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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
Jerome Martin
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p class="MsoNormal">Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1<sup>st</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe it was earlier.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not originally.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: The first name was John—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he’s not.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what about Lyon?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What’s that?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, give or take.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In the US, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Ah!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, mainly that room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: 155 millimeters.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Maybe I should come back.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I came back in 2001.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Very interesting project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yep, that was the one.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you helped design—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And tested.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Interesting story.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I moved here in ’76.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Really?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I can imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We were trying to help them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay, just curious.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I heard about it of course.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But I’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Well, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I believe we did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I hope so.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The most lasting impact.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: You do?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I’m conducting an oral history with Jerome Martin on June 1<sup>st</sup>, 2016. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University, Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Jerome Martin about his experiences working at the Hanford site and his involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. And you—just wanted to use your legal name to start out with, but you prefer to be called Jerry, right?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Jerome Martin: Yes, I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Jerome’s a little too formal. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Just for the technical purposes. Sure. No more, we will not mention the name—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Again. [LAUGHTER] So for the record, you did an interview with the Parker Foundation sometime in 2010.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe it was earlier.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Or possibly earlier. And some of the Parker Foundation videos, as we know, were lost. And so this video is an attempt to recapture some of the information that would have been in that oral history, but also add some other information, and also to give you a chance to talk about your involvement with the Herbert M. Parker Foundation. So just as a introduction to whoever views this in the future. So why don’t we start in the beginning? How did you come to—you’re not from the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not originally.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: All right. How did you come to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a little quick history, I got my bachelor’s degree at San Diego State College and then I was a radiation safety officer at San Diego State for about three years. Then I had an opportunity to go to the University of Colorado in Boulder, where, again, I was a radiation safety officer and on the faculty of the physics department. After several years there, an excellent opportunity came up for me here at Hanford with Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. So I moved here in 1976, and had a great opportunity to work with many other more senior people here at Hanford that had been here since the beginning. One of those, of course, was Herbert M. Parker. He was former director of the laboratories under General Electric, and then retired, but stayed on with Battelle as a director. I had a few opportunities to interact with him, and was quite impressed. I have heard stories about, he was a rather demanding taskmaster. And I could kind of imagining myself trying to work for him, but it would have been a challenge.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What do you feel is important to be known about Herbert M. Parker for the historical record?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve had an opportunity to review many of his publications. They were quite professional and very well researched, and in many cases the leading authority on several topics. So I was very impressed by his publications. I didn’t have a direct opportunity to work for him, so I don’t know about his management style or other things. But that was the thing that impressed me the most, was his publications.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What topics did Dr. Parker write on—or do his research?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: His early professional career was in medical physics. He was at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for many years. Then he was called upon, as part of the Manhattan Project, to set up the safety program at Oak Ridge. He did that for about a year or so. Then he was called upon to do the same thing here at Hanford. So he came here and established the entire environmental safety and health program for Hanford. Of course he had all the right background to be able to do that, and he was able to recruit a number of really talented people to help him with that. So I think Hanford ended up with what could be known as the best environmental safety and health program, among all the early AEC and then DoE laboratories. One of the things that impressed me most by that program was the record keeping. And I had an opportunity to work on that in later years. But the way the record keeping was designed and set up and maintained was quite thorough. It was designed to be able to recreate whatever may have happened according to those records. It turned out to be very valuable in later years.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Who instituted that record-keeping? Was that Parker?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I don’t recall the name of the individual that set it up, although I know Ken Hyde was involved very early on. He may have been at the very origin of it. But I’m sure Parker certainly influenced the rigor with which that program was established. In later years, John Jech was manager of the record keeping program, and then my good friend, Matt Lyon, was the manager of that. I worked with Matt, then, on American National Standard Institute’s standard for record keeping. We incorporated into that standard virtually all of the fundamentals that Parker had established initially.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: The first name was John—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The second manager of records was John Jech. J-E-C-H.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if he’s still living?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he’s not.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what about Lyon?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Matt Lyon passed away about ten years ago, as did Ken Hyde.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What’s that?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Ken Hyde—I think they all three passed away about ten years ago.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, give or take.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you mentioned that the record keeping was designed to recreate an incident as it happened. Do you know of any such—or can you speak to any such times when that record keeping system was crucial into a safety issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The one that comes to mind is one of the more I guess infamous incidents here at Hanford. It occurred just around the time I arrived here in 1976. It was sometimes called the McCluskey accident out at the 231-Z Building. There was an explosion in a glovebox that resulted in very significant contamination of Mr. McCluskey by americium-241. And the response to that incident, and then all the following treatment of Mr. McCluskey was very well documented. In fact, those documents then became the basis for a whole series of scientific papers that described the entire incident and all the aspects of it. So that was one major case where excellent record keeping was very valuable.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Excellent. And what—I’m just curious now—what happened to Mr. McCluskey?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: He survived for about ten years after the accident. He initially had very severe acid burns and trauma. But he was very carefully treated for that. The americium contamination that he had was gradually eliminated—not eliminated, but reduced substantially. He survived for another ten years after that incident even though he had heart trouble. I know several people that assisted in his care, and it was quite remarkable what they were able to do and what he was able to do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did he ever go back to work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No, he was 65 at the time of the accident.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So he kind of went into medical retirement at that point. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Yeah, I can imagine. So you said you came in 1976.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And what did you—what was your first job, when you came to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I worked in what was called the radiation protection department, later called health physics department. My first assignment was called ALARA management. ALARA stands for maintain our radiation exposures as low as reasonably achievable. I would monitor the exposure records of Battelle workers, and watch for any that were the least bit unusually high, and then look for ways that we could reduce those exposures. And I monitored other things like average exposures and the use of dosimeters and things of that nature. The overall assignment was to generally reduce the workers’ radiation exposure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How successful do you feel that the department was in that effort?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think we were very successful, and it went on for many years, even after I had that assignment. I remember one time, looking at a report that DoE put out annually on radiation exposures over all the major DoE facilities. Those average exposures, highest individual exposures, and things of that nature. Battelle and Hanford had among the lowest averages of all the other DoE facilities. So, I believe it was a very effective ALARA program here at Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Do you know if that report was ever made publically available?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, those are published every year by DoE.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, great. I’ll have to find that. Sorry, just scribbling down some notes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: At one point, Battelle had a contract with the DoE headquarters to actually do the production of that report each year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And I was involved in the production of it—oh, three or four years, as I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. So you mentioned that you had moved on out of that program or department, so what—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right. Well, I started getting involved in management at kind of the bottom level. I was an associate section manager, and then I got an assignment as section manager for the radiation monitoring section. I was responsible for all the radiation monitors—or as they’re now called, radiation protection technologists—the radiation monitors for Battelle and two other of the contractors here at Hanford. It was kind of ironic that I was located in what used to be the 300 Area library, and my office was on the second floor. And my office was the former office of Herbert M. Parker, when he was director of laboratories.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was an honor to have that space, and recall memories of Mr. Parker.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow, that’s great. And how long did you do that for?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I did that two or three years, and then another opportunity came along in 1979—no actually, it was ’79, but I guess I’d been on that management job for about a year and a half. In September of ’79, which was about three months after the Three Mile Island accident, we had an opportunity to make a proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to provide support for their staff in emergency planning work. At that time, NRC was making a big push on all the power plants, all the nuclear power plants across the country to enhance their emergency planning programs. So we began about a ten-year project with NRC to supplement their staff. The NRC established the requirement for annual emergency exercises at each of the nuclear power plants, where they had to work up a scenario, and then they would activate their emergency response staff to demonstrate that they would know how to handle that accident scenario. We served as observers. We had teams of observers with the NRC staff. We did a total of 800 of those exercises over a ten-year period.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So we had a lot of staff out there, doing a lot of travel.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah. So that would have been—so you said for power, would that have been for all of the power reactors in the United States?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. There were 103 plants at the time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. Did you do any in foreign countries?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I didn’t personally, but we did have some staff that went to a similar kind of program with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and visited foreign nuclear power plants. Some in France, that I recall.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So you said 103 power plants?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In the US, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Actually, that was the number of reactors. There was a fewer number of plants, because many of them are two or more reactors at a site.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay so the 103 is the number of reactors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I believe that’s correct. At that time.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: How did Chernobyl affect your field and your work?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s an excellent question, because that was in this period. Of course, the Chernobyl accident happened in 1986, and I was working directly with NRC at that time. I was project manager on that NRC contract. When Chernobyl happened, there was an immediate reaction, and NRC had to study the Chernobyl accident as well as we could, and then determine what could be applied to US power reactors by way of improvements and emergency planning. One of my managers, Bill Bair, was part of a US delegation led by DoE and NRC to actually visit the Chernobyl area shortly after the accident, interact with the Russians, and do lessons learned that was turned into a series of DoE and NRC documents that tried to extract as much useful information as we could from Chernobyl and apply it here in the US.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right, because if I’m not mistaken, the design of the Chernobyl reactor—there were reactors of similar design in the United States.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Not exactly. The Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel. There were a few reactors in the US that also did not have containment vessels, but they had other safeguards. The N Reactor was one of those. Unfortunately, I would call it an overreaction of the US government to a reactor with no containment. Severe restrictions were put on N Reactor, and some re-design was required that ultimately led to the end of N Reactor. It’s interesting to note that at that point in time, which was about 1986, 1987, N Reactor had generated more electricity from a nuclear reactor than any other plant in the world. So it’s unfortunate it came to an early demise.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And—sorry, my ignorance here on the technical aspects. You said some of them don’t have a containment vessel. What does a containment vessel look like and what role does it play, and why would there would be reactors with one and without one?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, N Reactor went back to the early—the late ‘50s, I believe when it was designed. It was designed similar to the other reactors here at Hanford that were intended for production of plutonium. But N Reactor was a dual purpose, in that it also generated 800 megawatts of electricity. But it had a similar kind of design to what you see out at B Plant, for example. So it didn’t have the same kind of containment vessel that other modern pressurized water reactors or other nuclear power plants have that is designed in such a way that if there is reactor core damage, any radioactivity released can be contained and not released.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Or released in a very controlled fashion.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I see. Kind of like a clam shell that kind of covers the—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s basically—yeah, in many cases a spherical kind of containment.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Excellent. So after—obviously the demise of N Reactor, ’86, ’87, is kind of the end of operations—or I should say of product production—product and energy production on the Hanford site. So how did your job change after that? And what did you continue to do after the shutdown?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wasn’t directly affected by N Reactor shutting down. And the other production reactors had been shut down before that, so I wasn’t really directly involved in that. But I had yet another opportunity came up that turned out to be really a challenge for me. The Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas is the primary assembly and disassembly facility for nuclear weapons. At that time, it was managed by a company called Mason and Hanger. Mason and Hanger had that contract for many years, and DoE challenged them to rebid the contract. So Mason and Hanger reached out to Battelle for assistance in teaming on environmental health and safety. So my manager talked me into being involved, so I went down to Amarillo and visited the plant and worked with the team there on the proposal that had to be presented to DoE. And we won the contract. Of course in the fine print it said I then had to move there.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Ah!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it turned out great. By that time, my family was pretty well grown, kids were through college. So we moved down to Amarillo, and I went to work at Pantex. We really enjoyed that. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amarillo’s a very nice town, a lot of nice people. The work at Pantex was very challenging. I enjoyed that very much, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. So how long were you at the Pantex plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I was manager of the radiation safety department down there for three years, which was my original contract obligation. During that time, we were very closely scrutinized by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, which was an organization established by Congress to be a watchdog over DoE. Their method for watching DoE was to watch the contractors very closely. So they would scrutinize everything we did, and then challenge DoE if they found something. They pushed us in a way that was good, because one of the things they promoted was professional certification. I’m a certified health physicist, certified by the American Board of Health Physics. At the time at Pantex, I was the only one we had there. But the DNFSB pushed us to add more, so I got more of my staff certified. There was a similar program for technicians called the National Registry of Radiation Protection Technologists, and at the time, we had two of my staff that were registered with NRRPT. Again, they pushed us to promote more training. By the end of that three-year period, I think we had ten of our technologists registered and certified. So we really improved the credentials of our staff. We instituted some new programs, again, related to ALARA radiation reduction. Probably the most interesting or challenging day of my life occurred down there in 1994. We were working on disassembly of the W48 program. The W48 was a tactical weapon used in—that was deployed in Europe—it was never used. But it was a very small, cylindrical nuclear weapon designed to be shot out of a 155 millimeter howitzer, which is amazing just to think about. But the plutonium pit in this device was surrounded by high explosive. It turned out to be rather difficult to disassemble this particular design of nuclear weapon. It also turned out that the plutonium pit had a relatively high dose rate, compared to others. So the workers were getting some increased exposure to their hands in the process of working on this. So we were concerned about their extremity dose. So we worked up a method for doing a classified videotape of the disassembly operation, so that we could study each step in the process to find ways to improve worker safety. Providing shielding, remote tools, things of that nature. The process on this was to take the plutonium pit and high explosives and put it in liquid nitrogen bath for a period of time. Then bring it out and put it in a little tub-like, and pour hot water on it. The HE would expand rapidly and crack off. And for the most part, it worked very well. Well, there was this one particular pit that we were working on when we were doing the videotape for this study. Apparently the HE wasn’t coming off the way it should, and so they had to repeat this process over and over. They brought it out of the liquid nitrogen, poured hot water on it, and the plutonium—the cladding, the beryllium cladding on the plutonium pit actually cracked, due to the severe temperature change. The workers who were working on this were trained very carefully that if that cladding on the pit ever cracks, get out of there fast, so you avoid a plutonium exposure. So that happened. One of the technicians heard an audible crack and saw it on the surface of that pit. And they all evacuated immediately. They got just outside the door of this special facility, and they called our radiation safety office, and fortunately my three best technicians were standing there by the phone. They said, pit had cracked. And so they got over there as fast as they possibly could. They recognized the danger of having an exposed plutonium pit, and how that can oxidize and cause severe contamination very quickly. They decided to put on respirators to protect themselves, but they didn’t bother with any of the other protective clothing because they wanted to save time. So they made an entry where the cracked pit was, still there with the water bath on it, and the video shooting this picture. They took samples right on the crack and on the water and all around it. They managed to take that plutonium pit and get it into a plastic bag and then they doubled bagged it and then they triple bagged it and sealed it up. Then they came out. Of course, the samples revealed that there was indeed plutonium contamination coming out of that crack, but they had contained it very quickly. When we made a later entry to retrieve the video tape that was still running, and we looked at the timestamp on it. From the time the crack appeared until they had it in the bag was seven minutes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: That’s about as fast as you can possibly expect a response team to come in and secure a situation like that. And so, following that, of course we had the incident debriefing, and I had to chair that. But we very carefully went through and recorded every little thing that happened from the time they were working on the disassembly to the time they exited. Got that all documented, and then the videotape of course documented all of that. The scrutiny by Department of Energy, the Amarillo office, the Albuquerque office, Headquarters, any number of others—we had a lot of attention that day. It was a long, hard day at the office, but very exciting. Following that, we had to debrief many other investigation committees and others. But we had that videotape to rely on, and that just was invaluable. That’s my—that was probably the most exciting day of my life, down there. [LAUGHTER] Got a follow-up to that. That W48 weapon was designed by Livermore. They came in at a later time and did a post-mortem on that cracked pit. And when they did, we discovered that the amount of plutonium contamination there that was available for distribution had it not been contained, would have totally just made that facility useless. I mean, extremely expensive clean-up, if it ever got done.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Not just the room, but the entire facility?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, mainly that room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That room.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But it was a very big room, and a very valuable room, specially designed. But the quick response of our radiation safety technicians and getting that contained saved that room and millions of dollars in expense.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And so this was a weapon that was the size of a howitzer shell?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: 155 millimeters.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. And what is the—I don’t know if you know this—but what’s the explosive power of that—is it—I guess it could be—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it’s just like the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about 20-kiloton fission device. The plutonium pit is designed to implode and cause a super-critical reaction.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But fired out of a howitzer, instead of—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Fired out of a howitzer, perhaps 20 miles or something. And then you can somehow coordinate the careful detonation of this--</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: --device. It boggled my mind.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I guess that’s best that that was never ever—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s quite a large number of different nuclear weapons. Many of them were tactical weapons used in Europe—or deployed in Europe during the Cold War. Many other more modern ones are part of Polaris missiles and other large bombs that can be deployed by B-52s or B-2s.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. There’s quite a wide range of different models and designs. I didn’t know that at the time, but it’s fascinating. I remember one day standing in one of the disassembly rooms, and they had this nuclear weapon in a cradle standing there on the floor, and they had the top off of it. And I could just look down in the top of it. I couldn’t touch it, but I could look in there and just see the engineering in one of those things was just amazing. Just beyond belief.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I bet. I can only imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. But I’ve gone off on this nuclear weapons story and departed from Hanford.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Maybe I should come back.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think that’s a very interesting story. I certainly—I’ve also, like I said, heard of plenty of bombs—ICBMs, missiles, but I’d never quite heard of a howitzer-type fired weapon. But also just the fact that your team and your field was able to prevent a really nasty incident is pretty amazing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Right.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: It speaks to your profession and your skill.