know, at that time, Sandvik was building nuclear fuel tubes from zirconium for three different companies. Babcock, Wilcox Combustion and Exxon. So that was a direct application of nuclear information. Because the design of all that came from having worked for Hanford [unknown]. And so during that time, it became obviously that the world was shrinking and that there was too many people looking for too few fuel tubes. So I put the company into titanium. And I found out that the aircraft people were moving strongly toward titanium tubing for all of their jets. So I started that as a diversification. And I told Sandvik that I thought within five to ten years that we were very likely to have no more work. I said there’s got to be consolidation. And I thought, ten, twelve years, French bought out Exxon—or Germans began it and they bought out the Germans. And now the group was French, running that plant there. And exactly it happened, so Combustion Engineering was bought by Germans, I think. I can’t remember who. So all of our customers were no longer, so we had no zirconium. So all we did was titanium. And while I was there, I was glad that personally the titanium golf shaft, utilizing nuclear energy technology. Franklin: What is that? Astley: Golf shafts? Franklin: Yeah. Astley: You know, golf. Franklin: Oh! Astley: And when I came in, 99% were using steel. And there were people trying to make using fibers which weren’t very successful. So I introduced titanium and got—the guy I made a friend of, the chairman of TaylorMade who had invented the metal clubs—got him interested in taking a look at titanium heads plus then matching them with a titanium shaft. And got his whole staff there to agree that this shaft was better than anything in the market. But it jumped the price of shafts. I had to charge $18 a shaft. They were paying 50 cents. So that was a big change. And I managed to get that settled in. He said, hey, we’re in a big fight. A driver costs somewhere between $90 and $100. And if you try to get over $100, suddenly they start shying away because they’re pretty much the same. They claim different. But at any rate, I said, well, that’s not what you want to do. I said this gives you the chance to have something that’s uniquely different. So instead of just charging for $18, I mean $99, make your clubs sell for $199. Because you have something to sell. And he said, yeah, he said, you should have been my marketing manager. I said, well, I am, I’m trying to sell you titanium. But anyway, I went out to dinner with him and at the end I said, okay, you’re really enthused about this. So I said I need an order from you. And he said what would you like to have your order start with? And I said, I’d like to start with at least 25,000 shafts the first year. And I’ll give you an exclusive for the first year. So he pulled over a napkin from the bar sort of thing, and he writes on it, I agree to buy 50,000 shafts from Sandvik special models at $18 a shaft with exclusive rights for one year, signed his name. So I took that back to—only way you could do this would be private industry. Go back to my [UNKNOWN] and say hey, here’s the order I just got. He’s a Mormon, doesn’t drink. He said, this looks like a stain on a cocktail napkin to me. And I said, yeah, that’s where I got the order. So he photographs it or something and puts it in. But I imagine if I had been trying to do something at the AEC, that might not have flown. Franklin: Right, yeah. Astley: [LAUGHTER] They’d have at least 15 regulations [UNKNOWN] Franklin: And they’d need it in triplicate, too. Astley: Oh, yeah, right. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I wonder if you could talk about living in Richland during the Cold War. And working at Hanford during that time. You’ve mentioned some previous experiences with Russian scientists. I was wondering if you could talk about how the Cold War affected you and your work and your family. Astley: I think it really didn’t affect us a lot. I lived in north Richland and I built a home there. I think the thing that was interesting was that, first of all, of course, by ’54 there was enough of Richland. So what we used to call the termination winds were not so severe anymore, because we had all the trees and the houses. So it was a little bit more protected. So that didn’t—although even then, we had some pretty fair gust storms compared to now—really bad. And at that time, you didn’t have all these fancy windows. They were all sash windows, so they leaked like a sieve. So every time we had a dust storm, the inside of the house was covered everywhere with a little layer of dust. And I would say that perturbed my wife. [LAUGHTER] And all the other wives. Because that meant a lot of work, you know. It wasn’t as if you just go in and dust something. I mean, the whole damn place had to be vacuumed. All the windows, everything that had a surface. And it wasn’t a minor thing. You could write your name in everything. Fraknlin: Wow. Astley: So that was something, I think, that certainly most of the females probably had to do the work. The kids didn’t care. I think they were kind of oblivious of everything in terms of the Hanford experiences. So I didn’t see much effect there. But in 1960, then, I guess they were probably DoE by then but I’m still not sure. But they then decided to, with the Corps of Engineers, to sell the town and get out of being <a href="https://youtu.be/GBNkByNJDys">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview N Reactor Fast Flux Test Facility Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1954- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1954-1991 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Eugene Astley Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear reactors Nuclear power plants Breeder reactors Description An account of the resource Eugene Astley moved to Richland, Washington in 1954. Eugene worked on the Hanford Site from 1954-1991. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12/05/2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F7ed21d8bfe16578201b1dbf9d81c15f9.jpg 59f28e2796fb3381c6cb93f53e568820 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Jack Armstrong Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Are you ready? Tom Hungate: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Jack Armstrong on May 30, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jack about his experiences working on the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Jack Armstrong: My real name? Franklin: Sure. Armstrong: Okay. John Armstrong. J-O-H-N, A-R-M-S-T-R-O-N-G. Franklin: Great. But you prefer— Armstrong: Jack. Franklin: You usually go by Jack. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: And so Jack, where and when were you born? Armstrong: February 25, 1942. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: In Ilion, New York. Franklin: Ilion. Is that in Upstate? Armstrong: I believe it is. I’m not real familiar with it. I was two years old when we left there. Franklin: Sure. So tell me how and why you came to the area. Armstrong: Well, my dad came here in ’44. We came in to Richland, and we rented part of a B house down on Douglas in Richland. Then later on, he got offered an H house, which is located at 407 Delafield in Richland. We lived there until they passed away, and then we sold the house. But then of course I had a brother which was a machinist out at 272-W in West Area. And my two sisters, one’s in Arizona and one’s in North or South Dakota. And I’m here. Franklin: Okay. And so why did your father come to the area? Armstrong: He was working for Remington Arms back there, and he heard there was some jobs out here, and he moved here and got on. He actually retired at PUREX where they got the little problem there. But I didn’t know anything about it or anything like that. He never talked about it, like a lot of them didn’t. Franklin: Even after the war? Armstrong: Yeah, it was just, he had a job. Just like when I got on out there, I just took whatever I could get, which was in the mailroom and the carpool out at 100-N in ’63. I saw Kennedy fly in to break ground. That was quite an experience. And then, over the course of years that I worked out there for 39 years, I held about seven different jobs, because I got bored where I was at. I did road crew, I did bus driving, storage delivery. I just had the best of it all, as far as I was concerned. Franklin: Right on. So no idea of what your dad did? Armstrong: No. Franklin: Do you know what he did at Remington? Armstrong: I have no idea. Franklin: Okay. Sounds like maybe something with machining maybe, because he worked for a gun— Armstrong: I don’t know. All I really know is that at PUREX he was mixing some chemicals and he was pushing some levers or something like that, and he was mixing some chemicals to do something. I didn’t understand any of it. Franklin: Sure. How long did your father work out at Hanford for? Armstrong: Oh, I have no idea. He’s been gone for quite a few years. Franklin: But it was well into the Cold War, though. Because PUREX didn’t—I believe PUREX came around in the early ‘50s, and so— Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: So, tell me about, what were your first impressions of—I know you would’ve been very young, but what were your first impressions of Richland and the Alphabet Houses and kind of the unique community here? Armstrong: Well, there was a lot of the barracks. A lot of the barracks that people would—and in fact, my dad was telling me about out at Hanford where they had confiscated the property out there and all that. It was just so much going on. In fact, you look at Richland today to what it was before, and you wouldn’t even recognize it. There’s a lot of history that the older people still hang on to. The 703 Building down behind the Federal Building, I mean, that all just engulfed that whole area, and it just changed so much. How many times has the post office moved from where it was, and stuff like that. That’s one of the things that I remember, right, I mean, every time I come into Richland, something’s changed. But it’s been interesting, the growth. I don’t know, I get a lot of questions about that. But I moved to Kennewick and I’m glad I’m there. But I had to drive al the way from up near the Home Depot all the way out—and lucky I didn’t have to drive all the way out to the Area like some of the people did. I think this bus service that they got rid of might have been costly to them, but the thing is, it sure saved people a lot of fuel, a lot of—I mean, we were busy just keeping the roads clear when it was the winter time. And trying to get people to work and stuff like that. But the buses took a lot of that away so that it was easier for people to get on a bus and go off to work. Franklin: Right, and there just wouldn’t be that Hanford traffic— Armstrong: Right, right. Franklin: Yeah, if the Hanford bus service was still around. Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. So it really, I mean—and then, of course, along came the hours that was limited on drivers to drive. So we couldn’t do any of that. We had to go home, take a rest for six hours or eight hours or whatever, and then come back. I gave up my CDL when I retired. I didn’t need it anymore. Franklin: Oh, okay. Armstrong: But I was one of the first ones that ever got it. And I was proud of that. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. And so how long did you—do you remember when you moved into the H house? Armstrong: Oh, gosh. I was so young. Franklin: Right. Armstrong: I don’t remember. Franklin: What schools did you go to? Armstrong: I went to Lewis and Clark, which, none of it’s there. And there used to be, right there on Fitch, when you run Fitch right into the school ground, there was a building there, and I can’t remember what it was. It’ll probably come to me later, but that was right there at the end. Collum was the one that T’ed right there. And I’d walk over to the school and go to school. Then I went to Carmichael, and I went to Col High and graduated in 1960. Franklin: Okay. Do you remember anything about when Richland privatized? Did your parents purchase the home that you were living in, the H house? Armstrong: Yeah, we did. Yeah. And we dug the basement out and added to the basement and all that, compared to what—most of all the houses, the B houses and the A houses and all that had part of a basement that was still dirt or sand or whatever you wanted to call it. Franklin: Right. Armstrong: But, yeah, a lot of good memories. Franklin: Yeah, well, can you share a couple with me? Armstrong: Well, we just basically—in fact, I still have association/contact with some of the people that lived in the neighborhood and have gone over and helped them out and do different things, repair things for them and stuff like that. But I get over to the neighborhood. My brother built the carport on the side of the H house for my dad for the car. And it’s still standing, and it’s doing great. But life goes on and everything changes. Franklin: Yeah. Armstrong: But other than that, we used to be able to walk over—well, over Wellsian Way there used to be a pond there that they used to stock fish with. And we used to walk over from the house and fish in there every year. And then they—it was a kids’ fishing pond. And they turned around and covered that all up and put businesses in there. And so on like that. A lot of things have changed that I think they lost their hand on it, because it would’ve been something that the kids today would’ve had something to do. And so— Franklin: Do you remember much about the incorporation, or kind of the general attitude of the town, how people felt about the government kind of getting out of the housing business? Armstrong: I don’t really know too much about that. I know that I didn’t even consider buying a house in Richland. My first marriage, we bought a house in Richland, and then when we divorced, I went, moved over to Kennewick. That worked better for me. But I still know a lot of the streets and which way to go and all that stuff. Franklin: Right. Do you remember—do you have any memories of doing civil defense drills when you were in— Armstrong: In school, we were, in Lewis and Clark, we’d always go in and line up in the hall and lie down and put your hands like over your face and all that stuff. Yeah, that was interesting. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Because you would’ve been in school, then, really during that high point, the real high point of tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. Was that ever talked about often? And was it still—how much did you know about what went on at Hanford at that time? Armstrong: I had no idea. Franklin: No idea? Armstrong: I had no idea. But I know that I was working at Safeway, that I was a carryout— Franklin: This was during when? Armstrong: This was when I had graduated from high school. Franklin: Okay, so in the early ‘60s? Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: Yeah, and I went and I went into the Navy and went in—I was a reservist for six years and two of it was active. Wouldn’t ya know I get stuck in Hawai’i at Fort Island. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Fort Island. Armstrong: Yeah, I know. So I was there, and my brother got brother duty and came on the ship that I was on for a while. But I came back and I got on at Safeway and was still a carryout. Then, somebody said, well, you ought to apply out at Hanford. Just get anything you want, just to get in. So anyway, just happened to be lucky that the gal I was married to, she worked at Fashion Cleaners over in Kennewick. This guy that interviewed me took his suits in there. So anyway, he went and told her before—after I got the interview done and everything. And he said, well, he’d call me tomorrow or the next day. So anyway he goes by the Fashion Cleaners, which I don’t even know if it’s still there, but he said, well, he’s got the job. So I got that, and once I got in the door, I had different things that I was able to get into. Franklin: Right. And so what was your first job out on Site? Armstrong: That was mailroom and the carpool. I took care of lubing the vehicles to the garage and stuff like that, and also delivering the mail to 105, 1100 Building, let’s see, I can’t remember the other ones. But there’s numerous buildings there that I would carry mail to, and I had that responsibility. I had a clearance where I could have people sign for things that they were mailing from one place to another, and I would make sure whether they were Secret or whatever, and I would deliver them. I had no idea what was in there, didn’t care, just delivered it. And then there was a guy that they were going to be laying off, and this guy was a control room controller. He couldn’t do it down in the Federal Building in the mailroom, so he wanted to switch with me so that I could do the mail down there, and he could possibly get—And then everything fell apart for him, but I walked right into it, because I got the job downtown and then I put in for a lube and tire job. Yeah, it was a lube and tire job out, there at 1170 Building. And I drove bus for five or six years and totally loved it. It was a ball. Franklin: What did you love about driving bus? Armstrong: What did I like? Franklin: Yeah, what did you love about it? Armstrong: Well, you got to know the people. It was just a lot of fun. I got rotated around the areas, so I would be able to—I had to know all the routes. In fact, the thing is is what a lot of people don’t realize is that all those bus drivers had to memorize the routes in town. Richland was the only one that would take the routes through the town. So, it took a while to know them forward and backwards. If somebody changed the color of their house or something like that, you had to make sure you knew that house was changed colors so you didn’t want to make a wrong turn. Plus, then you had the routes out in the areas, which you had to run. They had it set it up to where when you get to the main gate, one goes this way, and one goes this way, and they crisscross and then they meet up at the front of the Area. Some of those drivers get out of some of those buses leaving there and get back in the bus and go back to town. Then they’d be off for four hours during the day and then be on in the afternoon to go back up to pick up their bus and bring the people in. Worked real good and I really liked it a lot. Then I turned around and put in for the road crew. And I did that for five or six years, totally loved that. Franklin: Describe road crew to me, what kind of activities— Armstrong: Okay. You pump septic tanks out there. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: It’s not the best job in the world, but somebody’s got to do it. Then, we patched sidewalks, roads, small things that we did. Sprayed weeds out there. Since then, they’ve turned around and put it in to where they have a little more advanced equipment to do that. Believe it or not, we were out there with an old tractor on the front of a tank, and there was somebody on the back with a hand wand, and somebody was driving the tractor, whether it was me or somebody else. We’d drive through and spot-spray or whatever we were doing. Since then, they’ve actually went and put helicopters or whatever out there, and they spray and do so much quicker job and better job than what we can do. But we pretty well did it all. Especially when wintertime came, we had some salt mixed in with the sand, so that it wouldn’t freeze. But the thing is that a lot of people didn’t understand—and I learned a lot from this guy from Idaho, he was my boss for a while, and he said that actually, he said, the salt only works down to a certain degree, and after that it’s no good. And then they had dry pavement blades, which they finally eventually got away from. But they were, I thought, a lot more cost effective, because you didn’t have the shoes down there that would wear out. But they changed—with everybody they switch out with managers and stuff like that, everybody’s got a different idea. But we would—we’d be out there all night, trying to keep people to where they could be safe going out to work. There was one night that I was called out there and it was just below the east hill. We had heard that there was a gal that was coming from the power plant there at West Area. We all knew her. She was coming down the road and slid off the highway. Anyway, I was the only one out there, and I was going down the road, and I thought, well, I’ll stop and see if I could help her. Well, I put on the brakes and I didn’t stop. I mean, I had a whole load and everything on, and I was just sliding down the highway. I got out and had to hang on to the dump truck because it was so slick out there. So I finally figured out that that’s what was going on, so I started sanding there and that helped. And there was another time that a lot of people were having—they called it the first railroad crossing past 300 Area, and we were told that there was people having a heck of a time making it out of that little hill. So anyway, I whipped around and started spraying the sand right down in front of them, and they just all started moving. Made me feel really good, like I did something right, you know? It’s always nice that you get appreciation from people like that. But it just gave you so much enjoyment, doing a lot of that stuff. Some people out there had a lot of that with some of the jobs they did. That’s one that I really liked. But I’d just get bored after a while and decide to jump into something. I got out of the road crew and ended up going into the warehouse that all the main stuff came in there and they got sorted by the storekeepers and stuff like that, and then it would be put—we’d put it on our truck. We’d have 28-foot trailers with side racks that would lift off, and we’d turn around and deliver it to the different places that we’d go to. I was delivering to 200 West for about, I think it was about six years—16 years. 16 years, I did that. Franklin: Oh, wow. And that’s where you got your CDL? Armstrong: I actually had to get it—I think that’s where I got it from, yeah. Franklin: How was that? How was the warehouse work? Armstrong: It was okay. We would load up—well, they came up with the idea that they all needed water out there in the Project. I never agreed with that. But they would say that some of the pipes were rusty and all this kind of stuff. And they’ve got all kinds of filter plants out there and all this. We took a tour, the wife and I, and the guy went by with our bus, and he was saying, well, they’re building a filtration water plant here. I says, oh, is that for the water, so you don’t have to buy bottled water? And he says, no, it’s for something else. And I thought—there was one trailer that specifically started that, years ago. The big 5-gallon—and they’re heavy. The thing is you’d take a pallet or two out to somewhere and deliver it to them. Well, people were having to lift them and put them on top of their little cooler things. But it gave us a job. We did a lot of janitorial supplies out there in the Area. Paper. You name it. I had a combination of steel and some of the paper goods and stuff for different trailers and stuff like that. I enjoyed the big part of that. I had a lot of people that, when I was gone, they were glad I got back. There’s several drivers that had that same situation. When I retired—there’s a lot of people that still call me. And say, you know how this is, you know how that is. And I say, yeah, but I can’t help that; I’m retired. [LAUGHTER] But I tried to make friends with people that I worked with and stuff like that. I enjoyed most of it, I really did. But I’m finally got it through my head that 39 years was enough and that was it. Franklin: Okay. Yeah. How did—did working out there change when Hanford stopped production and kind of moved—the Tri-Party Agreement was signed and moved into clean up? Did that affect your job in any significant way? Armstrong: No, not really. The machine shops were still going out there. We’d haul steel out there. The real—in fact, my brother ended up—he was a machinist and he worked there at 2-West at 272-W. He was given the job to set up in 300 Area that used to have a machine shop down there and set it back up with him and another guy. They did a lot of machine work down there. A lot of it. So it really didn’t change too much. There was always special things that had to be made. And I was amazed—I would go into the shop to make my delivery where he worked, and I was really amazed some of the things they can make. It just took me—I couldn’t believe it. There was different things that he could do that I couldn’t even think of doing. But then, of course, he probably couldn’t jump in the truck and deliver like I do, either. But the thing is, you see so much that other people do. I would go into PFP, where the Plutonium Finishing Plant was, and they would check me up and down and everything else. And I’d meet the storekeepers that would take the material as I went into the area there. And it was just so much that you had to be an in-between, between the warehouse and the people that you were delivering to. The thing is is I enjoyed that part. I always have enjoyed that part. So it’s just like the buses, the same thing. It was so much fun. I was glad I got out of it before they shut everything down, because all those drivers that didn’t have seniority went out to the Area. That was extra driving and all that kind of stuff. They took all that away, because they used to be able to get a certain amount of money toward the fuel that they were having to drive out to the area but they took all that away. I can’t remember what they called that, but it was some extra money that they were getting, and then they took it away. Franklin: For folks that have to drive out there? Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: Like a mileage cost. Armstrong: Oh, yeah. And the thing is, one time—well, since we all got moved down—I got moved down to the warehouse, the guys out in the Area would need to call some drivers to drive out there and get some of the salt on the sidewalks and stuff like that. They were wanting us to get in our private rig and drive from the warehouse, or from where our house was, all the way out there. And I decided after the first time I went out there, I says, no, I’m not going to accept that. Because if I get stuck out there, they’re not going to pay me anyway, and I’m going to have to pay for a wrecker to get me out. So there was no real consideration, you know, for the person that was going out of their way to do their job. But if they turned around and have a government rig sitting there, and I got in it, I’d get paid. So your private rig, whole different ball game. Franklin: Right. Armstrong: I think they’ve taken a lot away from some of the people out there. And the machine shop, I think it’s gone out there. They moved it over to Pasco, and all the guys with it. So there’s a lot of changes. But maybe they didn’t need it, that’s the whole thing. But so many things have changed. The wife and I took a couple of tours out there, and she really enjoyed it, because she’s from the other side of the mountains. So, this was all new for her. Of course, I could explain some things to her, but some things the narrator had to explain because so much of it’s just changed. Franklin: Which tour did you take? Armstrong: We took the B tour. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: That was the best one I could tell her to do, because you get to see just about everything. In fact, the old bank down there at Hanford, I don’t know if it’s still there or not. I know they fenced it because people were going in there and taking things out of it, I guess, or whatever. But you used to be able to see the deer and the elk and all that stuff. Years ago, there was horses out there. They had it in their mind that they had to get rid of the horses because too many people were going down to the river and watching them. That happened. And that was bad, because I really enjoyed, when I had to run down through there, I could maybe see the horses. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Armstrong: But that’s when, even 100-F was even working. I was delivering to that one time. That was a long time ago. Then when they’d come out with saying that there were alligators or something. I think it come out here, about ten, 15 years ago, something like that. And I had no idea there was anything like that. The beagles were there, and, of course, they were down at 300 Area too. But I never knew that much about any of that stuff. I don’t know, I just thought I had a good time when I was there. Franklin: Oh, great. And so you said you retired after 39 years, so that would be— Armstrong: 2002. Franklin: 2002, okay. So, let me see here. We’ve covered a lot of my questions. Oh, we talked about JFK’s visit. Were you working on site when JFK came to visit the N Reactor? Armstrong: Actually, I was in the audience with everybody. Franklin: Oh, okay. Armstrong: I was out there at 100-N. Yeah. Franklin: And what do you remember about that day? Armstrong: Oh, I remember standing there and watching the helicopter coming across the Columbia River. And you know how you get that feeling, your hair standing up on end? And that’s about the way I felt, because it was so neat. I really liked the guy. It was just a neat experience that I went through. Franklin: Yeah. Armstrong: It was good. Franklin: Okay. I’m wondering if you could describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work in any of your jobs. Armstrong: It—[SIGH] Well, there was one time that they actually brought the dog in, down there at the warehouse. And they would go through the packages, just walk the dog through there. They started doing that before I left. It was amazing what the dog could do. That’s what sort of blew me away. We had a picnic down near the pumping station there, North Richland there. There was a park down there. They had the dog there. And the guy took the clip from his pistol and stuck it out in the parking lot on top of a wheel. And that dog walked right over there and found it. Never saw him do it or nothing. And I thought, wow, that’s cool. So they were really emphasizing that, that you don’t want to bring anything on there. I asked the guy, I says, well, if I had a pistol in my pickup that I drive to work, would I be in trouble if you found it? And he said, well, it’s on our property, so you’d want not to have that. Well, there’s some people that do that. Anyways, it worked out, I went home that night and made sure I didn’t have anything under my seat. [LAUGHTER] But the thing is, some of the things that the average people don’t know that those dogs can do, and that’s what they relied on. There was one incident when I was driving out to 100-N, there was a guy named Cotton, he was a patrolman. He was charged with letting a van come through the barricade. Because there’s a lot of vehicles in the morning going through there. So anyway, I went from 100-N over to 100-D and I noticed this van sitting off to the side of the road, like, there’s people over there trying to tie something down. And I went over to D and did something, came back, went to 100-N, went in and told the patrolman I saw a van sitting over there with some people tying something down to the roof. I said, they don’t look like they belonged here. So anyway, gave him my name and everything. Well, then I got a phone call. They charged their own patrolman with letting them through. They had no proof of it. It was really sort of funny, and I hope I don’t get in any trouble with this, but it’s a long time ago. But the thing is, I went down to the Federal Building and they had a hearing with Cotton. They had me as a witness. They said, well, which way would you have thought that van would’ve come in, the Yakima Barricade or the Wye Barricade? I says, I have no idea. I said, I don’t know. I know it was aimed towards 100-D, but I don’t know which way they could’ve come in. So anyway, these guys were bringing charges against Cotton and they said, well, you’ve got to say that he was the one that did it. Well, no, I can’t say that. So anyway, we went to take a break, and those guys that were in the Federal Building, they had their badges like here. Or no, they pulled them out of their pocket and put them on them when they went through the security thing. And I said, why aren’t they wearing them all the time? That’s what we have to do when we’re delivering mail or whatever. And the union person that was defending Cotton said, don’t say anything. We’re doing fine. [LAUGHTER] I says, well, that makes me mad. They have these ideas, but they don’t follow through on them. So—do as I do, not as I say, type-thing. It just gripes me to no end. But he got his job back. And he thanked me very much for that. He says, you stood up for me. He says, they were going to can me. And he was old enough to retire, but he just didn’t want to retire. So, he’s probably gone now, but I felt good that I was able to help save his job. Franklin: Any idea what the people in the van were doing? Did that ever come up? Armstrong: I think they got through and somebody just didn’t do their job. That’s all it was. Plain and simple. Sometimes, they would pull you off to the side and just go through your whole rig. You would never know what was going to happen. It didn’t matter if I went through there two or three times a day. They would still check you out. And that was just their job. If you went out there to Dash-5—sometimes I would have an escort that had to ride with me just to go inside the gate. Probably no further than from here to the parking lot. And then I’d turn around and get it unloaded and then head back to town. But you just never know. And that’s what they have to go for, you know, just to be able to check you, you have no idea they’re going to check you. Franklin: Sure, I mean, that’s the whole concept behind randomized screening is that it makes everybody want to play by the rules, right? You never know if you’ll be the one who gets checked. So what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Armstrong: Well, I don’t know. I didn’t get too bad in what I did, but I’ve had a little bit of cancer on my nose and a few things. I’m going down to a Jewish hospital in Denver every two years. I’m beryllium sensitive. That just allows me to be able to go—I pay for it, they reimburse me. So far, I’m in pretty decent health. And I’m 75 years old. I never thought I’d live that long, but you never know. [LAUGHTER] But, no, it’s a good-paying job. I can’t complain at it. They did some benefits and stuff that they changed and stuff that before I retired, I had 15 weeks of vacation that I was able to stack up. I got up to 20 weeks of severance pay, which made a pretty good little pot when I retired, so that helped me a little bit. And I don’t know if those benefits keep going with some of the people that are working out there now. I know a lot of jobs have went away and stuff like that. I’m just glad I got into it and did what I did and had a good time doing it. Made a lot of friends. So that was pretty good for me as far as I was concerned. Franklin: Okay. Great, well, thank you so much, Jack. I really appreciate you taking the time to come down and talk to us today. Armstrong: Glad to. Franklin: Okay. Awesome. Armstrong: Thank you. Franklin: Yeah, thank you. <a href="https://youtu.be/FvH0d5gUtQ0">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 272-W PUREX 100-N 706 Building 1100 Building 1170 Building 300 Area 200 West PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) 100-F 100-D Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1961-2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Jack Armstrong Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Civil defense Civil defense drills Description An account of the resource Jack Armstrong moved to Richland, Washington as a child in 1944 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1961-2002. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/30/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F9b10d9b58437486ee4cc1650b8118b29.JPG ec91cca70202c2f3af686cb3c2b19dc1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dennis Armstrong Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. Are you ready? Dennis Armstrong: Go for it. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dennis Armstrong on May 24, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Dennis about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. For the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Armstrong: Dennis A. Armstrong. A-R-M-S-T-R-O-N-G. D-E-N-N-I-S. Middle initial A. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] Okay, great. So, Dennis, how and why did you come to the area to work for Hanford? Armstrong: Well, I thought about what kind of answer it might take to really answer that, and it probably goes clear back to high school days. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: I did something along with four other friends. Went to an open house that the Washington International Guard had in Spokane, and ended up joining the group. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: Got assigned into a aircraft maintenance group, and learned how to like airplanes. At that time, Washington Air Guard was a fighter squadron. Very close-knit group of wonderful people that I was proud to be associated with for six years. Reason that kind of influenced why I came to Hanford is because all through my four-and-a-half years at Washington State University Pullman in mechanical engineering, I had it in my mind that I was going to go to work for somebody making airplanes. And in my senior year as campus interviews were underway, in those times, it was not unusual for almost all the big companies to come to campus to do interviews. Not so nowadays. But at that time, I picked out aircraft companies. And I got some pretty good offers. Know airplanes, know how they work, know how they get put together. And I got even some exceptionally good salary offers. I showed them to my advisor, and he said, Dennis, you’re a pretty independent thinker. Just to tell me you did it, go talk to at least two or three other companies besides aircraft people. So, I go up to look at the campus interview schedule, and I picked out two, three companies, including a scheduled interview from General Electric. Not knowing whether GE made toasters or waffle irons or what, to wherever I was going to be interviewed from, I went in kind of blind, and found out it was a representative from Hanford. Franklin: Ah. Armstrong: It happened that in my work at the Washington Air Guard in the maintenance shops, I enjoyed metalworking, including—well, I was primarily doing sheet metal work and aircraft structure work. And we had a couple nice lathes that I enjoyed working with. Just nothing else, to learn how to work them. And I ended up getting a job at the department of mechanical engineers, two years running, as senior laboratory instructor in the machine shop. So, expanding on that, I did a special senior project on machinability of metals. So that came up in the course of my interview with Doug Tilson, who was the representative from GE. And he says, I’ve got exactly that job right now. I need a candidate for it. We want to hire people into our tech grad program, they called it. And yet I’ll promise you a machining research job, first assignment, if you choose to come with us. So they sent me a letter, and not quite the high salary I had from the aircraft people. But I showed these to my advisor, and he said, that’s a given. Take it. So I went back and it happened that in the dorm that I had lived in, I had a couple friends whose parents had worked at Hanford, so I knew a little teeny bit about it. Never been here. One time, one of them had brought me over to Richland, before I ended up accepting the GE offer. That time—of course, GE was still the predominant employer at Hanford, and I saw nothing of what really going on at Hanford, but I’d learned a little bit about Richland and kind of liked it. And having grown up in Spokane, I thought, why on earth do I want to go to Los Angeles and work for North American Aviation on airplanes, when I’ve got something right close in Washington State? And they offered me a job that was right in a piece of line of work that I had enjoyed, and wrote them a letter and said I’ll take it. And, well, I went through a couple questions, like, tell me more about this machining research job. And they said, well, we looked at your paper and I’ve even shown it to the people doing it, and they would like to have you come, but that’s about all we can tell you. Okay. I showed these papers to my advisor and he says, that’s a given. Take it. Franklin: So, sorry, I’d like to just ask, that’s the second time you’ve said that and I wrote that down because I wanted to explore that further. Why did your advisor feel that that was a given? Armstrong: Oh, he went on to say, I’ve been in the aircraft industry. Very structured engineering. You’re an independent thinker. Get in with some company that’s not quite as structured as the aircraft industry is. And I had no way of knowing other than to listen to him. And then couple that with the fact that here I had an offer close by. Home was still Spokane. And kind of pieced it together and my advisor knew those links and kind of felt that this would be a good placement for me. Franklin: And were you from Spokane originally? Armstrong: Yes. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: And that’s how I ended up in the Washington Air Guard in Spokane, because I’d gone to high school in Spokane and wheat farming country south of Spokane. Franklin: Yup. Okay. So describe coming to Hanford. Armstrong: Well, I show up, and here there’s 50 other brand new hires and we all report into the building. I forget the number downtown; it was in the old 700 Area. It was GE new employee processing. I would find out I was the only one that had been already named to an assignment. They had the greases on the skids and I was given a badge and said, tomorrow morning, you’ll report out to this place out at the edge of the Earth called 200 West Area, to a building called 231-Z. I had no clue what that meant. Or even what the assignment was yet. But they described and spent all the rest of the balance of that day in terms of processing me in and getting papers signed and all this stuff that goes with orientation. Next morning, a fellow named Tom Nelson, who was supervisor of metallurgy development, eventually became Battelle, but for General Electric, metallurgy development operation in 231-Z building, he came downtown, picked me up, took me out 231-Z building. And I met a fellow there who I was assigned to to do a project. His name was John Rector. I learned that I was to produce a document on a machinability state of the art of machining plutonium metal. I’d, of course, never heard of plutonium metal before. I got my Top Secret clearance at that time. And they took me over to 234-5 to the production line and I saw what the whole purpose of Hanford was all about, in making parts. At that time, we made weapon pieces here. Not commonly advertised today, but it was not secret then. And still isn’t. But— Franklin: What kinds of weapon pieces were made? Armstrong: The plutonium core for the thermonuclear devices. Franklin: Okay, and so before—how long had Hanford been making weapon pieces? Armstrong: The history goes—of course, you well know from your study of the origin of Hanford—was to make plutonium metal to be sent to Los Alamos for assembly into the Nagasaki weapon. Franklin: Right. Armstrong: They continued to make them at Los Alamos up until like ’49, 1949, at which time this famous 234-5, or now called Plutonium Finishing, that was the name given to the plant later. That was built solely for the purpose of converting plutonium nitrate to metal. And metal—they call them buttons, the product—buttons into cast pieces and machined pieces for the weapon cores. And that started in like 1949, ’50, here at Hanford. And then a few years later, they built a parallel plant at Rocky Flats. Yet I think in the early years, best I knew, Hanford made three-quarters of the production, and Rocky Flats a little less than a quarter. Still Los Alamos made a few, but the stockpile was primarily made at Hanford. And then the balance started shifting a little more to Rocky Flats, until mid-‘60s when all the production went to Rocky Flats. Well, anyway, back to my pathway. Here I was, being told to learn all there is to know and put it down in a document on machining plutonium metal. And they had had a fella out from General Electric Schenectady who was a machining expert, and he had just left to go back to GE. And he was concentrating on traditional big production, like tooling forces and horsepower to make cuts. I walked through the production line, and they wanted emphasis on accuracy. Not what the program was gearing toward. They wanted emphasis on surface finish. And I turned around the program being done by metallurgy research people, and ended up putting out a document on how to get the finest surface finish we can be able to do with the lathes they had in 234-5 Building, which happened to be some of the finest that existed in the world. So, I wrote that document. It happens to still be classified. I’ll never see it again. Yeah, that leads me to a thought on classifications at Hanford. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. I used to think weapon design was the big secret; it really wasn’t. It happened that Hanford production rate was the big secret, and manufacturing technology was right behind it. So, we physically protected manufacturing technology higher than the design of the devices. Which is what you see nowadays in how close is Iran to making one? And you can betcha they’re farther ahead than our politicians think they are. Anyway, enough said. I put in four months writing that document, got published, and a fella, name of Les Brecke, who ran the production line in 234-5, invited me to come over and spend an assignment there. Still on the GE tech grad program. I had a friend that had wanted me to come and spend an assignment with the K Reactor design group, too. And I thought, well, I’ve been in one thing. I think I’ll take the K Reactor design group. And I did that. Down 762 Building, through the winter, so I didn’t have to go out to Hanford during the winter that first year. And I participated in designing a flexible horizontal control rod for the K Reactors. Was eventually fabricated and put in. At that time, operating problems with the reactors was secret. You actually got one of these flexible rods in your inventory at the museum backup storeroom. And I’ve got one of the three whole pieces of bonded carbide to go in it, because I ended up making those pieces later. I’ll get to that in a second. That was a fun assignment in terms of really designing a product and getting it approved and getting through design approval from the rather rigorous design approval process. So then I talked to Les Brecke again and said, do you still want me? And he said, absolutely, I’ll take you any time you can get here. And I ended up as my third assignment, then, in the GE tech grad program of going to production line at 234-5 Building. Two—oh, go ahead. Franklin: Sorry, I just—for those that may not be—including sometimes myself—who may not be well-versed in the numbering system— Armstrong: Oh, that. Franklin: What is—so earlier you said 231-Z and that— Armstrong: 231-Z was an original building that DuPont built to process the plutonium nitrate. And when that was moved over to the PUREX and then 234-5, which I’ll describe a little more later, the 231 Building was turned into a metallurgy development laboratory. And that eventually became a branch of Battelle when GE diversified. Franklin: And so 234-5, does that have a more common name? Armstrong: Well, the more common name is Plutonium Finishing Plant. Franklin: Okay, so that is the PFP. Armstrong: PFP. Yeah, that name, interestingly, wasn’t coined until after the weapons mission. Franklin: Okay. Armstrong: The original, it was just called 234-5 or Dash-5 or Z Plant. Never had a word name associated with it. It held a special clearance to even get in the door, you had to have—it was kind of a soft top secret clearance, called a blue tag clearance. You got a model of one of these badges there in your museum. Today, no one carries that clearance anymore, but that’s what it was, was access to weapon data processing. Franklin: Okay, my last question, what year did you come to Hanford? Armstrong: Oh! 1963. June of ’63. Franklin: You came in 1963. Armstrong: Yes. Franklin: Okay, I just wanted to establish that. Armstrong: And that was, I guess going clear back to the beginning of the story, when I joined the Air Guard when I was still in high school, that was like the 1958 timeframe, see? So all through my WSU timeframe, I was in the Air Guard, thinking of going to work for aircraft people and it wasn’t until ’62 or so that I started in the interview process to eventually take permanent employment. And then the pathway that I described, the interview from the General Electric Company here. It turned out to be here, but I didn’t know it at the time. Franklin: Gotcha, okay. Armstrong: So here I am, now, in the, it was called weapons manufacturing operation. Franklin: And this was with Les— Armstrong: With General Electric Company. With Les Brecke. Franklin: With Les Brecke, okay. Armstrong: So we did two things. We were the receiver of the plutonium button, which is the finished plutonium chunk coming from a simple term called the button line, which is part of the production in this Z Plant, or 234-5 Building, across the wall into the machining. Or first, casting. We casted this. It’s a metal just like you can cast and pour any other—lead, brass, bronze, iron. The process is quite similar. Casted into a shape, machine it to a final product, goes through inspection and package it and send it to the assembly plant. Franklin: And where was the assembly plant? Armstrong: They went first to Rocky Flats in Denver, and then down to Pantex in Texas where the final assemblies were all put together. Franklin: Right, right. Okay and so—sorry, go ahead. Armstrong: My job—the name of the group was called weapons fabrication, and my job was to overview the machining. They had just bought the set of very fine lathes that didn’t quite work as good as they thought they should. First job was figure out why. It was a kind of a combination of electronics problem and hydraulics problem that I think I solved because we made them work. So through ’63, ’64, ’65, I was in charge of those lathes pumping out parts that went to inspection. And then eventually shipped. I enjoyed it. I really did. I didn’t realize how good a job it was until it was all over. And one of the saddest things I had to do in the course of my career, we had set—we were setting with literally a five-year top secret plan of production, how many parts we were going to make every month for five years. And it went to zero overnight. Franklin: Mm. Why was that? Armstrong: : Political. Politics. Franklin: What year—when was that? Armstrong: Mid-’65, late-’65. I can’t tell you the politics of it. But the idea was save some money by shifting all the production and casting and machining over to Rocky Flats. Close down Hanford production. So that hit the newspaper and we were in one of the first major cutbacks at Hanford. It happened that the person I’d worked with in 231 Building, John Rector, had a hobby doing manufacturing in his basement. Of course, it wasn’t but the first weekend I was over to house, seeing what he was doing. He was doing stuff in his basement that was beyond a lot of capability of big production shops. He came to me and said, we’re out of a job. I was promised a position in the maintenance group. I didn’t quite know how I wanted to do that. I’m sure I could’ve negotiated something into design engineering. But John said, been my plan someday to start a full-time business. And if you want to partner with me, let’s do it. We did, and we operated out of his basement for three or four months while we built Western Sintering Company. It’s over on Stevens Drive, still running today. So I turned in my resignation to GE and we started Western Sintering Company. I enjoyed it. I truthfully enjoyed the independence of a small business for seven years. I’m still good friends with the people that run it today, including the family. I left under good pretense. And the reason I left was Atlantic Richfield, the employment relations fella named Bill Watson came to me and said, we need an engineering manager for East Area/West Area. Oh. Well, you’ve been selected to be the first offer. Oh, interesting. I’d never mailed out a resume or anything. I was selected by some friends, that when the opening was there, they scrubbed a bunch of names and came to me and said, the job is yours if you want it. And I took it. So I became the engineering manager of East Area and West Area, plant engineering. Franklin: What was so attractive about the job that you wanted it? Armstrong: Working with people. I think I saw this particularly in the production line in 234-5 Building. I was frequently being the fabrication engineer of a production operation where we had rotating shifts with five different supervisors. I was the guy that ended up as shift relief now and then. We had the finest operators that existed at Hanford. They were all hand-selected, good people. And I enjoyed working with them. They were all good to work with. So I thought, here I got a chance to work with engineers. At first I was put into a group that had about eight engineers. And then I took over from Walt Engels, who had chosen to retire under the Atlantic Richfield shingle, and took over a larger group of close to 75 people, including planning engineering for each of their established operating plants. At that time, we were still running PUREX and B Plant and 234-5. You asked about the Plutonium Finishing name to Z Plant, and that was done as kind of a last ditch, after our weapons mission was done. Rename the plant, try to get some other business here. And we did several projects. We did a couple plutonium fabrication test ingots for the Navy. And we did some plutonium heat source things for NASA. And we took in half a dozen jobs in that plant. We even made the first of the sabot units for the Army, the ones they fired over in Iraq. Those happen to have been secret when we made them. But then later they come out, the uranium sabot units for the artillery shells for tank cannons. Anyway, that was the approach to naming it Plutonium Finishing, as advertising capability out to the world that we could handle plutonium. It really was no other capability. But the bottom line, there wasn’t very many people who wanted to go out and hire that kind of work done, either. Franklin: Right, especially with the Cold War being over. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Armstrong: It wasn’t until five or six years later that the plutonium uranium mixed oxide fast reactor fuels business came into play. Otherwise that would’ve been a natural for takeover by that building. But it wasn’t understood then. So, at Western Sintering, like I say, I enjoyed it. We made our own machinery. Franklin: And what did you primarily make? Armstrong: Small mechanical parts, cold compaction of metal powders into shape. And the sintering process is a furnace to diffusion bond the cold compacted metal powders into a finished structural piece. In terms of things common folk think of, little gears, little bushings, little bearings, little—and I say little because we were somewhat limited by size. The bigger the part, the bigger the press. We had made our own up to 200 ton, and that could make a part of about two-to-three square inches of surface area. Otherwise, little parts can make them pretty fast on the small ten-ton press. We actually made some ten-ton presses for the nuclear fuels industry. Primarily Westinghouse and General Electric and even Areva out here. Back then, they were Jersey Nuclear. And we sold 34 of those things around the world, including four of them to India, and two of them up to Canada. Pretty well established a name in terms of a good operating machine for that particular industry. As I say, Atlantic Richfield came to me and offered me the job of plant engineering manager, which I took. At that time, the B Plant fuels—excuse me, the strontium cesium encapsulation plant was just in final design stage and not working very good. It happened that Les Brecke had been assigned over to that building, and here I was, previous good stand with him, and suddenly I’m in charge of making his equipment that didn’t work work again. Which we did do, as a group, a team. Ended up packaging the whole inventory of strontium cesium capsules that’s now in the reservoir. It’s been sitting there for 50 years now. 40 years. Anyway, however. So, at that time, Atlantic Richfield was pretty good a contractor to work for. I’d even rank Atlantic Richfield a little higher than General Electric in terms of wanting the people to understand they worked for Atlantic Richfield. Had good relations there. If they’d have stayed a contractor, I’d probably have stayed there. It happened that they chose ten years as the contract limit, and Rockwell, new contractor, and couple things happened at Rockwell outside of Hanford. The B-1 bomber went down the tube when Jimmy Carter canceled the project. And another parent company they had, called Atomics International was doing reactor research to eventually build some gas-cooled reactors. That was pretty much down the tube. So Rockwell sat there with two sources of their own people. They brought in quite a few to Hanford. And I was told that my job would be replaced by one of them. And I could go to project management, which I did. And I didn’t care for the project management, because I enjoyed the design work, and particularly the kind of design work we were doing which was plant troubleshooting. Every week we’d have a plant managers’ meeting of all the different site plants. Whoever’s in trouble, I could solve it and—I could put my team onto it and solve it. That’s the way we were set up to do it. And I laugh at the current problem of the PUREX tunnel collapsing, because I had exactly the same issue happen back in the ‘70s. It happened that there were a bunch of low level waste disposal units called cribs. There were stacked Douglas fir timber underground, meant to be just a big void space to send low level liquid waste. People out monitoring the desert where these cribs were came back with a report over the weekend that one of these cribs had collapsed, not far from the story of the PUREX tunnel last week. And so I’m at the plant managers’ meeting and this is the big flap for the week, why did this happen and what are we going to do about it? So I came back and put one of my good civil engineers on it. He came back in about ten minutes and said, good news and bad news. Good news, I know why, and bad news, every one of them’s going to collapse. Oh, tell me more. Well, these were stacked Douglas fir timber. You’ve got about 40 years on untreated timber and then it’s going to be weak enough to rot away and they’ll collapse. Okay, what are we going to do about it? Well, we’re going to fill up the holes. So that was our carryover to the plant manager. So we eventually came up with the process to slurry up sand and pump it down every one of these holes and we eventually breached some of them. Problem was, you see, the rodents would get down into a hole and then they’d eat the strontium salts that were in this low level waste. They’d come up and the rabbits would eat the rodents, and then the coyotes would eat the rabbits, and then you’d have hot spots around the desert. And that was bad news. So we ended up vacuuming the desert. That was a legend to live down. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, I thought about the PUREX tunnel, because I knew how that one was made. And I thought, surely, those timbers are rotted away. And that’s exactly the same story. The only answer was fill it with sand. And then what are you going to do about it? Of course, plan that’s somewhat out in the newspaper is fill them with slurry and probably a grout mix. Franklin: Well, it’s all—the PUREX tunnel it’s all solid waste, right? Armstrong: No, there’s no waste in there at all. Franklin: Or it’s contaminated solid objects. Armstrong: That’s right, that’s a good way to put it. The object of the design at PUREX Plant, in the earlier fuel separation plant, REDOX, T Plant, B Plant, whenever a failed big vessel or big pump would have to be disposed of, they’d put it on a railcar and drag it out to near the desert, drag it out to the burial ground and bury it. Actually time consuming plus potential for accidents and exposure. So the idea at PUREX Plant was build a tunnel at the head end of the plant. And then it got a failed pump, failed tank, you buy an old railroad car that’s junk, put the pump on it, and send it down this railroad tunnel for somebody to worry about someday. There’s no waste in there, other than whatever residual was on the contaminated equipment. But there still could be some pretty high level stuff. Franklin: Because of what it— Armstrong: What it was handling, sure. Franklin: But no solid—but no actual— Armstrong: No actual waste like we think of waste in the waste tanks, or waste like the strontium cesium capsules in B Plant. Franklin: Did you see the infographic that Washington State Department of Ecology had put out of the tunnels? And it had the railcars, but inside the railcars was a green goo? Armstrong: I didn’t see that. Probably wouldn’t have got impressed with it. I personally don’t like the state being a regulator. I think it should’ve been kept as a federal agency. But that’s my own opinion that they wouldn’t care for today. I don’t think the state’s got any business being in the business. Enough said. I won’t—that’s not a popular area. Franklin: That’s good. Armstrong: Ha! You can edit that out. Franklin: Well, I mean, you know, it’s just an opinion. So you had worked on these cribs and filled them up with— Armstrong: A slurry of sand. Franklin: Were these constructed similarly— Armstrong: No. Franklin: --to the PUREX tunnel? Armstrong: They were a hole in the ground with—I forget what they were, like, 20-foot long timbers stacked just to make a big void space, and then a roof over the top and six, eight foot of dirt on top of it. Franklin: Oh, okay. Armstrong: The whole idea was to get a big void space down underground to pump low level liquid waste. But over years of pumping low level waste in, it accumulates to high level waste, and that’s why it was bad to have the rodents down in there eating these salts. Franklin: Sure. Armstrong: So, anyway, with Rockwell coming in, and me going to project management, I had another group of people come to me, namely the Washington Public Power, we would like you to come with us. We’re building five nuclear power plants. And I said, well, I’ll be there. And so I took a job in project management of what was called the equipment qualification, namely to prove everything in the reactor was going to—everything safety-related was really going to work during every credible accident. We had about 20,000 electrical mechanical pieces of equipment that we had to have definitive proof it could stand an accident scenario. So, I’m still involved in Hanford and watching it, but yet direct employment left when I left Rockwell. Franklin: Okay. But still obviously related. Armstrong: Well, still nuclear power plant, as opposed to waste management area. Or production in the early years. Franklin: And how long were you with WPPSS? Armstrong: 18 years. Franklin: Okay. So you kind of saw, then, the full—the rise and fall, I guess one can say. Armstrong: Oh, yeah, in fact, even in organizational dynamics, this was a tough time. Organization staging for—I guess if you think of plant construction, you need one craft for some time, or one set of engineers for some period, and another set of engineers for another period. We had organizations that were struggling with trying to keep their mission alive. When Don Major, who was our general manager then, was trying his best to say, this organization’s got to phase down, because this one’s phasing up to finish the plant. But the thing that I saw my pathway pretty clear—I was kind of middle management through my whole career path, and here middle management at Washington Public Power Supply System, we could see a clear pathway to make that plant work. Something bothers me about the Vit Plant. People working on it aren’t going to see it work in the lifetime of the people working on it. That’s why I don’t like the idea of the state being involved in it. That should’ve been a small demonstration plant; could’ve been finished five years ago and working. If it worked good, we’d build two, three more of them. Franklin: Mm. Instead of building one— Armstrong: State kept insisting it’s got to be so big that once we turn it on, we’ll run all the waste through it and be done. They ended up building it so big that they couldn’t control the design process and still don’t know when it’s going to run. May never run. Franklin: Yeah. Armstrong: There are other ideas on what to do with waste. Some of them still being explored to maybe speed it up. But I—Savannah River has a waste evaporator and a waste melter. The titanium industry’s had titanium vacuum melters for years. We could’ve made one here. Franklin: Savannah River’s also partway through their vitrification process. But there, though, it’s easier because the chemical—they only used one—they used less chemical separations processes than we did. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: So they have much less complicated— Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: --waste. Armstrong: I understand that, too. You know, this is one of the things that even took me a long time to digest when I had plant engineering group over the Tank Farms and PUREX and REDOX and those, that each one put out a different product in terms of the waste composition. The process to handle it was somewhat different. But even in the years I was there, we were running the T Evaporator and the S Evaporator, and then the A Evaporator was built just after I left. They were all one mission: take the waste out of the tanks. It was done before I got there to take all the strontium and cesium out. That was done very quietly and successfully. So getting stuff out of the tanks was not a big deal. They knew how to do it. And suddenly it’s got to be reinvented. Even running the S Evaporator and T Evaporator, they were different processes, but we took a lot of water out and made a lot of space in the tanks. Some of them, they gained a little too much space and they had to put water back in to cool it down. But that’s part of the learning process. Franklin: It was meant that liquid waste would go in the tanks, right? So now that it’s been largely solidified, doesn’t that make it harder to access the waste via the existing pipes— Armstrong: Well, it sure does. Franklin: --liquid material— Armstrong: It sure does. In the first campaign of—effectively what was in there was liquids, yet a lot of stuff had settled out over the years. As they were extracting the product out of the tanks, they had some kind of pumps to get the liquid out and then some devices they called sluicers which would spray the tank bottoms, loosen up stuff so they could slurry it up and pump it on into B Plant so they could process. Still they cleaned the tanks out tolerably well. Yet the evaporator process included a type of pump called a salt well that we made in my plant engineering group, where we would literally put a well casing not far from what you see out in the desert for farming—put a well casing down in the tank so you could sift away from the salt product and get the liquid back out and send it to the evaporators. So every one of the tanks went through the salt well campaign of extracting liquids to try to get it solid. So this leaves a little different product to get out of there now. At that time, the idea was remote shovels and stuff like that to dig it out. That, I think was demonstrated doable. Yet concurrently, we had almost the same game that they got now. I’d get a call over the weekend, this tank’s potential leaker just got a high drywell indication, what should we do? And we’d come up with a plan to route piping and pump it over to another tank. And we think that one’s good so we’ll try that one for a while. Yeah, that one seems to be holding it. And then we had a big master chart—this was before computers could take care of things to count for you—we had a big chart of which tanks were suspected leakers, known leakers, possible leakers, and three or four other categories of maybe they’re okay or maybe not. We got space here but not there. [LAUGHTER] Same game that you read about in the paper today. But a little different product to have to handle, I do admit that. My own desires, and yet I was current plant operations/plant engineering, and Don Woodrich, in another group was long-range planning, what are we going to do with this stuff eventually? At that time it was dig it out, put it in casks and take it someplace. No one wanted it. Franklin: That’s a hard sell. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: What years was that? Armstrong: That was in the mid-‘70s. Because I left Rockwell. Rockwell came in in, I guess I’m going to say, the early ‘80s. That’s when I left and went to Washington Public Power. Franklin: How—so you were with them, with Washington Public Power, kind of until its ending— Armstrong: Well, through—I actually got caught in layoff. They wanted a headcount and they wanted dollars, and we now the four plants were put in first a construction delay and eventually a termination. It was clear that we had too many people. And the general manager had had a stroke and they hired a new guy. He come in and said, get me a list of the high dollar people in engineering, because we’re going to contract out a lot of this business. I was one of the higher paid engineers or managers, and I got hit with a layoff in the mid-‘90s. Franklin: So what did you do after leaving WPPSS? Armstrong: Retired. [LAUGHTER] Armstrong: I chose it to be an early retirement. And I’ve been active all along in the leadership of American Society of Mechanical Engineers. So I spent a lot of time there; still do. Franklin: Great. Let’s see here. You’ve answered a lot of my questions, but I have a few more. What were the most challenging and/or rewarding aspects of your work at Hanford? Armstrong: Oh, early years, like I mentioned, being selected to go into the weapons production group. That wasn’t a group you got into very easily. The best operators and the best supervisors that existed at Hanford. We had a final mission: make parts, put them in a box and ship them. I worked there for over four years for Les Brecke, who was a tough one to work for. Never missed a single shipment. Franklin: Wow. And what about the later years? Armstrong: Atlantic Richfield years, same story. I had a wonderful group of people. I had five subsections in my plant engineer group, specifically one for each plant. But I had them all structured so if they knew I was in some trouble someplace with whatever it be, I could draw from one group and put it into another group to get through a complicated problem. And we had some issues with evaporators and with—the Tank Farms were a constant headache. Even PUREX, when they started to shut it down and then ramp it up for what was to be the last run, I somehow—the production manager’s name was a fella named Chuck Malady, and I ended up being his ghostwriter for letters that went to, it was Energy Research and Development Administration, now DOE. I wrote two letters from the president of Atlantic Richfield to DOE, then ERDA: please, let us run PUREX one more time. We’ll be done with that N Reactor fuel forever. Twice the answer came back, no, can’t do it. Please don’t ask again, because Jimmy Carter wants no more waste in the waste tanks. Instead, they let the fuel rot away in K Reactor basins. We were campaigning, let us run PUREX. We could’ve done it and been done with it. It would not have added that much waste. But that was the decision made at the presidential level. It probably cost this country a hundred billion dollars, and we’re still not willing to admit it. They still haven’t got the mess cleaned up. We had PUREX ready to go to do it. Franklin: Right, right. Interesting. Thank you. What are some of your memories of any major events in Tri-Cities history? I guess, for example, were you around for President Kennedy’s visit? Armstrong: Yeah, in fact—[LAUGHTER] it’s kind of comical because I was working in the production line, and the message that came out was essential operations must continue, but non-essential people will be released to go to President Kennedy’s visit. And there’ll be buses to bus you down there. Les Brecke had maintained we were essential, so we weren’t going to go. And then he had a change of heart the last day, said, well, I want to keep my operators busy, but Armstrong and two or three others, you can get on the bus and go. So I was way back in the last row with the last bus that came in. I watched from way back, afar. It was fun to see it. Franklin: Yeah. Do you remember President Nixon’s visit? Armstrong: Oh, I do, but I actually didn’t—I wasn’t here. I was traveling someplace. So I didn’t get in on the festivities. Franklin: Any other major events in Tri-Cities history, plant shutdowns, startups, that kind of stand out to you? Armstrong: Well, certainly the contractor changes. Even one of the comical parts with General Electric, I worked directly for this Les Brecke, and he had a rather seriously assembled dossier on every one of his people. I forget who it was that came out, it might have been George Saylor from General Electric, who was high up in the employee relations group. He says, your secretary tells us you’re not going to release your files. You must turn them in! That’s GE property. That’s not your property. Everyone will start with an empty folder when Atlantic Richfield comes in. Actually, it wasn’t Atlantic Richfield; it was an interim company called Isochem, who was a rather short-lived vendor. They were supposed to build an isotope separations plant. Never did. And then Atlantic Richfield got that contract assigned to them. Interesting style then. But anyway, bottom line is, that was kind of a comical thing. I sat out on the outside of the row and then George Saylor comes out. I was outside of his office. My office was from here to the wall from his, and I could hear him arguing, you must release your employee files because those are GE property. Not yours. Well, he eventually had to. [LAUGHTER] So we started with an empty binder on everyone. But I think he kept a few things out of there. But that was kind of an interesting thing. Another fun one that happened, still with Les Brecke—I mentioned I’d been active all along in ASME in local and national activities. Well, it happened that another fella in 234-5 Building came to me and said, hey, I see you just moved to town. Would you help us with our local section meetings? I said, oh, yeah, sure. What do you want me to do? Well, here’s ten names. You call these ten members and remind them of our next meeting. I can do that. So I put the list in my drawer and come a week before the meeting, I pull it out and start calling people. Get down about four names, and there was a boss’s boss’s boss on the list. Me, little guy on the totem pole, going to call him? I’ll skip his name. And then I call the rest and then I put the list back in my drawer. Next day, I said, hey, I promised Marv I’d call these people. I guess I’ll do it. So I called him up. He answers the phone himself. Hugh Warren here. Oh! I wanted to remind you of our ASME meeting coming up this week. Oh, yeah! I got that notice. I’m going to be there; put me down. And he remained a lifelong friend, forever. Franklin: Wow. Armstrong: And the comical thing that happened is, he says, where do you work? I said, 234-5 work. I work for Les Brecke. Oh, I’m coming down there this afternoon; I’ll stop by and say hello. So, my office door was within viewing door of Les Brecke’s office door. And in comes boss’s boss’s boss, said hello to me and we talked a few minutes and he left. Pssht! Brecke comes out, what was Warren doing down here? [LAUGHTER] Armstrong: Oh, he just popped in to say hello. Enough said, anyway. It was just kind of a comical event. There’s probably hundreds of examples like that through the years. Like I say, when I had the plant engineering group, I had wonderful people working for me. Some of them unfortunately were older than I was and we read about one every weekend now. They’re passing away. Franklin: Yeah, that’s true. What was it like living in Richland—so you would’ve moved here after Richland had become privatized. What was it like living in Richland in that area of the Cold War in the ‘60s and ‘70s? Armstrong: I can’t say that there was anything spectacular. Downtown—well, I had an apartment when I moved in to Richland across from the old Kadlec Hospital. It was one block to what was called 700 Area. They were just building the Federal Building and knocking down all the old Federal Building offices. So I had one—that K Reactor design group assignment was in 762 Building, which I’d walk half a block from my apartment into the gate on the north end of the 700 Area and walked two buildings to my—I didn’t know much about what else was going on down there, other than that it was most of design engineering for the whole site. I was specific to the K Reactor and we were in one building. You talked about Kennedy; even going back to high—excuse me, college, I had an interesting experience with him. I lived in a dormitory the first couple years. And I guess it must’ve been like 1959 or ’60, it was a Saturday, and I was on phone duty. We had one phone come in to the dorm. You’d answer it and then call a room of somebody. Well, they were holding what they called a mock political convention. I wasn’t going to go to it, but in comes this call from somebody. Hey, we’re the State of Massachusetts and we got a big deal guy here, and he’s senator, and we’ve only got two people to represent our state. Send people over here! So I could put out a message on the public announcement through the whole dorm, and then my shift was coming to the end. I decided—we gathered three or four other people and we went over to the gymnasium to be part of the Massachusetts convention for this political convention. The famous senator was John Kennedy. We sat around, the eight of us, around the room—around the circle. Oh, thank you so much for you folks participating in this important political activity. He signed my program. And did I save it? No. Franklin: So he was actually at WSU? Armstrong: Yeah! Franklin: Wow, I didn’t know that. Armstrong: In fact, I think the yearbook that year has got his picture and I’m in the shadow in the background of it or something. But I didn’t save that program that had his signature on it. He signed them all. So then, years later, he’s president, and I’m in 762 Building in the K Reactor design group. Right next to my office was the resident office of the FBI. So, I probably knew it, among the first three or four at Hanford that Kennedy had been shot. Because they came over and—we knew the FBI guys, and they knew us. I could stand in their doorway and listen to their radio chatter. Of course, we assembled in the hallway to try and learn what was happening from the FBI chatter coming in on the radio. It was a whole story that was just emerging on the national news. So kind of a close couple paths crossings there. Franklin: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Thank you. I think that might be the most detailed—one of the more detailed Kennedy visit stories I’ve ever got, you know, from an interview. Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: So, I guess, in closing— Armstrong: In fact, the neighbor down the street from me was a fellow named Swede Holmquist who was safety director for all of Hanford under DuPont, GE, appointed by Matthias to be safety director. Franklin: Oh, wow. Armstrong: He brought home a lot of stuff when he retired, which I have some of it now. Which you’ll get someday. But meantime, I’m going to enjoy it. Franklin: Sure. Armstrong: Including the press release notebook on the Kennedy visit. Franklin: Oh, wow. Armstrong: Thick notebook. Franklin: Wow. So in closing, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Armstrong: Well, it was serious business. And I took it that way. I had very high security clearance. I took it serious. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to students in the university environments. This is my advice to them. If you get involved in either corporate security activity or government security activity, take it serious. I did. And there’s stuff I couldn’t tell you today that I was involved in. Mostly, interestingly enough, on manufacturing technology. One time the highest level security thing we had at Hanford was production rate. You can read about it in the paper right now how many devices we made. I wouldn’t have dared told you that in the ‘60s. Franklin: Sure, but that manufacturing technology, though, is still very much— Armstrong: Yeah. Franklin: Because of the danger of nations making-- Armstrong: Yeah, people picking up on how to do it. Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Armstrong: And even though what we did 50 years ago was probably different than what they do today. I was down at the University of Nevada Las Vegas a month ago, and I met a fella that was doing the laser work on the stockpile proof-of-reliability. He knew where I’d come from. I’d been through the whole test site. They took that job serious, too. But there’s been more released on what they did than ever will be released on what Hanford did. And yet even—I meet people around the country, everybody knows about Oak Ridge. Not very many people know what happened at Hanford. And I think it’s an important thing to tell, and this is why I’m excited about seeing the B Reactor elevated. And I’d go so far as to include the other facilities. T Plant’s an important part of the whole story. Franklin: Oh, sure. I mean, the fuel doesn’t pop out of B Reactor and then just go to Los Alamos. Armstrong: In fact, when I was plant engineering manager, one thing Rockwell did when they first came to town—there were seven people, and I’ve got a picture of all seven of them, that had like 35 years of total experience going back to DuPont. They were all given a Rockwell 35-year gold watch. Two of them worked for my group. One of them was kind of a simple story; he worked at Remington—excuse me, DuPont at Salt Lake, came up to Hanford. The other had an amazing story. I held a staff meeting when I gave out these two watches to the people. Had all my people and anybody else who wanted to come. And I said, Max Yeats, I want you to—he did not know what I was going to do. I said, I want you to tell us all where you were on a certain date in 1942 or ’43, like that. I didn’t know you knew that date. Well, I know the whole story, and you’re going to tell us right now, what happened that day and forth. Well, I haven’t talked about that much. Well, you can tell it, or I’ll tell it, because I know it. And he said, okay. I went to work for Remington Arms in Kansas City. I was in charge of tooling. Machinist background, mechanical engineering graduate. One day I was called in to the boss’s office, and told I was selected for a special corporate assignment. They knew nothing about it, I was supposed to take it. What do you want to do? And he said, I don’t know, I guess I’ll take it. What would you do, you were a kid out of school, worked for six months for DuPont? So he said, here’s an envelope; open it when you get home. You’re off now. Go home. Got home, told his wife—new wife, opened the envelope: Report to Dr. Do, University of Chicago in two days. Dr. Do was code name for Fermi. He went into Fermi’s office and said, go to that meeting room, get some other people, we’ll come in and talk. He learned the whole story of what was going to happen. And his mission in being taken in to Chicago was he worked on making the fuel for the Chicago Pile. And then there were six of them sent from Chicago to Hanford, and he was project manager on construction of B Plant. Not the reactor, but the fuel separations plant. And his whole career, he stayed as this senior, strong, individual contributor, including working for me, 40 years later. Franklin: Wow. That’s quite a story. Armstrong: And that’s never documented anyplace. Franklin: Yeah, the plants really seem to suffer from a lack of documentation and just awareness. The reactors get all of the— Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, he’d have been a wonderful person to have in your interview system, see? So I can tell the story about him now. All that came out as a result of Rockwell saying, we want to do something for the old-timers that are here. And they selected, it happened that they had some gold watches that said Rockwell on them, and they had them all in a—I gave the watches out at my own staff meeting, but then later they all assembled in the famous PUREX conference room for a group picture. And I went with them on that. I’ve got a copy of that picture with the seven people. Franklin: That’s really neat. Well, Dennis, thank you so much. It’s been a really great interview. Armstrong: Well, I could probably talk for an hour and two hours. I’m getting hoarse here, but I enjoy the history. I think you know that Don Sorenson and I both kind of partner in researching what we can. He’s two lightyears ahead of me and yet I’ve got stuff he’d enjoy having. I kind of got hooked on it when I cleaned out Swede Holmquist’s house. I wish I’d’ve saved more, but unfortunately, he’d brought home boxes full of historical papers, put them in his basement under a window where the sprinklers were running, and I opened up these boxes and they were all moldy. I didn’t want to kill myself. Including a big, thick white binder on the collapse of the second PUREX tunnel. I opened up, looked at the pictures and threw it in the dumpster. And probably that was the only one that existed. Yet that report might be in the library someplace. But it’s so hard to find stuff in the library. Don’s got access to more pictures. He has thousands of pictures. And his son collects pictures of Richland. Kind of an interesting tie. Franklin: Yeah, his Vintage Tri-Cities Facebook was just in the paper the other day. He likes a lot of our Facebook posts. That’s when I first found out about him. Armstrong: Yeah. Yet I’ve got some safety plaques that—I’ve got one 1944 from the National Safety Council to Hanford, 1944. And I’ve got 1945. I’ve got three bronze plaques that Holmquist lugged home. And I’ve got one that Kennedy gave the Site. In fact, have you been to the Nevada Test Site Museum? Franklin: I have not. Armstrong: Worthwhile going and see what they’ve done there. I’ll sign your travel authorization if you want to go. It won’t mean much when the dollars come, but. I’ve been there a number of times. In fact, I went again when I was—the student conference I put on in the University of Nevada. When the afternoon was quiet, I’d go over to the museum. Well, on an earlier visit, I’m standing inside the library. They’ve got a public reading room in addition to the museum tour. They’ve got this plaque hanging there, John F. Kennedy presents to the Atomic Energy Commission Sites. Docent walks up to me and says, isn’t that neat? You ever seen one of those? I said, yeah, I’ve got one hanging just like it in my room! Oh, you do? [LAUGHTER] I suspect it was a case where one had been given to each site. So probably half a dozen of those exist; I might have one of two that remain. I don’t know if Oak Ridge’s still exist. But these bronze ones, you’ll get them someday. In the meantime, I offered to give Connie a couple of them once. And I said, only one condition: you hang it in the museum. If it’s going to go in a filing cabinet, you can’t have it. And as you’re aware, museums don’t take things with conditions. Franklin: That’s true. Armstrong: Unless it’s a loan to special purpose. So it’s still hanging in my room. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, Dennis, if there’s other—if you think of things later on that you want to talk about, we’d be happy to schedule another interview with you. Armstrong: Or my experience might even be more broad than a lot of other folks. So if you get into an area where you want to amplify something, I’m on recall. I’m happy to do it for you. Because I think preserving the history is critical to the good work that so many thousands of people did at Hanford. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Paul Tibbetts and probably half a dozen of the crew with the first missions. Every one of them said the same story. People ask them, would you do it again? And the answer is, we were young Army officers, we were described a problem, we saluted and we did it. It wasn’t our position to challenge it. I kind of feel the same way, having been involved in production at Hanford. Didn’t bother me I participated in making many thousands of warheads. We only used a few of them, and those are the ones that I know got shot down in Nevada. And I learned later which ones got shot, because in my last year or so I was by I guess seniority, I was declared to be the authorized shipper of the final product out of Hanford. So every one of the shipments, including— I remember one time, the couriers would show up at the backdoor at 234-5. We’re here to take today’s shipment. Okay, sign here. And you got them. So they got sent down to Rocky Flats on a railroad car. It had a code name, Redwood car. It was always kind of parked up in the West Area shop area. Nobody knew what it was, unless you knew what it was. It was a US Mail car. It was painted just, US Mail No entry. I said to one of the couriers, hey, I want to see the inside of your railcar. Oh, yeah, come on up! No problem. Oh! I’ll be up. He took off with the load, and I went and got a car and took off. I got to be in the vault there that was normally off-limits to GE people. They closed the door and a guy sitting at each end of it with a machine gun, and off they went to Rocky Flats on a railcar. So anyway, those are fun little stories. I could probably have a thousand more. But I had fun during my career and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I really would. Franklin: Good. Well, Dennis, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Armstrong: Well, thank you for putting the time into it and the effort. I think it’s a good program. Franklin: Well, good. Thank you. Thank you for contributing. <a href="https://youtu.be/K5g1SgVQMS8">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 700 Area 200 West Area 231-Z Building 234-5 Plutonium Finishing Plant K Reactor 762 Building PUREX Z Plant B Plant REDOX T Plant WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply Systems) Tank Farms N Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1963- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dennis Armstrong Description An account of the resource Dennis Armstrong moved to Richland, Washington in 1963 to work on the Hanford Site as a Mechanical Engineer. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/24/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Spokane (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Mechanical engineering Plutonium industry Plutonium--Metallurgy Nuclear industry Nuclear weapons industry Nuclear weapons plants Nuclear power plants Radioactive waste disposal https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F90627f1dc8d48cfd156af27178b9863d.JPG ca157672f93a9363c189d29f81b4dce6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Ted Anderson Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Ted Anderson on May 11, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Ted about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Ted Anderson: [LAUGHTER] Okay. Theodore. Dahlin. Anderson. That’s T-H-E-O-D-O-R-E. D-A-H-L-I-N. A-N-D-E-R-S-O-N. Franklin: Great. Thank you so much. And you prefer Ted, right? Anderson: Yeah, yes. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: Well, there’s a little story here to that. Theodore is a compound name. Theo—it’s from the Greek. Theo is God; Dore is gift. So Theodore is gift of God. Ted, on the other hand, is to spread hay or manure. [LAUGHTER] Okay. Franklin: That’s good. So, Ted, tell me, how and why did you come to the Hanford Site? Anderson: How? Well, I’d had on-campus interview in 1967 with a representative from the Site here. Franklin: And where was this interview? Anderson: University of New Mexico. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: I didn’t take a site trip. But then I went to work for DuPont back in Virginia, and became somewhat unhappy there. Having gone to school in Albuquerque with all sorts of desert, basically, around and mountains and stuff. That’s where Hanford sort of is. So I gave a call to Dr. Watson, who was the recruiter here, and said, you still interested in me? Oh, yeah, when can you get here? So then I came cross-country with my wife, my daughter, and two cars. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: So, that was 1969. Franklin: And when you were—so you did your—which degree did you do at— Anderson: Chemical engineering. Franklin: Chemical engineering, and was that a bachelor’s? Anderson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. So what job did you come to do at Hanford in ’69? Anderson: [LAUGHTER] Came to work at Hanford. They were going to put me—well, I went to work in Tank Farms. But when I started out, all I knew was I was going to work at a nuclear reservation. Which, of course, at the time, there was a lot of secrecy. So they’re not going to tell you a lot until you get here. Franklin: Mm. So not knowing much about what exactly you’d be doing, what attracted you to come work at Hanford? Anderson: Basically, that it was desert, like New Mexico. And it was something new and different. I was probably a bit curious. I liked being in New Mexico where you could see for 50 miles, rather than in Virginia, where you’re lucky if you could see for a quarter of a mile. So, came out here. And of course, when we were first coming down from Spokane, and it’s June, late June coming up on July, and the wife is starting to look at all this brown country, because it’s desert. And she’s sort of looking at me, like, where have you brought us? Anyhow, that’s how I got here. Franklin: I think I and my wife had the same experience when we first moved out here. Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: Where am I? This is not the Washington I signed up for. Anderson: Yeah, where’s this “Evergreen State”? Franklin: So, you eventually went to work in the Tank Farms. So, I’m wondering if you could tell us, quickly, what the Tank Farms are, but then what your job, what your duties were there. Anderson: Well, there was radioactive waste that was created through the processing of spent fuel to get plutonium. The aqueous waste went into underground tanks. They’re nominally in the neighborhood of a million gallons. The first ones were 750,000 and later ones are actual full million gallons, 75 feet in diameter. They were basically concrete tanks with carbon-steel liners. So that’s where the waste went from reprocessing. Franklin: Were these tanks from like the World War II era on? Anderson: Yes. Franklin: Okay, so these were the single-shell— Anderson: Well— Franklin: What were known as the single— Anderson: Later on there were double-shell tanks, but initially what I was looking after was—I think there was some—I don’t remember if there were any double-shell tanks when I first started. There may have been, but— Franklin: So what was your job with the tanks? Anderson: I was shift engineer. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: Rotating shifts. There was a number of units—I had specific responsibility for two of them, which was ITS, In-Tank Solidification Units number 1 and 2. But I covered the entire Tank Farms, both East and West Area. So any time there was issues with waste transfers—they had another evaporator, 242-T, over in West Area. So I would make my rounds of Tank Farm operations. If there was any problems, try to troubleshoot. If it was something I couldn’t troubleshoot, then I’d make a little note of it and turn it in to the powers-that-be at shift change. Franklin: Which contractor was running the Tank Farms when you got here? Anderson: That was the Atlantic-Richfield Hanford Company. Franklin: Okay. So what was the primary—what was the goal of managing—like, when you say managing the tanks, what were the goals of that, what were the outcomes of tank management? Anderson: Oh, we were still producing a lot of aqueous waste. I mean, PUREX was in full operation. B Plant was processing waste to remove the cesium and strontium to try to get to a point where we could solidify waste. So, yeah, we were trying to accommodate the waste from—this is Cold War, of course. So there’s some pressure to make plutonium. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: Although, I think we did way too good a job at it. Eventually, when you think the first bomb was talking about grams, and eventually we produced something over 16 tons, we learned altogether too well how to—but anyhow. For just the start of things, we’re trying to make space for the aqueous waste that’s produced primarily from fuel reprocessing but also from other processes. Franklin: Right, because there were several processes of the waste, right? There were several different chemical—distinct chemical processes for reprocessing spent fuel. Anderson: Oh, yeah, yeah. The first was what was referred to as BiPO-4. That’s bismuth phosphate, Bi-P-O-4. And that, they were just after the plutonium. So that was the initial thing. That’s how we got our plutonium for the first bomb. Then they decided that there was an awful lot of uranium that was going out with the aqueous waste. So they had, among other things, what they called a heavy metal recovery program, where they would reprocess the waste that was already in the tank and try to remove the uranium so it could be made back into fuel assemblies. Franklin: Were the tanks designed for the waste to be pumped in and out of them in this fashion? Anderson: They were made to transfer between tanks. Recovery—because partly what went out was liquid and part of it was solids. The uranium was in the solids, so you had to have some sluicing in the tank. And, no, the tanks were not built with the idea that you would remove solids from them. Franklin: To reprocess. Anderson: To reprocess. We did, but—then there was some over things that—they had what they called a space recovery program. So they hit waste in several tanks in East Area with a cyanide solution that precipitated, pretty quantitatively, the radioactive material out. And then they pumped the supernatant across the road to what they called BC Crib Area, which was open trenches, a specific retention site. The waste was pumped into there until they had—specific retention meant they didn’t want it to go all the way to the groundwater. So they calculate what the soil column could hold. When it reached that level, they moved it. So that was another thing they did. As I said, B Plant was in operation when I got there. There, they were separating the strontium and cesium from tank waste and encapsulating it. At the Waste Encapsulation and Solidification Facility, WESF. Again, the idea was that eventually they wanted to solidify the tanks with the waste inside, and that was going to be the permanent disposal. Which, to tell you a little story here, the initial work they did, they took samples out at the tanks. Very small samples, because it’s hot, radioactively. And they sent it to what was in those days PNL. That’s before they got the extra N. Franklin: Right. Anderson: Then they concentrated it. And they said it was concentrated by a factor of four and allowed to cool. It became a solid mass. Then they extrapolated that, or tried to, to million-gallon tanks. It didn’t really work that way. [LAUGHTER] There was multiple challenges. For instance, ITS-2, which was in Tank 112B-Y, used big immersion heaters, like million-watt immersion heaters, to heat the liquid in the tank and boil it. Then it was moved from 112B-Y to a series of what they called bottoms tanks where it was supposed to cool and solids settle out. We were going to create more space for more waste so we don’t have to build more tank farms. Trouble is it didn’t really happen like that; you had selective precipitation. It didn’t just set up all at once. Certain compounds would settle out and they formed a crust on top of the liquid, which didn’t help with the cooling, because the idea was that this hot stuff would go out into these tanks and the tanks were ventilated and you would evaporate more water. So that didn’t work. Then they put in airlift circulators which were supposed to open up the surface. That worked for a while, but eventually, you get down to maybe ten feet in diameter for the airless circulators. So it was an ongoing challenge. And there was some really funny chemistry. For instance in, well, no, 2B-Y, which was, yeah, in-tank unit 1. I was there; I was in-charge engineer, where we’d take a sample and send it over to the 222-S Lab. Well, the sample—and, you know, you didn’t want to get real close to it. We’d ship it in these pigs, lead-shelled containers. Went over to the lab, and I filled out the sheet that says here’s what the characteristics were, which was a clear, yellow liquid. Then I get a call a couple days later from the lab that says, your sample sheet says it was a clear, yellow liquid. What we’ve got has lots of solids in it. Well, it had cooled, okay? So, you know. Put a magnetic stirrer in it—and this is all going to happen in a hot zone. Put the magnetic stirrer on it and heat it up. Steve Buckingham was the lead engineer then, lead chemist. Bucky as he was fondly known. And he called me up and he said, it’s been on there for two days. Still full of solids. So what had happened, apparently, was there was an irreversible precipitation. In other words, it wasn’t just a compound that precipitated out that could be re-dissolved; there was a chemical reaction that had happened when it cooled. Very strange material, because there were so many chemicals in it—and we tried to replicate the waste so we could do cold testing. They were never able to get physical characteristics and chemical characteristics in the same surrogate. You could mimic the physical characteristics; you could mimic some of the chemical characteristics; but you couldn’t do both in a cold sample. So, yeah, some really strange stuff. Franklin: Yeah, no kidding. Wasn’t—this precipitating out of water, I understand that to kind of get the material to be more of a solid, to save space—would that water have carried any kind of radioactive traces with it as it was precipitating out? Anderson: Oh, yeah. So, as it came off, like, 112B-Y, we had condensers to cool it down. And then the air was put through a HEPA, High Efficiency Particulate Air filters. So that, again, what was released had minimal if any contamination in it. Franklin: Mm. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Anderson: I said, HEPA filters were nominally good for about 106 decontamination factor. So, yeah. It cleaned up the air pretty good. Franklin: Well, that’s good. What would be done with these filters, because I assume after a while they would be radioactive themselves, right? Anderson: Oh, yes, yeah. You could flush them. But ultimately, they didn’t really—there were things that plated out on them that would increase the delta pressure, dp as it was known, to the point where you can’t clean them enough to—and they were only good for maybe six inches dp before they could be ruptured, pulled through. So, yeah, another little story from—there was something called AR Vault, which was used when you recovered stuff from A Farm, AX Farm Tanks, it would go into AR Vault. They were recovering sludge. When they got enough of it, then they would pump it over to B Plant, okay. The way this was set up, there was four tanks in this semi canyon building. There’s a big open door at the end of it, where if you needed to bring equipment in, you could. Okay, well, there’s cover blocks, so once you bring the equipment in, you close the doors, then you could take the cover blocks off. So there’s two different speeds on the HVAC, heating ventilation air conditioning, system. One was the normal, when that door at the end of the thing was closed. And the other was when it’s open, you really crank it up. So I was shift engineer and talking to the operator there. At that point, AR Vault was not actively being used. There was a little lull in our processing. So he’s running on to me, he said, they really need to change those filters out on radiation levels. Not just wait for the differential pressure to go up. And I said, yeah, good point. So I wrote up a little, what we called DSIs. Don’t Say It, write it. I left that for management; said, here’s my recommendation. Well, about three years later, I’m working on low level waste management, and I heard that they quote-unquote sucked the filter at AR Vault. I thought, oh, well, hmm, okay. Not too long after that, I get a call from somebody that said, I’m just reading your memo here. Why didn’t they take action on that? I said, did you look at the date on that? Oh, that was quite a while ago! [LAUGHTER] Because what had happened is, with AR sitting there basically not doing a lot of processing, but you’re still ventilating, still getting some particulate, it kept loading the filters. But the airflow rate was low. So now they’re going to open up the canyon doors and they jack the airflow up. And of course, delta-p is not linear; it’s an asymptotic thing, with airflow. So when they jacked airflow up, it sucked the filter. Well, now, the filter was supposed to be contact-maintained. That is, you could go in and manually take it into a disposal container. Well, as the operator had pointed out, they didn’t change it out on radiation readings, and now it’s too hot to do it manually. So now what they had to do—and we’re talking about a rather large assembly. So now what they had to do is go in a considerable ways away from this filter assembly and open up the line, and build a parallel one and reroute it around to go through a whole new filter thing. And then they had to take the whole old filter thing out and bury it. So, you know, it’s things like that that there tended to be not a lot of thinking about what the potential is. So anyhow. One of the little stories. Franklin: That’s great, that’s a great story. So how long did you work as a Tank Farm shift engineer? Anderson: Well, initially, I did it for—let’s see, ’69 to like sometime in ’72. And then I was on days for a while. And then I think they thought I was a bit persistent on some things. So then they—you know, please don’t throw me in the briar patch—they put me on shift work. I like shift work. You can shop when the stores are not crowded. Things like, we had a popcorn club for the operators. Of course, I’m—you hang out with the operators. So, yeah, they’d buy popcorn in 50-pound bags. They’d buy popcorn in 5-gallon tanks. You paid a couple bucks a month; if you wanted to make popcorn, you went down to CR Vault—CR Tank Farm, rather—and got popcorn and oil and went back to where your lunch room and made popcorn. I mean, it was—there’s a lot of camaraderie when you’re working with people like that. So, yeah. I liked working shift work. When my daughter finally got into school, it was not quite as much fun. Because she and my wife could sort of adjust when she didn’t have to go to school. But then when she was in school, it started getting a little more challenging. But anyhow, that’s—I went back on shiftwork. Worked on shift work probably until, I’m thinking early ’75. Then back on day shift again. And finally, August of ’75, I decided I’d had enough and I quit. Franklin: So you quit the Tank Farm? Anderson: I quit the job. Franklin: Quit the job. Anderson: Yeah. I was, at that point, farming quite a few acres and had some rentals, and was looking forward to just doing my thing, thank you. Franklin: Yeah. Was there a particular incident that led you to quit, or—I’m wondering if you could kind of describe what happened to come to that decision. Anderson: Well, one of the problems was is that, again, management tended to be shortsighted, as in the AR Vault incident. I was told that my resignation letter, it was probably at one time or another in hundreds of files out there because people thought it was such a wonderful letter. But, you know, just—very shortsighted, wouldn’t listen to good technical advice. And again, not well-managed. So I basically out of frustration just said, you know, I don’t think I need this. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Do you think that was particular to the Tank Farm, the tank unit, or would that have been like a contractor-wide issue? Anderson: To some extent, it was contractor-wide. I think the Tank Farms may have been—but then again, maybe it’s just because I had that personal knowledge of Tank Farms. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: Because there was other things that—it was always a short-term solution. Not looking out and saying, okay, how’s this going to work ten years from now, 20 years from now? It was more like, how is this going to work next month. So anyhow, yeah. And then of course eventually I went back to work for PNL. I was doing the initial waste vitrification demonstration. Franklin: So, tell me, how did you come to go back to work—you said you wanted to kind of do your own thing for—you know. But how did you end up coming back to waste management? Anderson: [LAUGHTER] Well, I was drawing unemployment because I had—well, another story. I quit and then I filed for unemployment and ARCO was going to dispute that. And I thought, oh, good, because I had lots of documentation of not being employed to use my chemical engineering education. Which is, you know, if you quit with cause and you can demonstrate the cause, you get unemployment. You have to wait seven weeks, or you did then, but you—you know. So I had done that. Then the wife and I—there was supposed to be a hearing in, I think, December. And the wife and I had gone off to Hawaii for a little bit of vacation. Came back, and lived in Benton City at that time, which had no home delivery of mail. You had to be a post office box. So we went up to the post office box, and here’s a stack of unemployment checks. ARCO dropped their—apparently, they decided that they didn’t want to get any legal go-arounds. So then I drew unemployment for as long as I could. When I got into my final 13-week unemployment thing, they were really insisting that I do some serious interviewing. Of course, I have to confess that one of the things that I thought made me unemployable was I had tried to unionize the engineers. [LAUGHTER] Anderson: Yeah, okay. Franklin: Yeah, that kind of will sometime earn the ire of management. Anderson: Well, they wouldn’t have dared to do anything like fire me, but they wouldn’t have dared to do anything like hire me back. Franklin: Right, right. Anderson: So anyhow I was interviewing with Jack McElroy, who was PNL. And they wanted me to help with—they were doing a waste vitrification demonstration project. They needed help, and I had a lot of background. He said, all I ask is one thing: promise you won’t engage in any unionizing activities—organizing activities. And I said, you got it. So, then I was working for PNL. Franklin: So, sorry, I’m very curious. I want to go back a bit because you just mentioned this unionizing thing now. What led you to that kind of activism when you were at your job at ARCO? Why did you try to unionize? Anderson: Because other people were having the same problems I was. The people—good people tended to be leaving. So your overall quality of the people you work with can tend to go down with times. And there’s a lot of people that, you’d talk, and they’d talk, but they don’t do anything. And I’ve never been one to—if you’re going to talk the talk, walk the walk. So I got together, we—what was it, the Hanford Employees—anyhow, we had a whole bunch of people with names that were interested in doing this. We quickly decided that we really couldn’t afford to do this if we were being challenged in court, because we didn’t have the resources. So then we contacted some professional unions, for instance, Boeing, their union. Their engineers are unionized, and we talked with them. Campbell’s Soup Company, of all things, was unionized and had their technical people in that. So, yeah, we were moving down that road. One of the things that stopped us was we didn’t want to be sucked up into another organization. It was beginning to look like you’re going to have trouble maintaining your independence if you get the help you need to fight the corporate people. Franklin: Right, because they’re going to want—another union would want your membership to bolster their ranks. Anderson: Yeah, and of course, none of them really understood Hanford, which was going to be another problem. So, that was basically—we said, no, this probably, it’s not the right time, maybe it’s not the right—you know. But apparently we had scared the tar out of management. I was told that there was some really serious conferences down in the Federal Building, fondly known as the Fed Shed, of people wondering what to do if we actually officially tried to unionize. I didn’t know I’d caused all that consternation, but—[LAUGHTER] Franklin: I guess word about you had spread. Anderson: Well, actually, there was three of us. I’m trying to think who the other two were. I can’t think of their names just offhand. But we actually were on TV, interviewed. You know, this is what we’re thinking about. Okay. But they’d say, these are engineers you’re working with who tend to be horribly practical. You know, you look down the road and you say, you know, I don’t know how this is going to work, and if we give up our independence, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to attract enough people to really get a viable vote. So we finally said, okay. Heavy sigh. But meanwhile, they made some changes for the engineering. Because engineering wage increases had been lagging the craftworkers, the union members. They were getting like 5, 6% a year, and we were getting like 4%. Which was one of the sticking point, you know. The squeaky wheel gets oiled, so let’s us be a squeaky wheel. Franklin: Do you know of any other—I assume you did your research in some of these other companies. Did you find any other atomic sites that had had engineers that had unionized? Anderson: Not that I recall, no. I’m sorry. There was one other professional union we had talked to. I want to say that maybe it was 3M but I don’t recall. I know Campbell’s and Boeing were the two for sure that we talked to. Franklin: Yeah, Campbell’s is very interesting. I wouldn’t have— Anderson: Oh, and United Auto Workers, also. That was another one. Franklin: Ah. Anderson: They’re union—their engineers were unionized. So yeah. Franklin: Cool, well, thank you. I’d not heard of that attempt before, so it’s really, that’s interesting. Anderson: Oh, okay, well, good. Franklin: One last question, too, before we go to your time at PNNL, about the Tank Farms. I’m getting the sense that, from your perspective, that there was much more of a—that tank waste management at that time was more about finding more room for waste to continue production than it was about ensuring the safety—or kind of the safety and stability of the tanks. Or, it seemed like there was more short-term focus than long-term planning. Anderson: Well, yeah. Franklin: Because that waste would have to sit there. Was there any talk of where that waste would go? Whether it be a repository or what would happen to it? Anderson: No, the assumption was it was going to be solidified in the tanks and left. Franklin: Oh. Really? Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. As in—from an engineer’s perspective, would that have been a feasible project? Anderson: It would’ve taken—for instance, what you wound up with, with the successive evaporations, is a very caustic solution. When it cools it doesn’t really solidify, it just gets thick. Sodium hydroxide, basically, lye. So one of the things that was talked about was the fact you get the tank to a certain point and you load it up with grout, cement, basically. We also did some experiments with fly ash, because that would absorb liquid. But again, in those days, there was no talk of the waste coming out of the tanks. Vitrification was not on the table. Franklin: Had there been any—had all the tanks maintained their stability at that point? Had there been any— Anderson: Oh, no, no. I’ll tell you the story about the tar rings. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: Okay. I say, these tanks are basically concrete tanks with carbon steel liners. Okay, well, we were developing in-tank photography. A good friend of mine, Jerry Everett, was the lead on that. He was with PNL, a photographer. So they developed techniques for lowering a camera into the tank and rotating it. So you got—and you could build a montage of the interior of the tank. Well, about the second tank they did that to, you could see there were black rings around certain points. Okay. Well, the tanks between the carbon steel and the cement was mastic, as they called it—tar. Because that was meant to basically seal it tight between the—okay. Well, now, if you’re seeing tar, that indicates that the carbon steel integrity is gone. Okay. And it was all sorts of theories about how that could happen. Potentially, they talked about microorganisms that could withstand the radiation and oxidize. And of course, young engineer and I expounding on some of these to one of the old operators. And he said, iron-loving biota, my ass. Oh? What happened? He says, they just jumped an un-neutralized batch out. Because the processing was done on the acid side. And then you hit it with caustics so it would be compatible with the carbon steel. And he said, so, you know, if you didn’t get the caustic added to the batch, it would go out to the tank, it would potentially float on the surface and eat up the carbon steel. And I said, so, is that written down some place? And he looked at me like I was an idiot. He said, hell no! I said, what did you do? Put the caustic down the pipe after it! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: With no mixing. Anderson: No. Of course, then the record shows you’ve used caustic. Here’s, we used however many gallons. [LAUGHTER] Okay, so there’s stories like that that I’m sure nobody would really want to admit, even today, but that’s what the operators said occasionally happened. You’d send an un-neutralized batch out. Of course, there was other things that went on. Like, S-X Farm over in West Area. It had initially been bottoms tanks for REDOX. And then they decided that they were going to try to use them further. REDOX was the first solvent extraction predecessor to PUREX. So the material that was coming out, then, was a lot more concentrated as far as radionuclides. Well, they were in a hurry to build the S-X tanks; because REDOX was coming online, you need a place to put that stuff. So the earlier tanks were built with a slightly convex/concave, whichever way you look at it, bottom, so it was a bit rounded on the bottom. Well, S-X, they built them flat, because it was faster. I mean, trying to weld carbon steel and get that—okay. Well, then, lo and behold, here’s this really hot waste, sludge, in the bottom of the tank. And of course, the concrete has some residual moisture in it. It evaporated the residual moisture and the tanks buckled up like this. Franklin: And cracked, right? Anderson: Well, cracks formed. They buckled up as much as eight feet. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: Well, it’s a 75-foot-diameter tank. Franklin: Sure, yeah, yeah. Anderson: But, yeah. So that was another thing. Eventually, what they did was try to move as much supernatant from the tanks that had the—it was 108S-X and 107S-X, I think. Franklin: So had they been concave, would they have buckled? Anderson: Nah. Well, likely not. Because you’ve got a lot of weight from the aqueous and the sludge. So the moisture probably would have, under some pressure, worked its way out. But, you know. They were in a hurry. Franklin: Right, got to have somewhere to— Anderson: Put. It’s the Cold War. We’re thinking we’re going to be in a nuclear war with Russia any time soon, so— Franklin: It’s so interesting to me that now we’ve been in this cleanup mode for almost three decades. It’s the constant topic of conversation and planning for the future and worrying, and it seems like that’s the complete opposite of the first 40 or so years, when waste was always the after thought and the idea was, well, let’s just make more room so we can pack more of it down there. It’s always like we’ll get to this later, like, constantly tabled issue. Anderson: You just keep pushing it off, pushing it off, because we have our short-term priorities. Franklin: Right. I think it’s hard for people now to understand, how couldn’t they have been planning? Understanding, knowing the basic science of how long these radioisotopes would take to decay, but then also knowing the chemicals that were used in this process, you know. Anderson: Well, one of the things that was explained to me and it makes perfect sense is, there was no experience, no history. So what they did was followed standard industrial practice. If it’s no good anymore, you bury it. Again, without the experience, what they had to go on was what had been going on forever in industry. So just transfer that to the nuclear side. Franklin: No, it’s perfectly rational. In its own way. But I guess with hindsight, it’s like, wow. Anderson: Well, hindsight is always 20/20. Franklin: Right, it’s kind of a scary rational decision in some ways. Anderson: Oh, yeah. Franklin: So in ’85, right, you—no, sorry, before that. Anderson: ’75. Franklin: ’75 you went to work at— Anderson: PNL. Franklin: This kind of new—was vitrification a new—was this kind of an emerging idea then, or was it already established for nuclear waste? Anderson: It was emerging. This was some of the work that supported DWPF, Defense Waste Processing Facility, back at Savanna River. Which I became intimately involved with. It was—yeah. I spent a good part of my life working on waste vitrification design and startup. Franklin: So the idea, then, instead of removing moisture, putting in tanks, is to turn the waste into a solid and encapsulate it, correct? Anderson: Yeah. It’s a vitreous product, glass. And then, well, Savanna River’s using these two-foot diameter stainless steel, that eventually, the intent is that it goes to a repository. But some of the early work looked at, what’s the place over in Africa where they had the natural reactor? Franklin: Oh, I can’t—I know— Anderson: It’s Oklo, or something like that? Franklin: Something like that, yeah. Anderson: Anyhow, what they found is that there’s enough heat there that a lot of material was vitrified. Now you go back thousands and thousands—hundreds of thousands of years later, and it’s still there. It hasn’t migrated. So yeah, you put it in glass and it’s not going anywhere. So that was the earlier work in. What PNL was doing was chop-leech of commercially irradiated—from West Valley, as I recall. Franklin: And that’s in New York, right? Anderson: Yeah. We brought them here, disassembled them, chop-leeched the fuel elements, dissolved out the— Franklin: So, sorry, what was that word you just said, chop leech? Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: What—can you— Anderson: Oh, okay. What you did is there’s—and I did the design for this. The fuel assemblies are fairly complicated, typically like a 12x12 array. But it varies depending on whether it’s a PWR, BWR, and those change at times. But developed techniques to take the head plate off so you can get at the fuel rods. And then you had a little clamping device comes out and pulls it into a hydraulic press. So you pull it like four inches through, you chop off two inches. You pull it another four inches through—so you get two two-inch pieces with each chop. Then it falls from there directly into a tank where you leech out or dissolve out the uranium and plutonium, whatever’s there. Then that’s going to be mixed with glass formers and turned into glass logs. Franklin: Okay. And this is done with the old, with the fuel rods? Anderson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And so West Valley sent these rods to PNNL? Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: West Valley was shut down. And they didn’t quite know what to do with the spent assemblies that were already there. So we helped them get rid of a couple of them. Franklin: Right. Was West Valley, was that a commercial—those commercial power reactors? Anderson: Yeah, it was intended to be a commercialization of fuel reprocessing. There were two places in the Untied States where that was supposed to be. That was basically a prototype. I mean, it was going to be commercial, but—and then the Morris Plant, GE’s Morris Plant, which was in Illinois. Morris Plant never got beyond early testing. They got it contaminated, but not badly. West Valley actually had processed fuel. And the problem there was that the powers-that-be kept changing the rules. They built the plant to the rules that existed at the time they built it. And then the government changed the rules, and then they tried to update. And the government changes the rules again. And they finally just sort of threw up their hands, and—Bechtel, actually, was the company that built West Valley. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: So they had some pretty practical knowledge of what was in there. In fact, I worked with a guy, Jack Nelson, who was one of the chief engineers on that. And Jack is still alive, down in the San Francisco Bay area. He occasionally sends little humorous things with another friend of mine down there who shares them with me. Franklin: Oh, that’s cool. So how come PNNL or PNL then, I guess—it seems like there’d be a national lab much closer to West Valley to send those— Anderson: Well, it wasn’t initially to process West Valley. We needed fuel assemblies. And they started casting around for where we might get them. Commercial reactors weren’t necessarily—they still had the idea that they were going to be able to reuse them. So we’d get them for free, basically, I think the idea was we’d pay shipping. Franklin: I’d imagine still is no small feat for used fuel assemblies. Anderson: Yeah. Anyhow, yeah, that’s how we got— Franklin: So how come that—why was the decision made to start vitrification with this commercial or reprocessing fuel assemblies rather than something at Hanford, like some sort of waste from Hanford? Anderson: Well, first of all, the Hanford waste, a lot of it, was slugs. Okay, if you look at what was in B Reactor, C Reactor, the earlier reactors, they weren’t fuel assemblies. What they had is tubes that they loaded metallic slugs in, I think they were like two feet long. Anyhow, if you go out to—you know about BRMA, B Reactor Museum Association? Franklin: Yeah, I’m actually a member, a board member of BRMA. Anderson: Okay, well, I’m a member. I pay my dues, but— Franklin: Okay. Anderson: So you can see there what the fuel slugs look like. Franklin: Yeah, we have some of those in our collection. Anderson: Yeah. Cold ones, but— Franklin: Yes, yes. We do not have hot ones. Let me just say that on camera: we do not have actual— Anderson: Radioactive materials. Franklin: We have the testers and the displays. Anderson: So anyhow, those weren’t really conducive to—because we were looking for something to apply to commercial nuclear fuel. What existed at Hanford was—it wasn’t going to be typical. Franklin: So these fuel assemblies then, are maybe similar to the Fast Flux stuff where they were these longer rods, okay. Anderson: Well, what they were was, again, as I recall, don’t quote me on this, but, like, 20-feet long, and a 12x12 array. There were spacers and cooling tubes. It came as an assembly that would slip into a reactor. Franklin: Gotcha. Anderson: When they did their refueling. Franklin: Okay, okay, thanks. All my experience with reactors is with out here. So I kind of forget about the—I forget how different commercial is from—or reprocessing is from the Hanford stuff. Anderson: Yeah. And of course, the commercial fuel is burned up a lot higher. Franklin: Right. Anderson: Because—I’m probably telling you what you already know, but, really, you didn’t want to irradiate the fuel too far at Hanford, because your 239 starts becoming 241 and pretty soon you wind up with something that won’t go boom. Franklin: Right. But in commercial you want that long-sustained. Anderson: You want to burn it up as long as you can because you paid a lot for it. Franklin: Right, right. Yeah, I think that’s something maybe that a lot of people don’t understand is how different those processes are. You don’t make bomb material in a commercial reactor. It doesn’t—it’s the exact opposite. Anderson: No. Well, initially, if you take a fuel assembly that’s just been installed for a few months and you pull that out, you potentially could process it to get it up to Pu-239 to go boom. 239, 238? It’s 239, I’m pretty sure. Franklin: Close enough. Pu. Anderson: Close enough for government work. Franklin: So in ’75 you start working on this waste vitrification. What did your—what was the outcome of the project? Was it a success? What did you produce? Anderson: I actually left before they actually—I designed the stuff, watched the stuff get built, and then I went off job shopping and wound up back out at Hanford, working on low level waste for Hank McGuire. Franklin: Okay, and how come you left PNNL before the project got underway? Anderson: Okay, well, initially PNL was a great company to work for. Ev Irish was the guy that was in charge of the whole thing. There was an awful lot there that was totally novel, and he just said, figure it out. Yes, sir. I mean, that’s—so I, for instance, was back Midwest, checking on the press operators. Things like zirconium, which was fuel cladding. But it is pyrophoric, so you do some research and say, we’re going to be storing these casings. There had been reports of fires starting in zirconium. It’s fun stuff. You’d get a casing and you scrape it along concrete, and it sparks. Just—it can be fun! Franklin: Sure, sure. Anderson: Anyhow, and they had flex time. You had to be there core hours, which was 10:00 in the morning to 2:00 in the afternoon. So I’m doing things like getting there at 6:00 in the morning and leaving at 2:30. Get my eight in. And then I could get my boat out on the water, sailboat. You know, it was great. I was given a lot of free reign. Then they decided we’re going into pretty much production mode and they got this guy in from GE’s Morris Plant, who was pretty much the north end of worse going south. And he said to me, what hours are you working? And I said, 6:00 to 2:30. Well, you need to work the same hours as everyone else. Well, we have flex time. Well, we’re not going to have flex time. Okay. That’s just one of the—he was a butt. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: And I had pretty much got my design in place, and I thought, let’s do something else. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: I’m not a patient soul; I tend to be restless. Next challenge, thank you. Franklin: And, okay. So then you said you went and shopped. When was this, that you left? Anderson: Gee, I went back to work in, it was ’76. I was there for a little less than two years. So it would’ve been ’77, ’78, I went back out. Well, I’d signed up with Butler R. Day, and I thought maybe I’d go someplace interesting like Oak Ridge. But they wouldn’t tell you where, you know. It’s a nuclear thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You see my resume; I can do that. And they said, okay, here’s where you’re going. I don’t think they’d looked at where I was at. They said, you know, if you have to commute more than 50 miles, then you’d get mileage. It’s about 25 miles, I’m sorry, I don’t get no mileage. But you know I’d signed up and it was good money. I mean, in the day it was—no real bennies, but $15 an hour in 1978, considering the minimum wage was considerably less than that. So I did that for six months. Then because they couldn’t hire you away from Butler R. Day until at least six months. And then basically as soon as my six months were—here, sign here. Okay, sure. Yeah, I was apparently appreciated. Franklin: Oh, good. So what were you doing? You said after PNL you left and went back to Hanford. Anderson: Low level radioactive waste management. Franklin: Low level—and what is that, specifically? Break that down for me in layman’s terms. Anderson: Okay. There’s all sorts of sites where contaminated liquids and solids had been disposed of, just in the ground. Cribs, specific retention sites, just—you know. Things like where there was a canal from B Plant that went out to a cooling pond. And then they had the Cell A incident at B Plant which resulted in a large strontium release. And so now that canal is contaminated all the way out. So what they do is they put a lot of dirt on it and dig a new one and we move on. But now it’s a low level waste site. So as I recall there’s close to 400 of them. Franklin: At Hanford? Anderson: Well, no, at 200 East and West. Franklin: 400 of them at 200 East and West. Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: And this is just a mix of like contaminated ground and— Anderson: Yeah, canal—liquids. Again, some stuff buried. It was a lot of liquids. Cribs and so forth. Cribs and spills. Franklin: Sure. And the cribs were just to—were these usually just like holding facilities? Anderson: No, no. Basically, it was to dispose of slightly contaminated aqueous water. And the idea was that the Hanford soil is a very good ion exchanger. And the water table’s like 200 feet down. So by the time that this waste gets to the water, it’s been cleaned up. Franklin: Like a natural filter. Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: But then— Anderson: That leaves the ground contaminated. Franklin: Right, then the filter’s contaminated, yeah. Not the water, but you contaminate the soil. Anderson: Yeah, well, the idea was that nobody’s ever going to live there, so, you know, they’re not going to be punching wells down in 200-East 200-West Area. Franklin: Well, I would hope not. Anderson: Yeah. So you know, that was considered—and I think I mentioned the specific retention sites with the stuff that they weren’t sure if it could be held up by the soil column. They would pump enough liquid in to saturate the soil column without reaching the water table. Franklin: Interesting. Anderson: Of course, I have to tell you another little story from back in my early days in Tank Farm. There was a tank in C Farm, I want to say it’s 103-C, which was OWW, that’s organic wash waste receiver from PUREX. Because PUREX, part of their process used NPH, normal paraffin hydrocarbon. And they liked to reuse that because it was expensive, so they would aqueous wash it. And then the aqueous wash would go out to 103-C. Well, there was some small amount of organic entrained over time. And then they were going to send 103-C, pump its feed over to my ITS-2 unit. You don’t want organic in—it was going to be above the flashpoint. So if you accidentally got organic in there, you could have a real nasty incident. Franklin: What—such as? Anderson: Explosion. Franklin: Oh, okay. That’s pretty nasty. Anderson: Yeah, you’d get it up to the flashpoint, and then all it took was an ignition source. Franklin: Okay. Gotcha. Anderson: So they’d taken a sample of 103-C, sent it over to the lab, and then said, that sample was all NPH. What? Again, this is crude sampling; you drop a bottle down to the tank liquid, let it sink until it gets filled and pull it up. And then rinse it off, put it in a lead pig, and send it down to the lab. So they said, oh, okay, that’s not good. We don’t want to pump that stuff to a hot environment. So then I was given a task—this would’ve been 1970, ’71—of finding out how much organic there was in 103-C. And I was given a magnificent budget of $250,000. Which in today’s money you could probably put a couple zeroes after that. And they were talking about things like radar and sonar. So now I have a problem, what to do. I’m working graveyards and—what is the difference between the—let’s see, the aqueous phase has a specific gravity of about 1.12. The organic is like 0.8. So there’s a big difference in the density, specific gravity. How would you—huh, Mr. Archimedes, buoyancy, yeah. So I sketched up a little thing that would go through a 12-inch riser. Plywood disk, appropriately weighted with enough lead plate so that it would sink. And put an eyebolt through the whole thing. So I had it sketched up and went down in the bowels of B Plant, to the shops, and said, could you build something like that? Yeah, where’s your work order? It’s just a piece of plywood. Why do I—? Let me take a look at it. So about two hours later, I get a call: are you going to come pick this up or not? Yeah, I’ll be right there. [LAUGHTER] Well, then, I was too lazy to write a test plan. So I waited until the weekend and my shift supervisor, as I recall, was Dean Curtis, known fondly as Curly because he was bald. So I said this is what I want to do in C Farm. Can you get me a couple operatives to--? Oh, yeah, sure. So, we took the riser cover off, had a tape and a fish scale and lowered it down. You can see when—as soon as you hit the liquid, the weight decreases pretty dramatically. And you keep lowering it, slowly, against the side of the riser with the tape. And then it gets a lot lighter as it hits the aqueous phase. And I had them repeat it. I’m taking numbers down. I had them repeat it five, six times, just to make sure it was good to within half-an-inch. But we had like 11 inches of organic on top of the aqueous. Okay, and then, yeah, let’s clean up here. Of course, now, the tape is contaminated, the plywood disk and the lead are contaminated, and the operators are whining about, well, now we’re going to have to wash that down and bag it out. I get the fish scale out. Oop! I dropped it. Oh my goodness. Ha, ha, ha. So it’s in the tank. Okay. So we button it up, I go back and write out my report and turn it in. Pissed my lead off to no end, because I didn’t spend any of the $250,000. The point I’m making here is the tanks were generally seen as, if you got something that you needed to get rid of out in the Tank Farm, open up a riser and put it in. Franklin: Right, because it’s all just so messed up down there anyway. Anderson: Yeah, or, we’re never going to get that stuff out of there, so why—So there were cement blocks, you know—that I know of! Now, Lord knows what went in there that I don’t know of. Okay, but that’s an ancestral story that—you probably shouldn’t let someone like me work shiftwork. Franklin: That’s a great story. Thank you. And so how long did you work as a low level waste engineer? Anderson: Until June of 1980. So probably close to two years. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: Yeah, a lot of that was we had a subcontractor, Ford, Bacon & Davis down in Utah, Salt Lake City. So a lot of what I was doing was going back and forth. Because what they were supposed to be doing was writing this massive report. Franklin: On the low level waste? Anderson: Sites, yeah. Franklin: Yeah. Anderson: Well, it turned out I probably wrote half of it myself, because they had been chosen on the buddy system I think. We had competitive bidding and they changed the rules in order for Ford, Bacon & Davis to get it. Franklin: I see. Anderson: Nice people, but the one really good guy, shortly after we got into this, they sent him off to Washington, DC. Paul something was his name. Good guy. But so anyhow, then we’d gotten that well underway. It was actually in DOE’s hands for approval. Meanwhile, I was separated from my wife. I’d gotten involved with a young lady who was attending Mills College down in Oakland, and then ran across an ad in Nuclear News from Bechtel looking for someone with vitrification experience. Which I had from PNL. The next thing you know, I’m headed for Bechtel in San Francisco. Franklin: Oh, wow, what a change. Anderson: Yeah, it was—I’d never lived in the big city before. Well, Rochester, New York, but it was on campus. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anderson: So now I’m taking public trans, you know. I was a serious runner at that point. And around here, a good part of the year you don’t have any races. Maybe you have one every month or so. In the Bay Area, there’s races every weekend. You could be really picky. I tended to pick the ones that had beer afterwards. Anyhow, that was—I had a very lovely time working for Bechtel, a great company. They took good care of me. When I first moved there, they’d given me a raise, a little bit less than 8%. But basically the guy I was directly reporting to, the chief, technically reporting to, had said, if Bechtel likes what you do, you’re not going to be able to change jobs to your financial advantage. Okay. So when they hired me, I said, okay, I remember that. About six months later, I got a 19% raise. So yeah. Franklin: That’s pretty good. Anderson: Yes, it’s a vote of confidence. It’s like, yeah, I like this. Franklin: That’s great. So you were doing vitrification work down there. Anderson: Yeah, doing the initial design work for Defense Waste Processing Facility. Franklin: At Savanna River. Anderson: At Savanna River, yeah. Franklin: So then you—but left San Francisco after a while and you came back to Richland? Anderson: I was—well, yeah. It was about five years there. We pretty much wrapped up—I wouldn’t say wrapped up, because we never wrapped up. But had the bulk of the design done, and they were going to shift things back to Savanna River. And being a process engineer, my engineering work tends to be at the front-end. Piping in instrument documents and things like that. Once I got those out the door, then you’re talking to your civil structural whatever people. So the job in San Francisco was winding down. That was in the mid-‘80s. We were in a bit of an economic slump. There wasn’t a lot of work in the Bay Area. DuPont said they wanted me to work for them back in Savanna River, because apparently they liked me, too. So then I filled out an application there. My old boss up here, Hank McGuire, I’d put down as a reference. And he said, if you’re looking for a job, why wouldn’t you look here? Okay, I didn’t know that—Oh, yeah! So then, the wife was going to start an advertising agency. She’s from the Tri-Cities. Wife, at that point. And said, it’d be a lot easier to start an ad agency where you know the territory, rather than going to the east coast where—so I took the job here at Hanford. So, yeah, that was lots of fun. Franklin: And what did you do this time around? Anderson: Oh, my goodness, what did we do? Well, it was more back on the low level waste stuff again. Trying to— Franklin: It says here in my notes that Jillian wrote down that you came to work on the Vitrification Plant before going to Savanna River to work on— Anderson: Oh, okay, yeah, that’s what. Yeah, the earlier—thank you for reminding me, because I’m going—At that point, it was called HWVP, Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant. Or, as the Indian manager called it, H-W-Wee-P. Had trouble with those Vs. Franklin: Mm-hmm. Anderson: He was a perfect example of—spoke good English, but idiomatic English? That’s difficult. So we who worked for him kept a little quotable quotes. Things like “a whole new ball of games.” And “out in the boondoggles.” Some of them were quite descriptive, I thought. Franklin: Yeah, that seems to be. Anderson: But he just was not doing very good with idiomatic English and he shouldn’t have been trying! Anyhow, that’s—yeah, HWVP. Franklin: And what is HWVP? Anderson: Well, that was just a precursor to vitrifying Hanford waste. That was a limited scope. They were not—the current one, Vit Plant, is supposed to basically address all the tank waste. HWVP was focused on high level waste. Franklin: And where was high level waste—what defines high level waste? Anderson: Boiling waste tanks. Franklin: Boiling waste tanks. Anderson: Yeah. But it was, again, very poorly managed. It was supposed to be just a duplicate of DWPF. Well, DWPF nominally was built for $620 million. They were still pouring concrete on startup money. So the actual cost was closer to a billion. Now, we’re going to build HWVP for $620 million just using the same drawings, which—it was so incredibly stupid. First of all, source term for Savanna River for exposure was for continuous exposure was 0.5 mR per hour. For intermittent was 5. Okay. For Hanford, it was .2 and 2. Different criteria. On top of that, the Hanford source term is roughly twice as radioactive as DWPF. So now that your shielding, it’s just not going to work. So you’re going to have to redesign all your shielding, which means you’re going to have to redesign all your m beds, which means—and that’s just one fallacy. Franklin: Sure. How come the radiation standards were so different between the two facilities? Anderson: Part of it is that, of course, DWPF was meant to support hydrogen bomb. So the stuff just wasn’t burned up as far and the waste wasn’t as hot. Where, Hanford, boiling waste tanks were screaming hot. PUREX was a very good process at minimizing the amount of aqueous waste you’re producing. Franklin: So it’s all concentrated. Anderson: Yeah, and screaming hot. Franklin: And screaming hot. Because you’ve concentrated all those isotopes once you’ve removed the water that the aqueous— Anderson: Yeah. Well, some of it. Franklin: Some of it, right. Anderson: So, yeah, the boiling waste tanks were self-concentrating. Franklin: Because the heat keeps evaporating— Anderson: Liquid. It boils, and you have to deal with—so you’ve got condensers on the off-gas. And of course the HEPA filters. But yeah, source term—well, and the source terms were very conservative. They looked at the worst stuff we had in the boiling waste tank and said you’ve got to design to that. And of course, we engineers said, well, why wouldn’t you mix that with—we don’t know that that can be done or will be done. You have to design to the highest possible. Right, okay. Franklin: And so, given these challenges, what happened with the Hanford Waste Vitrification Plant? Did it get built? Anderson: Oh, no, no, no. Nothing ever—it just kept getting screwier and screwier. So eventually I wound up back at Savanna River. Took a temporary assignment there with Bechtel. Well, story here. I’m working happily—well, working and getting paid happily, okay—here at Hanford. Westinghouse was the contractor at that point. So they put a notice up on the board that Westinghouse had gotten the new contract at Savanna River. Of course, Bechtel was a subcontractor to it in the announcement. So there was a good friend of mine with Bechtel in San Francisco, Vick [unknown]. So I picked up the phone to call Vick and congratulate him. No answer. I just hung up the phone like this, and it rings. Picked it up, and it’s Vick calling from Savanna River. Well, they’re going to have to be staffing up because DuPont’s engineers are leaving, Westinghouse is not taking over that part, so Bechtel is supposed to pick that up. And do I know anybody who might be interested in--? At that point, I was rather frustrated with HWVP. And I said, talk to me. So they did and I went back there on a temporary assignment. While there got divorced from the second wife. So then, okay, roll over to a permanent position there at Savanna River. I went back there as EGS, engineering group supervisor. So I had as many as, what, 38 FTEs reporting to me. FTE is full-time equivalents. Franklin: Yeah. Anderson: Okay. Franklin: Been here not that long, but long enough to have picked up some of the acronyms. Anderson: Okay. So then I was at that for a couple years, then they moved me up to task manager, which is multi-discipline. Then I ran the project thing, late wash project design, conceptual design report. Which typically was going to take two years for novel technology. They said you’ve got six months. We got it done! And then I was manager of design completion engineering—I forget what, the title is about this long. No more money, but the title was about—[LAUGHTER] So, yeah, that was—and then, again, that job’s winding down, and— Franklin: As the plant was being built? Anderson: Yeah. So they say, oh, don’t worry about it, you’ll be the one turning out the lights. No. I don’t see myself as the electrician turning out the lights. So then I transferred with Bechtel to southern California. They supposedly had a couple things they were going to—because I’m now a professional engineer in the State of California. There isn’t that many professional chemical engineers. It’s a rather rigorous exam to do that. Like, all day. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: Two four-hour sessions. Pass rate the year I took it was 27%. Okay. So they thought I would be valuable. Well, they were going to have me on a clean air project with ARCO. And ARCO delayed that part of it. Then they had another one that, oh, yeah, we got this one in the bag. They didn’t get it. So now I’m looking at another—I’m scrambling to find a couple hours a day worthwhile. There was another friend of mine, a honcho with MACTEC, and got hold of him and said, how are things looking? He said, want to come to work for us? Potentially. So I wound up here with MACTEC. That was in ’93. Franklin: What did MACTEC do? Anderson: They were supposed to be in-house consultants to DOE. Franklin: For? Anderson: The entire Site. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: What eventually it turned into was staff augmentation for DOE. Which wasn’t supposed to be the way it was done, but DOE needed people, and the funding process was not giving them what they needed to hire to directly. So they used MACTEC. So, yeah, worked that for a couple years. Franklin: And what did you do there? Anderson: Basically, anything I was told to do. But a lot of document reviews of things produced by the contractor. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: I did, well, at one time or another—another little corporate story here—I was on a team that was reviewing the safety analysis for a new tank farm. They made a flat-out statement that they’d covered all the safety aspects. And I said, bullshit? You don’t ever use absolutes like that. Because there’s always going to be something you didn’t think of. Oh, no, they thought of everything. I said, well, let me tell you something you probably haven’t thought of. You allow pickup trucks to drive out in the Tank Farm, right? Yeah. You have risers down to the tank, the tank’s under a slight vacuum. So there’s air leakage in through the riser that keeps the contamination from spreading. Yeah. I said, trucks—vehicles have been known to develop gasoline leaks. So now you have a pickup out in the Tank Farm, parked over a riser, leaking gasoline, fumes are being drawn into the tank. How long does it take before you have a flammable mixture in the tank? Oh. [LAUGHTER] I said, now—I said, you can do the—talk to maintenance. How often do they have to fix leaky fuel systems? You know, you can come up with some odds on this. Well, then, my part of the thing was done on our review. And I had scolded him for, don’t ever tell me you have covered all the safety things. Okay. Well, they never built the tank farm. They decided they were going to be able to get by with space recovery programs, whatever. And it was a couple years later that I was telling that story to a group of, well, actually I think the AICHE meeting. And this one lady said, you! What? Well, it turned out that they had taken my scenario very seriously and banned trucks from driving out in Tank Farms. So that makes things definitely—well, you need a special permit. Used to be you could just drive in areas that weren’t contaminated. Then you had to have a special permit and fill out all sorts of paperwork to get a truck out in the Tank Farm. She thought I was the cause for all that extra work. [LAUGHTER] Anderson: So anyhow. Franklin: Oh, that’s awesome. So you were kind of like a consultant for Tank Farm? Anderson: Mainly, it was Tank Farms, yeah, but it was whatever was going on that—documents produced by the contractor or oversight of problem/solutions. You know, report back to DOE, how is this going. Franklin: Sure. And then it says here that then you went back to the Vit Plant. Anderson: Yeah, well again, that was—a bit of a segue way. I got a call from San Francisco and said that they—Westinghouse had an RFP out, request-for-proposal for close to a billion dollars in Tank Farm upgrades over ten years. They wanted me to be like a one-man office here to spearhead that as things got underway. And they bumped me up to a Grade 28, you know. Okay, sure, why not? I mean, it wasn’t that I didn’t like working for MACTEC, but this seemed like a great opportunity. So, yeah, I took over and had a little office downtown. Franklin: In San Francisco? Anderson: No, downtown Richland. Franklin: Oh, Richland. Anderson: Yeah. Right there in the Parkway. So then Westinghouse started fudging, and they finally took the RFP off the table and said they’d do it in-house. So now I’m up here. And so they said—and, BNFL had the vitrification contract at that time. Bechtel was seconded to. So they said, you can either roll over to the Vit Plant or you can come back to San Francisco. And I said San Francisco, been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I think I’m good. So I went to work on the Hanford Waste Vitrification. Franklin: And what year was that? Anderson: Phew. Let’s see. Back up here. That would’ve been ’96, ’97. Franklin: Okay, and where was the Vit Plant at, at that time? Anderson: Early design phases. Franklin: Early design phase. Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: And how long did you stay with the Vit Plant? Anderson: Oh, gee. Basically until I retired. Of course, initially it was BNFL. Got a nice trip over to Sellafield in the UK. And I do love British beer. And the lake country, where Sellafield is, is pretty country, just--. And got to see what they were doing for vitrification. And I’m going, okay, I see a lot of mistakes here, but, well, we learn from our mistakes. Okay. Well, eventually DOE got disgusted with BNFL because the cost kept going up. It’s still going on today. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Anderson: Costs keep going up. Anyhow, so they basically fired BNFL. So then I went to work for, basically a job shopper here for like six months. Stayed on the job, but not with Bechtel. What was the name of that? Can’t think of the name. It was a big period of time while they rebid contract. And of course Bechtel won, and I’m back working for Bechtel. And so, yeah. Franklin: So how far did the Vit Plant get from when you started to when you retired? Anderson: Well, they’d broken ground. I really don’t recall. I mean, I know that they were working on it, but a lot of it was the structural stuff. Which, from a process point-of-view, I wasn’t involved in. I was still just doing a lot of design, or helping with design for the process part of it. Franklin: What are your views on the current situation of the Vitrification Plant? Anderson: Overdesigned. They’re trying to make it do everything. And they keep changing the rules. And then they’re surprised when the cost goes up. As a friend of mine said, generally, there comes a time in every project when you have to take the engineers out and shoot them, and just build it. And they never got to that stage yet. Franklin: Ah, I see. Makes sense. Anderson: Well, it’s the administrators that need to be taken, anyhow. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So last question, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and living in Richland during the Cold War and afterwards? Anderson: Oh, gee. Well, it’s very great community. I mean, because overall wages are high, overall education level is high. Schools are good. It’s just a great place to raise a family. In fact, a lot of people stayed here, unhappy with the job, but because it was good for their family, they said, okay, I’m getting a paycheck, it’s good for my family, I’ll hack it. So, yeah, that was—it was just a great place to raise a family. And both my kids are still here. Yeah, my son’s a Kennewick firefighter, and my daughter works for the state, basically overseeing the payments to the people on welfare, basically. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: So, anyhow, yeah. And two grandkids here. One of which—well, I have to brag a little bit. This is off the subject, but my son had been coaching soccer since his daughter was like six or seven years old. Club soccer. So last summer—and she’s now going to be a sophomore—the AD out there County of Benton said we’d like you to be the girls’ soccer coach. He said, okay. Oh, by the way it pays $4,500. He said, if they hadn’t told me that, I’d probably do it for free. Anyhow, so, the year before that, the soccer team won three games. This past fall, the girls were undefeated in the league. Took the SCAC championship, but lost their first game at state. I think they were sort of burned by that time. Anyway, my son then got coach of the year for the league, and my granddaughter was selected as MVP for the league. Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Anderson: So, yeah, great place to live. Franklin: So, Ted, is there anything we haven’t touched on that you’d like to talk about today? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: All right, then I think that’s a great place to end, thank you. Anderson: I mean, this could go on for a long time, but— Franklin: Sure, sure. Anderson: But I think you’ve got highlights and— Franklin: Yeah, we’ve got some really great stuff here. Thank you for really illuminating the waste processing history at Hanford. I appreciate it. Anderson: Yeah. Well, and the successive companies, like ARCO, basically, the guy they had leading it here had not been doing well in their primary business, which was petroleum. But now they won a contract here and got a place to stick him. So he didn’t provide strong leadership. That was sort of a—you know, they win the contract and here’s a place to park people. Oh, well. Franklin: Oh, well. Thank you so much, Ted, I really appreciate it. Anderson: My pleasure. <a href="https://youtu.be/LSqz5MdJ4VI">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview Tank Farms BC Crib Area 222-S Labs S-X Farm REDOX 200 East 200 West Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1969- Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Ted Anderson Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Chemical engineering Radioactive wastes Radioactive waste disposal Description An account of the resource Ted Anderson moved to Richland, Washington in 1969 to work on the Hanford Site as a Chemical Engineer. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 05/11/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F8938a4900744d564518bc93d898f6b2d.jpg 551b6009d403d2bd6e8f2a60ec34167a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed James Anderson Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Tom Hungate: We are rolling. Franklin: Okay. My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with James Anderson on March 14, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Jim about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? James Anderson: James Daniel Anderson. J-A-M-E-S, D-A-N-I-E-L, A-N-D-E-R-S-O-N. Franklin: Great, thank you, Jim. And so tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site? Anderson: Okay. I was born in Denver. And when I was in my fourth year, my dad worked for DuPont, which was Remington Arms back there, and they transferred him out here to this new secret project. Franklin: What year would this have been? Anderson: That would’ve been ’44, early ’44. Franklin: Okay, so you were born in 1940? Anderson: I was born in ’39, actually. I turned five after we got here. Franklin: Okay, sure, sure. Anderson: So. And my dad was a machinist. He came to Hanford making the first fuels that went to B Reactor. I remember this story, he’s told it many a time, but he hated machining uranium, because it was hard in spots and it was soft in spots. So you could gouge deeply or you might not cut enough. So the filings would go on the floor. Back then, they didn’t have protective clothing then. It was just, do the work. He and another guy that worked there got some uranium filings stuck in the soles of their shoes. So they went to the movies one night. On the way to the movies, they were looking at their feet and they were sparking. That was from the uranium filings that was embedded in their shoes. Uranium is somewhat pyrophoric. So they learned early on about that. Franklin: Sorry, pyrophoric, what is that exactly? Anderson: It’s burnable, basically. And it can sometimes catch fire on its own. Franklin: Oh, wow. I guess that’s what makes it such a good fuel. Anderson: Well, when I was in grade school, I knew I wanted to be a chemist. So we used to make pyrophoric materials: firecrackers, bombs, rockets, and things like that. So I’m somewhat familiar with that. Down at the Richland Library, you could get books on it. They had them there. They’d give you the formulas and everything. Being a kid, I used to go to the pharmacist and get my chemicals. When we’d go on vacation, like to Denver or Seattle or something, they had the chemical companies there, I’d go down and I’d get whatever I needed. Nobody asked me, questioned me or anything. I just did it. So we used to make gunpowder and stuff like that. I even made, from an Erector Set, a rocket that would go around in a circle. We had chemical fuses, so that we knew about how long it would take for it to self-ignite. And it didn’t go. So I went there and I put some more potassium permanganate on it, and it took off. The exhaust hit my shirt, and needless to say, I was on fire for a short period of time. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: That wasn’t so bad, but going home, Mom did not like that. So, I had a good lecture and so forth. [LAUGHTER] But—go ahead. Franklin: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, you go ahead. Anderson: But I always enjoyed that. When I was a kid, Richland looked like a battlefield. There was no grass, only trees where there had been orchards. When the wind blew, I mean, they used to say, on a clear day, you can see the house across the street. That was pretty much true. And that stuff was so fine, it would go in the windowsills and just settle. They also called them termination winds. Because a lot of ladies came to meet their husbands that had been working here, and after one of those storms, they’d say, honey, I’m leaving. If you want to stay married, you’re coming with me. So that happened. But we lived at the hotel down here in Richland until our house was ready, and then we moved in. We were a few days later than our neighbors; we were in a B house. So in 1957 or thereabouts when they sold the town, they had first priority and of course they bought the house. So we had to move and find another house. So that was very interesting. My boyfriend and I would crawl under the porches and stuff, and we would find spiders galore, especially the ones with the red hourglass. So we used to play with those, you know. And of course our parents always told us, no. But one of those black widows, when we were playing across the street from where I lived, it was still wild out there; there wasn’t grass or anything, and one of them crawled up my leg. I felt it, and I thought, uh-oh, I’m in trouble. So I thought, well, if I jump up and down as hard as I can, it’ll fall out. And it did. And I never played with them after that. But it was funny, my mother would get a stick that looked like, as a kid, about ten-foot long, and she’d get the spider on the end of it, and she’d walk across the street where she was going to kill it. As she was walking, the spider would crawl on the stick towards her. The closer it got, the faster she went. [LAUGHTER] And then when she got there, the spider was no more. But it was fun for kids in those days. And in fact, the streets were none. They were just dirt. G-W was dirt. So it was kind of interesting, you know. And in summer when it was real hot and real dry, that stuff was very powdery. I can remember walking to the grocery store and coming back, and in the inside of my pant legs were covered with that dust. So it was fun. I enjoyed that. We used to go down by Fred Meyer and that was a swamp back then. I don’t know if you guys knew that or not, but they got a pump house down there, too, and they used to—but there were frogs galore, polliwogs, cattails, you name it. It was a good place for boys to play, and we did. And I can remember, we’d take these home, and they’d change into frogs, obviously. And then we’d let them loose, and a lot of them would bury themselves in the flower gardens. I can remember my dad in the spring hoeing around the bushes and so forth, and every so often, out would come a frog. [LAUGHTER] But that was fun, just to go down there and play and stuff. Most people didn’t even lock their doors. I mean, everybody had Q clearances. I don’t know if they were called Q clearances when I was a kid. I remember this place was so hush-hush, I never knew what my dad did. Even after they announced the bomb had been dropped. I can remember, he never said anything about his job or what he did. And when I, years later, when I went to work at Hanford, I got to go visit him where he worked. So I got to learn what he did. He was in the water plant. Franklin: Was he still working at Hanford when you started at Hanford? Anderson: Oh, yeah. He retired from N Reactor. Franklin: Okay. When your father started, you said early on he started as a fuels fabrication for B Reactor, and what area was he working out of then? Anderson: That was 300 Area. Franklin: Okay, and how long did he do that for? Anderson: Oh, not very long. He hated it, and so he transferred out to B Reactor. He was out at B Reactor when they had their startup problems. And then he was there when they solved the problem and away they went. DuPont always over-designed, as far as I know, their work that they did. Of course, they were told so many tubes for the reactor, and they made about twice as many. So when they—I think it was Enrico Fermi went into the room—with the slide rule, you know, we didn’t have computers—and he determined what it was, and he came up with the term “barns.” So he discovered what it was and then they filled all the rest of the tubes up and away they went. That was an exciting time. Dad remembers when that happened. Franklin: And what did he do at B Reactor? Anderson: He was in the water plant. They would pump the water out of the river, clean it up, and pass it through the reactor. From there, it would go into cooling or whatever and then eventually it would go back into the river. I can remember—now this is aside from that, but the Columbia River flows over some uranium fields. I don’t know if you knew that. I think they’re up in Canada. But because of all the reactors on the river, and they cleaned it up to run it through, there was more uranium in the water coming into the Site than there was leaving the Site. Franklin: Hmm. Anderson: And the place he worked, I’ll tell you, it was hot. It was steam as well as the water purification. He always loved a hot house. And of course, none of the rest of us in the family really enjoyed that. [LAUGHTER] But when it got down to 90 or 80, that was starting to get cold. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Anderson: Yeah, he was— Franklin: I guess he must’ve liked summers in Richland without air conditioning. Anderson: Well, in fact, when we came we had no air conditioning. Eventually we got swamp coolers. You could leave the front door open and cool the house down. Humidity back then was something like 5%. Of course, as they put in the crops and stuff up the valley, then the humidity went up and they weren’t quite as efficient anymore. But I can remember when we put our first one in. Oh, that felt so good. Franklin: Yeah, makes a big difference, just water evaporation makes a big difference. So you—what type of Alphabet house did your family move into? Anderson: We moved into a B house. Franklin: Okay. That’s the two-story or a one-story? Anderson: It’s a one-story duplex. And back then, in the basement, they had a little room, if you will, for coal. So the company would supply you with the coal. Whenever you wanted it, you’d call them up and say, I want some coal, and they’d bring it to you. And then you’d have to stoke the furnace and so forth. Later on a lot of them put in an automatic feed into the furnace. Once in a while, those would catch fire. Sometimes that coal would make a gas in there and it would blow up. The door, of course, would swing open when it would. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It sounds really dangerous. Anderson: It sounds it, but it wasn’t that bad. But a lot of people got rid of coal when they sold the homes and stuff. And then they did whatever they wanted, electrical baseboards and so forth. Franklin: What was your overall impression of the Alphabet houses? Anderson: Well, they are all basically look-alikes. I mean, you may have an A and a B and stuff close together, or a C or whatever. But when you get down to it, one section of the block could be the same as the other side of the block. This is stories I’ve heard, a lot of the men—especially the men—would come home from having a party down at the tavern or whatever, and since most people didn’t lock the doors, they would just go inside, because they knew each house was the same. They’d go and start to get ready for bed, and of course when they discovered that the wife was not his—[LAUGHTER] they immediately left. So. Franklin: What about the quality of construction or how it was like to live in an Alphabet house? What were your impressions on that? Anderson: Actually, the construction for the Alphabet houses was pretty high, I think. They used good wood. Now, they didn’t put a lot of insulation in a lot of houses. And so a lot of people had to come back and add insulation. I have a Q house now. It just had a foil strip between the sheetrock and the wall and that was the insulation. Supposedly, it would reflect it. So when I bought the house, I had to add insulation to it. Franklin: It says here that DuPont grouped workers together from different sites they were transferred from, so that your father or mother knew a lot of their neighbors when they moved to Richland. Anderson: Yes, in fact, I lived on the south end of town, and everybody around where I lived was from Denver. Franklin: Oh. Anderson: And so they did that because it made it kind of feel like home. Franklin: Sure, just some semblance of familiarity or, you know. Anderson: Yes. What was across from the Uptown district, there were a lot of people there from Salt Lake, because that was another DuPont site. They used to call that Little Salt Lake. [LAUGHTER] My dad had a friend that he worked with back in Colorado, and he worked up here as well. He came up here. And those two were friends, best friends, for 77 years. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: So my dad died first, and so he was—my dad died at 92 and his buddy died a couple years later. Franklin: Why do you think your family decided to stay after World War II? Anderson: Well, actually, the benefits, you know. Your homes, to begin with, were free. And if you wanted your house painted or whatever, you could do that. So there was a lot of benefits to stay. You didn’t have to pay rent and stuff like that. So it was nice. Once you made friends, and of course, where we lived, it was from Colorado area, then a lot of people didn’t want to stay. There were some that left. I’ll be honest. They wanted to go back where their relatives were or whatever. I’d say at least half of them came back. [LAUGHTER] They thought this was a better place. Franklin: Was your family from Colorado originally? Anderson: Yes. My dad was born in Colorado and so was my mother. Franklin: So growing up, you went to all of the Richland area schools, right? Lewis and Clark, Carmichael and then Columbia High, right? Anderson: Yes. In fact—just a second—there was—you know, we’d go to school, and we’d see somebody new, it was always, where are you from? There was something like a handful of kids that were from this area. By the time I graduated from high school, we had over 1,000 there. I’d guess just about half—I mean, not half—about a handful or so in number were actually born here. I belong to the Rambling Rovers right now which is an old-timers group. The school that’s still out at Hanford—I mean, it’s just a shell, but—eventually, the town got so big and stuff, they used it for a grade school rather than the high school. So, yeah, it was fun. The only problem is they opened Chief Jo up the same time as we had Carmichael. We used to play each other in basketball. They had the all-stars, if you will, in their school. When we’d play them, we’d lose by tons of points. When we got to the high school, on the starting basketball team, four were from Chief Jo; one from Carmichael. Originally, when they built Carmichael, they were originally planning on putting a pool underneath the basketball court. That never materialized. Franklin: What do you remember about civil defense in school? Anderson: Yes. We did have some civil defense activities. The main thing I really remember was all around town were these sirens. They always tested at the same time each month. I don’t remember exactly, but it seemed to me it was like the last day of the month. Franklin: And these were evacuation sirens, or air raid? Anderson: Either. They would wail or they could go straight. And those were loud. I mean, loud. In back of Fred Meyer, up on the hill there, was the one that was closest to our house. But then they took all of them down, and it was normal, I guess you’d say, again. Franklin: Do you remember doing duck-and-cover? Anderson: Yes. Franklin: And can you describe that? Like, what would happen in the classroom and what was that to protect against? Anderson: Well, I can remember—you’d crawl underneath a desk, so that falling debris and stuff would not have as great a chance to hurt you. The biggest thing I hated in grade school was kindergarten. They had mats, and you had to take a rest period during kindergarten. You know, I gave up naps like when I was two or so. And you go back to school and they wanted you to lay on the gym floor on those mats. That was horrible. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That was worse than the duck-and-cover? Anderson: Oh, yeah. Franklin: So you eventually graduated high school, yeah? Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: As a Columbia High Bomber. Anderson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: And you went to WSU. Anderson: Yes, I did. Franklin: And what did you go for? Anderson: Well, when I went to Wazzu, I knew, as I said earlier, that I wanted to be a chemist. So I went up there and I took the chemistry courses. For a couple years, I took nuclear chemistry and radio chemistry. There were some funny stories on that, like my first year up there—and I hadn’t worked at Hanford yet and didn’t know what hot meant. Hot meant radioactive out here. So somebody went to get a piece of glassware, and they said, don’t touch it, it’s hot. He thought it was radioactive, and he just dropped it on the floor. [LAUGHTER] So that did happen. That was funny. We even had a couple—well, we had a reactor up there. I don’t know if you knew that or not. Franklin: Yeah. Anderson: But we, for instance, took gold foil and irradiated it as one of our projects and we’d have to go back and determine its half life and so on. We did that to calibrate our instruments, things like that. And then our senior year, we had radiochemistry, which is more like theoretical physics or something like that. Our instructor—I always got a kick out of him—he’d give us an exam. He’d have about ten questions on it, and we’d have an hour to do it in, you know. Pretty soon he’d say, how many are halfway through the exam? No hands. Eventually he’d get down to, how many got one done? And he’d get no hands. And he’d say, well, okay, let’s make this a take-home test. And you’d take it home, and you spent the whole weekend doing it. I mean—[LAUGHTER] And then we had to—in the one where we would have all the instrumentation and so forth and did all of our experiments, we had to do longhand procedures. That would be like 10, 15, 20 pages long. Every week, we had to do one. Sometimes we’d laugh and joke that, you know, the further they could throw them up a step, the better the grade. But most of them were really more interested in why you didn’t get the correct result. So your error portion of the write-up was very important and critical. But I enjoyed chemistry up there. And of course, after school, there were a lot of things you could do with chemistry. Franklin: Such as? Anderson: Oh, this was a guy down the hall. He and I were in the same class, but he made some ammonium triiodide, and he painted it on the rubber tips of the seats in the toilet. And they would dry, and then somebody like at 2:00 in the morning would have to go in there and sit, and it’d blow up. And sometimes he’d squirt it in the key locks. You’d put your key in there, and the friction would set it off. Franklin: [LAUGHTER] It wasn’t like a large explosion, right? Anderson: No. Franklin: Just kind of like a little—but enough, probably to startle somebody. Anderson: Oh, especially in the morning, when you’re still asleep. Franklin: Oh, wow. Anderson: But yeah. And I tried to make some rockets there, and I set one off in the room. The ceiling was all speckled. Franklin: Oh, wow. You must’ve liked to have a lot of fun, huh? Anderson: Oh, it was fun, yeah. I enjoyed it up there. Franklin: And so when did you graduate? Anderson: Graduated in ’62. Franklin: ’62, okay, and then you started at Hanford Labs. Anderson: Right. Actually, I went up to the Seattle World’s Fair up there. Then I came back and went to work. So it was in June of ’62 that I started down here. I was in the tech grad program, which started out at the 300 Area for me. You were interviewed, and depending upon what your choice was would depend on where you started work. But I started work in 300 Area. The PRTR Reactor was there. I worked in the water lab. I also worked out at the 100-K Area, and they had a water lab out there. So I had to substitute for the guy that was responsible for those when he’d go on vacation or whatever. So I’d spend half a day at PRTR and the other half of the day at K. I’d pick up the car down at the Federal Building and check it out, and I’d have it all day for my activities. Franklin: And what was—what did PRTR stand for? Anderson: Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor. The one big thing I remember about that, it was—it used heavy water for the moderator and so forth. But there were jugs—and I mean jugs—of heavy water lining the hallways throughout that whole reactor building. I mean. And that stuff is very expensive. Franklin: What was the job of that reactor? What did it do? Anderson: It was supposed to determine how you can recycle plutonium in a reactor. Rather than enriching uranium, or some other technique. So it was real nice that way, but they did—I can’t remember exactly what the mistake was in there, but they got it all contaminated. [LAUGHTER] So it didn’t last much longer. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: They came out with the FFTF and stuff like that, and a lot of people—I had a father-in-law back then that was a heating and ventilating engineer, and he—DOE kept chiding Battelle down there to get going and get that reactor going. They had to send out the prints and stuff like that to the commercial reactor manufacturers and get their input so that we could demonstrate something that they were interested in. Oftentimes, he said, the requests were 180 degrees apart. [LAUGHTER] So it really slowed them down to do that. They finally gave it to Westinghouse, who finished it. Franklin: So you said you worked at PRTR and then in the water lab. Anderson: Yeah, they had a water lab in PRTR. They’d take samples of the reactor effluence and stuff like that. Franklin: And do what with it? Anderson: Analyze it to see if there’s radiation in it, if there’s any cross-contamination, or if there’s impurities in it. Because sometimes impurities can corrode or whatever. So you want to make sure those are taken care of. Franklin: And so how long did you work this kind of split-shift between PRTR and the water lab? Anderson: Well, I worked in the water lab at PRTR the whole time. Franklin: Oh, okay, sorry. Anderson: That’s okay. But, yeah, I did that—he went on vacation three times or so, so I probably had a month’s work there. Franklin: And what other jobs did you have out at Hanford? Anderson: Oh, I had a chance to work at B Reactor, as a matter of fact. I interviewed out there. The manager out there made it sound like utopia, you know? You’re going to do this, you’re going to write these reports, and your name’s going to be out there in blinking lights. He didn’t say that, but he made it sound grand and glorious. And I thought—I just had a gut feeling, don’t go to work there. Smart move, because they shut it down. But so I went to 234-5 Building, which is the plutonium building. I had three main jobs there. The first one was in the Process Laboratory. There, I got to handle plutonium. That’s quite a thrill. Then we did a lot of analysis for operations so that they could control the process and so forth. Then, I was asked up to do the carbon machine. I tore it apart, and I was getting ready to put it back together and make some modifications. The shift manager at Dash-5, he ended up with diabetes. And so they had to remove him from the shift for a period of time while he got that under control. So they sent me down there to take his place. Well, I never had worked with union before. Now, I don’t know if you guys have or not, but I had to make a transfer from a tank to one of the cribs outside. So I couldn’t find the operator, so I did it. Well, I got my grievance, and I lost that one, obviously. I’ve had a couple other grievances, too, and I won those. [LAUGHTER] But that was interesting, to do that. So I was working shift work doing that. We had to make the buttons, the plutonium buttons. We’d get the plutonium feed material from either PUREX or REDOX. And then we’d run it through the plant. We had a screw system there and you could backflow the gasses over and stuff like that to come up with your product. We ended up with plutonium fluoride. And then we’d have a crucible that we’d put that stuff in, and we’d add a little iodine and calcium and heat it up and then the reaction would take place. The plutonium would go to the bottom into a little, I guess you’d call it, kind of like a little cup in the bottom, so it would all be in there. Now, this is something that I had never thought of until I was in the burial grounds, but those crucibles were made out of ceramic material. They were manufactured by Coors. Coors beer. They were, and I guess they still are, one of the top qualified manufacturers of that material. Franklin: Interesting. Anderson: So that stuff back then was a classified secret and so forth. So we had a lot of waste from Coors in Colorado, which is non-rad, go to the burial grounds because it was classified. So if a lot of people think, you know, everything out there is rad, well, that’s not so. But, yeah, we did a lot with that. And then from there, I went down to the Research Laboratory. I had to make plutonium chloride material for Rocky Flats. I have no idea what they did with it. It was one of those things, you know, here it is, we give it to them, and we don’t talk about it. Franklin: Don’t ask too many questions? Anderson: Right. But we used phosgene gas, and we used these in cylinders. You’d heat it up and you’d pass the gas through it, and it would change the oxide to the chloride. Now, phosgene gas is very poisonous. And that used to be one of those trench gases they had during, what was it, the First World War and stuff like that. And it’s supposed to smell, and it does smell like freshly mown hay. You don’t want to breathe it, that’s for sure. But every so often, a whiff would come by. I did have a couple slight smells of it. Franklin: Did it make you sick? Anderson: No. Franklin: Oh. Anderson: It wasn’t that concentrated, I guess I’d say. Franklin: Was it a neural agent? Is that what it does? And how does plutonium chloride differ—is it like—it’s not a liquid—is it solid or powder? What kind of form is it? Anderson: It’s a powder. Franklin: It’s a powder, okay. Anderson: Chloride’s got more atoms in it—not atoms—neutrons and protons than fluoride does. So it’s a lot different from it. Now, the thing that I had a—I didn’t have a problem with it, but it was my first time in dealing with kg quantities of plutonium. We had holes in the hood so we could put these canisters in there. I had something like, what, 20kgs of plutonium in there. And I’m sitting there, thinking, you know, I hope those critical mass people know what they’re talking about. [LAUGHTER] Because, you know, you think, you’re okay, as long as you don’t do something. But if you drop it, what do you do? And that led to other questions, because eventually when I was in operations, I got to have all the combinations and stuff for the vaults that stored plutonium. You could only have two people go in a vault at once. That’s because we are contained of water—“we are contained of water”? Our body has a lot of water in it. So that’s a good moderator, so you don’t want too many people going around. And then of course the cans are the size of a tuna fish can and they had them on posts in there in the safe. Go ahead. Franklin: I’m sorry, I’m just curious about this water thing. What role would the water play around plutonium? Anderson: Neutrons. It moderates the neutrons. Franklin: Okay, so how would—wait, so, you could start a chain reaction then— Anderson: Yes. Franklin: --with water in the—oh, okay. Anderson: Yeah, and you didn’t want that. Franklin: No. You usually—well, you only want it when it’s intentional. Anderson: Yeah, like in a reactor or whatever. Now, one other thing that was interesting is they had a criticality shortly before I went over there at Dash-5. So we didn’t have a way to recycle plutonium. And so a lot of plutonium went into storage. Not just in the vaults, because we ran out of that. We had igloos on the other side of West Area. There were seven igloos there and we stored plutonium in there. Periodically, when I was on shift, taking that supervisor’s place, then we would go out there and we’d check it and see what’s going on. In one place, in one of the igloos—these were left over from the Army, by the way— Franklin: Yeah, I’m sorry, when you say igloo, what kind of structure are you referring to? Anderson: It’s basically a metal building that’s in an arch shape. It’s not square-shaped— Franklin: Oh, like a Quonset hut. Anderson: Yeah, like a Quonset hut. But it’s covered with dirt. Franklin: So kind of like either built into a side or—it kind of blends in—that’s so it’s insulated, right? Anderson: Well, yeah, but you know the military was out here for a long time and they kept ammo and stuff in there. So you wanted them to be pretty well-protected. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: And then the front of it, for instance, was made out of concrete. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: And there’s a door in there and so on. We went to radiation monitoring to get some support. They were not accommodating, let’s put it that way. So I and two operators went out there, and we found that there was some liquid organic material that was packaged in there. Apparently, it had fizzed, and it had come up and eaten its way through the plastic barrier, and then it just kind of rolled onto the floor. Then it went all the way over into the gutter. That was pretty high in plutonium, let’s put it that way. The mice had gotten in there and tracked it all over. Franklin: Oooh. Anderson: And their droppings were hot. And I and another guy got contaminated in there. You had to wear two pairs of rubber gloves and then you had to wear a thick latex glove on top of that. And the moment you touched that organic, it would go right through. So you started peeling the gloves off. Franklin: Wow. You mean it would eat right through the glove? Anderson: Oh, yeah. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: So, two of us went back with a very minimal count on our hands, and radiation monitoring raised a fit on it. And I said, well, we asked you, but you wouldn’t take it. So from that time on, we had monitors out there. Franklin: What happened to the rats? Were their bodies found, or did they somehow maybe go further up in the food chain, or--? Anderson: No, we never found a rat or mouse. Franklin: Just the tracks and the droppings? Anderson: Mm-hmm, mainly the droppings. And I got an idea that stuff killed them. I mean, if it goes right through gloves… Franklin: Yeah. Wow. Anderson: So, in fact, years later, after I retired and I went back to work out there, I had somebody call me up, and we went out there to look where all those had been and stuff, because they’ve all been removed. There’s no igloos out there anymore. Franklin: And what—was there any trace of them, or any trace of the accident out there at that point? Anderson: No. It’d been decontaminated. Franklin: And where exactly was this? Anderson: It’s west of West Area. There’s an Army Loop Road that goes in back of West Area. And it was on the other side of the Army Loop Road and there was a fence around it. Franklin: Is that right up against the mountain then? Or--? Anderson: No, it’s flat out there. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: When you go on the highway, the public highway, and you go out there and you can see some of the buildings and stuff. If you look close, you’ll see where there had been some—I don’t want to say buildings, but some foxholes or something like that that the military had done. It was just in back of that, is where it was. Franklin: Interesting. And so, after the research lab in 234-5-Z, where did you go from there? Anderson: I went to PUREX. First job I had at PUREX was in operations. There was the main supervisor and then he had two that supported him. I hired in over there as one of those. The building was divided into the west side and the east side for the two. I had the head end which was where the fuel dissolution occurred, where we had the uranium facilities outside, the liquid uranium, because we didn’t make solids back then. And then we also had the stack and so forth out back. So all that was something I had to get familiar with. Franklin: I’m sorry, what was the stack? Anderson: Oh, it’s a 200-foot chimney, I guess you’d call it, and that way whenever you dissolved or whatever and you had off-gassing and so forth, it’d go out that 200-foot stack. And that gas would go through a glass filter. That way, you didn’t have radiation going through except the radiation that was in a gaseous form, because nothing will stop that, pretty much. And iodine was one that would go out that way. Now, speaking of stacks, when they built B and T Plant, they did not have filters on them. The stack was 200—all those stacks are about 200 feet tall. So when they dissolved on the old buildings, because they didn’t have filters and stuff, they had to do it when the wind was proper. And then, after a while, of course, the machinery and stuff in the plant would corrode a little bit, so you could get dust particles and whatever coming out of the stack. And there were times when—I wasn’t working out there, then, but I was told that they had to put on booties when the bus was out there to walk into the building, and then they took them off. Because the particulates out there were bad. PUREX had some of that, to a certain extent, because their first step going up into the building was about even with the asphalt. So you know something had been covered. Franklin: Were B and T retrofitted with the filters after? Anderson: Yes, only theirs were sand filters. Franklin: Oh, okay. How did the glass filter—I imagine it wasn’t a sheet of glass. Anderson: Oh, no, it was kind of like insulation in your house, only it was beaucoup thick. I don’t remember how thick it was, but sometimes chemicals would hang up on it, because they’d be in particulate form. And because PUREX was a nitrate facility—well, all of them were nitrate facilities, because the bulk of the materials would be soluble in the nitrate form. So it would catch, like, sodium nitrate or something like that. Our filters over there, when I was working over there, started to plug, so we had to add another bay for filtration. You still let it go over the old one, because you wanted to use it up as much as you can, and then go up into the new one. Franklin: How would those be cleaned, or would they? Anderson: They weren’t. Franklin: Oh, okay. What would they do, just collapse the stack and—like break the stack down? Anderson: Oh, no, we just added on to the filter system. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: At PUREX, that’s all we did. Franklin: Interesting. Anderson: And at B and T, that was the sand filter. So they added some HEPA filters to them later on. Franklin: Hmm. And so what—how long did you work as an operation supervisor at PUREX? Anderson: Oh, probably a year or so. The laboratory manager came down and asked for me to go to work in the laboratory. We talked about it and so forth, and he said there was a pay raise in it. So, you know. I went down there and I went on D shift as a shift supervisor in the laboratory. Franklin: In which—at PUREX? Anderson: The PUREX Process Laboratory. So there I had about ten people working for me in the laboratory. And operations would take their samples, and we had a dumbwaiter that went down to the sample floor, and they’d stick the samples on there and bring it up to the lab, and then we’d analyze it. Franklin: And what would you be analyzing for? Anderson: Well, for instance, in the feed, we would be analyzing for the uranium, plutonium and neptunium, because those were the products. You want to know, if you start out with, say, one pound of plutonium, that you end up with a pound at the end. You don’t want it to go out to the Tank Farms or whatever. So that’s one of the things. The other thing is you strip the fission products away from it and so forth so you’re cleaning it up as it goes through the plant. So that was very important. And if they had plant problems or something like that, we might get special samples. And I can remember one sample that went out to one of the cribs for the off-gas system. Apparently it bubbled over or something, because it was pretty yellow when we got it, plus it was pretty hot, in terms of radiation. So, you know, you have to tell them what’s going on and then they’ll take care of it. We eventually—well, I had three jobs there, actually. I did that and then I went to day shift as a day shift supervisor, because when our manager left, our day shift supervisor was bumped up to manager, so I took his job. And then later on, the research chemist that was there, he left and got another job offsite. So I took his job. [LAUGHTER] I did that—I worked in that lab—oh, well, counting the tech grad program and so forth, I probably worked in that lab six years to eight years, somewhere in that timeframe. Franklin: At the PUREX lab. Anderson: PUREX Process, yeah. And eventually, you know, while I was working there, waste management was the buzz word. That was the new thing. So B Plant became the center point for that. So we started getting set up to also analyze B Plant samples. They’d have to bring them to us. Franklin: Sorry, when you say waste management was the new buzz word, you mean, like, there was a new recognition of the waste products being generated at Hanford, or— Anderson: Yes. Franklin: How did that change from what had been happening before? What was this new focus and where did it come from? Anderson: Well, I don’t know where all of it came from, but the main reason was to keep track of that and to try to separate some of the higher beta gamma emitters which could assist you in high level waste determinations and things like that. Now, high level waste is a unique word. And transuranic is a unique word. Transuranic basically means if it’s greater than uranium in the periodic chart, it’s transuranic. So that waste—eventually, not at the beginning—went down to New Mexico and to their caverns. Franklin: Into Carlsbad. Anderson: And then the high level waste means that it’s the first cycle waste from processing fuels. So the bulk of the beta gamma products are in there. Franklin: And early on, that had not been—before the PUREX process and REDOX were—some of that waste had just been processed a bit but then dumped, right? Anderson: Well, it was separated from the transuranics and then it was neutralized and put out in the Tank Farms. Franklin: Right, but it was still high level waste in the Tank Farms? Anderson: Not necessarily. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: [LAUGHTER] See, it has to be from the first cycle waste. You run the fuels through, and on the first cycle waste, you separate the high level waste from the transuranics and uranics, as far as that goes. So anything separated after that is not high level waste. Now, for instance, and this may sound funny, at FFTF, they had some reactor trees that were in the reactor and they got contaminated—activated from the neutrons. Heating steel and stuff like that, it’ll absorb it, and you get cobalt-60 and all sorts of stuff. Well, that stuff, you know, could read—and I’m making this number up—say, 100,000 rad, okay? That’s low level waste. The intensity has nothing to do with what it is. Franklin: That was going to be my next question. So high level waste, you said, is the product after the first pass. Anderson: Right. Franklin: So even if you strip out the uranics and transuranics, that waste could still be hot, but it would not be high level waste. Anderson: Exactly. Franklin: Okay, so that’s a term that refers to the product of a specific state in time, not the level of contamination or radiation level of the actual item. Anderson: Same thing with the spent fuel, you know. Spent fuel, you think of it being in the reactor for a period of time so that it burns up the uranium-235 or whatever. In this case, it doesn’t really matter, as far as how long it’s been irradiated. If you put it in the reactor for five minutes, it’s been irradiated. Franklin: So, it’s spent fuel in that sense. Anderson: Yeah, and it might be cold enough to touch, but that doesn’t get rid of it as spent fuel. See, some of these definitions are, I guess you’d say they’re politically driven. Franklin: Yeah, as someone who comes from a history background and not a nuclear chemistry background, the use of the term “high level waste” brings out something else—doesn’t seem to be the best descriptor for this specific—you know, if you were to say, maybe, first pass waste. Because “high level” makes you think that it’s important waste, not necessarily that it’s just the waste from the first run through the— Anderson: Well, it is important, because in the spent fuel, you know, when you separate that out, you’re going to have mixed fission products that are hotsie-totsie. Franklin: Is that a technical term? Anderson: No, that’s [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sorry. Anderson: That’s a good question. Franklin: Couldn’t resist. Anderson: But no. For instance, at B Plant, they would recover the cesium and the strontium. And they would send us over some cesium in, say, a 100-pound pig for shielding. Well, you’d have a half-an-mL of cesium in there, which is a strong gamma. So in order for us to play with that—I shouldn’t use the term “play”—but to do the analytic analysis and so forth. We’d have to get a pipe that was, say, ten feet long, and put it through the handle so that the two people that were carrying that 100-pound pig around were minimizing their exposure. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: Because even through that 100-pound pig, it was pretty hot. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: So, yeah. Now, strontium’s not quite so bad, because it’s a beta emitter. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: But there’s still both heat. And of course they added the facilities over at B Plant to encapsulate those materials. If you went over, they’d look almost like standard fuel elements or something, and they glowed blue. Franklin: Was it that—what’s that type of radiation? Anderson: Cherenkov. Franklin: Cherenkov radiation. Anderson: Right. Franklin: Sorry, when you’re saying B Plant, you mean B Reactor. Anderson: No. B Plant. Franklin: B Plant, okay, and what is B Plant? Anderson: B Plant was the first—T Plant was the first separation facility to separate plutonium from spent fuels. It was a precipitation process. Franklin: That’s with the cribs and the pools, right, with the constant chemical refining—or separation of the plutonium. Anderson: Right. They precipitated it and then went on with it. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: And recovered it. So, yeah, that was very important. Franklin: And how does B Plant differ? Anderson: It’s almost the same as T Plant. T Plant was the first one built, so they made it a little bit different so they could do more research or studies or whatever with it than B. Franklin: But it was still one of those long canyon buildings. Anderson: Oh, yeah. They’re roughly, what, three football fields long or something like that. I mean, they’re huge. Franklin: Where was that located? Anderson: B Plant was probably a mile away from PUREX. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: And T Plant was probably a mile away, more or less, from Dash-5, the plutonium building. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: I wouldn’t be 100%. Franklin: Sure, I understand. Anderson: A mile, I mean. Franklin: So we talked a bit about high level waste and that kind of specific definition, and you’d started to talk about spent fuels and, I think, maybe the problem with that terminology, or how that terminology could cause issues or something. I wonder if we could go back to that. Anderson: Okay. Issues how? Franklin: Well, I don’t know, you started to mention that spent fuel referred to a specific process. Anderson: Oh, yeah. It’s just like “high level waste” or whatever else. If it was in a reactor for a short period of time—maybe it’s touchable, you know, whatever—but it’s still “spent fuel.” So you’ve got to treat it like spent fuel, and it has to go to a geologic repository and all that stuff. Franklin: Oh, okay, I see, I see. So it’s a very large, all-encompassing definition that doesn’t necessarily tell you how long it was in the reactor and how much of the uranium has been processed and things like that. Anderson: Right, because if you leave it in the reactor for a shorter period of time, versus longer, you’d come out with fuels-grade plutonium. If you leave it in longer than that, you end up with reactor-grade plutonium. One is more amenable to nuclear devices. Franklin: Which one is that? Anderson: The—what’d I call it? Franklin: You said there was fuel and reactor grade. Anderson: Yeah, fuel grade. Franklin: Fuel grade. Anderson: Not fuel grade, it’s—well, yeah, I guess that works, fuel grade. But it’s not reactor grade. I mean, it’s one that you can use in bombs. [LAUGHTER] Weapons grade, that’s what it is, weapons grade. Franklin: So there’s weapons grade and reactor grade. Anderson: Yes. Franklin: Okay. When did you start work on the thorium campaign? Anderson: Oh, we had two of them here. One of them was a short period just to demonstrate that we could do it. And then the next one was to demonstrate that we could meet the requirements that were set upon us. Franklin: And that was for the Navy, right? For the Navy reactors? Anderson: For Rick Rickover. Franklin: Yeah, Admiral Rickover. Anderson: And I’ll say this, whenever he spoke, you jumped. Franklin: Why? Anderson: I mean, he had the power. When he said something, you did it. There was no ifs, ands or buts. Now, the thorium campaign—and actually if we had thorium reactors, that might be another topic. We never had those out there. Well, I guess we did, because we did irradiate some. But Rickover wanted some uranium-233, so that’s what we made. Because thorium, when you irradiate it, will go up to uranium-233, which is also fissile. You can make bombs. It’s weapons grade, or again, if you overdo it, it could be non-weapons grade. But we had to recalibrate the laboratory in order to handle that material. You used the same chemicals, basically, but you have to use them in a different way, and we had to analyze it a different way. I became, since I was the research chemist there—we had to have large samples of the product so we could analyze for all the impurities and so forth that they wanted. Consequently, we had a cabinet that we had in the building—in the laboratory, that could handle kg quantities of uranium-233. I had some critical mass bottles, which is product bottles that they used down in operations. When we accumulated enough 233, I would fill one of those jugs. I put a little plastic mixer in the bottom and put it on a magnetic plate, and then we’d mix it up and so forth after we put it together. And then I had to take enough sample out of there, because it was product—just like we did down below—and analyze that and make sure it met all the requirements. Franklin: What is the advantage for using thorium instead of uranium or plutonium for the reactor? Why the push for thorium? Anderson: Well, Rickover wanted it. He wanted it for the Navy. Franklin: And why? What’s the advantage to using thorium? Anderson: Well, you have impurity of uranium-232 in there. You could make fuels for submarine reactors or whatever. If you did that, you had to have pretty clean separated materials, because that 232 is a very hard gamma. It would go from gamma to gamma to gamma. So you would have more than enough coming from it. So if you kept it long enough, you’d have something that could probably be lethal. So it was kind of its own self-control. Franklin: In what way? Anderson: It’d be lethal. Franklin: The product would? Or the— Anderson: The product would, because the uranium-232 is decaying into these hot daughters. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. How is thorium made? Anderson: Thorium is in the earth. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: So it’s a natural element. And then when you throw a neutron into it, it makes—thorium-232 and you add a neutron becomes thorium-233, and when it decays to uranium-233. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Anderson: So it’s kind of like uranium-238, getting a neutron and making Pu-239. Franklin: Okay. And how long did you work on these thorium campaigns? Anderson: Oh, they were very short. I think it was probably around six months long, something like that. The demo was just a short period of time. I don’t know, weeks, maybe, at the most. But the other one was a lot longer. Franklin: And then you mentioned right around this time that waste management started to become kind of a hot issue. Maybe hot’s not the best word to use, but it started gaining a lot of attention. So you moved to waste management, right, from PUREX. Anderson: Yes, I transferred. Also, I went to an engineering group because they made more money—back then, they made more money than a chemist. But yes. And there, boy, I’ll tell you, I was at B Plant, which was the operations facility. I wrote monthly reports, management reports, I wrote two of those every month. I mean, one of each. And then I wrote quarterly reports for burial grounds, gas emissions, and liquid discharges. Then I also wrote the Tank Farm reports. And so, I had to be involved with a lot of that. And the funny thing is, my boss called me into his office after I’d done that for a few years. He says, guess what? I got a proposition for you. I says, oh, what’s that? He says, well, it’s one you ought to say yes to. And so, he said, engineering wants your job, and wants you to go along with it. So, I transferred from operations to engineering. That’s how I got involved in the engineering aspect. Franklin: Of waste management. Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: So how long did you work as a waste management engineer? Anderson: Oh, from 1971, about, until 2012, I guess. Franklin: Wow. That’s quite a long time. What were some of the—can you describe kind of your work as a waste management engineer? What did you do out there and what significant accomplishments or setbacks did you have? Anderson: Well, we had, for instance, with the double-shell tanks, one of the A Farm tanks—not, let’s see, AX. AY. 102-AY, I think it was. I could be off on that, but—we had to analyze the material that went in there and keep it below a certain concentration of sodium and so on to keep it in a good, safe condition. And then the other tanks, we had to keep track of the material that went in there. For instance, we had one tank that tended to get a lot of the first cycle waste, and we had to make sure that the fissile material in there was according to par. So we had requirements and so forth. When we went out to the liquid discharges to the ground, for instance, you had to make those as low as you could. I remember, DOE asked me to tell them what the—after they ran it through a process and cleaned up the discharge quite a bit. They asked me to tell them what it was going to be like in 20 years. I said, well, here’s what we put in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you’re not going to see much change out in the crib, because it’s already so contaminated. So they came back and said, well, forget the old stuff; just do the new stuff. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what we did. But sometimes the operation would have a problem with it and it would discharge some radioactive materials into the environment. Franklin: From the tank to the— Anderson: No, from the building. Franklin: Oh, from the building to the environment. So not from the building to the tank, but— Anderson: Now, over at one of the ponds, they put up scarecrows to keep the ducks and stuff out. They got used to that, so then they started with a shotgun effect. It was an air gun or something. That worked for a while, but then they got used to that. So finally they had to put a net over it. So, yeah, Mother Nature’ll get used to most anything. Franklin: Yeah. Anderson: So, that was a problem. Franklin: What about the emissions from the Tank Farms? I wonder if you could talk about that. Anderson: We never really noticed a lot of emissions from the Tank Farms when I was working in it. I remember a lot of the tanks did not have filters on them. In the middle of winter, because they’re liquid tanks, you’re going to have high humidity coming out the breather, so there was what looked like steam coming out. Somebody in DOE saw that. So we had to hook everything up to an exhaust system. But we never really had much of a problem unless liquid burped out of a tank or whatever. Franklin: Did that happen? Anderson: Yes, it did, in some of those farms, and it was pretty hot. In fact, one of them was so hot that, rightly so, the manager over that covered it with some soil so it wouldn’t get airborne and so forth after it was on the ground. So, I remember they called me up, and I had to go out to the building and we put in a concrete burial box into the trench. We had to have it such that they could scoop up that material and go over and dump it into the concrete box, so we could tell the public that it had been contained. But I remember going to work at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I worked until noon or something like that. My boss said, how long have you been out here? And I told him, and he says, well, go home. [LAUGHTER] But that happened every so often. Not a lot, but. And there’s some stories I put in my Tank Farm—not my Tank Farm; my burial ground report. They used to transfer sometimes over ground, and they still do. Franklin: What do you mean transfer? Oh, transfer waste. Anderson: Waste, overground instead of underground. On REDOX, it’s a half a mile away from the S Farm complex, so they could read it over there, which is quite a distance away. So they had to rush over there and pump cold water through it and get the readings down. Franklin: Pump cold water through--? Anderson: Through the transfer line. Franklin: Oh, okay. Half mile transfer line seems— Anderson: No, that wasn’t the transfer line. The Tank Farm is over here, and REDOX is over here. They can read it over at REDOX. Franklin: Oh, they can read—okay, I see, I see. Anderson: Yeah. Now, what we did, when I was in engineering there, is we would calculate the volume of liquid that would be in a pipe when you’re transferring. You could transfer from East Area to West Area, which is a few miles. But you had to calculate how much was going to be in the lines. So when you transferred, you would look at the drop in the tank, and you’d look at the rise in the other tank, and there’s going to be a delay because of what’s being held up into the piping. So, we had to do that. One time, the liquid went down real fast, and it went up real slow in the receiving tank. We had to shut it off and find out what’s what. We could take pictures inside the tanks and stuff like that, so we went in. Well, the solid material in the tank that we were removing the liquid from had an annulus of solids around it. So instead of being the full diameter of the tank that we were pumping out, it was the inside. They didn’t match up, because a small radius of waste, versus the tank, which is the full radius. So we had a lot of troubles with stuff like that. We used to take a lot of pictures in the Tank Farms. Franklin: How would you take a picture of the inside of the tank? Anderson: You get a rigid pipe, if you will, and then you hook the camera up to it. And you can remotely set the frames down there and the flash. Then you can hold it or support it, whatever, and rotate it. So as it goes around in a circle, you’ll get pictures of it. The other thing that we did was put gas—you’d put the camera, wrap it in plastic so it won’t get contaminated—but you can’t do that with the lens. That would distort and stuff. So you had air being blown over the lens to keep it free and clean. Franklin: Wow. Anderson: So you had little pieces of instrument pipe, I guess you’d say, that would do that. Franklin: Kind of spritz air across it? Anderson: But we did that in the casings, too, in the burial grounds. Franklin: And the radiation in the tank wouldn’t contaminate the film or any of the mechanical components of the camera or anything like that? Anderson: No, because they’re encased in that plastic. Franklin: And so then the camera was then safe to work with, too, once you unwrapped the plastic and everything. Anderson: Right. Franklin: That’s right, that’s really interesting. Anderson: We had almost a full-time photographer out there that did that. A lot of those were his ideas. Franklin: Wow. That’s quite something. Anderson: Now, I wrote a history book on the Tank Farms. Franklin: For DOE or just in general? Anderson: Just in general. So I wrote the document, and 90% of it or more is tables of what went where and all that sort of stuff. From Tank A to Tank B and to Tank C and so on. Franklin: And did you do this as a private citizen? Did you do it while you were working out there, or--? Anderson: Oh, I did it out there. Franklin: Oh, okay, okay. Anderson: See, I was in waste management, and I had all those different projects: I had the Tank Farms, the burial grounds, the cribs, ponds and ditches, and the gas emissions. The environmental group said, well, I’m doing their work. [LAUGHTER] So I lost all those reports except for the burial grounds. Which is fine, because there was more work in the burial grounds to do than the other. But I enjoyed the writing that history book. But as I went around the building, there was umpteen secretaries. Back then, no computers, you know, for us. So I’d say, you want to do some work for me? Sure! And I’d show them those tables, and—no! So it took me a long time to get them typed up. And then it was decided that it was too sensitive a material. So they wouldn’t let me publish it, but I could make operational copies. John Glenn, you know, the astronaut and senator and stuff, he was at a meeting, and I wasn’t there, so this is purely secondhand or more—but there was a Battelle document that was in the same category. They’d done the work on it, but they didn’t think they should publish it. So, he found out about that and so he asked the people there, he says, so what other documents are you hiding? They said, Anderson’s document. So I had 30 days to publish it. [LAUGHTER] That’s how it got published. Which is okay, but it didn’t have the scrutiny it should’ve had. But I put a cover letter on it that showed that. I had a lot of projects there. You do that. I had to look at the inventory—or the MUF—they called it the MUF back then: Material Unaccounted For—at Dash-5. Franklin: As in, radioactive material? Anderson: As in plutonium. Yeah. Because when you got kg quantities of stuff, you’re never going to be down to the gnat’s eyebrow. But I was asked to make a report on that, and I did. Since most of it was buried and so forth, we’ll probably never know how good the numbers were. Franklin: Right, some of it made it into the waste stream, right, in some form or another. Anderson: Right, and sometimes it might not even have existed to begin with. Franklin: Jillian wrote some things for me to ask you about here. So I’m just going to kind of go down the list, if that’s all right with you. If we’ve already covered it, please feel free to tell me that. She had on here, Tank Farms and emissions from Tank Farms. Anderson: Oh, we went through that, because— Franklin: Right, right. Anderson: They didn’t have HEPAs and so on. Franklin: What about waste generator requirements? Anderson: That’s on radioactive solid waste. We couldn’t do an audit, but we could do assessments. One of the requirements that DOE put on us was that you’re to check and find out what’s going on. So that was in DOE Order 5820, I think it was. So we set up a program, and I used to visit all the DOE sites that sent us radioactive waste. They could be colleges, they could be other research laboratories, and so forth. Once a year, I and another guy and sometimes a couple more would go to do the different generating sites and verify that they’re indeed meeting our requirements for disposal. We would actually look at the waste. Not just say, yea verily and bless it. We had to go in. And we found some interesting things in some of that. We found a Coke bottle—Coke can, I guess it was, in a radioactive waste. That’s not supposed to be in there, you know. And then down at 300 Area, we found a wooden box that had the janitor’s materials in it. Why would that be in there? Well, he didn’t know what to do with it. Franklin: When in doubt, put it in the garbage, right? Anderson: That’s right. So we had some oddball stuff like that. One of the biggest problems we had was lead. Because they came out with hazardous requirements as well as radioactive requirements. Well, lead, if you do the test on it, the laboratory test, it’s a hazardous material. I remember we had a lot of people in one of the laboratories that said, well, I’ve been using it to prop my laboratory door open for 20 years and it hasn’t killed me yet. Franklin: You’re talking about, what? Like, just a piece of lead? Like a lead doorstop or something? Anderson: No, just a chunk—a lead brick. Franklin: Just a lead brick. Anderson: Just a plain old lead brick. Franklin: Where would one get a lead brick? Anderson: Oh, out at Hanford, they’re everywhere. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: I mean, you use them for shielding, mainly. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: So, yeah, you get them everywhere. Franklin: Of course, now that would be almost unheard of, right, to just have lead bricks on the floor as doorstops. Anderson: Right. And we had lead glass, too. Franklin: Right. Anderson: Leaded glass. So we took some leaded glass and analyzed it. It’s also hazardous. It meets the—or fails the test, or whatever you want to call it. Franklin: Sure. Anderson: We even went over to—it wasn’t Macy’s then, but it was the people that owned that facility before. We got some Steuben glass. That is the most crystal clear glass I think there is, but it’s high in lead. So the problem is, for instance, if you like wine, you may not want to leave it in there too long. We even called Steuben up, and they said, oh, yeah, we know it. Franklin: Wow. Another thing here is concern about hydrogen explosions. Anderson: We had that in the burial grounds as well as the Tank Farms. Radioactive materials can decay and ionize other things—organics, for instance—and tear them apart. So you can generate hydrogen. So, you don’t want that to build up in your, say, a waste drum of solid waste. So, we had to come up with some techniques to use so that we could mitigate any chance of hydrogen buildup in a waste system. For instance, we ended up with catalyst beads that we put in solid waste in a screen. We screened it and put it together so it’d be on top. That’s where hydrogen likes to go and stuff. So then we also put clips, vent clips, on the side of the drum that would be good enough to allow hydrogen to weep out, but it wouldn’t be good enough to let the plutonium out. So we did all these different things. Franklin: Did you ever have a hydrogen explosion? Anderson: No. Franklin: Okay. So this was just a concern based on the probability, but not an actual event. Anderson: That’s correct. Franklin: Do you know of any hydrogen explosion in a waste tank? Anderson: Not in a waste tank, but that reactor back east did have hydrogen in it. Franklin: Which--? Three Mile? Anderson: Three Mile Island, yeah. Franklin: Mm. I see. So another bullet here is trenches for reactors. Anderson: Okay! Now, we started this a long time ago, but the Navy has reactors in subs and they also have them in, oh, the flat tops. Franklin: The aircraft carriers. Anderson: Aircraft carriers. Franklin: Oh, so this is the burial grounds for the reactors. Anderson: Right. So they come from the shipyard over on the west side of the state, and then they put them on a barge because they’re so heavy. They bring them up the Columbia and then they bring them to the dock just south of 300 Area. Is that right? Yeah, I think that’s right. And then they transport it on a vehicle that has multi, multi tires. Then they travel at about five miles an hour or so and take it out to the burial grounds. So we have all those reactors out there. If you look at them, the outside of it is the hull from the sub, for instance. And then they put a plate on the front and back and— Franklin: How did that start? Anderson: Well, the Navy—well, we had the treaty with Russia. What was it? SALT Treaty? Franklin: Strategic Arms Limitation? Anderson: And so Russia had to know how many missiles were available in the military. So when they’re in dock and they’re [unknown] they leave the missile ports open so satellites that go over can look in and say, ha, they’re clean. And they can still count them in the burial grounds, even though there’s nothing there except the reactor. But we have to meet that. That’s politics. I won’t try to second guess that. Franklin: Sure. That’s fine. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: There’s a place for politics. Anderson: Now, the old reactors out along the Columbia River, there was a lot of talk about putting those in the burial ground, too. There’s all sorts of techniques. Originally, they were going to bring them, but they decided to let them decay a while and then maybe bring them over, I don’t know. Franklin: Or who knows? Maybe they’ll become part of the National Park someday. Anderson: Could be. Franklin: And then the last one here is something I’m familiar with, Environmental Impact Statements. Anderson: [LAUGHTER] We wrote our first burial Environmental Impact Statement in the early ‘70s, I think it was. Franklin: Right, that would’ve been right after the creation of the EPA. Anderson: And so we did that and then later on, Battelle had to do them. So then we did a pre-report, or—I don’t want to call it a pre-report. A report that had the information in it, and let Battelle run with it. So we worked on a lot of those, too. But that would include, again, burial grounds—or it depends what the EIS is on. But if it was on the burial grounds. One of them was on high level waste; I remember that, and Tank Farms, I think it was. So, yeah. Franklin: So the EISs, then, covered the different waste management activities that were going on out at Hanford? Anderson: Yes. Franklin: And so what kind of work did that take to put together and EIS for high level waste or for Tank Farm remediation? Anderson: It took months. You had to estimate what was going to happen and how it was, and then you had to look at different scenarios. But we couldn’t say what the final scenario was, or the conclusion. Franklin: Just because you didn’t know, or--? Anderson: No, that was Battelle’s problem. Let them decide what’s what. Franklin: Did you find yourself spending a lot of time doing EIS work? Anderson: Whenever they happened, yeah. Otherwise it was kind of not there. I mean, we had to obey by them. Once they were issued, we had to meet their requirements. Franklin: Sure, sure. So from the early ‘70s, then, and you said you retired for good in 2012, where was most of your work centered? Anderson: From about 1971 on, it was in the burial grounds. Franklin: Okay, so the 200 Area burial grounds. Anderson: Burial grounds. Franklin: It says here that you retired in 1996. Anderson: I physically retired in ’96, and then they called me back and I worked until 2012. So I almost worked 50 years. Franklin: Wow. How did things change for you, beginning in the late ‘80s after the production shutdown? Did you find your job changed? Or did the outlook of your coworkers or the bosses of the Site change? Anderson: Actually, we had more work because of the inspections we had to do and things like that. So it didn’t cut the work. Franklin: Just got busier for waste management? Anderson: Yeah. I mean, the requirements got more and more, so we had that. Now, that doesn’t include the ERDF, because I never worked on the ERDF. Franklin: Sure. Were you involved in any way with the vitrification plant or that type of waste management? Anderson: Not much, no. I can’t say much about that. They did make a vault out there that they took Tank Farm waste and added concrete to. That didn’t work. Franklin: You’re talking about—no, you’re not talking about BWIP, are you? Anderson: No, BWIP is another deal. It’s over by one of the A Farm complexes. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: But they were taking Tank Farm waste and trying to show that they could put it in a vault and solidify it. But—I never followed it completely, but I don’t think it ever lived up to its expectations. Franklin: As in cost expectations, or as in safety— Anderson: As in meeting the environmental requirements. Franklin: Okay. I’m wondering, just quickly if we could go back in time a bit. Do you remember President Kennedy’s visit? Anderson: Yeah. [VIDEO CUTS] Anderson: To Kennedy’s visit? Tom Hungate: Yup. Franklin: Yeah, yeah, just—I wonder if you could tell me about that. Anderson: Well, I had to work. [LAUGHTER] But I was at PUREX when that happened. We had a door that the chemicals could come into the plant through. It was looking north towards the N Reactor. I can remember the cars going crazy out there and coming back the same way. So that’s all I could visually see, was what the traffic was going to and from. But, no, I wasn’t out there so I couldn’t say much on that. Franklin: Okay. When did your father retire from Hanford? Anderson: In the ‘60s. Franklin: Oh, okay. Anderson: And they called him back and he worked a few more times, 2,000 hours or whatever it was, and finally my mom said, that’s enough. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Where did your parents move after the B house was sold? Anderson: Oh, they bought another B house about three or four blocks away from that one. Franklin: Oh, okay. And did they live there then, for the rest of their lives? Anderson: Yes. They lived on one side for a while and then they moved over to the other side and lived on the other side. Franklin: Did they rent out the other side? Anderson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So I was just wondering, is there anything we haven’t mentioned in this interview that you’d like to talk about? Anderson: Well, depends, but it seems to me, like, for instance, the burial requirements—and a lot of places were that way—but I searched and I searched, and I finally found the original burial requirement. That was in an RWP and it was about that long. Franklin: Sorry, what’s an RWP? Anderson: Radioactive Work Procedure. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: And there was a paragraph in it that was for the burial grounds. That was it. As time progressed—that was in the ‘40s, and as time progressed, they became more and more complicated and so forth because we had new requirements to meet. Then in probably the ‘80s, RCRA came in. So hazardous chemicals was also part of the problem. So you had to keep rad and hazardous and meet both requirements. Franklin: In the burial grounds. Anderson: In the burial grounds. The funny thing is, the first one I wrote was in the ‘70s. DOE said, we want you to put the sanitary landfill in it, too, so it covers not only the rad burial grounds but the sanitary landfill, which is the one in between East Area and the Wye Barricade. So I put that in there and we had to meet the requirements for that place in that document. I had to divide it up into the rad section and into the sanitary. So I issued it, and then DOE come back and says, what do you got this in there for, the sanitary? I said, because you told me to. And they said, well, take it out. [LAUGHTER] So they took it out. Or I took it out, because I had to rewrite it. And I was in on a lot of the rewrites after that. The documents got so thick and so forth, it was almost a fulltime job just to get that done. So that was probably something that was very important. The paper trail is not complete as far as I know. It took me a couple, three years to find the original one. Franklin: This report from the ‘40s. Anderson: Yeah. Franklin: And where was that? Or where does this appear in? Anderson: Well, I don’t know where it is, but an engineer had it and he had squirrelled it away. I found out through word-of-mouth and so forth where I might find it, and lo and behold, I finally did. But a lot of that early stuff— Franklin: Was it a Hanford-generated report? Anderson: Mm-hmm. Franklin: Okay. Anderson: It’s got a number and everything on it. So but that was interesting. In talking to some of the people—because the second half of—not second half; last third or so of the report I put together on the burial grounds—I interviewed the people that were involved in making the burial grounds and got a lot of good information on that. Franklin: You mean people that were involved in the early— Anderson: In the early East and West burial grounds. Franklin: And so you were kind of doing your own oral histories. Anderson: Well, that was for my document that I put together. Franklin: Well, sure. Anderson: It’s about that thick or whatever. [VIDEO CUTS] <a href="https://youtu.be/irJsdV1qKlU">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview B Reactor N Reactor PRTR (Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor) 300 Area 100-K Area FFTF (Fast Flux Test Facility) 234-5 Building REDOX T Plant B Plant 200 Area Burial Grounds Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1944- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1962-2012 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with James Anderson Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear reactors Chemistry Civil defense Civil defense drills Description An account of the resource James Anderson moved to Richland, Washington in 1944 as a child. James worked on the Hanford Site from 1962-2012. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 03/14/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fc3fa2945a233debbf97729f37ac460ce.JPG dd1b10256a2b922e96d8e6590c70ede7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Douglas Alford Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Douglas Alford on January 22, 2018. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I’ll be talking with Doug about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Douglas Alford: Madden Douglas Alford. Now you want me to spell it? Franklin: Yes, please. Alford: The last name? Oh. M-A-D-D-E-N. D-O-U-G-L-A-S. A-L-F-O-R-D. Franklin: Great, thanks. And you prefer to go by Doug, right? Alford: Yes. Franklin: Okay, great. So, Doug, tell me how you came to work for the Hanford Site. Alford: I came in 1951. Franklin: Okay. And how did you hear about Hanford? Alford: Pardon? Franklin: How did you hear about Hanford? Alford: Well, I went to school at Central Washington in Ellensburg. Franklin: Oh, okay. Alford: And so I was familiar with it. Franklin: Where are you from originally? Alford: Well, I was born in North Dakota. Franklin: Okay. And when did you come to Washington? Alford: I came to Washington in 1934. Franklin: Okay. Why did your parents come to Washington? Alford: My dad was a farmer. We had three years of no crops whatsoever. Dust blowing. It was a lot worse than—you’ve heard about the dust blowing here at Hanford, but it didn’t hold a candle to what we had in North Dakota. Let’s see. Well, my dad sold the place for $1600. It was a section of ground, but that’s all he got. So, when we came out, we came over with two cars. The lead car was a Model T Ford, and he was a relative of my mother. And then we followed him and we came over the Rocky Mountains. It was just a gravel road at that time. Franklin: Wow. Alford: It was quite a trip. We were in the second car, so there was a lot of dust. Every once in a while, we’d lose him ahead of us. But [LAUGHTER] we’d back off a little bit and we’d find out he was there. Franklin: How old were you when you made the trip? Alford: About—I left about when I was seven years old. Franklin: Okay, so you were born in—what year were you born? Alford: ’25. Franklin: ’25, okay. Wow, that sounds like quite a journey, driving from North Dakota. Where did your parents settle when they came to Washington? Alford: It was Kirkland, Washington. Franklin: Oh, okay. And what made you choose Central Washington College? Alford: What year? Franklin: Why did you go to Central Washington? Alford: Well, I was in the Navy prior to that. I just—I had always planned to go to college, so. I think that was in 1946. Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Alford: ’46. I think I started at college and didn’t like it too well and I quit after a quarter or two. And then went back the next year and finished my degree in chemistry. Franklin: In chemistry, right. And then you—when did you come to Hanford? What year did you come to Hanford? Alford: That was 1951. Franklin: And what did you do? What was your first job at Hanford? Alford: The first job—I had about ten or twelve lady laboratory technicians that I was supervising. I think I did that about three years, three or four years. It didn’t appeal to me after a while. Franklin: Yeah? Alford: I thought there might be something a little better. Franklin: Okay. And what did you move on to? Alford: Well, I quit Hanford and worked—a friend of mine up in Prosser on a farm. But that was supposedly a year-round job, and it didn’t pan out that way somehow. So I called my friend, Fred Clagett. He was the mayor of Richland at that time, but he also worked in personnel at Hanford. And I told him I’d like my job back, but I don’t want the same one. And he said, that’s fine, and he even gave me a raise. Franklin: Wow. Alford: But I did spend a little time reading pocket books and things like that until my clearance came. That was customary for most everybody coming in. You just sat there and read and had to wait for your Q clearance. Franklin: The Q clearance, right. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: So what job did you hire back in as? Alford: In engineering—an engineer. I guess they call it an Engineer I or something like that. That was much more appealing to me. I had that on one of those write-ups I had. I don’t know whether you have it or not. Franklin: I do, yeah, it says that you worked in the 300 Area. Alford: Yeah, that’s the 300 Area. Franklin: What kind of duties did you do as an engineer there in the 300 Area? Alford: You know, I might have to have one of those myself to remind myself. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Sure, yeah. Okay. There you go. Yeah, that’s all right. Visual aids are encouraged. So it says here you worked doing cold pilot plant work and the recovery of uranium from simulated solvent extraction products, which contained urinal nitrate hexahydrate. Alford: Yeah, that was the first job. Uranyl nitrate—when you brought the slugs in from the—or the fuel elements in from the 100 Areas, we’d dissolve them in nitric acid. We’d always—so they’re mainly the uranium slug. We took the solution, the uranium solution and put it in a calciner at a pretty high temperature, and we’d come out with uranium oxide. That was the—we were just testing what temperatures we needed to run that and things like that. Franklin: So you’re basically trying to recapture the uranium, during the process— Alford: Yes. Franklin: So you could probably re-put it in other fuel? You could refuel it. Alford: Yeah, it could be reused—the uranium could be reused. And then we also ran cold operations in a little bit of a pilot plant, to separate—trying to separate the strontium and cesium out of the solvent-extracted waste. The solvent extraction is a number of steel columns. The first one, the waste stream from the first one contains all the fission products. Downstream, the different columns, we’d get the strontium, cesium isolated there. Franklin: What was the purpose of isolating the strontium and cesium? Alford: They’re a fission product, a long-lived fission product. So for one thing, Oak Ridge was looking for cesium-137 for medicinal work, actually. But they’re both long-lived isotopes. We figured we had to get rid of them later on so we could isolate them. They’re a really—in the waste stream. There’s more work downstream. We moved from—that was in the 300 Area, and then we moved to the 200-East Area, what we called the hot pilot plant at that time, semi-works and we just continued the pilot scale work that we were doing in the 300 Area, just on a slightly larger scale. But that, at the semi-works, we were on actual PUREX waste stream that contained the strontium and cesium. Franklin: So you were receiving the waste as it was exiting the PUREX plant— Alford: Yes. Franklin: But you weren’t extracting all of—you weren’t using all of the waste, right, just a portion of the waste? Alford: No, just a very small portion of it. Franklin: So that’s how a lot of that strontium and cesium ended up in the waste tanks later on. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: Because you couldn’t—so, when you would extract it, you said you used to the cesium—Oak Ridge wanted the cesium. What was the strontium used—was it just extracted because it was so radioactive, or did it have an application? Alford: Well, we extracted it because it’s a long-lived—it’s a 90-year half-life, and it’s something we just simply had to—I think it’s still stored out at Hanford, probably, in large lead casks. There’s a lot of strontium and cesium in the tanks out there also. But from the pilot plant at the semi-works, I moved to B Plant. That’s a full-scale operation. We ran around the clock. We had four shifts. I think—I don’t remember exactly how many—but anyhow, my part of that one, I was writing the—I had several engineers and a couple technicians, and we wrote the—took the procedures from the other research and engineering people in the building. They told us how to do it, but then we put it into operating procedures for our operators. That’s what I did; it’s called Process Control. We wrote the operating—that was a—I guess I was—well, I moved from there to the manager of B Plant operations. Franklin: So, B Plant was effectively a copy of T Plant, right? It was a Manhattan Project era canyon. Alford: Yes. Franklin: What process were you operating at the time? What were you processing at B Plant? Alford: At B Plant, we had large-scale solvent extraction columns. They were just enlarged from the pilot plant. It was initial pilot plant in the 300 Area, then semi-works was upgraded a little bit, and then B Plant was big, steel columns. And you got solution—aqueous solution going in and organic solution going in, and they were pulsating. This is how we’d separate one from another—one isotope from another. Franklin: What isotopes were you separating in B Plant? Alford: Well, we weren’t actually—just separating the waste stream. Finally getting the plutonium out of the—to send to the—well, the Plutonium Finishing Plant, that’s the one that they’re having trouble with right now. Franklin: Yeah, 234-5. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: So in B Plant, you were separating plutonium. You were taking this solution in, and then separating the plutonium out from the waste stream. Alford: Yes. Franklin: Okay. And you did this—this was all done remotely, right? Alford: Right, yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about that a bit. What were the challenges in doing this work remotely? Alford: Well, the cover blocks sit over the cells. We’d have about five cells, and you’ve got cover blocks over each cell, several. I think about three cover blocks: one on each side and a middle one. Those cover blocks weigh about 70 tons each. Franklin: Wow. Alford: And then it’s all stainless steel piping in the processing cell. And then we have a big gantry crane that moves over. The crane operator, when he gets—if we have to make a rooting change in the cell, he removes the cover blocks, and he has remote—we have remote connectors on every—we call them jumpers, that’s the solution transfer pipe from one to the other. And he’d make that whatever transfer or connection we needed, and then cover blocks go back on. That was the—we were always, of course, in a down period when that happened. Franklin: What do you mean, a down period? Alford: Well, I mean, we weren’t operating when the cells were open. Franklin: So you said that each cover block weighs 70 tons? Alford: Yeah. Franklin: So that’s concrete—those are concrete blocks, right? Alford: Well, they were—I’ve forgotten how big they are now. I think they’re seven feet thick and I’m not sure how wide. Franklin: That’s huge. Alford: The cell was about—well, one cell was probably 20 feet or so. 20 by maybe 15 or something. I don’t remember exactly. Maybe 10 by 20. I can’t remember that. Franklin: That’s okay. So I imagine that in that area, you would be on the other side of a thick concrete wall, sampling and observing the process. You wouldn’t actually be in the gallery, right? Alford: No. Franklin: Because it was too radioactive in there. Alford: Right. Franklin: How did the operators see—did the operator have a direct line of sight on what he’s doing, or how did you shield the crane operator from the radioactivity? Alford: Well, the crane operator, he had lead shielding underneath him and whatnot. He had lead shielding all around his cab. Our operators, they would have to go in to take process samples routinely. At that time, they were getting more exposure than we liked. That’s where I devised a sampler that reduced their time in there. I applied for a patent on it, but they told me that I used vacuum so that invalidated the—I can’t imagine why. But anyhow, it did the job for the operators. They still call it the Alford connector. Franklin: Oh, that’s cool. I’m wondering if you can describe this Alford connector. What did it look like and how was it an improvement over the existing sampler? Alford: Well, the only thing that it improved, it took a lot less time to take the sample, so they weren’t exposed—they weren’t in the canyon as long as they would have before. Franklin: Would the block have to be off for them to take the sample? Alford: No, they have—the blocks are all on, and we were operating at that time. But you have to take successive samples to go to the analytical lab, and that’s where these ladies were working. Franklin: Oh, right. So how would—if the blocks are on and the stuff is in the cell and it’s connected by a jumper, how would you get a sample out? Where was the— Alford: Well, the sample port is built in. There’s an entryway in the cell cover block itself. It’s not a straight line; it’s a curved line to reduce radiation. But I think that’s— Franklin: That’s really interesting. Alford: There is one little—when I moved in from process control to the manager of the plant, I could always—a little bit of a smell in the office, and I couldn’t figure it out. And, I don’t know, I asked somebody what it might be. Well, it turned out to be, the crane operator, in order to come back down out of that crane and change clothes and go to the bathroom—well, he had to urinate. And this thing ended up in my office. He didn’t run right in the office, but that was the smell that I heard. Franklin: Oh, wow. Alford: It took us a while to uncover the problem there. [LAUGHTER] The crane operator didn’t admit it, but— Franklin: It’s a waste stream of a different kind, huh? Alford: Yeah! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, man. Okay. So what were some of the challenges of working in B Plant? Alford: Well, one of the things that, even when I was process control, but more often when I became manager, I’d get more night calls than I wanted. If we have a stream that’s—if you have a waste stream going out and the radiation is higher than it should be, or when we dump the acid, some of the acid waste into the tanks, it’s supposed to be neutralized before it goes to the tank. Occasionally, the guys would fail to neutralize it, and we’d get a little bit of a burp out in the Tank Farm. Well, we had normal problems with operators and engineers—nothing unusual, I guess. They weren’t— Franklin: I imagine, all that shielding and not being able to directly see what was going on, was that challenging? To have all of that shielding between you and what was actually happening there? Alford: Yeah. We had to depend on—we had a lot of control instruments. You know, just like, they’re reading all the—on the graphs—I can’t remember now what exactly we did, I mean. But the chemical operators, they’re on the outside. They’re not in the area of the canyon. There’s probably a six-foot wall between them, between them and the canyon. So they weren’t in a radiation zone. But the only ones that—we had to send samplers in every so often. I had a boss that was pretty persnickety. He was—at least occasionally one of my supervisors would call him instead of calling me first. And then he’d call me, and then I’d have to pretend like I knew about it. It was a little bit of a game that we played. But he’s what I’d call a perfectionist. I know when I had to write monthly reports every month, I thought I had the perfect report one time, but he called me and told me I had the wrong year. It was right after New Year’s, and I still had the—so I missed that, even. But he was a real good boss. Franklin: What kinds of things were you sampling for, when you’d take the samples? What was the purpose of the samples? Alford: The what? Franklin: What was the purpose of the samples? You’d talked earlier about taking samples. Why’d you need to take samples periodically? Alford: Well, the whole process is lined out, different columns are supposed to be a certain composition if the thing is running like it should, the flow sheet. If it’s off-standard or something, we want to know about it to correct it. That’s mainly the reason for the samples. Franklin: Oh, okay. Alford: Occasionally, if we couldn’t get the right—well, occasionally the lab technicians that we’d send the samples to, they’d have a problem or so, and we’d have to re-sample the tank and re-sample the columns and so forth. Franklin: What was the most rewarding aspect of your work at B Plant? Alford: The most rewarding? Franklin: Yeah. Alford: I guess the people. I had a real good bunch of people and we got along very well and they were very dependable. And I learned a lot along the way. Let’s see. After B Plant, I went to the PUREX plant. Franklin: Okay. Alford: And at that time, at the PUREX plant was where we had the first cesium leak in the Tank Farm in the 2-West area. That was really the first—these are million-gallon tanks, and it’s hard to measure an inch difference. An inch drop can be quite a few gallons in that tank. Franklin: Yeah. Right! Alford: But anyhow, that first leak, we went to—my engineering assistant, he carpooled with me. And he told me, I think we got a problem over in 2-West. I told him, I don’t want to hear about it now. But I heard about it the next morning. Franklin: I bet. Alford: And then my boss, Bill Harley, and I had to go down and talk to the, at that time, the AEC people. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned to them that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg and it’s inevitable that there’s going to be more. And we found out that we’ve had a lot—even in the double-shell tanks now. We haven’t ever had anything out of the double-shell tanks, but a lot of the single-shell tanks are giving us problems. That’s one of the things we’re trying to get things into the double-shell tanks, and there’s even some talk maybe of building more. I don’t know. A lot of it is politics, probably. Franklin: Yeah. So this leak you’re talking about in 200 West was in the single-shell tank? Alford: What was that? Franklin: The leak in 2-West was in a single-shell tank? Alford: Yeah, they all—2-East and 2-West were all single-shell initially. I’ve forgotten the time, but we went to double-shell tanks for additional containment. And now we’re trying to—we’ve got an evaporator running and we’re trying to move the solutions from the single-shells to the double-shell tanks. Franklin: Right. Alford: And that’s one of the things that the vitrification plant is supposed to go, but that’s why behind schedule and way over budget and so forth. Franklin: Sure is. Alford: Yeah, it is. Franklin: Yeah. I’d like to talk a bit more about the tanks. Were they intended to be long-term storage, or was there any thought given to long-term storage in the early years of Hanford production? What was the discussion about the waste problem when you started at Hanford? Alford: Well, the main emphasis at the time that I worked there, we were trying to get enough plutonium down to Rocky Flats to build a bomb. We didn’t really—had we been able to do it over again, there’s a lot of changes we probably would’ve made. But we probably did some things like when the slugs would come in on the train cars from the 100 Areas, we’d always dissolve them at night. Because there’d be a little bit of a nitric acid cloud, and we could—that’s one of the things that we had to shut the PUREX plant down, eventually. We did shut it down. We only had about probably three or four, maybe five months of processing, and we’d have processed all the fuel. But then the AEC in Washington, DC said shut it down. So that’s what we did. I kind of lost my train of thought for a minute there. Franklin: That’s okay. That’s fine, we can move on. I’d like to go back in time a little bit and ask you—so you came to Hanford in 1951, right? Alford: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So at that time, Richland was all—it was still a government town, when you moved here, right, and GE ran the town services. Alford: Right. Franklin: Where did you live when you first got here? Did you live in Richland? Alford: Yeah, we lived in Richland. Two-bedroom prefab. If I remember correctly, it was on McPherson Street. I don’t know if that’s still here or not. Franklin: It is. I used to live right—when I first lived here, I lived in a two-bedroom prefab myself, on Stanton. Alford: Is that right? Franklin: Which is very close to McPherson, yeah. Alford: Yeah. They were all Alphabet Homes. Franklin: How long did you live in the two-bedroom prefab? And how many people—did you have a family at the time? Alford: Oh, yeah. We had two kids, Christine and my son that’s—he passed away here, three, four years ago—at that time, and then middle-aged son, he was on the way. That’s why I decided that it might be better to work at Hanford than work at the farm, which wasn’t quite as reliable. Franklin: Oh, right. Yeah, you had a family to take care of. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: What was your wife’s name? Alford: Beverly. Franklin: And what did she do when you lived in Richland? Was she stay-at-home, or did she work as well? Alford: No, she stayed home. She was a very good homemaker. I have to hand it to her that I’ve lived as long as I’ve lived because she’s really a good, healthful cook. Franklin: Oh, good. Alford: She cooked— Franklin: What did you think about Richland when you first moved into town? I assume it was probably the first time you’d ever lived in a government town. What struck you as—what stands out? Was there anything that struck you as odd or different about Richland when you moved here? Alford: Well, I can’t think of anything—the one thing, when I needed anything in the way of hardware, to repair something, I always had to go to Pasco at that time to get it. And then when I came back in ’54 from that one year of farming, we moved into another house, and I don’t remember what it was. But we eventually moved to Pasco not long after that, because it seemed like everything we needed was in Pasco. There just wasn’t much available in Richland at that time. Franklin: Right, you’re saying that kind of the commercial sector was lacking. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: Yeah. And then did you stay in Pasco for the rest of your time at Hanford? Alford: Yeah, then we lived in Pasco for—I don’t remember now when we moved to Pasco, but, yeah, we were still there and we moved around a few times. But we’re— Franklin: How did you—I assume when you first came to Hanford, you had to take the bus out. Did you take the bus out to work? Alford: Yeah. Franklin: Can you talk about that? What was that like? What kind of schedule did it run? Alford: I worked on the day shift all the time that I was out there. I didn’t have shift work to do. But the buses were good. They had a lot of people that played cards on the way out and on the way back and whatnot. But I didn’t get involved with that. But it was a chance to get caught up on some reading and things like that. But later on, I started driving, because I would, quite often, be in a meeting that was still going on when the buses left. So I either had to get out there and hitchhike or—I had a government car quite often. But many times, I finally just decided just to drive and then I could—because it seemed like we were in a lot of meetings and my boss, he was pretty good, but he had a staff meeting, he’d always have it at 11:00, so that people couldn’t hold over. Franklin: How has the Tri-Cities changed since you first moved here? Alford: How what? Franklin: How has the Tri-Cities changed since you first moved here? Alford: Oh, boy. It’s just—it’s more recent, the change I’ve seen, really has picked up the pace. It really—I can’t say, except the growth here in the past ten years has just been phenomenal. Franklin: Were you working—you were working out onsite when President Kennedy came to visit. Alford: Yes. Franklin: Did you go to see him? Alford: Yes, I did. Franklin: And did your family come as well? Alford: And I think my wife and I came. I can’t—but not the kids. The kids were in school. Franklin: Okay. What do you remember about that day? Alford: Well, I thought he did a nice—he was a very, very good speaker. I always liked him; he was a Navy man just like I was. Franklin: Oh, okay. Alford: He was a good democrat. Franklin: Okay. So I guess we’ll go forward again. Thanks for—I’m always interested about the social aspects of Tri-Cities in the past. So you were at—we talked about the tanks, and then the leaking. And then you were at PUREX plant when it shut down, right? Alford: Mm-hmm. Franklin: So after PUREX plant shut down, you went to work for the Basalt Waste Isolation Project. Alford: Yeah. There’s a little story there that— Franklin: Okay. Alford: I probably—I don’t—when the leak—when we went downtown, there was a meeting with DOE—DOE, you know, runs the show. I don’t know if this—heads have to roll when something happens. Franklin: Right. They sure do. Alford: The supervisor on the 2-West Tank Farms, we had to walk him off the plant. My Tank Farm manager had to walk him off the plant. And I’m not going to name names, but—and then my Tank Farm manager, I don’t know how exactly he—he got sidelined. You might also—I got sidelined. I moved from an operations manager to a staff manager on a slightly different job. The operations—it was, you might say, a slight downgrade. But my boss, Bill Harley, I think he—I forgot what happened on him right now. Anyhow, quite a few of us got penalized one way or the other. I don’t know if this is something that it should go into the records or not. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Well, I think— Alford: It’s just one of those things that happened. Franklin: Sure. Alford: Anyhow, I went to the staff manager for a while but I don’t know how long I was in that now, but it was just administrative work. Then I moved downtown to the Basalt Waste Isolation Project. That was pretty interesting. The problem there, we were testing the basalt in Gable Mountain to see if it would be a suitable location for highly radioactive waste casks. Solidified casks. Due to the high radiation that would be, the tunnels had to be self-supporting. We couldn’t use timbers because they wouldn’t hold up. So we took core samples of the basalt to see if it was under stress. When we pushed the two-inch core sample out of the gun, it would just pop off like checkers, and that told us that it was under stress, and it would never work. At that time, I had a talk with my boss about whether we should just ‘fess up to the fact that it’s no good and we might as well not waste any more taxpayer money, but that was the wrong thing to say, too. So it wasn’t long after that, I was, I think, in the basalt project. I think probably a couple, three years. And I also at that time, I was downtown, and I used the kind of flexible hours and I was starting to farm. And so early in the morning I’d make the rounds of circles to see if everything was all right. Then I’d call my friend that I later on worked for to tell him it’s fine, and then I’d go to work. And I would be able to—I got my time in, but I got a little bit different hours than some of the others and it worked out pretty well. After a couple, three years on that, I decided to retire. It was after kind of—you might want to edit this out, too. My boss sent me out to talk to the psychiatrist. I called him the shrink. He happened to be—after he was the head of the—superintendent of Pasco Schools, I think. But anyhow long after that I decided to go farming full-time. When I didn’t have a long commute to Hanford, I suddenly found myself with a lot of spare time. Along with the spud farming and so forth, I decided to put a vineyard in, a wine grape vineyard in Block 1. We did that—I think that was 1982 that I retired. ’82, yeah. We put the first half of the vineyard in in 1983 and the second half in 1985. We got crops and we didn’t intend to stay in business, but I had Dr. Clore, my consultant at that time. When we got a crop, the varieties and the yields and whatnot established on the vineyard, that’s when we decided to sell it. That’s what our original plan was. It was located along the river, a good location, but I had grown spuds prior to that, but it was a little too rocky for spud-growing, so that’s why we put the vineyard in. Franklin: What did you do after you sold it? You just retired full-time? Alford: Yeah. I retired and I farmed full-time, spuds and corn and wheat, down in Oregon a little bit. But most of it around here. And then the wine grapes. Franklin: Okay. Oh, sorry, were you going to say something? Alford: Pardon? Franklin: Oh, nothing, never mind. In what ways did the security or secrecy at the Hanford Site impact your work there? Alford: Did--? Franklin: How did security and secrecy affect your work at the Hanford Site? Alford: Well, we had to, one thing, if our filing cabinet wasn’t locked, security would make the rounds, and if it was unlocked, they would call you at home and you—we didn’t have to immediately go out, but the next morning we had to out and verify that everything was the way it was. When you’ve got four drawers and they’re not all secret documents, but there’s enough there that there’s no way that I could remember what was—but we managed to get by it. Franklin: Did that ever happen to you? Alford: No. Franklin: Oh. Alford: No, but another thing that’s a little bit humorous that happened to be at B Plant was, I would find orange peelings on my desk sometime when I’d come in. And we finally tracked it down. I had the shift people to keep an eye out, and it was a raccoon that came in and floated around and got in the waste basket. [LAUGHTER] That’s where he— Franklin: That’s pretty amazing. All that security and the raccoon was just kind of moving in there as he pleases. Alford: He was—I don’t know what kind of clearance he had or not. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Did you ever encounter any snakes? Alford: Not that I can recall. Franklin: Okay. Any other ways that secrecy or security impacted you when you were working there? Alford: No, I don’t think so. I was pretty careful not to bring stuff home. Because it was—Patrol—I very seldom brought work home. I never brought anything home, you know, that required a Q clearance. Franklin: Okay. It says here in your bio that at times you accompanied the personnel department on trips to universities to interview students to work at Hanford. Alford: Yeah. Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about that. What kinds of people were you looking for? Alford: Yeah. We usually, I would go as an operations-type. But the personnel office, they’d invite maybe an engineer, they’d invite me and a manager or something like that. We were looking at third-year kids, mostly. Most of my—I can’t remember every—University of Colorado and University of Wyoming and Brigham Young University, and Utah State were some of them. I guess there were others. But if a student looked like a reasonable hire, we’d bring him in for an interview. And then somebody—but there were only third year students, so—I’ve forgotten now. There’s—I can’t recall just exactly how that intervening year, that subsequent year, how we handled that. But the personnel department would keep in touch with these students that looked good to us. But we didn’t have the authority to hire anybody in, but we were just scoping— Franklin: Did you ever get asked any strange questions by students, or did they ever ask you things you couldn’t talk about? Alford: They what? Franklin: Did they ever ask you any strange questions, the students, or— Alford: Oh, they may have. But I can’t recall. In Salt Lake one time, I was interviewing in the morning, and I went out to lunch—you know, it’s right on the leeward side of the Rocky Mountains. We had quite a snowfall. Oak Ridge, I had to go there a couple of times. I think I’ve forgotten—anyhow, the place we stayed at—these trips are all set up for us—the place I stayed at, they had a flood or I’ve forgotten what the deal was now, but I had to eat down in the basement. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That doesn’t sound like too much fun. My last question is, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Alford: Would you repeat that? Franklin: Sure. What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War? Alford: Well, our main—I may have mentioned, I think—my main goal was to beat Germany to the bomb. Well, I can’t answer your problem directly, I don’t think. The fact that we could build buildings and we could do things—if you have a real goal in mind, a lot of times, the politics have to come separate. That’s kind of the way it was when I worked out there. We could do—even on reactors, it took us ten or fifteen years just to get the paperwork and the licensing and things like that. The Frenchmen could do all that in five years, and we knew that. But still—if we could get rid of the paperwork, it saves money and gets the job done much quicker. Franklin: Okay. Well, Doug, is there anything else that you’d like to say before we close the interview? Anything else you haven’t mentioned or I haven’t asked? Alford: No, I think you’ve done pretty good job. Franklin: Okay. Alford: Sparking my memory, but I just—I’ve kind of lost a lot of my memory now. I’m getting on in years. Franklin: No, thank you so much for interviewing with us. You’ve had a really remarkable career, and I appreciate you taking the time to share that with us today. Alford: Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed it. Franklin: Good. Okay. Yeah. Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 100 Areas 200 East PUREX B Plant Plutonium Finishing Plant 234-5 Building Tank Farms 200 West Basalt Waste Isolation Project (BWIP) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1951- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1951-1982 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Douglas Alford Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Ellensburg (Wash.) Pasco (Wash.) Chemistry Nuclear reactors Reactor fuel processing Description An account of the resource Douglas Alford moved to Richland, Washington in 1951 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1951-1982. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 01/22/2018 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fda26cb19779d92a2c99d388c60c061cb.JPG 2bdd1af2ebcb6e94b7a0dba47b60794e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Jillian Gardner-Andrews Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Mel Adams Location The location of the interview Washington State University - Tri Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound 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. <a href="https://youtu.be/N3s8V4Mll-c">View interview on Youtube.</a> Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 200 Area PUREX 2750 East Building Vitrification Plant PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1979- Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. 1979-2003 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Mel Adams Subject The topic of the resource Hanford Site (Wash.) Richland (Wash.) Nuclear reactors Environmental engineering Radioactive wastes Radioactive waste disposal Description An account of the resource Mel Adams moved to Richland, Washington in 1979 and worked on the Hanford Site from 1979-2003. 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 02/10/2017 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to the US Department of Energy collection. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Ff382a23fcd038452449b8e5f06182749.JPG 3e67685eee00cd52b35ca73813a2bb88 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Post-1943 Oral Histories Subject The topic of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Description An account of the resource Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this collection should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for these items. Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Robert Franklin Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Dan Ostergaard Location The location of the interview Washington State University Tri-Cities Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Dan Ostergaard on December 7th, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus on Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Dan about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us? Dan Ostergaard: Okay, my full name is Daniel Vernon Ostergaard. The last name is spelled O-S-T-E-R-G-A-A-R-D. Franklin: Okay, and your first name? Ostergaard: Dan. I go by Dan. Daniel, D-A-N-I-E-L. Franklin: Okay. Great. When I was doing that boilerplate, I almost said December 7th, 1941. Ostergaard. Me, too. Well, that’s in my—I still live World War II. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh. So, tell me how and why you came to the Hanford Site. Ostergaard: Okay. I got interested in photography in junior high school in Kennewick. And back—that would have been, well, I graduated from high school in ’65. Franklin: So you’re from the Tri-Cities, then. Ostergaard: Right, I grew up in Kennewick. Franklin: Okay, and when were you born? Ostergaard: December 27th, 1946. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: So, I got interested in photography kind of through the chemistry class. I was a lab assistant, and the guy who was doing the yearbook needed somebody that’d shoot pictures. And I had done a little bit of stuff with my mom’s help at home, so that just sort of got the ball rolling. Did the usual school stuff, graduated Kennewick High School. And in high school, shot pictures for the yearbook. We had kind of a unique situation where the yearbook actually provided us the facilities, but they actually bought the pictures from us. So we were in essence a little business. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: We had our accounts down at the local drug store that had a photo counter. And it was a real good training thing. We were given assignments—the yearbook advisor was named Mr. Shields, and he said, I need a one-column-wide picture about four inches high and I want four faces in it. I don’t care what they’re doing. I just want four faces. They won’t buy the book unless their face is in it. So that was kind of the direction we were given, and it was up to us to figure it out. And after I finished high school, went to CBC. In high school, I also worked at a portrait lab named Dave Studio in Kennewick, in the back processing film and prints and doing all the things you do. And continued that at CBC. I had my own stuff shooting on the side. And then I went to WSU in Pullman for two years. Through that time, I had worked two summers for the Hanford photo group. One summer in the Federal Building, and one summer in 300 Area in 3705 Building. It was Vietnam era. I enlisted, went in for two-and-a-half years. Got an early out when they were winding down. I called up my boss, Lance Michael, and I said, hey, I’m getting out of the service; you got any work? And he kind of said, when can you be here? I said, in a month? Okay, you’re hired. That was the interview. Of course, I’d interviewed for two summers prior, in essence. [LAUGHTER] So I started doing lab tech work, just kind of whatever was needed to be done. The reason that was so attractive, because the Hanford photo group was like Disneyland. There was everything there somebody with my background could aspire to want. We had the ability to do all the photo processes. We had very competent photographers. They were hired mostly out of Brooks Institute down in Santa Barbara. We called them Brookies. The lab people sort of saved the Brookies a lot, we thought. [LAUGHTER] After I got out of the service, we had just opened up the photo lab in 3706—they’d moved it from the old wood lab building at 3705. Went over there, and then just kind of evolved into doing higher, higher level things. The photo group had three different photo labs at the time. One in the Federal Building, one in the basement of the ROB, the Battelle building, and then one in 300 Area. They had all evolved for a specific purpose. The Federal Building lab was to keep the AEC/DOE people connected. The ROB lab was just directly for supporting Battelle at the time. They had just gotten the contract in, I think, ’64. Franklin: What does ROB stand for? Ostergaard: Research Operations Building. Franklin: Research Operations Building, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah, and then 300 Area, we did all kinds of things. And this was all pre-computer era. So we had—different labs did specific things. The color was done initially in the Federal Building. The ROB was pretty much black-and-white and copy work. And we did big enlarging and things like that. So some things, the jobs had to move back and forth to each lab’s specialty. So we actually had a courier who started at the Federal Building, picked up stuff and dropped off on the way out. Camera man: I need to interrupt this. I don’t think this is moving. I don’t see any numbers changing or anything. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Really? Jillian Gardner-Andrews: Oh no. Camera man: It’s bothering me. [VIDEO CUTS] Franklin: …records digital, so I don’t— Camera man: Well, keep going. Let’s—I guess-- Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: He’ll get better a second time. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you’re saying that each lab had its own specialty— Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: And that there was a courier. Ostergaard: Right, right. And because each lab was separate, and there wasn’t a computer, the cloud, or anything like that, everybody had their own numbering system. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Which has led to complications to this day. Franklin: Tell me about it. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I process a lot of photos from onsite and it’s always very confusing as to why some are stamped 300 Area, why some are stamped Battelle, why some are stamped 700 Area, and this is—I want you to go into this in detail for me. Ostergaard: Okay, so, well, we’ll do that numbering thing then. If you see anything like with a 2-digit and then like an A or a B or a C and then three digits afterwards, those are from the ROB lab. Franklin: Sorry, two-digit, ABC, and then three numbers? Ostergaard: Yeah, the idea—first of the year, they would start out at A, and then run with the numbers, you know, the first two digits? So you could look at that. The first two was the year, always. And the second one was just an arbitrary A, and then if it ran through 999, they went to B and upward. The Federal Building numbers started out pretty much as four-digit numbers. And that was a carryover from the GE photo lab days. Some of those things I still never have figured out what they did. And then 300 Area just started out with the year, 7, 8, whatever. And then generally they’d run four digits. It got to be later on they would run five because they were running out of space. And then in 1992, we had our own computer system written, so it kind of linked up. Those dates always started with the first of the year and then the month, you know, 01. And then there was three digits after that. So by looking at those numbers, if you see an 89 blah, blah, blah, you’d know that was shot in 1989. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: So that was some of the numbering systems. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: And then there were other—we supported some of the metallurgical labs and things who had their own thing going on also. So we supported a lot of specialty labs in the 300 Area, doing things then. So we would process film for them, make prints, and give them back everything. We were doing fuel studies where they would take fuel pins from bundles that had been through the reactor process, and in the 327 Building, section them remotely—because they’re screaming hot—and usually those things were about the diameter of a pencil. So they’d slice that across. And then through periscopes, using 70 millimeter film and Hasselblad cameras is actually shoot like an aerial mosaic of that thing at 75x or 125x magnification. We would process that film, print it on a machine printer 2x, and then literally mosaic them together. So you’d end up with like a large pizza. And that would show the cladding and then what had happened to the fuel inside. These things were fairly important. They spent a lot of money making them, so— Franklin: Right. That sounds like very technical work. Ostergaard: Well it was, yeah. We had at all levels. From the PR thing to the technical part. And you supported a lot of engineers for reports. We did a lot of what would be promotional stuff now for people to go back to DC and whatever, for pushing their project to get funds. In addition to—and then of course just reprinting. Negatives were in the file. And that was the other part of the problem with the negatives, is they were retired, not in any systematic order, they were just—when the lab ran out of space, we’d box up five cabinets’ worth of negatives, send them off to storage—you know, with the transmittal. But still—and then it got complicated—well, you know, I say, all this sounds silly, but it was all at the time very rational. You can’t judge—[LAUGHTER] They were doing good, actually, for what they were doing. But the specific photographers tended to work out of specific labs. Because we usually had seven or eight full-time photographers going at that time. And some of these guys were more specialized in technical things, and some of them were more people-oriented. And so, you had to kind of assign the right type of personality to the job. You didn’t want to assign a technical person to go out and shoot a PR thing somewhere. That would get you in trouble. [LAUGHTER] They just weren’t groomed for that. Franklin: Right. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] We had—along those lines—you know, the thing we had a difficulty with in hiring is we would—we were looking for pretty high-end lab tech people, too. So a lot of these folks would be coming out of Brooks with all this money they’ve spent training, and they couldn’t get a photo job. So we would hire them, but we’d caution them all the time—this is not going to lead to a photo job. We’re hiring you to do this technical thing. A few of them evolved over, and it was very frustrating for some folks who—I’m not doing what I want to do. But we already have—you know. So there’s always that line [LAUGHTER] of doing that. And again, back then, we were self-contained. The security was much tighter—I don’t know if you’ve went out to Energy Northwest lately or anything, or if you’ve ever been there, where they’re looking under your car with mirrors and all kinds of things. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, our security was pretty tight. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: The photographers, on the badge, they had the areas listed in a grid, the areas they had access to. So it was pretty tight, and we were playing TSA going in the gates at that point. We got so you just put your lunch in a plastic bag and just walk by and hold it up. It wasn’t metal detectors, but it was security. So that led to interesting things. The 300 Area lab was the largest, and we probably had the most people of any of them. We did pretty much our own maintenance. These were all chemical processes that needed to be maintained. So there was a great deal of quality control work going on, of running test strips and reading them and adjusting the chemistries. And just the simple things of inventory. We had a phenomenal—we had pretty much one person, that’s all they did was inventory. You know, ordering stuff, seeing that it was in, and then basically rotating the stock, so that we were using the oldest first. There was a lot of stuff going on. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: So you worked mostly at the 300? Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: Okay, and then how many people worked at that operation? Ostergaard: Probably, 20, 25. Franklin: Oh, wow, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah. And the ROB was smaller—I’d say it was about four. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: And the Federal Building, they did the color and they could also—everybody could do black-and-white; that was just by default. And that was probably more like a dozen. And then there was a video—motion picture group down there also. At probably the height of everything, we were probably running 62 people. And during FFTF construction, we were doing a shift-and-a-half, basically. Franklin: And that would just be documenting the construction? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. And then all the other stuff. Because everything that had to do with FFTF was a huge project. It wasn’t just building the facility you see, the white dome out there. There was a high bay in 300 Area, all kinds of research on—oh my god, it was huge. And so there was people busy all the time doing that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay. Did you have much contact with the video people? Ostergaard: Not a whole lot. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: That was kind of a different world. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: There was also kind of the contention—not necessarily nasty—between the labs. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: There was always a bit of tension there, that—ah, them dummies they screwed up again, so we got to run down there. There was a lot of that stuff going on. Franklin: Like kind of like a friendly competition? Ostergaard: Pretty much. Mostly friendly. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Mostly friendly? Did you know anybody that worked at the other labs or in the video group that’s still around that might want to talk to us? Ostergaard: Let me think that through. Franklin: Okay. We just--our collection—sorry, go ahead. Ostergaard: No, I was going to say—yeah, I’m just thinking. Because I think Bud Mace is gone. Don Brauer’s gone. Yeah, it’s really thinned out. Thinned out everywhere. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: As happens. We have several hundred videos in our collection. Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: So it would be interesting to talk to somebody about that. Why they filmed certain—because some of them are very interesting films of processes and—so it’s kind of— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. They were highly technical. We had a technical person who was just in charge of doing extremely technical things. He was out of RIT. And he did some fabulous stuff. I always enjoyed hanging around Roland. Franklin: RIT? Ostergaard: Rochester Institute, yeah. And, again, it was—we had to support ourselves. There was no FedEx in the day. And not getting something done because something broke was not an excuse. That was not acceptable. So you always had at least two or three ways of getting something done. That was—and we always did come through; we had a reputation for that. Franklin: How long did you work at the 300 Area lab? Ostergaard: Pretty much—well, the last year—it was probably 25, 30 years straight. Franklin: So you started in ’72, right? Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: So you would have gone into the early—late ‘90s, early 2000s. Ostergaard: Something like that. Well, there was a migration. Everything wound down. As things closed down, the ROB lab was closed first. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: We moved that activity out to 300 Area. Franklin: And do you know roughly when that was? Ostergaard: Oh, I hate telling it wrong. ’78, something like that. And as things tightened up a little bit more, we actually closed down the Federal Building lab, which was on the third floor. Much to the happiness of the computer people, because there were leaks on the third floor out of all these processors. We had catch pans and stuff under everything. Franklin: Oh, the chemical— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, these are all wet processes. Nothing digital there. Franklin: And do you know when the Fed— Ostergaard: God, again, that’s just kind of murky. It’s— Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: You know, the big change happened for us when the contract changed in about ’87 or ’88. Franklin: And that was from Westinghouse— Ostergaard: Well, we were actually Battelle. Franklin: You were Battelle, okay. Ostergaard: Right. And the contract changed—consolidation, they liked to call it. We ended up getting transferred over to Boeing. Most of the service groups went as a package to Boeing. And then when Boeing came out and Lockheed came in, then we all were moved to Lockheed. So, as it wound down, we had a couple of pretty big layoffs where you just feel like a survivor the day it’s done, when they lay off twelve people in your group and there’s four of you left. Stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] So we kept plugging away out there, and then they finally found enough money to make us go digital. Franklin: That’s good—I was going to ask about that. What year was that? Ostergaard: Let’s see, I’m trying to think of what machines we were using. We were in the Apple side of the world at that point. And, you know, 7200 Mac or something was pretty jazzy at the time. [LAUGHTER] You know? So again, those dates are just—I could probably do some thinking on that, but I’d just hate to say something specific. But as we wound down, then they decided that we were too big of an expense to be in 3706. So we ended up moving down to the Snyder Building. This was under Lockheed. And set up shop down there. And of course, I was always—by that time, I had migrated my work into more doing archival stuff. I kind of just created that, in a way. I got tired of people asking for stuff that I knew we had, that nobody could find. Franklin: Right. Ostergaard: And so I just started—in the time when I didn’t have anything better to do, I just literally started going through the drawers. And that kind of got me the bug. [LAUGHTER] So my intention was to make a three-ring binder with Hanford’s 100 greatest pictures. That was my first goal. Well, that pretty quickly evolved into about 35 or 40 binders— Franklin: Yeah, I was going to say, that’d be kind of— Ostergaard: Yeah, well you didn’t realize what you were up against, you know. So you get to the point where you say, okay, I’ve got enough stuff here to make a collection of each of the reactor areas. So there’d be the 100-B book, there’d be the—you know. And do that. And then as a spin-off I would do aerials. Wherever I’d had enough stuff to organize, I would make another binder. And then, oh, about around 2000, when Hazel Leary was head of the Department of Energy, she was due in for this great opening up of all the information. And they started a project at DDRS— Franklin: DDRS? Ostergaard: Yes. And that worked out of the library there at 300 Area. They had, I think, five or six derivative de-classifiers. And they had a couple of students out there. Their goal was to scan 100 negatives a day. And they would arbitrarily take a storage box—have you ever seen a storage box? A real Hanford box? Franklin: No, I don’t know if I’ve seen a Hanford box. Ostergaard: Okay, well, most of these things early on—most everything was four-by-five negatives. So it was a half-cubic-foot box about yea high with a top that comes off. And then inside, there’d be rows, and there’d be a manila envelope with glassines, mostly, where there’d be a date and stuff written on them. And that was kind of—you got the date range to and from. And they started out and they did about 55 boxes. I don’t know how they were necessarily selected. But they did that. And the first box they did, they came down to us and wanted to see how they were doing. We had a higher-end scanner than they did. They were running off $150 scanners at the time, which was basically trash. Franklin: Yeah, really low DPI. Ostergaard: Yeah, you see some of those things now, those really crappy looking things. That was out at that project. Franklin: Like 400k-size image files, if you’re lucky. Ostergaard: Yeah, right. Franklin: We get requests about images that people find online and they’re like, do you have a higher version of that? And I was like, that was scanned in 2002. Like, you know, sorry. Ostergaard: Well, that’s the disconnect now. And they keep talking about getting me out there to help put some of that to bed and maybe leave a better trail than we did. It’s—yeah. [LAUGHTER] It’s an art to find some of that stuff. Franklin: I bet. Ostergaard: And you can’t do it—I don’t know what the mechanism is—I’ve been out of there now two-and-a-half years. So I don’t know if there’s anything in place. But I had pretty much, at the time, looking for things, I had the ability to request boxes endlessly. And so what I would do was I would get out my notebooks and stuff with all the transmittals and all my little notes I had made on the side. I had hand-written sheets for every time I’d order a box. And this went on for years. I would note the box and the date, and then I would look for what I wanted. But then anything else that was interesting in there, I would go ahead and make a note of it so I could backtrack a little bit. And that’s what I hope—that stuff hasn’t been disrupted too badly that it can’t get in there and say, this is golden. It looks awful, but this will really save you. [LAUGHTER] So, that takes a lot of dead-ends, but it also leads you to discoveries. And there was always the push to put more stuff into iDMS. My project for four years, one of the clerks, name of Bonnie Campo and I, pretty much, we did 20,000 a year into ARMIS, the database at the time. The selection process—that was my call. We’d literally start going through the files, and anything to do with helping the site be cleaned up, remediated, construction—all that was golden stuff. So that was the selection process for that. And then if I found—and I kind of took it upon myself—there were some culturally significant things, I’d put those in, too. So I would scan them, I’d transfer them to Bonnie, she would upload them with appropriate information. So we did 20,000 a year, so we did 80,000. Franklin: Wow. What do you—can you expand on culturally significant things? Ostergaard: Well, things like back in the ‘50s, where they would have pensioners’ dinners. They celebrated the employees. They weren’t disposable. They were treated with much more respect—this is all my personal stuff. [LAUGHTER] But it was celebrated more. And then also, up until ’58, ’59, the City of Richland was a company town. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: Basically owned by GE. And they documented all kinds of cool stuff. So, a lot of that would go in. And just things like the first house being sold. And things like that. And then just the culture—the pictures of the safety prizes. If everybody—the thermoses and things. And then probably not socially appropriate things anymore of get some gal up on a ladder for Friday the 13th holding a broken mirror. And just stuff like that. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Any idea where those—where do those pictures live now, or those negatives? Do they— Ostergaard: Oh! It’s all at 3212, the newest records— Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: Yeah, that’s pretty much where everything is, that I know about. And I’ve tried the damnedest to find everything. It gets to be a challenge. [LAUGHTER] But those first ones they did, that was where what we dubbed the DuPont Collection came out of and the GE Collection. Those first five boxes were the D numbers, the P numbers. Those were, of course, the most interesting ones, and that caught my eye right now. And then ultimately when they were asking, what could we do—national archives, they want stuff from us; we’ve never given them anything. And by that time I’d kind of rescanned a lot of the what I call the D numbers, the DuPont ones, just because they were very, very useful. Franklin: Is that what the D stands for, then, on that? Ostergaard: Okay, okay, let me go through that. There’s a set of numbers—or prefixes. D stood for Determinant, of all things. I found down, when the CREHST Museum was still operating, I had enough leeway, I would go down and kind of mine their resources. And I found the memo one day that directed from somebody in Delaware that they wanted this thing photographically copied, and it set the parameters for each eight-by-tens of each shot and to show construction progress. So there was the P number which was progress. D was determinant. There’s a few Es, which were emergencies. That wasn’t used too much. There was S for safety. And there was M for meteorological. I think I got them all. And the D ones—well, of course the P is progress, and what they generally did for—I mean, down to outhouses almost. They would shoot every couple of weeks or whenever something significant happened, shoot that. So you can combine those into collections of a particular building being built down to small little workshops and things. I found that memo down there, and then I found the part that is really the key to that thing, is there were—since everything was automatically classified at some level, just by nature of it existing, it was classified. And they had to move these around to get things made or whatever. So since it was classified, there had to be a transmittal for every time it moved. So here were these onionskin sheets that listed a set of numbers. And it said, okay, this was D such-and-such, taken on such-and-such a day, and this is what it was. That was just part of the security routine. So there was the marker that described that image by default. Franklin: Right, yeah, the metadata kind of— Ostergaard: Right, exactly. Franklin: Produced in an ancillary process to— Ostergaard: Right, so I kind of went, oh, how about this! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah, that’s something. Ostergaard: So I handwrote some notebooks just so I could find that stuff easier. And—oh, also, what happened—there was a lady before I ever—I never even met her, name of Flo. She was the archival records genius lady. She could find anything. Flo Unterhagen, I believe her name was. And there was somebody in the ‘70s had taken all of those DuPont negatives. They looked kind of like—from the surface—like they’d kind of lived a rough life. Like they had probably just been thrown in boxes and stuff. And somebody organized those into the storage boxes, each with an individual manila envelope and the number on the outside, and that was about it. But somebody had organized that. Somewhere in the ‘70s, near as I can tell. And then the other—the GE ones were dubbed the Flo Five. Those were very significant. Because that was building up to the Cold War stuff. So that was the second project that I suggested to them. The first one was actually what we dubbed the Settler Collection. When I was doing my work for getting those 80,000 in there, I kept coming up with pictures of people prior to Hanford. Franklin: Right, the residents in the towns of White Bluffs and Hanford. Ostergaard: Right, so I kind of got the bug at that point. And some of the folks I knew—Annette Heriford, I knew her from—she worked in the photo group. Franklin: Really? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah! Franklin: I didn’t— Ostergaard: Yeah, Annette, yeah. Franklin: We just recently got the collection of Harry Anderson. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: A lot of his photos and things. Ostergaard: Good old Harry! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But we’ve been going through those, and I know that he worked with Annette and with the White Bluffs and Hanford Reunion-- Ostergaard: Right. Franklin: Organization. Ostergaard: So I went to the last five or six of those things, and almost was accepted. But I did work for the government, so that automatically made me suspicious. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Oh, right. Ostergaard: Harry was a piece of work. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: I’ve heard! Ostergaard: Yeah, one time, on one of the tours, we all went out on a bus. And I come out, and what I did—I had the van, the photo van, and I had some composite, big map things I’d made. We had the ability to mount and laminate and everything. So I would show up with the van, would hang these things around the side of the van just as talking points for these people, and that would get the conversations going. They’d start to look at that and go, oh, well there’s my place, and then off you go. Cool stuff. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really neat. Ostergaard: And so Harry was out there one day, had the van, and he was trying to—he said, you know, you’ve got a van here, how about we go over here and look at something? And I was going, ehh, I’ve got to get back to town. It’s like, I don’t want to get loose with Harry! [LAUGHTER] Get in all kinds of trouble. But, yeah, he was something else. Franklin: And he also worked for— Ostergaard: He was a security type. Franklin: The Project. Ostergaard: Yeah, oh, god, yeah. Well the rumors I’d hear was he’d hang around in bars, basically, and if people were talking too much, get them called in for—he was something else. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow, he was one of the—it’s just so interesting that he’s this transitional figure between White Bluffs and then— Ostergaard: Yeah. Well he was in the right position, and probably rogue enough to— Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: And then you said Annette worked for the photo group, okay. Did you she work for your photo group? Ostergaard: She was down in the Federal Building. And so we always got along real well. She was a stickler. I’d show her stuff, and boy, if she thought that date was wrong, she was on your case like—[LAUGHTER] But so when they said, what can we give to the National Archives? I said, well, I’ve been collecting up these images, and I know a lot about them. And there are about 200 of them. So, we did the whole process as a trial thing, and pulled retired negatives out of our files to them and kind of learned the whole process. And it got a lot of nice press, and that’s what they wanted. They were making progress. And that went so well, they said, well, what next? And I said, well, we’ve got all this stuff DuPont shot. We’ve pretty well got it all scanned into our files. We’ve kind of got all the information out of it we’re going to need. So, we went ahead then and retired those over there. Which, again, was great for everybody concerned. It’s nice to kind of get them over there. I think it was five boxes, six boxes. And then the third series we did was GE—kind of the same thing, again. So we got a little more sophisticated each time. And then also the ability of iDMS to take file sizes got better each time. We were kind of held down to, oh, ten-meg JPEG compressed at first. And they would only take JPEGs. And then by the time we got to GE, it was like, well, pretty much just send us anything you want. Which was just the evolution of the whole thing. So I was making pretty good-sized scans. Franklin: And is that how—so, I’m a little confused. Did you send the originals to NARA, or did you send the scans to NARA? Ostergaard: No, they didn’t want anything to do with digital; they wanted the physical stuff. Franklin: But you scanned the originals and put them into iDMS. Ostergaard: Right, yeah. Franklin: Oh, so is that still in iDMS, to your knowledge? Ostergaard: Yeah! If you get ahold of somebody who can get you to the collections, it’s under the GE collection or the DuPont collection. Franklin: Because we have access to iDMS. Ostergaard: Okay, now it’s not—things are hardly ever taken out of iDMS, so you do a D number or something, you might come up with the old, nasty scan, you might come up with the one we put in. Franklin: Okay, I’ll make sure to look at the file type and size. Ostergaard: Yeah, because that’s—it’s a quirky thing to use. ARMIS, its predecessor for photos, was much better. And what we did a lot of—the folks—and this is what I learned—when they were doing their initial work on the DuPont stuff, they were making their best guesses to what it was they were looking at. Because they didn’t—they just had a negative and an envelope. And so a lot of those were way off. So Bonnie and I—if you had spare time, you’d just go, show me everything from 1952 or something. And they migrated all the stuff over from the Battelle system into ARMIS system. Of course, the things never fit the right boxes. And so we kind of just reworked the information—we had the ability to do that. Put structure in the structure box, and maybe leave the title. Because a lot of times they would write the title with the structure in it. So, it was—again, it was kind of an art form. [LAUGHTER] To define stuff. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Right, I’m totally aware. Ostergaard: You’re finding that out. Franklin: Well, I’ve been in archives for a little while, so I’ve seen— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. Well I had the big battle with the GE thing. They wanted to change the filename around to suit their system which then totally destroyed the providence of the damn negative. It just—ugh. [LAUGHTER] So, every time you do a move, you lose something, pretty much. Franklin: Oh, yeah. Ostergaard: And what we did for GE by then—security—we’d kind of gotten really in tune with security folks and their concerns. They wanted to know what we’d sent off. A lot of times, they were more concerned about the envelope than the negative. Franklin: Right, because the envelope has the information and description. Ostergaard: Right. By the time we got down to the GE stuff, I was overscanning the negative. I was scanning—put it on the flatbed and scan outside the boundaries of the actual negative itself. So they could see whatever had been written in the boundaries. I wasn’t cropping or doing anything like that. I was all about giving you the whole package. Franklin: Right, because you can also crop that out later. Ostergaard: Later, right. See, that’s what—you can’t put it back. I’ve always looked at is as me being the intermediary in this process, for somebody like me 30 years from now. I don’t want to box them in—I learned that real quick. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It’s so refreshing to talk with somebody who understands-- Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: The basics and things like provenance and— Ostergaard: Yeah. Because things tie together later. Franklin: Yeah, they do. And you need that if you’re coming at it without that institutional knowledge. Ostergaard: Oh, my. Well, then, the other thing, I’m sure you’ve discovered it by now, is like the DuPont final report. The four-volume— Franklin: [inaudible] Ostergaard: Oh, boy. Okay, DuPont published, probably in February or March of ’45, what they called their final report. It’s four volumes, 1,500 pages where they do an incredibly good job of describing what they did without saying a damn word about what they did. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Or what it was for. Franklin: Right, that sounds— Ostergaard: That thing is—that, and Groves’ diaries if you can stand—not Groves, Matthias’ diaries—those things. But I’ll get you the Hanford numbers for those DuPont things. Because that is a treasure trove. Once you get in there and start reading, you realize they did everything for a purpose and a reason. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: It was—and a lot of it—and then there’s some very miscellaneous other reports that link pictures to things that are—but that DuPont report gives you an incredible insight. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: Into what they did. Yeah, that’s—when I finally discovered that, I was going, oh, my god. It was so fun over the years, you kept having these—oh my god, I know what this is for. [LAUGHTER] It just evolved, you know, more and more into me doing archival things and less and less the other. Of course, I carried a big footprint around because I had all these negatives attached to me. And so we moved to Snyder, we actually had to have the floor reinforced where these—these are great big fireproof safes. So to get them down there—and I had them all fitted in, and then we were there for several years and then they wanted to move us to the Garlick Building over here. And so they’d give me a room to put stuff in, and then as we got it over there, the movers got all the cabinets moved in there, and then the powers that be decided, no, we don’t want to file the negatives here. We want to use this room for storing our junk or something. So, that was rather traumatic that day. [LAUGHTER] So I ended up putting my stuff in moving boxes around the hall in various places, and I was still working out of them. What I did when I was unloading the drawers, I color-coded each file cabinet. I had a number for each cabinet, and then a little chip of paper that corresponded to that. And then I would start a drawer one, box one, drawer one, box two, right on down the row. Finally, after a year or two of that, they ended up moving me down to the 712 Building, which is now where they’re building the new—across from the Richland Library where they’re building the new City Hall. That was the original records place, built in ’51 or ’52. It was just a big concrete bunker, basically. [LAUGHER] Which is a really cool place. So I ended up getting moved into there in some space. The print people—the union print shop was still there at the time, so it was me and them. And I loved that place; it was just Hanford from the ‘50s. It hadn’t changed a bit. We stayed in there, and of course that was a very expensive building to maintain because it was all full of asbestos and that kind of stuff. So that’s when we ended up getting moved to 3212 and they were building 3220 to store the collection. So that’s where I got out there with all my stuff again. So I had, like I say, this huge footprint carrying these negatives around. [LAUGHTER] And that was a great place to work for an archivist. It was in the back of the building, back with all the pipes and everything. Nobody bothered you; you were just back there doing your thing. It was great. Franklin: And so how long did you—you don’t still work out there? Ostergaard: No. Franklin: No, and when did you finally retire? Ostergaard: Well, they asked me to leave two-and-a-half years ago. One of those. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: One of those early retirement, or kind of--? Ostergaard: Yeah, it was like—hi? You’d walk in there, the human resources lady is there. Like, okay, I know what this is. It’s like, okay, don’t blow it. [LAUGHTER] Just make nice. Nothing good will come out of anything other than being nice. So that was two-and-a-half years ago. So what you’re seeing me now doing is volunteer work. I got connected up with Colleen and stuff. And I still thrive on doing this stuff. That’s why I’m doing it. Franklin: Great. Ostergaard: I love access. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. And so you still have your clearance and everything to get in there? Ostergaard: Nope. Well, see, that’s all B Reactor, see, it’s open to the public. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: I’ll do it again coming up this year. The Russians come over for their reactor inspection tour, PPRA, yearly. That’s a treaty that we signed with them in late ‘90s, I think it was. We inspect each other’s reactors to see what’s happening and make sure that, one, we’re not making plutonium, and two, they are because they’re dual-purpose reactors, what they’re doing with it, apparently. So I was doing that for five or six years before. And I found it quite fascinating. It’s something you have to be respectful and careful. We duplicate the picture we shot the year prior for their report they make. If the building still exists. And now it’s getting down to a little bit of 100-K West and B Reactor. So I’ve really—the PNNL folks like it because I’ve done it enough, they—Battelle knows me; the Russians know me. And everybody likes that uniformity. So that’s a fun thing to do, for me. And that one, again, you get a temporary badge where we’re going. I truck along. And do different pictures real quick for them, and then we have a final banquet where they sign the report and everything. That’s always quite interesting. Franklin: Oh, yeah, I bet. Ostergaard: It’s really cool. They love to toast everything. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yes, they do. Ostergaard: It takes a while. Franklin: Yeah, I’ve been to Eastern Europe. Toasts are a way of life. Ostergaard: Oh, god. So anyway, I’m still doing that and I’m looking forward to doing more of that. Franklin: That’s really great. How did you get involved with BRMA, the B Reactor Museum Association? Ostergaard: Well, it was kind of after I quit working out there regular. These guys, I was aware of them, you know. And so one of them called me up and said, you know, we’re looking for something. And everybody’s always calling me, looking for something. He said, you know, you ought to join. And I said, well, I probably should just to keep my hand in things. So that’s kind of how I became connected with it. And it’s really neat to sit in a room where there’s twenty guys who really knew their stuff. It’s something else, to have that ability. So I’ve been doing that. And then of course, I hear of things coming down the road and kind of watched the national park thing develop, and getting involved with Colleen. Every once in a while I have to remind her: you got something coming up, do you need pictures? Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] But that was the way out there. We always, especially when we were working for Lockheed. Lockheed was working on getting the MSA contract. So they were in the full PR, look how good a company we are, you should have us do the contract thing. So we were doing all kinds of stuff, back, again, ten years ago, things weren’t as tight as they are now. So our display group was actually making all kinds of display stuff for Lockheed Corporate under Linda Goodman. She grew her outfit quite large, but we went along for that ride. So we had people to go just do nothing but do displays and take them out. That was not a Hanford-related thing, but it was—we kind of had the ability to do all kinds of stuff. Which has always be exciting to be involved with something like that. Franklin: Right, to make some things from site-specific to like more PR. Ostergaard: And of course everything couldn’t be done fast enough. And you learn there that when they want it, they want it, but they don’t think they want it. So you have to sort of manage your managers in a way. You have to be ready to—well, they haven’t asked yet, but you know they’re going to want. You just learn after you get— Franklin: How was the transition to digital photography for you as a photographer and someone that works—and an archivist—I’m kind of curious as to how you’ve managed that transition. Ostergaard: Well, for some reason it was much harder than it should have been to get the digital equipment. Somehow it got involved with the printing people and how much elaborate stuff they go through to buy equipment. And we had people high up go, how in the hell is this taking so long? You just go buy some computers. But it’d somehow gotten into somewhere where you had to write things of why this would be good, and—ugh. It just drug on interminably. So we did—on the computer part, we had—the film scanner was always kind of a difficult thing, because they just weren’t that good at the time. And we’d always kind of prided ourselves in doing good things, exceptional things. Well, that’s when the thing I should mention of the evolution of film sizes. Four-by-five was kind of the standard from the ‘40s. When I came out there, I had to have the fortune, through our little business arrangements at the high school—I was making money, actually—and I needed a camera to shoot. Because they weren’t giving me anything. So I ended up buying a Hasselblad of all things in 1965. Franklin: That’s an expensive—for a high schooler-- Ostergaard: The list price was 600 bucks. Franklin: Yeah, that’s like a car. Ostergaard: And the local photo camera down there, the guy, he knew I was looking for one and I was a regular. He said, well, he said, you know, if you can keep your mouth shut, I’ve had this Hasselblad way too long here in my inventory. He said, it cost me 435 bucks. I’ll sell it to you for my cost to move it. So I got it at a discount. I still have it. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Wow. Well, those are cameras that you—I mean, you pass those down. Ostergaard: Oh, god, yeah. So I’ve still got all the stuff. So I was kind of primed up and then I started working summers out there. And then you see all the real—the stuff you see at magazines here, it is in front of you. So as it evolved, when I went out there, they weren’t shooting Speed Graphics, they were shooting Linhof Technikas. Big, huge, gorgeous cameras. Heavy as—and then there were view cameras, too, because of just the technical stuff that they did. And then it kind of evolved into two-and-a-quarter roll film, which was principally a Hasselblad with a set of lenses. Everybody had one. Everybody pretty much had a Technika setup, they had view cameras, and they had the Hasselblads. And 35 millimeter was considered miniature, and it was only for shooting slides, pretty much. And that kept on, and some of the illustrator types in Battelle wanted to have that editorial look so they would go shoot black-and-white. So they’d get the grain look and all that stuff. But the thing of choice was two-and-a-quarter roll film. And then of course it evolved from black-and-white and then the color started slipping in there. They were shooting some color sheet film, and it seemed like the preferred way at that point was transparencies first. And there are still some of those floating around in the files. And then it would move over into 50/50 black-and-white. Sometimes they’d go out and shoot black-and-white and color at the same assignment if they had the time. Sometimes you were moving around, you couldn’t do that. But they still wanted black-and-white prints versus color, because color was considered premium cost. So to make it look like you were not wasting money, you had it done in black-and-white. I’ve had people tell me that I don’t care what it costs, but I don’t want it to look like I spent any money. [LAUGHTER] You know, you’re out there, you just roll with whatever—and that’s part of the key to my being there so long, was I was quite flexible in going with whatever. You could do—so anyway, it evolved into roll film. And then we finally, on the digital thing, when we finally got this block of equipment, I think they bought two Nikon D1s. Which, probably your cell phone now would—[LAUGHTER] But we had all the Nikon stuff, so it was a natural to go with that, because the lenses still were compatible. And that was the beauty of that. We always were Nikon out there, just because we had massive amounts of lenses and everything. Franklin: That’s why I always buy Canons, because I just inherited Canons. Ostergaard: That’s what you do. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel there. So that’s kind of how that evolved. And you can see that. And also you can see the quantities of negatives shot increase with the smaller film. Sheet film, you’re pretty—there’s a lot of work involved loading holders and processing and everything. And then when you get to roll film, well, hell, there’s twelve on a roll. So you shoot them all. Franklin: And then now in the digital age, you’re just limited by— Ostergaard: I’ll go out to B Reactor, you figure that’s 300 shots, easy, without even thinking about it. And you give somebody 25. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Franklin: It’s a different—which is also I think a challenge for archivists moving forward is— Ostergaard: Oh, I know. Franklin: The amount of stuff we produce in the digital world is greater. Ostergaard: And how much of that stuff I’ve been giving you—well, I’ll give you the raw and what I gave the customer, but then here’s the other 250 which I can’t bring myself to throw away, unfortunately. [LAUGHTER] You just never know. Franklin: So, did your parents work for Hanford at all? Ostergaard: Nope! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Okay, so you were the first one. Ostergaard: Well, what happened—all my uncles and ultimately my dad, they were all in the service in World War II. This is all from Nebraska. They had had a rough time in the Depression. They’d lost the farms. They were traveling around before the war, picking fruit, doing whatever. They’d been out here before the war. My grandma’s sister was out here with—and they had her—the family farm they had was a typical chicken and eggs and fruit and alfalfa—everything, a truck farm. And so after the war, they all decided that it was time to get out of Nebraska. So in all their travels they had decided this was the good spot to go. I was born in ’46—essentially ’47, and I think they came out in ’48 and settled right when the Cold War was starting to ramp up. So there was plenty of employment. The family had always been carpenters and the like, and Dad, he had carpentry experience and working in lumberyards and stuff. It’s kind of my joke out of Caddyshack is he ended up right in the lumberyard. Of all the places you could work in here, he never made an attempt to get on at Hanford. He was working various lumberyards around and wholesale hardware and stuff like that. My other uncle did get involved in it, so. But, yeah, so that’s how it come to be. And Mom, she finally—she was secretary for First Lutheran Church. And again there, you’ve probably picked up, there was—then especially—sort of an animosity against Richland from Pasco and Kennewick. Franklin: Can you talk about that a little bit? Because that’s—I think that’s very interesting. Ostergaard; Well, you know, the perception was—especially because Richland was a company town at first. They were renting these places, in essence. So GE was the landlord. Everybody worked—Pasco, Kennewick, they were their own. So it’s like, well, they need a lightbulb changed, they just call somebody up and the company come change the lightbulb. Just all that kind of stuff. Locally, I totally, growing up in Kennewick, benefited from Hanford bigtime. Because a lot of Hanford—specially the doctor level and stuff, they didn’t live in Richland. They lived in Kennewick and Pasco, and they wanted their kids as well educated as the kids in Richland. So there the push was, boy, you have good schools in the Tri-Cities. That was just the accepted thing. So a lot of my contemporaries then, their fathers worked out here. So there was just a different set of expectations that went along with all that. Franklin: So that kind of—the middle-class and upper-middle-class affluence sort of Richland-- Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, it spilled over. Big time. But I benefited totally from that environment and just those expectations: you were going to go to college, you were going to do this, you were going to— [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But so you’re saying there was maybe some resentment that GE and the government took care of people in Richland— Ostergaard: Oh, yeah way past— Franklin: And there was this idea that they were freeloading or something— Ostergaard: Yeah, and that was just probably a jealousy or something. Dad, he worked in the lumberyard in Pasco. And in summer, he’d have to come up and help fill-in—there was a lumberyard up here on Van Giesen. Where Boehm’s Chocolate is—or was. There was a lumberyard in there at one point. So he hated to come up here. He said, they expect so damn much and they don’t want to pay for anything. He called them smashers—for atom smashers. Franklin: Oh, okay. Ostergaard: Damn smashers! God, I hate them! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: That’s really—I’ve not heard that before. Ostergaard: Well, that was his term. Franklin: Right, I like that. Ostergaard: And of course at that time, Richland had a really, really good basketball team. Art Dawald was the coach in that era. So there was a—boy, that was kind of the high school sports thing. And then Pasco and Kennewick had a giant rivalry in football. And that game was the only day game they played, and that was always on Veteran’s Day. That was a big deal, big time. Franklin: Can you describe growing up in the Tri-Cities in the Cold War and how—being so close to Hanford, but living in Kennewick or Pasco, was there any kind of fear that Hanford would have been a prime target if the war were ever fought? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah, we were totally afraid of the Russians. [LAUGHTER] There was not necessarily anything nasty out there, it was more the Russians. We had, probably not as intense as Richland with the duck-and-cover stuff. I don’t think we were ever scrambling under desks or anything. We didn’t have any air raid sirens; I know Richland did. They brought those things in from World War II and set them up around town here. So we had our instructions. And I know one time—I wish I had one of these things. They were flying around in airplanes one time throwing out little pamphlets to—What Should You Do— Franklin: Like civil defense pamphlets? Ostergaard: Yeah, right, yeah! It was just— Franklin: That’s an odd way to distribute that. Ostergaard: God, I know it. But I wish to hell I had one! Because I found one stuck in a tree. But, no, and unfortunately, it was hyped up enough at home—lived in a wood frame house. And in the night the wind would get to blowing and banging against the house and stuff. And there were several times I convinced myself that it was a bomb going off. It was serious stuff. You were totally into it. Franklin: Was there ever any worry that you knew in the communities—Kennewick, Pasco—of the environmental aspect of Hanford— Ostergaard: No. Franklin: Or any kind of— Ostergaard: No. That just wasn’t happening yet. Franklin: Okay. Even though—I mean, because the Green Run was in 1940— Ostergaard: I mean, nobody knew of that until—not even heard of it until probably 20 years after it happened when the Down Winders got going. Yeah, I’ve sat there thinking about 1954, November. Where the hell was I that day? The wind was coming out of—so you start thinking about it then. But, yeah, like I say, for me, I was kind of proud of the place. I still am. Of what had happened and everything. So I’ve benefitted—[inaudible] but have benefitted greatly from the whole business. We had one couple of Christmases ago, the family got together. And my brother, he’s working sheet metal contract out there—foreman for that. And his two sons, they were working down at Hermiston in getting rid of the mustard nerve gas and stuff. Franklin: Oh, right. Ostergaard: And I going, damn, World War II’s still been good to this family. We’re still working because of it. [LAUGHTER] Which is, you know, true! Franklin: Yeah, yeah, there’s legacy aspects of weapons production. Ostergaard; Totally. And of course back then the science thing was big. I remember in 1957, the International Geophysical Year and all this stuff we got handed at school. It was something to be—technology was just to be treasured. In this environment especially. Franklin: What are some of your memories of any—some of the major events in the Tri-Cities? Like did you go to any Atomic Frontier Days parades? Or did you—what about Kennedy’s visit or Nixon’s visit? Ostergaard: Okay, well, let’s see, Atomic Frontier Days—that was still when Richland was—we didn’t go to Richland. That was, no, we don’t go to Richland. [LAUGHTER] We were much more Kennewick and Pasco oriented on that. I missed the Nixon visit because I was in the service. And the Kennedy visit was ’62, ’63? Franklin: ’63. Ostergaard: That one, Jesus. I was probably—well, I was 16. I just wasn’t conscious of it at that point. It just wasn’t something you did. I do remember they had Eisenhower come out in ’54 to dedicate McNary Dam. And they ran school buses—loads of kids—down to see it. My folks wouldn’t let me go because they didn’t like him. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Were your folks Democrats? Ostergaard: Yeah. Franklin: Okay. Ostergaard: [LAUGHTER] Oh, hardcore. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: But like FDR era, Progressive New Deal-era Democrats or--? Ostergaard: Yeah, kind of. They were just like—[HISS] Republican. So there was that type of thing going on. I became aware of—fortunately, in high school, I had some very good instructors who made us politically aware. And so I knew all about Magnusson and Jackson and how all that works. The more I find out, the more interesting that gets. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Could you describe the ways in which security or secrecy at Hanford has impacted your work? Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s just what you did. It was just an expectation. You go out there and here’s all these guards and all this stuff. You just played the game. I’d never considered it, necessarily, a burden. It was tedious and ponderous at times, but you just—you do what they say. They make the rules, they can change the rules, they can enforce the rules or not enforce the rules. You’re powerless, so you just go along. It’s real simple. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford during the Cold War and then afterward? Or just your kind of experience at Hanford? Ostergaard: Well, first thing I’ve kind of learned is you can’t judge anything from the past in light of how you judge things today. That is the most—people kind of, especially Pearl Harbor and the activities around then—we were sort of caught flatfooted. And then some of the things that went on—internment camps and things like that. It’s just like, you got to go—okay, we didn’t know what the heck was going on. We didn’t know if they were going to land in Portland the next day or something. And so you react. And some of those reactions weren’t the best in the world. But you can’t end up—of that. And then the same thing with the environmental stuff out there. You can’t call any of those folks dumb or not caring, because all the stuff I’ve seen and all the images and stuff, everybody was doing the best of their ability with what they had. And so there wasn’t any just slipshod, they-don’t-care—except maybe the Green Run or something, but—[LAUGHTER] But you kind of look at some of that as an overzealous—because, again, it’s all driven by fear, or unknowns. Just for that not to be forgotten. And also that those people were as smart or probably smarter than we are, I think, as far as thinking things through and making do. Because that’s always been my contention with the construction camp and everything. You have those ’43, ‘44, ’45—they didn’t—if you were draft age, you weren’t there unless you had some real specialty. They recruited out of the southeast. And they didn’t want to recruit workers from the industrial—shipbuilding and all that, take those away. So they were down in the south where there was workers available. And all these people had just survived the Depression. And they knew how to make do. And they came up here and continued to make do. So that’s kind of my thing, is just that whole—and it’s unfortunate that such a great amount of energy and everything was expended on something that had such a nasty result. But—[LAUGHTER]—it’s just— Franklin: What about later in the Cold War though? The ‘50s through the late ‘80s, and kind of that mass of—because a lot of conversations about Hanford, there’s the World War II Hanford, but then there’s the larger, much larger mission but with not such a dramatic conclusion to it, right? The Cold War kind of made 20,000 nuclear weapons around and then just kind of fizzled out. Ostergaard: Yeah, the Cold War ramp-up thing was like—I just caught probably the tail end of that. But kind of—I got wandering here a little bit—but I always think it’s just so cool to be part of this process where all these things were happening. And being somewhat of an insider of it, I have a whole different perspective of things. If you say radiation, I go, well, okay, what kind and how much. Not, radiation?! Now, I’d be that way with nerve gas from Umatilla—which way do I run? [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Nerve gas is nerve gas no matter which way you look at it. Ostergaard: That’s right! So I have just always been kind of a—had a little better understanding of what was going on and realized there are phenomenal risks still out there. And when you’re working with guys who, in the day we were doing in-tank waste tank inspections by putting a Hasselblad on a rig, shooting argon on the lens to keep it clean, button this thing up in plastic, and dropping it down a riser and rotating the camera, shooting pictures with a strobe inside to see the tank walls. Franklin: Wow. Ostergaard: Now they do it digital. Franklin: Yeah. Ostergaard: So that was some of our specialists who just—that’s what they did. And I got involved in—always in the after thing of all that stuff. I would be handling the film and processing things. Franklin: Was that done for all of the tanks? Ostergaard: Oh, god, yeah. I did-- Franklin: That’s such a laborious— Ostergaard: Oh, totally. Franklin: I mean, that’s necessary work, but that’s such a laborious technical process to go through that. Ostergaard: Oh, yeah. I went through—for an outside contractor, went through and basically did all the single shell tanks that we could find. Everything I could find on each one of them. Of course that stuff was in essence obsolete now because of age and whatever. Yeah, it was fascinating stuff because it was just so scary—or so potentially bad. [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Yeah. Ostergaard: Yeah, that was just a really—just in technical—I want to throw in a little pitch. The environmental stuff for the photo lab, we—back when I first came there, pretty much everything went down the drain. And again, it’s photo chemicals. And then in—when was it? When the Hunt Brothers kind of tried to corner the silver market there for a while, our boss, Les Michael—we had massive amounts of fixer we were generating. So he, on his own initiative, started reclaiming silver. We had a whole setup out there. We used an electrolytic process. So we were kind of ahead of that curve by our own doing. We were actually scraping—you know, we were doing the whole thing. And then as it got tighter and tighter, we started doing whatever is deemed proper at the time. So we had that running pretty tight. There was one time we—the state—we were actually functioning like a photo lab like you’d see in Seattle or Portland or anywhere else. Pretty much doing the same rules, because it’s just all the same stuff. They had some state inspector come in, and they were—since we were Hanford, we were kind of targeted, I think. We ultimately, one time, ran parallel processes on all the waste streams coming out of our processes, running typical batches of film. The state people brought in their sets of jugs and stuff to collect. And since the Hanford people didn’t quite trust and vice versa, they were doing a double set. And then they sent this stuff off, spent horrific amounts of money that proved we were doing everything right. [LAUGHTER] We weren’t really getting pats on the head. Everybody was just glad it was over. Whoops. So, we were doing a good job. Franklin: Cool. Ostergaard: And the cool thing about that, too, is our negatives are still hanging in there really well as far as process. I’ve had that question before: well, aren’t your negatives getting old? And blah, blah, blah, blah. Some lady from somewhere back east, one time, and I was very nice about it. But I said, well, no, our negatives are wonderful. They’re not fading. They’re not, because one, we had the budget and everything to do everything correctly. So everything was thoroughly washed, thoroughly fixed, everything. And also they’ve all been stored in human conditions. They haven’t been in a CONEX box or anything. They’re out where people are. And we’re in a desert; there’s no humidity. Everything-- Franklin: Yeah, that’s really good for long-term. Ostergaard: Yeah, so everything’s fine. We do have—I think they got them out now—I went through and did a study on nitrate-based negatives. And I found you do all your work and mostly early ‘50s and mostly it was Ansco and it may be a few DuPonts and stuff. I found about 1,100. And you could just—in a storage box—you could just open the box up and sniff and tell. Oh, there’s something in here. So I went ahead and kind of made the guys—I think they pulled them out eventually. But that nitrate thing, especially at the Hanford environment, what do you do with them? Fortunately they’re scattered all over the place so there’s not a critical mass of them. And what the archive folks were doing with them is they were pulling them out and freezing them. But here, if you have a whole freezer full of nitrate negatives, you’ve created a waste. So it’s a double-edged sword. [LAUGHTER] But we had our share of 90-day storage pads and saving film to recycle and the yearly contract and we had our ion exchange column. We were doing everything. It was good. Franklin: That’s good. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about or mention? Ostergaard: Oh, I’m sure there will be 20 things the minute I walk out the door. Franklin: Well, thank you so much, Dan, I really appreciate it. It’s really illuminating to hear you—to get some of that information on the photos and your perspective on Hanford, having not only worked there but also having seen so much of the history from the photo side. Ostergaard: Yeah, great. Well, like I say, I didn’t want it to end. I was just having way too much fun. Franklin: Yeah, I bet. Ostergaard: And it was, the more—like you—the more time you invest and the more time goes on, the more you start to make connections of things. It’s just like, wow, this is just—I’m just getting good! [LAUGHTER] Franklin: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Ostergaard: Okay, all righty. Franklin: All right. Ostergaard: Great. <a href="https://youtu.be/fTjZHnejr9Q">View interview on Youtube.</a> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:13:04 Bit Rate/Frequency Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio) 317 kbps Hanford Sites Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview 300 Area 327 Building 700 Area B Reactor Years in Tri-Cities Area Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site 1946-today Years on Hanford Site Years on the Hanford Site, if any. ~1970-2014 Names Mentioned Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community. Mr. Shields Lance Michael Bud Mace Don Brauer’s Bonnie Campo Groves Matthias Colleen Linda Goodman Art Dawald Kennedy Nixon Eisenhower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dan Ostergaard Description An account of the resource An interview with Dan Ostergaard conducted as part of the Hanford Oral History Project. The Hanford Oral History Project was sponsored by the Mission Support Alliance and the United States Department of Energy. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 12-7-2016 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Those interested in reproducing part or all of this oral history should contact the Hanford History Project at ourhanfordhistory@tricity.wsu.edu, who can provide specific rights information for this item. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/mp4 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2018-26-2: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.] Provenance A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource. The Hanford Oral History Project operates under a sub-contract from Mission Support Alliance (MSA), who are the primary contractors for the US Department of Energy's curatorial services relating to the Hanford site. This oral history project became a part of the Hanford History Project in 2015, and continues to add to this US Department of Energy collection. 1954 300 Area 327 building 700 Area B Reactor B Reactor Museum Association Battelle Boeing BRMA Cold War Dam Department of Energy DuPont Energy Northwest Hanford Kennedy Kennewick Organization School War Westinghouse