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, like I mentioned, the professional credentials. Two of the three technicians who responded were certified by NNRPT. And they had the right kind of training, knew what to do, did it very well.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I had an opportunity a year later to nominate them for a special DoE award for unusual—not heroism, but effective response. And they won the award that year.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. So how and when did you leave Pantex?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, the first time, was in ’96—no, I’m sorry, in ’93—and I had a special appointment back at DoE headquarters in Germantown. So I went back there for two years to work with the branch of DoE that was like an inspector general—the internal inspection branch, if you will. Very similar in scope to what the DNFSB—Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board—was doing. Scrutinizing all the DoE operations at the national labs and other facilities, and trying to always make improvements.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked with the DoE headquarters staff on many different audits that we did at other DoE labs. At the time, I specialized in dosimetry, both internal and external dosimetry, and other operational health physics parts of the program.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. So when did you come back to the Tri-Cities?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I had a couple other interesting assignments in there. After DoE headquarters, then I went back to Pantex for three more years. And then another opportunity came up on an old facility near Cincinnati that needed to be decommissioned—decontaminated and decommissioned. And I went to Oak Ridge first, worked with the Foster Wheeler Company on the design of what became the largest radon control building that had ever been done. I was the radiation safety officer for that project at Oak Ridge in the design effort. And then we moved to Cincinnati for a year and I worked at the Fernald facility in actually building this radon control facility. What we were trying to deal with were these large concrete silos that contained residual ore material from the Second World War. They have to go back to—when the Manhattan Project was trying to bring together the necessary uranium in addition to the plutonium that was produced here at Hanford, they were using a rich pitch blend ore that was coming from what was then called Belgian Congo in Africa. It was shipped from there up the Saint Lawrence River to a facility near Niagara Falls. And then it ended up being processed to extract as much uranium as possible. But there were these residuals. They ended up in these concrete silos near Niagara Falls, New York as well as this Fernald facility, just outside of Cincinnati. So we had three big concrete silos that—I don’t recall—they must have been 80 feet in diameter and 50 feet high. So they held a lot of uranium ore residuals. It contained a fair amount of radium, which gave off radon gas. This facility was located not too far from a residential area. So it became a greater concern for getting it cleaned up. We put together this radon control facility that had these huge charcoal beds and you could pipe—you could take the head gas off of this silo, pipe it into these charcoal beds where the radon would be absorbed, and then the clean air would circulate. So you could fairly rapidly reduce the concentration of radon inside the silo to much lower levels. In the process, the charcoal beds got loaded up by absorbing radon. There came a point where you had to heat up that charcoal to drive off the captured radon. We devised a clever scheme with four different beds where we could kind of keep one of them recirculating on all times and have the other three working.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you say drive off the captured radon, where would it be driven off?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Over to the next charcoal bed, which hadn’t yet been completely saturated.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh! But then eventually you still have charcoal that—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: but it decays with a 3.8 day half-life, and that was built into the plan, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if it was to escape, right, it would get people very—it would contaminate or get people sick, or--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, it was pretty carefully designed not to—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, but I’m saying that radon—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, if it escaped from the silo. If there was no control of it—a certain amount of radon was escaping from the silo. For the most part, it’s a light gas, it just goes up and the wind blows it and disperses it. So it was very difficult to even measure anything offsite. But there was that concern there that we were dealing with.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: But if enough of it was released at once, then there might have been an issue?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Like if the whole roof of the silo was suddenly removed and it all came out, that could be a problem, yeah.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. I didn’t realize it had such a short half-life.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. So I did that, what amounted to ten years of offsite assignments. About that time, my wife and I got tired of moving. So we came back to the Tri-Cities, and our kids are here. I came back to work at Battelle for another few years before I retired.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: When did you come back to Battelle?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I came back in 2001.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay. So then you worked for—it says you retired in 2006.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I retired about four years later. And the last major project I worked on was also very interesting. It was the project for customs and border protection. It was to install radiation portal monitors at seaports. This was shortly after 9/11, and there was a concern about dirty bomb material being imported by any means. We had one part of the project dealt with seaport, another part airports, and a third part postal facilities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So I worked on the seaports part, and I had the Port of Los Angeles was my assignment. Another one of us had Port of Long Beach, which is right next door, which are the largest seaports on the West Coast and have the largest number of shipping containers coming in. So we devised a method for monitoring those shipping containers as they were unloaded and making sure nothing was coming in that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did—oh, sorry.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Very interesting project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I don’t know if you can speak to this, but was anything caught by these monitors?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. But not dirty bomb material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Turns out they were so sensitive, they would detect any kind of elevated background radioactivity. For example, kitty litter is a little bit elevated in background. Any kind of stone product, and there are various granite and other stone products imported from different places. Those had a high enough background activity that they would trigger our monitors. So we would run all these containers through a set of monitors, and any that triggered that amount would then be sent over to a secondary monitor, where they’d examine it more carefully, verify what was actually in the containers, sometimes inspect them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So recently our project staff got a tour of some of the facilities at HAMMER. And I believe we saw one of those monitors. Would that have been the same?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Mm-hm. Big yellow columns?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that they run it through.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yep, that was the one.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: So you helped design—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We helped design—oh, I didn’t really get involved in design. That was done by some real smart people out here at Battelle. But I was onsite trying to get them installed.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: And tested.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow. That’s really—that’s fascinating.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah, it was. I had a chance to do a lot of fun things when I worked at Battelle.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like maybe I need to go get a job over there. Maybe they need a traveling historian. So, where—what have you been doing since you retired?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, for about five years, I worked for Dade Moeller, which is kind of a spinoff company from Battelle. And they had a major contract with NIOSH—National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health—as part of an employee compensation program for radiation workers. Initially, the way this was set up was we got the actual radiation exposure records for former employees and examined their measured radiation exposure, and then did some other calculations that would tend to take into account anything else that they might have been exposed to but was somehow not measured on the dosimeter and many other factors to kind of add up their maximum possible radiation dose. And then that was compared—this is where it got a little complex. There are many different types of cancer that can be caused by radiation at a high enough level. Some types of cancer can be caused by a radiation level lower than some others. So it depended on what type of cancer the individual had as to which—how we measured their maximum possible radiation exposure to the likelihood that that cancer was caused by radiation. We did a careful calculation using probability and determined that if their cancer was at least 50% probable that it was caused by radiation, then they were granted an award. Well, we did that for several years in a very careful, scientific way that was well-documented. Then it became political. A lot of former workers, then, applied for another category within this overall compensation program that they called Special Exposure Cohort. Which meant that it didn’t matter how much radiation exposure they had, if they had the right type of cancer, they could get the award. And it’s kind of degenerated that way. But for many years, I think we did it right. I also had an opportunity to work on another part of that project where we did what we call the technical basis documents, where we reconstructed the history of how radiation exposure records were developed and maintained at each of these different sites. Every one varied a little bit. I did the one for the technical basis document for Pantex in Amarillo, because I was familiar with that. But I got to do several other interesting sites, one of which was Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa. Going there and interviewing some of these old-timers and looking at their old records, I found that there was a chemistry professor at what was then Iowa State University. He was called upon by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to help them improve their methods for extracting uranium metal. The old process that had been used by the Curies and other early scientists was really quite inefficient. But this professor developed a method used in a calcium catalyst that was very effective. He was able to purify uranium metal much quicker and in larger quantities. The story was that he would have to get on the train every Sunday afternoon and go to Chicago for the meeting with the Manhattan Project and report on the progress of his research and so on. One week after successfully isolating an ingot of uranium metal, he took it with him in his briefcase. Went into the meeting with Manhattan Project and clunked it on the desk, and passed it around. He said that this is a new method for producing substantial quantities of uranium metal. All the scientists around the table kind of poked at it and scratched it and so on and didn’t believe it was really uranium, but it was. And they finally decided that he had made a great breakthrough, so they sent him back to Iowa and said, make a lot more, fast. And he did. So he had the material they needed, then, for the Manhattan Project.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Interesting story.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. So how did you become involved with the Parker Foundation?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: About ten years ago—almost ten years ago—my friend Bill Bair and Ron Kathren and a couple others on the Parker Board invited me to participate. Matt Moeller was chairman of the board at that time—invited me to participate, and I just joined in, and found it very rewarding. I really appreciate what the Parker Board does in the memory of Herb Parker and in the sense of scholarships and other educational programs. So it’s a pleasure to contribute to that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great, great. You moved in 1975 or ’76?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I moved here in ’76.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: ’76. And you mentioned children. Were your children born here, or did you move here with them?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: My oldest daughter was born in San Diego, and my younger daughter was born in Boulder, Colorado.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: So they were six and eight, I think, when we moved here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: What were your impressions of Richland in the mid-70s when you moved? Did you live in Richland or did you--?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We did. Yeah, we lived just a few blocks from WSU here.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: In North Richland. It was a very different community, but one that I came to know and respect. Because at that time, education was really paramount in the minds of parents and the school system. And my wife was a teacher. So we really took an interest in that. My kids got a really good education here in Richland. Went to Hanford High, and then did well in college. One of the main features of Richland at that time, I think, was a superior education program. Some of the other history of Richland with old government housing, and then we got a new house, and things like that are entirely different, but also very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And is that what you kind of are meaning when you say it was a different community? I guess I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. How—in what ways was it different?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, a large part of Richland was originally government housing, and you only had to drive through town, you could see all the evidence of that. And then on the north side of Richland, they had opened up—beginning in 1965, I believe—development of newer private housing. We got here just in time to get in on a new house, and worked out fine for us.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great. Was there—being next to a site that was primarily involved in product production, plutonium production—was there a different feeling about the Cold War in Richland per se than anywhere else you had lived in the United States at that time?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There definitely was different feelings about the Cold War and living anywhere near a nuclear power plant. I remember when we were working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at many different reactor sites around the country. In many cases we would have public meetings to introduce the local folks to what we were trying to do to improve the emergency planning. There was a lot of concern about living anywhere near a nuclear power plant just a few years after TMI. I tried to explain to people how I live within 30 miles of nine nuclear power plants. But I understood radiation. I understood the risk, and I understood what could go wrong or how to deal with it. And it didn’t concern—didn’t bother me that much to live here. I found that to be generally true of a lot of people in Richland that were part—working at Hanford and were well-educated. They understood the risk and they could deal with it. Whereas many other people were just afraid. And I attribute that to what I call now about a 71-year deliberate misinformation program on the part of mass media to scare people about radiation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I like that. I’m writing it down. How do you feel that the—do you feel that the ending of the Cold War changed your work at all? I guess the reason why I ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: --these questions about the Cold War is because it was the impetus for much of the continued production of the material.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yeah. I was in Germany in 1988, just before the Berlin Wall came down. I was also there in Berlin in 1984, and we actually crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin on a special tour.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Really?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite amazing. I was in Berlin for a meeting of the International Radiation Protection Association. I took my whole family; it was a tremendous adventure for them. But we were able to be part of a special US Army tour that went through Checkpoint Charlie. I think they did this once a week. And we had a little tour of East Berlin while it was still under the control of the USSR. We visited their Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they had a little ceremonial changing the guard there. And we visited the square in Berlin where Hitler had burned the books that one night in 1939. And then we visited a huge Russian war memorial, and there was a building there where the Germans had surrendered in 1945. There was quite a story about that. But I was really impressed with this huge Russian war memorial. There were five mass graves that each held 100,000 soldiers. It was done in kind of the Russian style, with statues and other honorary symbols to clearly show their respect for the lives of all those soldiers. But that was an impressive sight. But I was there again in 1988 just before the Berlin Wall came down, and you could kind of see the end of the Cold War coming. So it was a great opportunity that I had, working for Battelle, being able to travel like that, and do many exciting things.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you get to ever talk or meet with any of your counterparts on the Russian side?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: After the Cold War ended. And what was that like, to finally work with what had been considered the enemy?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: It was quite unusual. I was scheduled to go to Russia a week after 9/11. It almost got canceled, but I managed to go. I was giving—they were having a conference for young scientists and trying to introduce them to international concepts of radiation safety. So I gave my paper and four others that we did to that group. It was located at what was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos, their design facility. There weren’t very many Americans had been in there up to that point. So I was watched very closely. [LAUGHTER] And not allowed to see much, actually. But it was a very interesting exchange. The papers I was presenting were prepared in both English and Russian. And then we also did what they called a poster presentation, where we had a big poster with diagrams and everything—again translated to Russian. So we were able to put these up at this conference for these young scientists. They, I think, got a lot out of it because it was in their language so it was easy for them to understand. Working with an interpreter was a new experience for me. I would give this oral presentation, so I’d say one sentence and the pause. The interpreter would repeat that. I’d say the next sentence, and—kind of an awkward way to do an oral presentation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I can imagine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But their hospitality was very good. This was in 2001. So the Cold War had been over for quite a few years. But we were trying to establish better relations. I think it was quite effective in doing that. I had another opportunity to work with Russian scientists on an NRC program, again where NRC was trying to provide training to their equivalent Russian inspectors for nuclear power plants and explain to them some of the ways that they did inspections, things they looked for, how they documented findings and things like that. We had four Russian inspectors and their interpreter come over from Moscow. I was their host in Washington, DC, and we worked with them there with the NRC headquarters for a week, providing training. And then we brought them out to Idaho to the Idaho National Lab, north of Idaho Falls, and went to a large hot cell facility at Idaho. A hot cell is where they have a heavily shielded enclosure with mechanical arms that do things on the inside. It was quite a sophisticated facility and somewhat unlike what the Russian counterparts were used to. But it was a good learning exercise for them. We kind of went through a demonstration of how we would do an inspection—a safety inspection. So, I had those kind of opportunities to interact with Russian scientists and found that very exciting. Very interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Did you find that there was anything that you had learned from them at all? Or do you feel that the US was much more advanced in radiation protection and health physics?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I kept my ears open when I was talking to them, but they didn’t reveal much. [LAUGHTER] So, we didn’t pick up much that way.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We were trying to help them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Right. Were you at Hanford during the Russian visit to Hanford when they toured the Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: No. That was after I retired, I think.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay, just curious.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I heard about it of course.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I’m sure. That must have been a pretty big deal from the standpoint of both countries. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think there’s one thing I remember from when I did this interview the first time that I wanted to mention.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I’ve been talking about all the varied experiences I had, and excellent opportunities over the years. But I think one of the perhaps most impressive things that I was able to do was to be able to hire several good people into my organization. I won’t mention names, but there were several that I call superstars that are now leaders in the field. I was able to bring them in right out of college or from another job, and hire several really good people that certainly enhanced our program, and then gave them great opportunities to grow and expand. Like I say, they’re now leaders in the field. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s great. Maybe you can give me their names off camera and we could contact them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I think they’re already on your list. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Oh, okay, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: But I’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Well, good.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: We’ll do that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: They should be. Tom, did you—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tom Hungate: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Emma, did you have anything?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Emma Rice: No, I’m fine.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Okay. Well, I think that’s it. Jerry, thank you so much.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, that was fun. Did we stay on target?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I believe we did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I wandered a little. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: That’s okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: There’s some stories there that might be interesting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: I think the stories help keep the oral histories—they have a human-centered focus and they’re interesting for people to watch.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I hope so.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: And I think there might be a couple things that merit some more research in there that personally, for me, I’d like to find out some more about.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Especially the howitzer thing.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: One thing I’d just like to ask—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Sure.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: You’ve been involved in a lot of things over a broad range of time and experiences and I just kind of wonder what you would feel is the one—maybe the item or two that you’ve worked on that will leave the most lasting impact?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: The most lasting impact.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Or that you wished had been developed more that didn’t quite complete, you’d like to see more work done on it, it was either defunded or it was—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Well, I’m thinking of several different things now. I’ll just have to think it through. The work we did with NRC to improve emergency planning on nuclear power plants I think was very effective. And that’s still being maintained today. Work we did with DoE at Pantex on nuclear weapons. You mentioned the end of the Cold War, that’s when many of these tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were brought back and declared obsolete, and so we were doing a massive disassembly operation on those. I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and found it fascinating. We implemented some methods at Pantex that I think are still in use in the maintenance programs that they do now. But we were able to, I think, substantially improve on radiation safety at Pantex. Certainly to the point where we were finally blessed by DNFSB and DoE. I think the quality of that program has been maintained. There’s several other projects that I’ve worked on over the years, but I guess there’s no one thing that stands out that I would be concerned about that it was defunded or ended or somehow went downhill. I’m sure that’s happened, but I haven’t kept track of everything.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Being as nuclear power and nuclear weapons have different objectives, and you mentioned this retirement of a lot of nuclear weapons, do you feel that nuclear weapons still have a role to play in security—</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: I do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: You do?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Martin: Yes. Because the Russians still have a lot of them, China has some, the French and English have a few. It’s what I call the mutual deterrent, which is a term that’s been used. It just means that we don’t ever want to use one again, but if any one of those countries had some kind of an unbalanced advantage, it could be used. So if we have this mutual assured deterrence, it keeps that in balance. So it’s important to maintain that stockpile.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Interesting. Thank you.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Hungate: Okay.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Franklin: Great.</p>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:02:44
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
B Plant
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1976-2006
2001-2006
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Herbert M. Parker
Ken Hyde
John Jech
McCluskey
Mason and Hanger
Dade Moeller
Bill Bair
Ron Kathren
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
2001-today
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 Jerome Martin
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Jerome Martin 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
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06-01-16
Rights
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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
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-15-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
Provenance
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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.
300 Area
B Plant
Battelle
Cold War
Department of Energy
General Electric
HAMMER
Hanford
Livermore
Los Alamo
Los Alamos
Manhattan Project
N Reactor
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Park
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
River
Ron Kathren
Safety
Sun
War
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2Fbab9aaad909435686a751bcbe39d438b.JPG
66ab21e45337864e82e518e34179747c
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F1397d9eb82d20248c32d7079d03d7288.mp4
f4cbd8641a1b1edcb6e4447010862c8d
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
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
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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
Maxwell Freshley
Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Douglas O’Reagan: First off, would you please say and spell your name for us?</p>
<p>Maxwell Freshley: My legal name is Maxwell Freshley, F-R-E-S-H-L-E-Y. Not many people around here know me by that name. I go by Max.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, thanks. My name is Douglas O’Reagan. I’m conducting an oral interview history here on January 11<sup>th</sup>, 2016. This interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. And I will be talking with Mr. Freshley about his experiences working at the Hanford site. To start us off, would you tell us maybe some of your life up, before you came to this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I graduated from the University of Portland in 1951 with a degree in physics. I was offered a tech grad position on the site here. At the time, it was operated by General Electric Company, and this was—I started work here in June of 1951. Okay. So I guess prior to coming here, my having been raised in Portland, and that’s where I went to school, my extended experiences were rather limited. That’s kind of what happened. So I came here in June of 1951, fresh out of school, I wasn’t married at the time. First place I lived was in the Army barracks in north Richland. I can’t tell you about how long I lived there, but while I was living in north Richland in the barracks, I did not have a car. So being kind of isolated out north was a bit of a challenge. So as soon as I could find somebody who would loan me some money, I bought a brand new Ford and that solved a lot of my problems. And then sometime during that first year, I was moved to one of the dorms in Richland. I think the dorms were located on Lee Boulevard. It was close to—I’m calling it a drugstore. But it was kind of like a Payless. I don’t think that was the right name at that time. But they had a restaurant—they served food in this drugstore. So that’s where I would eat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Had you heard about Hanford before you came here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Not really. I really hadn’t heard about it. It was all secret, you know?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Were you aware of the sort of connection with the atomic bomb before you got here?</p>
<p>Freshley: I’d have to say I was not. Although while I was still going to school—still in school—when was the Nagasaki ignited?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: ’45, I believe?</p>
<p>Freshley: ’45?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I think so.</p>
<p>Freshley: That—oh, okay.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It was the very end of the Second World War.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. Well, I might’ve heard of that. Yeah.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was your first impression of Richland and this area?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] First impression was living in the barracks out in north Richland-- [LAUGHTER] was not too great. Of course, my first impression was it was darn hot here, coming here in June. It was very warm. My future wife and her mother brought me to Richland from Portland and dropped me off. [LAUGHTER] So things kind of went from there.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. So we were going to ask about where you were living, but we already addressed that to some degree. What was life like in the barracks?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh. I would say very basic. Of course, in the dorm rooms that were assigned, you always had a roommate that you lived with. So I became, of course, very familiar with my roommates. When I moved from the barracks to Richland, I had a different roommate. So I made acquaintances with two people like that. They were both scientists, so we got along really well. In fact, one of them is still living in Richland.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What kind of work did you do at Hanford, and where on the site did you work?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, first of all, I worked in 300 Area in 3706 Building. I was—they assigned me a position in the Graphite Group. We were studying graphite, the moderator in the reactors. One of the things that was going on at the time—and I can’t tell you what reactor it was—but the graphite core was swelling. It was—I don’t know if it had come in contact yet with the upper shield, but it was growing. I was assigned to two people in the Graphite Group. We went and extracted samples of graphite from the core of this reactor. The thing that they had set up to do that, of course, was already here. So we were extracting samples—core samples. What the purpose of my job was to determine the annealing temperature of the graphite, so that if they raised the temperature in the core to a point where graphite annealing started occurring, then the core would shrink back and not interfere with the top shield. So I think they were looking for somebody—[LAUGHTER] I won’t say it. But anyway, I was assigned the position or job of taking these graphite samples and investigating the annealing temperature. What we used was a Fresnel diffractometer. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that, but interference rings from this interferometer would be displayed. It was my job to count the rings. It was a very tedious job. I’m sure that these two fellas didn’t want to do that, so they found me, and I did it. These rotations were—honestly I can’t remember whether they were three months or six months, but you would rotate from one position to another. I don’t remember if you could choose your positions—your rotations—I guess it probably depended on whether or not there was something available or not to go to. So I fulfilled my position in the Graphite Group. I didn’t want to stay in the Graphite Group, so I moved on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Before we move on, I have a quick question for you. This is a little bit off-script, but I have an undergraduate degree in physics.</p>
<p>Freshley: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I was reading a while back that when you started heating up the reactors, it caused that expansion to go back, and that sounds like what you’re describing.</p>
<p>Freshley: Mm-hm.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: But what is annealing?</p>
<p>Freshley: It’s heating to a temperature where the damage caused by the neutron radiation would be annealed physically. So the core would shrink back. But you had to get it up to a certain temperature, and you didn’t want to overheat it, because if you get it too hot, then the core—the graphite would oxidize. That would not be good. But I think the cores were enclosed in an argon atmosphere, as I remember.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It just surprised me, of course—I expected you get something hot, it expands. But now we’re saying you get it hot and it shrinks!</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, that’s right. But when you’re looking at the diffraction rings on the interferometer, you can tell by the movement of the rings when you are reaching the annealing temperature. So either they—and I can’t honestly remember the details here, whether the rings did not move as fast, or whether they might have even changed direction.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: So I had an early experience with a graphite-moderated production reactor.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it—you said you moved on from graphite to something else?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh yeah. My second assignment was in the metallurgy laboratory in 234-5 Building. 234-5 Building now is known as—god. Hm. Plutonium—it’s the one that you read a lot--</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Plutonium Finishing Plant?</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon me?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is it the plutonium finishing?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, Plutonium Finishing Plant where the plutonium buttons were received and machined to a hockey-type shape. Well, they were—actually, they were reduced to form the metal, and I was not involved in that. But I was in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, which was at one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. I don’t think there are many or any people left around who know of that. I can’t think of anybody that I worked with during that period who’s still around. But we had a Plutonium Metallurgy Lab, and my manager was a very nice fella. This, now, was in the early ‘50s. One thing that he wanted me to do—and I don’t think that what I did was original research, because I think all of the original research was probably done at Los Alamos, which was the renowned weapons facility. He wanted me to investigate the low temperature phase changes in plutonium. So what I did—and that’s important because phase changes in plutonium or any metal creates a dimensional change. And a dimensional change is not something that you want in a weapon or a bomb, because it interferes with the efficiency of the bomb. So here I was, fresh out of school and didn’t know from up. Anyway, I put together what’s called a differential thermal analysis apparatus. Are you familiar with that?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I know the individual terms.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. [LAUGHTER] So that’s what I did. I ran low temperature phase studies on plutonium—pure plutonium to detect these low temperature phase changes, which were very—since they were low temperature, they were very difficult to pick up, because there wasn’t much energy exchange during the phase change. Then, since that was not something you would want in a weapon or a bomb, small alloy additions were added to the plutonium to stabilize the low temperature, so you didn’t have these low temperature changes. All of this at the time was quite classified, which make it extra interesting, I guess. But when I went out to 234-5 Building in the plutonium lab, we were—there were three or four of us—we were assigned a car. So we had a car that we could go back and forth in, to work. That made it pretty nice, because we didn’t have to ride the bus and all of that. Then—this is something else that I doubt very much that anyone knew about at the time. It was the fabrication of plutonium parts for artillery shells. We cast plutonium in what was known as the 231-Z Building. We didn’t do it in the 234-5 Building. 231 was just across the street. In that building, I was not involved in the casting or the machining, but the parts were machined in that building. Then they were brought over to 234-5 Building in the Plutonium Metallurgy Lab. Because plutonium would oxidize and so on—so my job was to produce pure nickel coatings. But I don’t mean coatings like were attached. We used bismuth, which has a low melting temperature and it’s stable, to machine the exact replica of the plutonium part. Then, my job was to make—with electroplated nickel onto this bismuth—and then the bismuth was melted away. My job was to enclose the plutonium parts in nickel. So I had to do that in a vacuum. At first I had to do the electroplating. Then I had to put the nickel—what—the nickel cover, if you want—on the plutonium part, under vacuum, and solder a seal around the edge to make it—so it wouldn’t contact the air. And then it wouldn’t be as—you wouldn’t have to worry so much about contamination. But it had to be done in an atmosphere where, after the nickel part was put on the plutonium part, I sealed it with the vacuum and then it was not contaminated. The interesting part about that—one of the interesting parts—is that we were doing this for the Livermore National Lab, who was also at the time at a weapons facility. There were two: Los Alamos and Livermore. We were doing this for Livermore. As soon as the parts were finished, and I finished them, there would be a representative from Livermore waiting for the part. These parts, at times, were handed off, out the back door of 234-5 Building to this individual, who then took them to town, to the airport. I presume then, they were flown to Livermore. These tests at the time were conducted in the South Pacific—Eniwetok Islands. I never knew anything about the results. [LAUGHTER] Or what happened. But I suspect that these days we have artillery shells with plutonium weapons involved.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you were working on all these—all these different processes, what sort of team were you working—were you working mostly on an independent sub-project, or did you have other people you were sort of working with day-to-day?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, when I did the differential thermal analysis, it was me. And when I was enclosing the plutonium parts in these nickel shells, that was pretty much me. Yeah. The group was small. I would guess—let’s see, there was—oh, three, four, five—I suspect there were less than ten people in the whole group. The machinist—there were two machinists—I guess I shouldn’t say who they were, but—they did very well—one of them did very well in the Tri-Cities. He had a big vision and—</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I ask, because some of what you’re describing sounds—at least to my sort of ignorant ears—like applied chemistry as well as applied physics. Did you have a chemistry background, or was that not really necessary for what you were working on?</p>
<p>Freshley: I did not have a chemistry background other than what you normally get in a four-year program. I did not have a metallurgy background, either. You know? So that all took—I had to get acquainted with that aspect of the world, and I found it to be very interesting. Later on in my life, I was sorry that I probably hadn’t taken metallurgy.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: How much were you instructed specifically what to do versus sort of innovating yourself or figuring stuff out as you go?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I’m sure that my manager—he had a degree from Montana School of Mines in Metallurgy. He was a very nice person. He—I’m sure I got instruction and help from him, because I needed it. Here’s this 21-year-old kid, just out of school, doesn’t know metallurgy from up. But I guess I was successful and it worked out.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Let’s see. Could you describe a typical workday within those first—you worked there for a long period of time overall, is that right? How long were you working at Hanford overall?</p>
<p>Freshley: Overall?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] I started in 1951 and I retired in 1993. Then I consulted for a period after that. So you figure out the years. The first 14 years were with GE, then Battelle came in ’65, and I transferred to Battelle. I had the choice at that point to transfer to either Battelle or Westinghouse. Westinghouse was focused on the FFTF, and the development of that reactor. But I chose Battelle.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Why did you choose Battelle?</p>
<p>Freshley: I don’t know. I think they were interested in things that I found fascinating. So I switched to Battelle, and have never been sorry. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So when you were describing—is that amount of time that you were describing up to the end of your time at GE? Or was there still more that you were working on at GE before, or subsequent to—you were describing the different plutonium products.</p>
<p>Freshley: I haven’t gotten to the end of GE yet. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay, great. I’d love to hear more.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. And then I got out—I was moved—I got into other things besides plutonium metallurgy. I might say that one of the—while I was at the plutonium lab, one of the technicians was working in a glovebox—do you know what a glovebox is?—that exploded. And it totally, totally contaminated the lab with plutonium. So we spent—the group—spent a lot of time decontaminating that room, and everything in it. We were successful enough that the walls were repainted to secure the plutonium contamination and everything. But then—I don’t know why I changed—but I stayed in 234-5 Building, and maybe—I don’t know, three, four, five years, possibly. Then I got involved in light-water reactor fuel development. That’s where I basically spent the rest of my career. In the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction. We did—in those days, you were given—at least, in my case, you were given a lot of flexibility to do new things. That was really neat. Then—I didn’t write down the date, but in the late ‘50s, PRTR was under construction, and there was the second International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. We contributed to that publication—there were several publications. I didn’t get to go to the conference, but we contributed to that. Then I got involved in plutonium recycling in thermal reactors. I don’t know if you read this morning’s paper: there was an article there about a plutonium fuel—well, it’s called MOX—mixed oxide: plutonium oxide and uranium oxide, a mixture of fuel. This was at Savannah River, and they were building—or are supposedly building a facility for fabricating mixed oxide fuel for light-water reactors. But there have been some problems there, and it’s way behind schedule and over cost or whatever. But that doesn’t affect me. So I’m not involved in that. But anyway, I got involved in, like I say, fuel development—plutonium fuel development for light-water reactors. We had the liberty of doing a lot of different things. One of them was—oh, when we—at first, we found diluents for the plutonium. We irradiated and tested many diluents for plutonium. It had to be diluted—I mean, you can’t use pure plutonium. So I got into that, and we conducted lots and lots of testing of different diluents for plutonium in the MTR and ETR in Idaho—Materials Test Reactor and the Engineering Test Reactor in Idaho. There was a lot of that, and the post-radiation examination was done in the 324 Building, where the major contamination still exists that they have to remove. It’s in the ground, and it’s a major decon project right now with whoever the contractor is, I don’t know. Anyway, we did a lot of testing in MTR and ETR with diluents. We developed a plutonium aluminum alloy spike enrichment element for PRTR. That was one of the activities. An aluminum plutonium spike element—excuse me—is only for spike enrichment in the core. These are spaced around for different neutronic effects. And the reason—it’s a difficult concept, and I don’t know how we got started on that, exactly, because the coefficient of thermal expansion of aluminum with a little bit of plutonium in it is a lot different than the Zircaloy cladding in which it is enclosed. So there were problems with that. Then—ah, let’s see—then I got into recycling the plutonium in thermal reactors, and that was a major government initiative to dispose of plutonium that was no longer needed. So we made mixed oxide fuels of different types. One of the types that seemed attractive at the time was a vibrationally compacted mixture of plutonium and uranium. That is a difficult thing to achieve, because we had to make plutonium—mixed oxide shot, and we vibrated it into the long rods. I remember setting up a shot tower in the basement of 326 Building to make uranium shot. That didn’t work out too good. We didn’t put any plutonium in 326 Building.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Is this still the late ‘50s or have we gotten into the early ‘60s yet?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well this would be the late ‘50s. Well, we’re getting into the ‘60s, though, yeah. We did irradiation tests of aluminum plutonium spike elements in PRTR. I can’t remember what the plutonium concentration was, but then we started working on VIPAC, or vibrationally compacted fuel. It seemed like it would have advantages, because you’re not working with the small centered pellets. You can just pour the fissionable material into the tubes and VIPAC—vibrationally compact—it. So that—we did a lot of work on that, on VIPAC fuel, because we thought it would have an advantage fabrication-wise. But it had disadvantages, too, of course. You couldn’t compact it to the density that you would get with the centered pellet. There was another concern about it, and that is: fuel elements and reactors, the cladding fails from time to time. Still does. I think they suspect that there is a cladding failure in the Columbia Generating Station now. We needed to look at how they would perform with a cladding rupture. So we performed a test in PRTR in what was known as the Fuel Element Rupture Test Facility, FERTF. We were brave.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It sounds dangerous!</p>
<p>Freshley: We put together a test element. The elements in PRTR were 19 rod clusters—I forget how long, but quite long. So what we did--we were adventuresome—we put a mixed oxide fuel element in PRTR, but first we drilled a hole in the cladding. John Fox, who you’ve interviewed, still can’t imagine that we did something like that. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: This probably couldn’t happen today [INAUDIBLE]</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, no. No way. Anyway, in 1966, we had that experiment in PRTR, and everything was going pretty well until they started cycling the reactor power a little bit. Well, from then on, things went from bad to worse. The cladding failed, but I mean, other than the small hole that we had drilled in it, it ruptured for over quite a distance. When it did that, it swelled, and it came in contact with the pressure tube of the FERTF. It caused that to fail also. So this made a horrible mess in PRTR. The reactor was shut down for I don’t know how long during the cleanup and the recovery from that. I can’t remember—I have some pictures if you’re interested—whether or not we were operating with fuel melting at the time. Because we wanted to get as much heat out of the element—or out of the rods as we could. Now, uranium melts at a little over 2,800 degrees centigrade. So we did a lot of work with not only VIPAC fuel—fuel melting in VIPAC fuel, but also in pellet fuel. Of course, you don’t do that sort of thing in real life. In a commercial light-water reactor—I don’t know what the maximum operating temperatures are in the uranium pellets, but it’s a long ways from melting, I guarantee you.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So did you get the data that you wanted from this rupture test?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, don’t do it. Yeah, and that was kind of actually the end of VIPAC fuel interest. It would definitely not have been commercially viable to have something like that going on in a power reactor. Of course, we learned what the rupture behavior—probably the worst case of what a ruptured VIPAC fuel might do in real life. So that was kind of the end of VIPAC fuel elements. But it was interesting! A really interesting thing to work with and try and develop. We had various—came up with various schemes for compacting UO2 and MOX with using a Dynapac machine, which is a high-energy compaction machine, to form particles. The ideal particle would have been a sphere in a varying size range, so you can maximize the density during VIPACing. But it didn’t work out. And I didn’t get fired. [LAUGHTER] But there were a lot of experiments. Also with looking at the transient behavior of VIPAC fuel, we even conducted some tests in a test reactor. You are placing pure PUO2 particles next to the cladding. Then doing a transient power test on that to see what kind of behavior you would get: how the PUO2 particle would behave. This was done in a reactor in Idaho called SPERT—I can’t tell you what the acronym stands for right now, but it was an interesting exercise. Had some—maybe the reactor was in San Jose; I’m not sure. Anyway, I had some companions who were working for GE; we worked together on that sort of thing. But then, this would have been in 1975, ’76. The light-water reactor power industry wanted to go to higher burnups. That is, leave the fuel in the reactor longer, so they would have longer times between maintenance shutdowns. At the time, the maintenance shutdowns were probably a year or less. So what happened when they went to higher temperatures and higher burnups, the fuel column in—these are ten or 12 feet long rods—would shorten. The fuel column, then, would shrink—would settle. So that caused a great deal of consternation in the light-water reactor power industry, because they had these voids, then, at the top of the fuel columns. Something we called the irradiation-induced densification occurred. So then there was a big effort, commercially, to find solutions to that, so we had—there was what was called a fuel densification program to solve this problem. The fuel industry—let’s see, how was this—they could not tolerate the core shrinking, and then that led to an understanding, or an investigation of N Reactor densification—just the neutron activity. But then they wanted to go to higher burnups. So they started leaving voids in the pellets to accommodate the fission products associated with the high burnup. That didn’t work out to well, either, because of the column shrinking. So that’s when we launched, or got into looking at the fuel densification behavior. The fuel vendors, then, came up with adding materials into the fuel—god, I can’t think of the name now—that would disappear on the high temperature centering of the pellet, leaving voids—controlled voids in the pellets. And they do that today. So the High Burnup Effect Program was a big program here at the lab for quite a long period of time. As a result of that, the fabricators reduced, by using—I can’t think of the name—reduced the density to accommodate the fission—oh, then they put in pore formers. And we, as the lab, were instrumental in coming up with suitable pore formers that would disappear upon centering, during the centering process, to leave these voids in the fuel pellets to accommodate the fission products. As a result of that, this proved to be very satisfactory. It resulted in a stable fuel column and the achievable burnups were increased significantly. You’re probably aware of the fact, now, that the Columbia—the reactor, generating—the Columbia Generating Station, now, can go on a two-year cycle. Meaning they don’t have to shut down for maintenance every year; they can go two years. So the achievement of satisfactory high burnup in reactor fuel was made. All of the other reactors, now—light-water reactors—use that technique. And in fact, as a result of that, the NRC—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—has imposed a requirement that they test the thermal stability of centered pellets by exposing them to a heat treatment so they don’t shrink any more. Or the shrinkage would be very small. So we were instrumental in coming up with this out-of-reactor thermal test to test the stability, if you will, of the pellets.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: You mentioned working with the light-water reactor industry. Were you working with different groups outside of the Hanford Site and outside of Battelle at that point, or was it still focused within the company?</p>
<p>Freshley: I would say that the company, Battelle, the lab, was instrumental in these investigations. EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, was a partner. In fact, they were kind of the driving force helping us put together a joint program where we had seven other contributors—financial sponsors to this program. We had meetings frequently on the progress of this effort. These seven sponsors came from all over the world: Japan, France, England—of course, the commercial operators in the United States were members. So we had this rather large, difficult to manage international program to develop these advanced fuels for high burnup.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So this wasn’t classified, or was it more of a sharing agreement with [INAUDIBLE] Not classified then?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, it wasn’t classified. Well, maybe there might have been some—not security, but because the seven sponsors of this program were—they were paying money, you know? And contributing, and they wanted to protect their interests.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: More like trade secrets, then, rather than—</p>
<p>Freshley: Pardon?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: So, more like trade secrets, then, rather than confidentiality.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah, but I’d say, most of the—in the United States, the utilities that were operating light-water reactors contributed to this. Another contributor or sponsor was Germany. I can’t remember all of them. That made it real interesting. We had these technical reviews and meetings all over the world. So that made it kind of neat.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: Yeah. But the program was very successful. I think I have some documents that describe it, if you’re interested.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah, absolutely.</p>
<p>Freshley: Okay. And then—I’m not covering this too well—I thought my notes would be more complete but they’re not. [LAUGHTER] Then I got into—this was late in my professional career. There was a reactor in Savannah River, and I didn’t—I can’t tell you the name of it—that produced tritium for thermonuclear weapons. It had to be shut down because of safety reasons. So I got involved in what was called tritium target development for light-water reactors. Because you need tritium for a thermonuclear device. What we did was, the way we did it, we irradiated lithium metal—I shouldn’t say irradiated; we exposed lithium metal to a neutron environment in light-water reactors. The idea being to generate tritium, the gas. Well, what happens is lithium is a metal similar, maybe—low-melting, kind of—to aluminum. It’s not compatible with many cladding or enclosure materials. So we exposed lithium to neutrons to form tritium. In doing that, you had to—because the tritium is an isotope of helium, you had to tie it up some way and contain it. You didn’t want it to get out of the cladding, because we were using zirconium cladding. And then inside of this target, we used a getter for the tritium to collect the tritium and try and keep it enclosed. In fact, I’ve learned recently that there are some commercial reactors back east that have tritium target elements in their cores now to produce tritium for thermonuclear devices.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I imagine that’s something the government wouldn’t want other places to be doing then.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, probably not, yeah. You can google tritium production and you’ll get information on the process—well, I don’t know about the detail of the process, but information on producing tritium in light-water reactors. Then as I was nearing retirement, I got out of that and was taken over by a couple other people. But it was interesting, and so that’s kind of—I enjoyed doing this sort of thing a lot. Exploring and testing and so on.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Was the tritium work also unclassified then, or was that back to the classified world?</p>
<p>Freshley: I think it was in the classified world, perhaps, at the time. Although the lady who currently manages that project at the lab here gave a talk on these elements, these targets, and some of the latest things that they were doing. This was a while back, that she gave this talk. But there were parts of the talk she could not discuss. These parts that she couldn’t discuss are unknown to me and foreign to me, because a lot of that has happened since I retired. See, I retired in ’93—1993. That was—what—25, 26 years ago.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: When you moved from GE to Battelle, did you ever notice any sorts of differences in your work experiences in sort of general terms?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, not really. They were the same people involved, in my case. The big difference is that under DoE at the time—I think it was DoE, maybe AEC—we did not earn credits for service. So 14 years, I didn’t get any—[LAUGHTER]—credits for service which would help my pension, until Battelle came. Then that changed. I do get a GE pension still, but it’s not very much.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Let’s see. Are there sort of—one thing I’m interested in is how working on Hanford—people’s experiences changed over time as the decades went on, how things changed. Anything sort of leaps to your mind in those regards?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, one thing that comes to mind to me is things that you do if you’re in the lab and so on, are a lot more regulated now than they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Can you imagine opening the door and getting somebody a plutonium part that he takes off with and goes to Livermore?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: You don’t do that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Right. Let’s see.</p>
<p>Freshley: So things are a lot more regulated now. And I would say a lot more sophisticated, too. I am aware of the fact that AREVA, here, the fuel fabricator, has developed since my time some very sophisticated models on fuel performance. We didn’t have models like that in those days.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. One of the things we’re also trying to get at, which is why a lot of this has been very useful, is what was done on the Hanford site that was sort of innovative or hadn’t been mastered elsewhere? Because you hear sort of both sides of the Hanford legacy, and a lot of these are harder to get at without having classified sources. So the unclassified versions people could tell us about are very interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I would say, that except for my time in the plutonium laboratory, things were pretty much unclassified. The development of these different fuels—fuel materials—and testing them and so on. I would say that was pretty much unclassified.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting.</p>
<p>Freshley: Now, I’m sure that AREVA here has some proprietary interests in their fuel modeling these days. But I’ve seen some of it; it’s a very sophisticated code and model.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What was it like living in Richland, let’s say the ‘40s and ‘50s first and ask for the later parts afterwards.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, I can tell you my experience.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Yeah.</p>
<p>Freshley: First, as I said, I lived in the Army barracks. Then I moved to the dorms that were on Lee. This was before I was married. I was here for a year before I got married, and then when I got married, we got access to one of the Gribble apartments. I don’t know if they’re still there on Gribble Street? I think, maybe, Kadlec has taken all of that over now and destroyed all of the old buildings. But they were two-story apartments. They were really nice. Then after that, we lived in that apartment for five years, my wife tells me. And then we bought a ranch house. It wasn’t a purchase from the government; it was after the ranch houses and the other government houses were sold off by the government. This fella was in a position, a management position, in DoE—I think it might have been AEC at the time. And we bought this ranch house from him on Burch Street in Richland. We paid him $10,000 for it. And then from there—we lived there for a few years, and then we bought a house on Howell. And from Howell, we built a house in Country Ridge. That’s where we live now. We’ve lived there for 20—over 25 years.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Interesting. I was just thinking back on the timeline there. I know for a long time people couldn’t buy houses in Richland. So I guess you got your first place not too long after you were allowed to?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, I think it was very soon. I can’t remember his name, but he was in some management position in DoE and wanted to sell his house. So we bought it from him and got the title and made some changes and so on. Yeah, it was among the first government houses that were sold privately.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Mm-hmm. What was life like in the community around there? Do you remember any sort of community events?</p>
<p>Freshley: Yup. Town Theater was there. Actually showing movies, of course. Mm, I don’t know how to answer that. I would say it was pretty normal. Did a lot of outdoor activities, a lot of snow skiing at Tollgate—I don’t know if you know where Tollgate is.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: I’m new to the area.</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, are you? Okay. It’s in the Blue Mountains. A lot of boating activities. We had a canoe and enjoyed that. Things like that.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Great.</p>
<p>Freshley: Pretty normal, I would say. Wouldn’t you?</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure.</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Did you ever feel like the sort of larger scale politics of the day ever impacted your life whether—Cold War security issues or changing Presidents or any of that?</p>
<p>Freshley: I can’t relate to that. I was not politically inclined like some people you know. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Sure. Let’s see. This is sort of a similar question, so we don’t have to go into too much detail. Any memories of the social scene, local politics, or other insights into life in the Tri-Cities over the time you lived here?</p>
<p>Freshley: Over what time period? Oh.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: In the time you lived here.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, like I said, I’m not politically oriented, so if there were these things happening, I was pretty isolated from them.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. Could you describe any ways in which security and/or secrecy at Hanford impacted your work?</p>
<p>Freshley: No, I really can’t, except 234-5 Building, every time you went out there, you had to have your badge and security. I think even in the Plutonium Finishing Plant, there probably—I think there were—additional security requirements.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: What would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford or living in Richland during the Cold War?</p>
<p>Freshley: [LAUGHTER] Well, I wouldn’t know how to answer that. I would say, from my experience, it was very normal. I guess if there were security requirements and things like that, you just kind of got used to it, and you didn’t—it wasn’t something that stood out. I think that’s true.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Okay. So what haven’t I asked about that I should ask about? What else is there I should be asking about?</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, how do I answer that? I don’t know. I think we’ve covered my experience pretty thoroughly. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Well, we don’t have to dwell on it if nothing comes to mind.</p>
<p>Freshley: No.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: It is an open-ended question.</p>
<p>Freshley: Well, what happened, after we bought our ranch house, the government didn’t come around and change our light bulbs anymore. [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>O’Reagan: Oh, really? Did you have to—how much of a transition was that once you sort of became a homeowner? Was it--?</p>
<p>Freshley: Oh, it was a good transition, from my standpoint. You could do things—like we made modifications to the house. It was our house. It wasn’t controlled by the government—or owned by the government. So that made a big difference. You had a lot more freedom and so on in what you did and how you did it.</p>
<p>O’Reagan: All right. Well, thanks so much. This is very, very interesting, very useful.</p>
Duration
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01:06:39
Bit Rate/Frequency
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317 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 Area
324 Area
3706 Building
N Reactor
Plutonium Finishing Plant
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1951-today
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1951-1993
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
John Fox
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Max Freshley
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Max Freshley 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.
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
Date
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02-10-2016
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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.
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video/mp4
Date Modified
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2017-04-12: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
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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.
300 Area
324 Building
3706 Building
Battelle
Cold War
Engineering Test Reactor
General Electric
Hanford
Livermore
Los Alamo
Los Alamos
Mountain
Mountains
N Reactor
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Plutonium
Plutonium Finishing Plant
River
Savannah River
School
Street
Theater
War
Westinghouse
-
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F943bf3b64bc6d74e596b733e8caba09e.JPG
c476b8467e153b14d6cea7bbcc040f07
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F74b26e06751e61230844cf404b522e0c.mp4
450178788ef7cb79d4b24fa735ed2a84
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
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
Subject
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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
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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
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Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Robert Franklin
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Tony Brooks
Location
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Washington State University Tri-Cities
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history interview with Tony Brooks on February 8<sup>th</sup>, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Tony about his experiences working at the Hanford Site and his lifetime in the health physics profession. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?</p>
<p>Tony Brooks: Antone Leavitt Brooks. A-N-T-O-N-E L-E-A-V-I-T-T B-R-O-O-K-S.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great. And so let’s start at the beginning. Where and when—where were you born and when?</p>
<p>Brooks: I was born in Saint George, Utah, which is the fallout capital of the world.</p>
<p>Franklin: Is that—that’s southern?</p>
<p>Brooks: Southern. Right as you’re going towards Las Vegas, it’s the last city in Utah before you leave, head out across the Nevada Desert.</p>
<p>Franklin: And why is it the fallout capital of the world?</p>
<p>Brooks: Because we shot off 103 atomic weapons aboveground at the Nevada Test Site. Normally, the weapons would be shot so that the fallout would go north across the Nevada, then turn and come east across Utah. There were a couple of shots that didn’t do that, that came right straight east to Saint George. And so we had some of the highest fallout levels recorded. When we were little kids, we’d be out playing basketball, and they’d say, hey, fallout cloud’s coming over, go in the house. Come on, you know? We’re playing ball here. [LAUGHTER] Or I’m up to bat next, I’m not going in the house.</p>
<p>Franklin: So you had an early connection, then with—</p>
<p>Brooks: Radiation.</p>
<p>Franklin: With radiation and atomic testing and atomic production.</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, right, right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: So how did you get involved in radiation testing and health physics?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, see, what I did then, when I went to University of Utah, got a bachelor’s degree there and then I got a master’s degree. And a guy named Robert Pendleton had just gotten a grant from the old Atomic Energy Commission to study the movement of fallout through the environment and into people. I did my master’s degree then following fallout. We set up a series of dairy farm stations. Each week we’d go and we’d sample the milk, we’d sample the grass, we’d sample the people, and count and watch the fallout move through the ecosystem into people. And so that was my master’s degree.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what year was that?</p>
<p>Brooks: In ’62.</p>
<p>Franklin: ’62, okay. And then that—</p>
<p>Brooks: They shot the last of the aboveground tests then. The atomic bomb ban—testing ban came in about then. But one of the last shots they shot was called Sedan. And Sedan was designed to see how big of a hole you could make with a nuclear weapon. So they buried it out in the desert, dug a serious hole with it. And the fallout came right over up across Salt Lake City.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Brooks: And so I was there, working on my master’s degree at that time. So we got a good dose of fallout from that also.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow. And does that kind of—I know that there were also those pathway-into-human experiments here at Hanford, as well. Does that kind of—does that mirror—is that around the same time?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yes, yes, yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: They used to have the old Hanford Symposiums up here, and we’d always come up and participate in those.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh really?</p>
<p>Brooks: And so we knew the people here; they knew us. We were doing the same kind of work. In fact, the guy who was one of the big ones here, a guy named Leo Bustad and Roger McClellan, okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, we’ve interviewed Roger before.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, Roger was my boss.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: So when I got my master’s degree, I went on to Cornell University. It was everywhere, okay? Fallout was everywhere. It was in everything, it was on everything. My concern, then, was, are there health effects? Are there health effects? Are we causing damage? Are we all going to die of cancer? Okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brooks: That was a big concern. And at that time, we didn’t have a whole lot of data on internally deposited radioactive material. So I went to Cornell University and got my PhD there, studying chromosome damage. The chromosome is the most sensitive indicator of radiation-induced damage that we had at that time. You could look down the microscope and see the breaks and the rearrangements caused by the radiation. So that’s what I did my PhD. Then Roger McClellan hired me to go to the Lovelace Foundation, where he was the new director. I was one of the first two people he hired at Lovelace. So that’s how Roger and I got together.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, right. And what did you do at Lovelace?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, Lovelace—see, I wanted to continue my studies on internally deposited radioactive material, and that’s what they did. They had animals inhale, inject, ingest all kinds of radioactive material. So what I did was study the chromosome genetic damage as well as cancer induced in those animals.</p>
<p>Franklin: Does that also kind of mirror—that mirrors some of the testing done at Hanford Labs and PNNL on—</p>
<p>Brooks: Oh, sure, oh, sure, oh, sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: --animal. First with the pigs and beagles—</p>
<p>Brooks: See, they had a big dog program here, we had a big dog program at Lovelace. They had one at Utah, they had one at Argonne, they had one at—so they had all these programs that were well-coordinated, studying effects of radiation on animals.</p>
<p>Franklin: So, were you all studying different areas of that—</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah.</p>
<p>Franklin: --or kind of all studying the same, trying to work towards the cracking of the—</p>
<p>Brooks: Each one—each laboratory had kind of an assignment. University of Utah, they inject—they started first. They injected the animals with radioactive material. Well, we don’t get injected much, so, University of California at Davis fed the animals radioactive material. Lovelace and Pacific Northwest Lab had the animals inhale it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: And so the route of administration was different. But once it got inside, and once it went where it was going to go, then the effects were very similar. So there was a lot of coordination. Every year we’d have a meeting sometime—most—a lot of the times up here. They’d have the big Hanford Symposiums. I came up to those faithfully every year. And so the people up here were well-acquainted with the people down at Lovelace ITRI.</p>
<p>Franklin: And what did you find as a result of—</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, what I found primarily is that radiation is a very good cell killer. Okay? Radiation kills cells. That’s why we use it in therapy, right?</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Brooks: If you’ve got a cancer, what do you do? You radiate the sucker, right? Why do you do that? To kill the cells. The other thing I found was that radiation is very poor mutagen. I spent a lot of time trying to look at mutations induced by radiation. It kills too many cells. It’s not very good at mutating. See, about that time, another thing came along that hit here as well as there, and that was Jimmy Carter says, okay, national laboratories, we know a lot about radiation. But we don’t know anything about chemicals. So we’re going to assign each of the national laborites a chemical process for producing energy and let’s look at what that does. We were given diesel exhaust and fluidized coal combustion at Lovelace. Pacific Northwest Lab was given another—I don’t remember exactly what theirs was. I think it was something to do with coal. Okay? And so we went through and took all these techniques and technology we’d developed for radiation and applied them to chemicals. Man, there’s a lot of good mutagens in chemicals.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah?</p>
<p>Brooks: You better believe it. So you get all of these chemicals from burning, chemicals from—you know, I’d take petri dishes and I’d put a bunch of cells on them. I’d irradiate them. Could have put 100,000 cells, radiate them, there’d be 4,000 or 5,000 left to be mutated for radiation. Chemicals doesn’t kill them. It just mutates them. So you get benzopyrene and methylcanthrene, all these really hot environmental chemicals. And so I said, oh, jeez, radiation’s a poor mutagen. It is not a good mutagen. A lot of other things are really hot mutagens; it’s not.</p>
<p>Franklin: And these chemicals were mostly from like carbon and fossil based—fossil fuels--</p>
<p>Brooks: Well—</p>
<p>Franklin: --based applications?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, they were, but Lawrence Livermore Lab was given food, okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: Cooking hamburgers, folks. Overdoing—burning things.</p>
<p>Franklin: Like, the carbon.</p>
<p>Brooks: The carbon, right, and all the products there. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. And about that time, a guy named Bruce Ames developed what we called the Ames Test. The Ames Test was designed to test mutagens. And we all jumped into the Ames Test. Chemicals are really good at producing mutations in the Ames Test. Radiation didn’t produce any.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting. That’s interesting because that kind of contradicts the cultural pop idea of radiation as causing massive genetic disorder or kind of positive disorders like superheroes, you know?</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And stuff like that. But also negative like 50-foot ant, or you know.</p>
<p>Brooks: We all know where the Incredible Hulk came from. We all know Ninja Turtles, we know where we got those. That’s all radiation, folks. That’s all radiation. But in reality, radiation is not a mutagen.</p>
<p>Franklin: It just would have killed them.</p>
<p>Brooks: Sure, sure. [LAUGHTER] It might have mutated them—see, there was a big, big project down at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They called it the Megamouse Project. Now, Megamouse Project was designed to look at mutations induced by radiation. So they took a whole bunch of male mice, radiated them almost enough to kill them. Let them recover, irradiated them again almost enough to kill them, and then bred them. They had hundreds of thousands of offspring of mice from those. How many mutations? 17 extra.</p>
<p>Franklin: Wow.</p>
<p>Brooks: And so when we started setting standards, the International Council on Radiation Protection and the National Council on Radiation Protection. But when I was young, mutation and cancer were about deemed equal. But as the data came in, mutations kind of went away. Okay, so mutations kind of went away. Cancer was still a big concern. So that’s what I try to do, is take my mutagenesis assays, short-term assays, and link them to cancer induction. So I treat an animal, check through his chromosomes, check for the mutations, then look for cancer in them. And so we were trying to make those links so I could do a short-term test and do a prediction, say. But, again, the more I worked, and the harder I worked, the more I understood, radiation is not a very good carcinogen, either. Otherwise, when we radiate people to cure cancer, we’d make more cancer than we cure. We don’t. The people who are radiated are cured. Some additional cancers come up, but not many.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right.</p>
<p>Brooks: See, you look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it’s the thing I always like to talk about—is here we are—boom, you know? We drop two weapons, kill 200,000 people. Radiation’s a good killer. We had 86,000 people survive. We followed that 86,000 people for their lifetime. We know what each and every one of them died of. How many extra cancers did we see in that 86,000 people? 40,000 controls and 40,000 exposed. How many extra cancers? Had a great time, once, I was talking in a ninth grade class, telling them about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were all about asleep, you know? They weren’t too enthused about it. So I said, okay, here we got two populations. 40,000 exposed, 40,000 controls. How many extra cancers were there in the exposed? I whipped a dollar out of my wallet and said I’ll give the kid a dollar that comes the closest. You think every hand come up?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brooks: [LAUGHTER] Every hand came up, you know. So I start writing them on the board. Oh, everybody—everybody died of cancer. No, no, you get run over by a truck, you get—everybody doesn’t die of cancer. I started trying to talk them down, trying to talk them down. Well, half of them. Three-quarters, half, a quarter. Trying to talk them down. Couldn’t. Finally some wiseacre rises his hand in the back of the room and says, nobody got cancer. I handed him the dollar because he was way closer than anybody else. So in those two populations, 40,000 people—you got to remember that 25% of us die of cancer. Radiation, no radiation, nothing. That’s a given. About a fourth of us die of cancer. So in the 40,000 without radiation, about 10,000 cancers. That’s about what we expected, about 10,000 cancers. The radiated people, how many extra? That’s always the big question. About 500. So we had 10,000 in one population, 10,500 in the other. No question, radiation increased the cancer frequency.</p>
<p>Franklin: But by a pretty small percentage. By—not—I think—</p>
<p>Brooks: It’s not huge.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, not a huge—</p>
<p>Brooks: It’s not huge. And most of the people who got the cancer were the ones in the close-in zones that just about got killed from the blast and the heat and the fires.</p>
<p>Franklin: What about UV radiation and skin cancer?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s a complete different story that I don’t have much expertise in.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, sure. That’s like the only kind—</p>
<p>Brooks: But—yeah—ultraviolet light causes DNA adducts that causes skin cancer. No question. You go out and sit in the sun—see, now, the other part of this story—the rest of the story—is that since I’m from southern Utah, I’m a Downwinder, just like a lot of the Downwinders here, okay? So if I get cancer, I get $50,000. No questions asked. I was actually invited to be the distinguished scientist one year at the Health Physics Society meeting. And I’d just gone in to have a bunch of skin cancers removed. I’m not blond. Saint George is a hot place, man. Skin—peel and burn, man, peel and burn. Over and over. So anyway I get a lot of little skin cancers, and I’d just gone in to the doctor to have those removed when I was given this award. And so I was there in front of the group. This guy, Dr. Toohey, Dick Toohey, who’s in charge of reimbursement, came up after my talk and says, hey, what you got there? Well, went to the doctor, had a bunch of skin cancers removed. Well, what kind were they? Well, I told them the kinds. Well, how many did you have? I told him, had three. He says, you know, if you get five, you get your $50k. Okay? [LAUGHTER] Two more skin cancers, I get my $50k. But what are the facts? Is there an epidemic of cancer in southern Utah where the fallout was where we’re getting paid? Utah has the lowest cancer instance in the nation. Southern Utah, where I live, the county where the biggest fallout was, has the second lowest cancer rate in the state. But we still get paid. So I go down there and give a talk and I say, oh, jeez, you know, if they didn’t cause it, why are they paying us? Why are they paying us? That’s a hard question to ask and answer. Because that’s what they ask. Why are they paying us? So what do you tell them? I tell them, well, you had a good senator. Senator Orrin Hatch got legislation through the Senate that said southern Utah had been abused. We had fallout, no question. We had exposures, no question. So, we decided to reimburse you. Well, how many get reimbursed? Can you reimburse everybody exposed to fallout? No. Russia set off a whole bunch of nuclear weapons. We set off a bunch of nuclear weapons. We contaminated the Northern Hemisphere. Brits, they were smart. They went down to Australia to set theirs off. They contaminated the Southern Hemisphere. So, we’ve all had it, okay? So we can’t reimburse everybody, can we? So how many are we going to reimburse? Well, you know, these four counties, this county in Nevada, this county in Arizona, 25% of us get cancer, that’s about right. The same way here at the Hanford Site, you know? Downwinders. People that worked at the Site. Military people. See, so they’ve set up all these programs to pay people off that were damaged.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Brooks: [LAUGHTER] So I come at it from a little different position than—</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: What I ended up doing—I’ve taken you through more than you probably ever wanted to know.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, not at all.</p>
<p>Brooks: But what happened, see, is after I left Lovelace, Roger McClellan left Lovelace, I left Lovelace. I came here and Bill Bair hired me to work out at Pacific Northwest Lab.</p>
<p>Franklin: Right, and what year would this have been?</p>
<p>Brooks: It was ’98.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: So—no, it wasn’t ’98. ’88. Excuse me.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: Anyway, I came here to work at the Pacific Northwest Lab. So I worked here for about ten years at PNNL. And I don’t know how much of that story you want to hear. Probably not too much, but—</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I’d love to hear about that.</p>
<p>Brooks: But I worked at the cellular molecular biology group at Pacific Northwest National Lab.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay. And what did you do there? Similar to—</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, similar. Spent a lot of time on radon.</p>
<p>Franklin: Ah, the home radiation.</p>
<p>Brooks: The home radiator. We had a big radon program at PNNL, and I was the head of that.</p>
<p>Franklin: Doesn’t Spokane have really high levels of radon in the nation?</p>
<p>Brooks: They do. They’re one of the high ones. The Reading Prong in the east, Spokane, several places have quite high radon. And so we did a lot of experimental work on radon. Again, trying to link cancer induction to [UNKNOWN] changes. So we’d have animals inhale radon, we’d look for the chromosome damage and all that. Then we’d try to look for the cancers in them. And a guy named Fred Cross—you probably have interviewed Fred Cross. You surely should have if you haven’t.</p>
<p>Franklin: I think we—I think we might have. I’ll have to go back.</p>
<p>Brooks: Anyway, because Fred Cross ran a great big radon program for exposure to animals of radon. So when I came here, I got talking to Fred and I says, hey, Fred. Rats get a lot of lung cancer when they inhale radon. But not one case of trachea or nasal cancer. You inhale it, it goes down your trachea, into your lungs. How come you don’t get tracheal cancer? You inhale—have hamsters inhale radon, you don’t get anything! Now are we humans more like rats or hamsters? [LAUGHTER] That was one of the questions, you know?</p>
<p>Franklin: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Brooks: Are we rats or are we hamsters? So I went ahead and started studying that at the cell and molecular level. When I asked a guy named Tony James, said, hey, Tony, how come rats don’t get tracheal tumors? And he says, well, maybe the dose to the trachea—the amount of radiation to the trachea is very different than the deep lungs. You inhale it, maybe it goes and stays better, and maybe that’s what it is. And I says, well, can you help me with the dose? Well, you tell me the diameter of the trachea, you tell me the velocity of the airway, you tell me the particle size, you tell me the branching angles, you tell me this—I can tell you what the dose is. I says, crap, I can’t tell you all that. I’m a simple biologist. So I went ahead and looked at the cells and see what they tell me. So we have the animals radiate, inhale the radon, go in, look at their lungs, look at the trachea, look at the nose, see how much chromosome damage there is. Same all three places. Same amount of dose, no cancer nose or trachea, lots of lung cancer. Same amount of dose. Same amount of damage. Same number of mutations. Huh! So I look at the hamsters—Chinese hamsters, Syrian hamsters. Same thing. Same amount of dose, no cancer in hamsters. Lot of cancer. So I decided that maybe mutations aren’t that important. There are other processes going on besides that. And this was something that really—a lot of people did not like.</p>
<p>Franklin: Why?</p>
<p>Brooks: Because they always thought that mutations make cancer. You got a mutation that releases itself from its control, it goes ahead and it does this, this and this. Before long you have cancer. But, hey. Same number of mutations, no cancer.</p>
<p>Franklin: So why, then, was the cancer—same level of dose, all three areas, same level of mutations, why was the cancer only happening in the lung?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, that’s a good question. And so, what happened then—and this is the last part of my career—is I left Pacific Northwest Lab and came to Washington State University. My office was down the hall about four places on the left down there. And when I left PNL, they were going into the molecular science center, and they closed down the radon program. So I had a couple million dollars’ worth of funding in radon, and they closed it down. Oh, Brooks, you don’t have any funding. No, I don’t, do I? So what are you going to do? Well, I’m going to try to write some grants to get some more funding. No, no, we don’t have time for that. So anyway, I changed positions over there from biology into risk assessment. And I knew that I wasn’t a risk assessor. So I spent my nights and weekends writing grants. I got a grant from NIH, National Institute of Health; I got a grant from the Department of Energy; I got a grant from NASA to study radiation in space, and to study cell and molecular changes. So I hit on three grants, so I came over here and says, hey, you know, I got some money. Is it all right if I come over here? What do you think they said? Oh, yeah, we’d love to have you.</p>
<p>Franklin: Open arms?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, come on. As long as you realize that we’re not giving you any money. But you got your own money, come on. And that was wonderful, it was. It was really good. I came over here and as a result of getting the grant from DOE, then, they started what they called a Low Dose Radiation Research Project. And the Low Dose Radiation Research Project, Senator Pete Domenici out of New Mexico said, hey, we’re spending billions of dollars cleaning up waste, we’re spending billions of dollars on concern over medicine use. We’re concerned about nuclear weapons, we’re concerned about terrorists, but we don’t know much about low doses. We know what happens up here at this high dose region, where we really kicked the devil out of you, you get cancer. What about the low dose? Of course, at that time, we’d sequenced the genome, we had all of these new tools and techniques where we could go down and look. So DOE started what they called the Low Dose Program. They had what they called the Chief Scientist for the Low Dose Program, and I got that. So I sat here at Washington State University and ran the Low Dose Program out of Washington, DC with a lady named Noelle Metting. So, my job was the best in the world. My boss was in Washington, DC. I was here, sitting down the hall. And we helped them run this program where we had about $25 million a year. We distributed it to the very best scientists we could find anywhere in the world. We didn’t just limit it to US scientists. If you had an idea or a technique that was unique, we’d give you money. We gave money to Grey Lab in England where they had a microbeam where they could shoot individual cells. We gave money to the Australians where they were able to look at mutations in animals at very, very low levels. We gave money over in the Ukraine where they went over and studied a lot of the rodents after the Chernobyl fallout. And so we had all the very best—I thought—the very best cell and molecular biologists in the world studying the health effects of low doses. And my job, along with the lady named Leslie Couch, who worked here with me, was to run the program and to take the abstracts and take the information and put it in a kind of language that the lay people could maybe understand. We scientists, we don’t care. If I can talk to my two best friends, that’s all I care, you know. [LAUGHTER] I don’t care if the Rotary Club understands what I’m doing. But that’s one of the problems we’ve had. See, the public’s perception is way over here. The real world is way over there. And we as scientists have not done the job. We have not done the job. So that was my job here for about ten years, at Washington State.</p>
<p>Franklin: So what did you find?</p>
<p>Brooks: We found that the response of cells and molecules at low doses is very different than high doses. At high doses, you’ve got injury, you’ve got repair. At low doses, a whole different set of genes gets turned on, whole different processes are upregulated. But the wisdom of our political system killed the system, shut the program down. I retired and went to White Pass and ran a girls’ camp for a couple of years. And Bill Morgan came to Pacific Northwest Lab and took over at the Low Dose Program. Now, I don’t know if you’ve—Bill passed away last year. Huge loss. So Bill came and took over my job that I had as the chief scientist. And then I got running the website for them, see? And so they gave the website to Pacific Northwest Lab. So while I was running [LAUGHTER] a girls’ camp, plowing snow, which I did yesterday—went up and helped them. [LAUGHTER] Trying to keep the roads clean. Then Bill was running the website here for two years. It’s really interesting because the website really got quite popular. Because we were putting all the new information into it, and publications—lots and lots of publications on what happens at low doses and how different it is than high doses.</p>
<p>Franklin: What constitutes a low dose?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, what you have to realize is that we live in a sea of radiation, okay? There’s a background amount of radiation that we all have. The higher in elevation you get, the more you get. If you live in Denver, you get way more than you do here. So what usually people do is say, well, here’s the background, and some value above that must be a low dose. [LAUGHTER] How fast you give it is the other thing, is how fast you get it. The body’s able to recover and repair. So if you give 100 rads or one gray all in one second, that does a lot more damage than if you give that over a year. Your body repairs and eliminates the bad cells. And that’s the other thing we found: a lot of protective processes that we didn’t realize existed.</p>
<p>Franklin: You mean the body’s own protective processes.</p>
<p>Brooks: Sure. The body has a built-in system, man. We’re being insulted by all kinds of things all the time, and, golly, we’re still alive. We should have been dead, see, if it wasn’t repairing. So anyway, I ran this Low Dose Program and then I went up to Camp Zarahemla. When I got there, I still had money left in my grant from the Department of Energy. Then I talked to Dr. Metting and I says, look, Noelle, I can send this money back to DOE if you’d like. Or you can let me keep it and I’ll write a book on the history of the program. And so the two years while I was at Camp Zarahemla, I spent every morning writing the history and so I compiled all of publications, put together the history, and got that all published just as I—all put together—just as I came out of there. And they made a website, put it on the website, so it’s been on the website for a while. But I couldn’t get her to publish it. And so, the bottom line on that is that DOE has finally given Pacific Northwest Lab some money to help me get that published. And Washington State University is publishing it.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Brooks: And it’s supposed to be out in April.</p>
<p>Franklin: Oh, wow, cool. Congratulations.</p>
<p>Brooks: So anyway. [LAUGHTER] But anyway, that’s the history of the DOE Low Dose Program. That’s what I did at the very last of my career. Now, when I got back from Camp Zarahemla where we were running the girls’ camp, Bill Morgan says, you know, this is a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. Why don’t you come and help me? So Bill wrote a contract for me as a private—I set up a company and we—DOE says, well you can run it through PNL, or you can run it through Washington State, or you can set up a private company and run it there. They had a set amount of money that they were willing to give me. I thought, oh, PNL has an overhead rate of a little over 100%. Washington State has an overhead rate of about 40%. My company has no overhead rate. I think I’ll do it that way. [LAUGHTER] So anyway, Bill was very nice, and he helped me set up and get funded through PNL. So I worked, then, for PNL on the website for a number of years after I got back from camp. Then of course Bill passed away and the program there has gone down to where there’s not much left. So that’s where I am today. I still—PNL gave me some money to get the book published, so that’s very nice. And I work for EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, where they’ve been paying me some money to write some papers. I got a very nice paper published with two real good people, Julian Preston, who’s a geneticist and David Holm who’s an epidemiologist, where we looked at dose rate. See, now, how important is dose rate? Now, this is a big argument now, whether, if you give dose over a long period of time, it’s less effective than giving it all at once. All the data says that’s true. The Germans, on the other hand, have eliminated nuclear power, and they have decided that there is no benefit of protracting the radiation.</p>
<p>Franklin: Of what?</p>
<p>Brooks: Of protracting it, extending it out in time. In other words, if I give you one unit of radiation in one second, or if I give you one unit of radiation in ten years, the effect is the same. Does that make sense to you?</p>
<p>Franklin: It doesn’t if the data doesn’t support it.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, the data doesn’t support it. Because every cell in your body is whacked when you give it all at once. You give it over time, the cells are turning over; any individual cell doesn’t see much. All he sees is a very low dose. He responds differently to that than he does this whack.</p>
<p>Franklin: The whack turns on different—</p>
<p>Brooks: Turns on a different set of genes, turns on a different set of processes. I’m trying to survive up here, okay? We found, for example, if you take—we developed a microbeam here at PNL—Les Braby did—where we could take and shoot individual cells with alpha particles. So we get under a microscope, get a bunch of kids that were good with video games, shoot that cell, and move, shoot this one, and shoot that one. We knew exactly which cells we’d shot. We knew exactly how many alpha particles we’d shot them with. Then we look at the response. That was what I was doing, looking at the response. It was really kind of neat, because you’d hit one cell, cell over here would responded. Of course! We’re talking to each other. We’re not a single cell. We don’t have eyes in our liver, you know. Come on. When we develop—and so, that was what we call the bystander effect. This is one of the things we found at the Low Dose Program. You hit one cell, the whole tissue responds.</p>
<p>Franklin: Trying to prevent the damage, right?</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, what does it do? It’s trying to prevent the damage. So if you hit one cell, it sends out messages: I’ve been hit! Help! What do the other cells do? Pew! Kill it. You’re out of here. It’s called apoptosis, or spontaneous programmed cell death.</p>
<p>Franklin: You hit the whole tissue at once, then they all can’t respond.</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, everybody’s damaged, folks. But if one cell gets hit, the whole tissue responds to try to save the tissue, not the cell. They’ll kill that cell. It’s called selective apoptosis, where you just eliminate that guy. And so there’s a lot of that—really fun. I just had a great time at it.</p>
<p>Franklin: That’s great. Did you ever find out why the rat lungs were prone to cancers, whereas the esophagus and the trachea were not?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, you know, the thing that we found in the Low Dose Program was the cell communication. The cells in the trachea and esophagus are nicely arranged in nice little columns. And the communication is very nice between them. In the lung, you get this thing spread out. You kill a cell over here, you stimulate another over there, you do this, this, that. Very different project. And so I think that what’s happening is that the cells that are able to maintain communication, maintain structure—if you have an inflammatory disease, okay, esophageal reflex. What do you get? You get esophageal cancer. No radiation, no mutations. Inflammatory disease. So any time you get tissue disorganization, inflammation. We did that with the lungs. We’d have these animals inhale radioactive material. If you gave them enough, you’d kill them. They’d die, pneumonitis, fibrosis, the lungs would fill up with water and they’d die. If you give them a little less than that so they didn’t die of that, almost every one of them got cancer—lung cancer. If you go down a little lower, but still an awful lot, but protracted over a long period of time, almost nothing.</p>
<p>Franklin: And why did the Syrian or Chinese hamsters not get the lung cancer when they were exposed to the same amount?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s what we call genetic variability, okay? You and I are different. You and I are different. Every one of us has our own genetic difference. As you looked into these animals, they had different pathways. They have different ways to repair. They’re different.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: If you look at the human population, we’ve got sensitive people, we’ve got resistant people. I think the sensitive people are more like rats and the resistant ones more like the hamsters. That’s one of the things that we’re starting to unravel. What are the pathways and what are the ones that are important? That’s when the program was killed. And so that’s one of the things I’m pushing really hard and working with a lot of people now to see if we can get money back into that program. It’s really a critical thing.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure. I believe you. I mean, it sounds like understanding—because we all live with low dose and varying amounts of low dose.</p>
<p>Brooks: That’s right.</p>
<p>Franklin: And especially as we don’t have that kind of constant testing of radiation anymore, we might get exposed to different variabilities, right?</p>
<p>Brooks: Right, right.</p>
<p>Franklin: I’m wondering if you could talk about the consequences of that. Because I’ve heard a little bit about it, of the loss of the generations that kind of ingested the radiation from atomic weapons testing. Do you know what I’m talking about?</p>
<p>Brooks: Not for sure.</p>
<p>Franklin: That there was ways to kind of track where people were, based on the amount of material in their cells that they had ingested from the atomic weapons testing, and that now there’s a generation that has grown up since the ban and doesn’t have those kind of genetic markers anymore.</p>
<p>Brooks: No. Yeah, I don’t know. I think, of course, once you take the radiation—and we’re very, very good at detecting radiation. That’s one of the things that we’re really good at. And that really impressed me when I went from working with radiation to working with hot chemicals. Radiation—if I spill something—I knew right where it was. Chemical, I spill something, I don’t know where it was. So we’re so good at testing and detecting. My generation, I can go in and get counted today, and they’d tell me how much strontium I’ve still got in my bones. I had thyroid. We counted people all over the state of Utah that had fairly significant amounts of radiation in them. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Lots and lots and lots and lots of people have ingested lots and lots and lots of radiation. And so it’s not a mystery box anymore. The mystery box is the fact that it hasn’t been very effective. And I’ve just been really grateful for that. Because when I was growing up, I thought, oh, crap, you know? We’re going to have a cancer epidemic in southern Utah the likes of which you’ve never seen before. It didn’t develop. Chernobyl, we went over there and set up a study. Guy named Admiral Zumwalt was a Navy admiral. He knew the Navy admirals over in Russia. So we got all of us together and set up a big study to study Chernobyl. We had each of the Russian countries matched with the United States group. We had Ukraine and Belarus and Russia, all matched with Fred Hutch, one group, Texas, another group, Boston, another group. So we got all our best people, matched them with theirs, to go over and look at that. Chernobyl had just happened. We wanted to find out, again, are we going to have terrible cancer epidemic in Russia? And now it’s been 20-plus years, 30 years, after Chernobyl, huh? 20-something years.</p>
<p>Franklin: 30. A little more than 30, because it was 1986, right?</p>
<p>Brooks: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: April of ’86.</p>
<p>Brooks: So, ’86, I was still a youngster. Anyway, I was sitting on this committee. Been sitting on it for years. When we started, our prediction was that we were really going to have some serious problems with cancer, especially leukemia—especially childhood leukemia. And thyroid. See, the Russians didn’t need people telling people in Pripyat that they had a problem for several days. So they were there sucking in the iodine-131—thyroid getting really kicked. So all of our models, all of that, said, boy, we have a serious problem here. The longer we did it, the more measurements we made, the longer we followed it up—where are the cancers? Where are the cancers? Zero excess solid cancers, with exception of cancer of the thyroid of children. Huge increase in cancer of the thyroid in children.</p>
<p>Franklin: And is that a result of the radioactive iodine?</p>
<p>Brooks: It is the radioactive iodine, very high doses.</p>
<p>Franklin: And we’re talking about people in the surrounding area, not talking about the responders.</p>
<p>Brooks: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The responders, they got zinged. They got zinged. We killed a bunch of them. You know, the Russians, they had a very different philosophy than what we have. It’s like me having a great big bonfire here and saying, why don’t you go stand in the middle of that bonfire? You know, I’d rather not. They knew how hot that was. They knew going in there was going to be lethal. But they sent them in. See, we wouldn’t have done that. Okay? But, yeah, first responders—</p>
<p>Franklin: So why the children and not adult—if they were all in the same environment, why the children and not the adult?</p>
<p>Brooks: That’s really a good question. Why the children and not the adults? Children thyroids are developing. There’s lots of cell division in there. There’s lots of opportunities for things to go wrong. Adult thyroids are just sitting there, doing their thing. Almost no cell proliferation, almost no cell division, no differentiation. They’re just sitting there. Now, you take the liver, which just sits there—I did a lot of work on liver. Liver cells, you can radiate the devil out of them as long as you don’t make them divide, they seem to be fine. But you stimulate them to divide—I could go in and flop out part of the liver, make the liver divide, up come the cancer. So there’s a lot of processes, but the children’s thyroids were sensitive.</p>
<p>Franklin: And it’s the—so then is the cancer then carried in the division? Is that how it multiplies? [INAUDIBLE] establishing a link--</p>
<p>Brooks: Either that—carried or expressed.</p>
<p>Franklin: Carried or expressed, okay. So does the action of division make it—the cells more likely to turn cancerous? Or do we still—</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, cell tissues that have more rapid cell division have more cancer in them.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: Bone marrow, GI tract, lung.</p>
<p>Franklin: Skin?</p>
<p>Brooks: Skin, yeah, skin. But you look at the liver, almost never divides. Radiation doesn’t produce much in the way of brain cancer—cells don’t divide. Muscles, nothing. Bone marrow, gut, skin—all of those dividing—rapidly dividing cells. If the exposure is given acutely.</p>
<p>Franklin: Okay.</p>
<p>Brooks: But if it’s protracted in time, it’s very different.</p>
<p>Franklin: Interesting.</p>
<p>Brooks: Because the cells are dividing, and one cell gets hit, its great-grandson maybe get hit. But if you get them all at once, and they have to all divide, and they have to all survive, and they have to all repopulate, that’s where it comes.</p>
<p>Franklin: Gotcha. Well, thank you, Tony.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s probably more than you ever wanted to hear.</p>
<p>Franklin: No, I think it’s really instructive. And it definitely complicates—complicates our idea of how radiation affects the body, but clarifies and I think kind of dispels some of the misinformation and myths that surround—</p>
<p>Brooks: Yeah, fear is a really important part of this whole thing. We had a meeting up at Leavenworth where we brought in scientists from around the world and spent a week up there, trying to decide and discuss what we could do about the fear of radiation. We had a guy from Argentina, we had a guy from Germany, we had a guy from Australia, we had three of us from the United States, and we spent a week up there. It’s really difficult to decide what makes people so afraid of anything. I’m afraid of snakes. Okay. You can tell me that snake’s not going to bite me, but don’t put it on me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure.</p>
<p>Brooks: [LAUGHTER]</p>
<p>Franklin: Well it’s tough, right, because fear is a natural human response to keep us alive. It’s a safety feature. Yeah, fear of the unknown. Tony, is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to mention in the interview?</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, I don’t know, other than it has been really an exciting career for me.</p>
<p>Franklin: Great.</p>
<p>Brooks: We’ve had a wonderful time, got to do a lot of interesting things, meet a lot of interesting people. I can say the main thing that I’d like to be able to help with is to help people know that if you go in and the doctor says you need a CT scan, take it. The radiation dose from a CT scan is so low that you don’t worry about it. If you need an x-ray, take it. If the dentist wants to look at your teeth, take it. Because the risks are so very small.</p>
<p>Franklin: And that radiation doesn’t automatically cause cancer.</p>
<p>Brooks: Right.</p>
<p>Franklin: It depends on the time of the dose and the amount of—</p>
<p>Brooks: Right. And, see, that’s the public perception, that if I get radiated, I will get cancer. If I get cancer, the radiation caused it. And that’s a hard perception to break, because it’s absolutely not true.</p>
<p>Franklin: Sure, okay. Well, great, thank you so much, Tony. I really appreciated the interview.</p>
<p>Brooks: It’s been fun, I can say.</p>
<p>Franklin: Well, I’m glad we could get this for—and that Parker didn’t have one with you—Parker Foundation. So I’m kind of glad that we could kind of get you in with all those other voices about radiation and health safety. Because you have a lot of—a lot of what you said was really instructive. And you said it so easily that—you know, I’m a historian, an archivist. I’m not a radiation expert. I know I’ve been working on this project about some of the basics, but it was very easy to understand. And so you spent your life dedicated to that; you’re a trustworthy source.</p>
<p>Brooks: Well, that’s right. I’ve invested my life, basically, trying to do that. And I started off scared to death of it. Okay?</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah.</p>
<p>Brooks: And the more I worked and the more I’ve studied and the more I’ve seen, all the way from the animals to the humans to the tissue to the cells to the molecules, everything tells the same story.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah. Great, well, thanks so much.</p>
<p>Brooks: Hey, thank you, man.</p>
<p>Franklin: Yeah, thank you.</p>
Original Format
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mp4
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00:52:33
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317 kbps
Years in Tri-Cities Area
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1988-today
Years on Hanford Site
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1988-1998
Names Mentioned
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Leo Bustad
Roger McClellan
Fred Cross
Pete Domenici
Noelle Metting
Leslie Couch
Bill Morgan
Les Braby
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Interview with Tony Brooks
Description
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An interview with Tony Brooks 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.
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Hanford Oral History Project at Washington State University Tri-Cities
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02-08-2017
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video/mp4
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2017-13-11: Metadata v1 created – [A.H.]
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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.
Adult
Atomic Energy Commission
Cancer
Children
Cook
Department of Energy
Desert
Hanford
Livermore
NASA
Park
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ec69668cfd105a3844bc1dfc036df261
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/omeka-hhp%2Foriginal%2F66986ea49c777b4977889b8a654cf444.mp4
6007493e41305ba6e1266b686800d020
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Title
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Post-1943 Oral Histories
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Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
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An account of the resource
Oral histories with residents about the Hanford area during and following the Second World War
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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
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Interviewer
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Laura Arata
Interviewee
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Dale Denham
Transcription
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr SCX251492516">
<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><strong><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Northwest Public Television | </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">Denham_Dale</span></span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></strong></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Laura Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I feel ready.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> I think Dale feels ready.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Dale </span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Yeah. </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Are you going to ask me some questions to begin with, or just--</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I sure am.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">[LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">We're</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> here, huh?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">If we could just start by having you say your name, and then spell your last name</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> for us, please</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">. Dale Denham. D-E-N-H-A-M. I always let people know it's like the denim jeans. Can't forget me.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Thank you. My name's Laura Arata. It's December 12, 2013. We're conducting this interview on the campus of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Washington State University</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Tri-Cities. So if we could just start, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about when</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you came to Hanford, why you came to Hanford, and what you knew about it at the time.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, maybe it's better if I tell you when I first came in 1947.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: Please do.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> But as a young person, came with my family because</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">my dad was invited to come up here and start a radio station. And Dad was in the radio business since the '20s.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And his buddy says, boy, this is just a golden opportunity, and dad said, oh no. The war's over and this place is</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">going to fold.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Obviously, he was a bit wrong, but he had been through the Depression and all those kind of things. So we came.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">My sister and I would come up on the train and spend weeks, because they had a couple daughters. And they</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">moved in in '47 and stayed here 'til '57.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So the station today is KONA, but at that time it was KWIE. And it began in that period, and so we made lots of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">trips. But they lived in Kennewick, so I really didn't spend much time in Richland. They brought us out to see the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">barricade out here on Stevens, and the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> bypass to even get to the 300 A</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">rea. And at the time, their studios were</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">being built, and so they were doing things in the Hanford House, whic</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">h is today the Richland</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Red Lion.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I had some introduction to the Tri-C</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ity community. But I came as a graduate student, 1961, as part of a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission, which was in Health Physics</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd it turns out I was in the first class</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">of graduates of master's degree from the University of Wash</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ington. There were like ten of them, ten</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> of us. We</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">came and spent the summer here in '61. I got married that summer also. And we became acquainted with the site</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">by</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">much like they did most of the engineers, they moved us around on site, kind of give us a familiarity with all</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the different aspects of health physics, which was radiation protection, basically, for the people and the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">environment.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so that was my introduction to the place. But while I was here, the </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">opportunity to get a master's, because they</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">didn't have a master's program at UW at the time, because we were the first class. And while we were here during</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the summer, a program opened up to get a master's by going back for the second year.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So I went on back to University of Washington and was able to get my master's. Matter of fact, I was studying</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">rheumatoid </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">arthritic</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> patients looking for ways to use the reactor there at the university to evaluate the gold in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">these patients, because gold was not a cure for the disease, but it could slow it down and at least make people so</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">they could</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">so I worked with two individuals. I collected all their urine, because we were looking for activation</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">techniques.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And it took me most of the year because the opportunities were great to look to the future, but we didn't have all</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the technology yet. I was doing a lot of my work using a single channel analyzer and looking at different photo</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">peaks, energy, gamma ray energies coming off of these radionuclides, because we're all full of sodium, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">sodium has a very high ener</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">gy activation product, sodium-</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">24. And so that was a real issue. And I had to try</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">different ways is to subtract that material, or that impact that we would see on the scans.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But that was the beginning. And so I completed the degree. And then my wife had been born in Long Beach,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">California. Her grandmother was still down there. And so got the opportunity to go to Lawrence Livermore</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Laboratory</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">it was called Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the time</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">in Livermore, California. So went down</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">there and spent seven years</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">no, five years</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and then came back up here. She developed some real allergy</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">issues. And the kids were still young, small, a couple years old.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So it was a good opportunity to come back. We knew what the area was like. We had spent the summer here,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">which is a tough time. And of course we remembered</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I remembered from my childhood all the dust storms and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the running out to grab the laundry to bring it in because it was getting dusty.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I just thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine. And my parents, </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Dad was from Baker City, Oregon</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, and mother was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">from Boise, Idaho. So it made sense, in one </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">sense, that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> they might select to come here. But Mom didn't get along</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">too well in the heat, and so this was not a favorite place. So that was probably part of the equation, too, that they</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">chose not to even go any further, even though their friends were very successful here and sold out, and bought</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the station in Hood River and then retired, which is what they all did.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that was my introduction and coming to Hanford. And I served in a variety of departments</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I mean, by name,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">but they all were basically radiation protection, health physics, mostly applied. In other words, I was dealing with</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">how to take air samples, where to take air samples, how to take river samples, how to measure them, what to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">measure them for. I got into the environmental arena, which was really my long-term interest.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so I was involved in the late '60s in the water monitoring portion of the Hanford program, where I looked at</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the water in the schools, took water from the public schools, water from the wells, drinking water. We sampled</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">water from the river directly. We monitored the river by passing it through detectors. And this was a period when</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">most of the reactors were operating, so there was plenty of activity, and a real challenge to trace that. Where did it</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">go? How wa</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">s it going to impact the public?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I worked primarily in the 3</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">00 Area</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> until I retired from Battelle in '95. Oh, by the way, that's who I came to work</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">for, was Battelle. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd I spent all my career up to that point with Battelle after I'd come back from Livermore. And I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">took the certification exam in health physics and became a certified health physicist, a diplomat of the American</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Board of Health Physics. I served on the board for that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">certifying other individuals coming along.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I taught some of the classes here. We started here when this was the graduate school, the graduate center, long</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">before Washington State University became a part of the community. And so I had a lot of involvement in that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">arena. I just really enjoyed the field because it was broad enough that we could be concerned about x-rays and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">radiation that you would get externally from contamination, or get it on your body, in your body, so internal</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">evaluation.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I was primarily interested in keeping the environment clean, which was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">A</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd I have to mention Herb Parker</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">because he </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">was really the father of the radiation protection, radiation safety here at the site. And Herb called me</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">up one day</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">this was in the early '70s</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and said, I've got an opportunity for you. I think that you would make an</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">excellent candidate to make this move.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I said, well, I wasn't interested in moving. Well, he says, I think you should come over to my office and let's</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">chat. Well, he had a job in an environmental organization called Radiation Management Corporation. He was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">consultant to them, and they were in Philadelphia. And I'd always lived all my life on the west coast, so I wasn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">very enthused.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I went, I listened. He sent me back for an interview. I went in December, just about this time, a horrible time to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">go back there. It was crummy weather. It was wet, dark, I couldn't see anything. But it was a little company, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">they were about to grow with the nuclear industry to supply environmental monitoring support for the nuclear</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">power reactors up and down the east coast.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So I turned them down. But two years later I got another call and says, gosh, we really need you, and here's an</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">opportunity. You better come. So by '74 I did take advantage, moved back there. And then I think it was Jimmy</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Carter that desired not to reprocess any fuel, and so the nuclear industry, the nuclear power industry dropped off</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, at least began its diminished increased places, increased sites, increased utilities going with nuclear.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> So that led to the need—w</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">e had too many people, grew fast, but then</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">A</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd matter of fact, my original boss here,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Bob </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">Junkins</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">by name, hired me in '67, and I worked with him for almost two years before I moved to the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">environmental. I was in the criticality safety, nuclear safety business in that time. And my whole role was to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">develop a criticality safety manual that we could use to audit and evaluate the users of nuclear material here on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the site—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Battelle's portion of the site.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And that led me</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">then, with that environmental interest, I moved into the environmental monitoring portion in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">late '60s. And that's what set me up for that. I went to Philadelphia, but I had to go find something else. And</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">unfortunately, in that time period, I also got divorced back there in Philadelphia. And my children moved back to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the west coast, to Bainb</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ridge</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Island.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So it was now, where do I go?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Fortunately</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> there </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">w</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ere lots of jobs. I didn't have any problem finding a job. But I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">chose to go back to Livermore because I was familiar with the territory and the people. And so I went back there.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But it was only a couple of years, because I met a gal that I had dated in high school. And she ran into my sister,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and my sister gave me an address. I wrote to her, and she called me up and says, what are you doing for</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Christmas? I said, I'm taking the train to go see my kids. Well, why don't you stop here and see me on the way in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Salem? And we both went to Willamette University. That was where our degrees were from. And I'm still married</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">to her today, 35 years. And we've had a great time here at Hanford.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">When I did retire, I moved</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, I helped</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">because she was Vice President of United Way. And so I took on the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">role of the listener as the United Way representative volunteer at the Reemployment Opportunity Center. This was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">1995, when we had some 5,000 layoffs. I was part of that, only I wasn't a layoff. I took a voluntary retirement,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">early retirement.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And through that I discovered that there were other positions available on the site, and Bechtel Hanford had come</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">in as the environmental restoration contractor. And golly, I was involved in all that sort of stuff. So it was a perfect</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">opportunity to send a note</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I knew the head of the department from my health physics background and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">membership</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and was offered that opportunity to go to work for them. So I spend another eight years with them.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And then to finish my career, so to speak, I retired from them in '06, and then I got a call from Battelle, said, we're</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">doing all these calculating the radiation risks of former atomic energy workers, and we really need some help.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Could you do this for us? And that was nice because I did it at home. I would come to meetings with Battelle. And</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">one of my close friends, the two of us kind of worked together, which was great, because we were working at</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">home. I had to buy a new computer and all that because I needed access to much more sophisticated equipment</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">than I had, because I was just a little email and that sort of thing.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">My exciting things that happened here, my work </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">in </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the nuclear—criticality safety—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that was one of my first papers,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">major papers, because while I was at Livermore I studied the transuranics, which meant the materials that were</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">heavier than uranium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> curium</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> and so on up the chain.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I got very familiar because I was working with a group of chemists in California as their radiation safety</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">person, where they were trying to come up with these heavier elements. And so I got to know most of that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">material. And when I got up here and the criticality safety, because that was a concern too. We knew that some of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">these materials could go critical with the right conditions.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that gave me an opportunity to use that background that I had in knowing these materials, and then to put</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">together, really, a summary. I evaluated the fire safety aspect, the e</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">xplosion aspects, the radiation—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nternal as well</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">as external—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">aspects. So that was one of my real highlights. And that came right at a time when I took the exam to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">become certified in health physics.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">The next the set of the exciting things were the working with the environmental, where I got involved with nuclear</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">power reactors and in helping develop criteria for their environmental monitoring programs. You see, we went</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">from Atomic Energy Commission, AEC, to ERDA, Energy Research and Development Administration. That was in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">'74. And then we became the Department of Energy, and that was about '77, '78.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So I went through that period, so I was working for all three agencies, so to speak, just because one followed the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">other. I think my document that we finally issued on how to use environmental monitoring</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that is, what</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">techniques and so on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were recommended by what was called ERDA at that time, but became the DOE position</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">for all the sites.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And the way we handled that was, we we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nt out as teams and visited Oak R</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">idge and Savannah River and Chicago.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And we even went to some of the power reactors, or the early</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">not so much power, but the early development</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">reactors, Idaho, testing, and checking out how they were doing things so that we could then look at a composite</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and gather the folks. We held a couple of workshops where we brought in folks from all these other sites and said,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you know, here's what we see that ought to be the basic criteria. So that was a great opportunity to explore and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">see other sites.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So I visited many of the DOE sites, Los Alamos and Livermore, as all part of that, too. So I had a wonderful time</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and experience in a whole variety of things, handling these transuranic materials that not a whole lot was known.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And you came to know these things by working with them, working on developing shielding, because these</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">materials also—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">not only external radiation but also neutron radiation, which you get primarily from accelerators, or</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">from particular radionuclides that do give off neutrons as they fission. And so those were areas to explore and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">develop.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But what a great place to have to have worked, to have had my time, and I really don't want to leave the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">community. We've enjoyed</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and my wife, I thought, who really was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">after she finished school at Willamette, she</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">stayed there in Salem and went to work. And she's always been in the social services side of things.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And she came here, and she headed up Girl Scouts, she headed up Red Cross, and then got involved with United</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Way. So we ended our careers here, so to speak, but a great place that we have enjoyed. And of course it's far</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">different today than when I came 60 years ago to visit, because the agriculture and all those other things that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">have occurred as part of the site.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">All right. </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">That was a wonderful overview. I'd like to back up for just a minute to when your father first came here to start this</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">radio station. I know you said he lived in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Kennewick, but--</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">No, he didn't. It was my father's best buddy. Yeah. They both </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were in Portland radio stations.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Dad, and his name</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">was Clarence McCrea</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">dy, but we called him Mac. And he chose to come, and brought us along to come and see.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But Dad refused to come and be a part of the team.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Dean Mitchell's the name I can think of right now. He was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and Dean Mitchell, I t</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">hink, is still in the community,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">think he's still </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">alive. And I believe he goes to Kennewick United Methodist Church over there. I hope to see him</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">because I'm going to be speaking at that church here in a couple weeks, actually about three weeks, in January.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I know I linked up with him because I had a lot of pictures from all this development of the radio station that my</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">family</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">not my own personal family, but our very close family friends. And we only celebrated Easter and Fourth</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">of July with his family. So you can see, we would come up here and be up here, and in a good time of the year,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">spring. Summer was hot, but these were occasions. Yeah, so my family never did move up here. But they came to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">visit when I finally settled here in '67.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Visited. </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Okay</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">. So do you recall any impressions of the community at that time from your visits, what it was like to be here?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, the things I remember</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and even as a graduate student, the rest of the guys</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">there were four of us came</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">together</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">no, three of us. Three of us who had all gone to Willamette together</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">went to UW for our first year, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">then all came here, and then went back to UW to complete that program</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">they all lived in Kennewick, but I lived</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">here in Richland. I couldn't pass up the nickel each way bus. And I lived in on Gribble Street, which is now where</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Kadlec</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> has taken over those what were two-story apartments and one-story </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">fourplexes</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And that's where I lived that summer in '61. And the bus came right down our street, hopped on for a nickel, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">whether I went out to our areas or the 3</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">00 Area</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, because we spent one day a week during that time in the 3</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">00 Area</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> in classes in the library, because that was an opportunity for us to learn more about the site, and about the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">profession and the field. So we had people tell us about instrumentation, told us about environment, told us about</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the various things that were related to radiation instrument development, and different kinds of survey</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">instruments, and so on.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And that was a nice part, because coming back a few years later</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, I left here in '62, finished my degree, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">didn't come back 'til '67, so I was gone for five years. The bus system was still here, but the rates were different,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and I wasn't using the bus then. And I went to work for Battelle, and my office was in the </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Federal Building</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">. So I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">able to walk to work. And I'm a busser, a walker, and I've been that all my life. I did that in Portland. So it was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">logical step for me.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">The fact that I could get around</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I was not much of a commercial</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I didn't buy a lot of stuff. And so to this day</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">we're not much consumers. And so it was great. There were a few places. I bowled, you know, I played tennis,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">golfed some,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> took advantage of the things that were available right here. I had a cousin</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">couple of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">cousins still in Baker City, Oregon, so we'd go down for weekends to go down and see them.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And he was a dentist, so he took care of my dental needs early on. But once I settled here with my wife and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">family, it was no longer making those kind of trips for that purpose. We still had the friendship and relationship.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I enjoyed just the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, I guess I wouldn't say I enjoyed the heat, but yet I liked lots of sunshine, and the people.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Enjoyed working with the people. And that was a tough part of retiring. And of course, I took care of part of that by</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">volunteering over at the Reemployment Opportunities Center, which was over in Kennewick. And at that point we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">had moved out to the Village at</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Canyon Lakes. It was brand new,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> building that community and retirement.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so I thought, well, we'll get in on the ground floor. We'll be there and get acquainted, and so on. But then the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">opportunity with Bechtel, but clear out at the north end of the site. A</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd after two years of that long </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">commute, we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">moved back to Richland. But the opportunities here for my interests, and the opportunities on the job, because I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">didn't just stay right here, because I was working for Battelle, and we did a lot of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I suppose you would call it</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">contract research because that was Battelle's primary activity. But yet it really took me to visit other sites and to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">see how we could improve what we were doing right here.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I thin</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">k that that opportunity—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I didn't have to go somewhere else. Yes, I did interview for jobs along the line,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">along the way during the time. I </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">interviewed at Los Alamos. I interviewed at Rocky Flats and so on. But this was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">home, so to speak. And so it was a g</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ood place to stay. It wasn't—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">30,000 or so population.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And the population of Richland, today I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think it's doubled in all this time. But the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">boundary where Yakima came in to the Columbia there was kind of the southern end of Richland. There was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Richland Y and so on. But I lived essentially all my time within that confines. And of course now there's many</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">homes and developments south, and yet still part of the incorporated portion of Richland. So yes, this was a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">delightful place, and it still is for me.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">We've heard lots of fun stories about card games and checkers games and </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">different kinds of things going </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">these buses. Do you have any fun stories?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, yes. I tell you, what I used the bus for was sleeping. Being a newlywed and having all these classes and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">riding the bus every day, I would often take a nap on the way home. And often I'd end up at the end of the bus.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Rather than getting off at my stop, I would discover, oh, I missed the stop, so I got a little walk in.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> [LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> yeah, there were card games on the buses. I was not a bridge player</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, and that was one of the—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I played at pinnacle and hearts. And we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">played on the job. My goodness, we kept our scores on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> the blackboard in the office. Yeah, w</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">e played hearts. And there</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were other games, I'm sure, but that's what I remember the most. And I remember, also, we were conscious of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">our walking hour, keeping track of our weight and all. So we would walk over</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">after lunch we'd walk over and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">check our weight at the medical, go weigh on the scales.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I was never a smoker, but one of the guys in the group, even the leader, was a heavy smoker. But one of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">guys who was roughly my age</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and matter of fact, he went back to grad school, and that opened the door for me</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">to step in and take his job in the environmental in the late '60s. So that was ideal. And that was another thing. We</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were paying attention to those things that now the society is beginning to look at. So we looked for those kinds of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">things.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I think the working environment was great. In my later years here, before I left Battelle, it was altogether different</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">because now the opportunities within Battelle were more in the research ar</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ena. And that wasn't my forte, i</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">t was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">not my capabilities, not my interest, in going out and trying to obtain contracts and so on. So I found it</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and that's</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">when the opportunity to retire early, I just took advantage of it. My wife had a good job, and so she became my</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">sugar mama to take care of me, take care of us. And we had no children living here. Our children were all grown</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">by then. And so our needs were different.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I missed the people. But yet I was interacting every day, because I was there usually half a day. But some</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">days I'd be there all day. And I kept the hot water hot so I could make cocoa, or soups, or whatever people who</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were coming to find jobs and to look. We did mock interviews and all that sort of thing. So it was a continuation of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that people interaction that I really enjoyed.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And of course, when one does retire, a number of my friends have said the same thing. And yet today I don't</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">know how I have time to work, because I'm plenty involved in the community. And so that's part of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">my wife and I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">joined the </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">Gideons</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, and so that's been one of our maj</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">or activities in our retirement,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> that we've served as</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">presidents of the local camps on a geographic basis, and also area directors. And we have a state convention</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">coming up this next spring, so we're heavily involved in that. So we have enjoyed that aspect of life here.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And we have a daughter in Olympia, and we have a son</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, a daughter and family in Olympia and same in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Portland. Otherwise the kids are south of Eugene and Cottage Grove, and then a son and family in Albuquerque.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Neither of the sons</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">b</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">oth have PhDs—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and neither are involved in the nuclear business. Both of them engineers.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">One basically what I would call a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, one's a civi</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">l engineer with water interests.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> And</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> other is involved in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">materials engineering, works for Ball Aerospace, so has a lot of involvement in things that I might have had an</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">involvement in, but not from the nuclear standpoint.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham:</span> Yeah, the things I remember</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—l</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ike I say, we had activities with other </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">families</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> right here. We were involved in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">church. We got involved in the church. I'</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">m in a different church today, b</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ut that's where we raised our kids. So it</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">was a good community environment.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">In terms of what else did I do, well, I think I mentioned I had the children, and we did things with them. We</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">camped. And I wasn't a fisherman or a hunter, so those things weren't part of my interests here in the community.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I remember we would do the sledding and so on when the conditions were right, the snow and Carmichael</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Hill, because we lived not far from there, we'd walk over there, and swimming pool.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Back in the very early days</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and let me go back to that for just a moment. Because when we came, McNary Dam</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">wasn't here. So we had to take a ferry to cross from or Oregon to Washington, or we had to take the Bridge of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Gods back</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> 40 miles out of Portland, and then take that route. And we'd usually come over </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">Satus</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Pass and come</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">into Kennewick that way. Today you can take Highway 12 and 14 in all the way to Vancouver on the Oregon side--I mean, on the Washington side, excuse me.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that was interesting because this was a free-flowing river. There weren't any dams in that area. And so riding</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that ferry in a fairly narrow portion of the river was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and these are one- or two-car type ferries. I mean, this wasn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">a big ferry like you see out of Puget Sound. And it was difficult to reach the shore. Sometimes you'd get close and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you'd have to back up and try again.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And then I watched all the highways come in over the Horse Heavens. Because it used to be you could stay on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the Oregon side and come around through Walla Walla that way. So it was a whole different</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and it took longer.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">The roads weren't as nice. And so I watched the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">several times they've rebuilt the highway over the Horse</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Heavens.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Because we have family in Portland, we go down there every month or two with grandkids. They're about to finish</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, the last one is in his senior year in high school, and the other's in college. And all the rest of our grandkids,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">except the ones in Albuquerque, are all over 21. So our involvement with them is a lot different than when they</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were younger.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So yeah, it was a different place just because of the getting around. And we didn't have a public transit. We didn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">have</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">n those early days right here. But we had the Hanford buses. And you can see the one down there by the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">Crehs</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">t</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Museum. And that's what I rode much of the time, up until when I chose my work with Battelle. By then,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">going out on the site, it was about $50 a month to ride the bus then. It was more expensive.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And then I did go through some periods of spending time out on the site, where I'd spend a couple weeks for</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">some activity, work-related, and I would end up being able to take a government car. And I worked in the </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Federal Building</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, so it was convenient. We had a motor pool there.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that’s some of the </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">background. I don't know if there's other things that you were hoping to talk about, or remind me of.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I think I just have couple more questions. One thing I wonder if you could talk about, obviously much of your</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">career at Hanford spans the Cold War period.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: Mm-hm.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> So of course security was a very important concern. Can you talk a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">little bit about how that impacted your career?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, it certainly did. And I was fortunate in the sense that I had the Atomic Energy Commission fellowship. In</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">order to get that and apply it at the University of Washington, I had to get security clearance. So I was cleared,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and that happened when I went to Livermore.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Right after I finished grad school, I arrived at Livermore. And because I had a clearance, I was assigned those</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">facilities to be radiation safety person. I know that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> you know the name Ron Kathren</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, or have come across Ron</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> Kathren. And Ron Kathren</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> became my officemate there. He didn't have the clearance. So I got to be in places</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">work things that he wasn't able to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">w</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ell, he was eventually,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> I mean, he got the clearance also.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And of course, late in my career</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">like when I went to Philadelphia, I didn't need a clearance back there. And when</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I came back, yes, I had to get my clearance re-instituted in Livermore, because Livermore is still very much</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">involved with weaponry, or at least the development of materials. And so yes, clearance. But fortunately, I didn't</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">have an issue, and because I had had it really at the beginning when I went to grad school, that didn't impact me.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And some of my site visits at Oak</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> R</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">idge</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> I had to have special clearance to get into some of the places. One of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">things I didn't mention, and I should, I got involved in the decommissioning. And of course, that was the activity</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">with Bechtel Hanford. But the other thing I got involved in was what we call development of an emergency</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">assessment resource manual. We called it HEARM, and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> they called—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">because I was working with some gals, too, that was my</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">harem. But it was Hanford Emergency Assessment Resource Manual.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, our sponsor at DOE headquarters began to see the utility of that at some of the other DOE sites. So we went</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">to Livermore, we wen</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">t to Los Alamos, we went to Oak R</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">idge, we went to Savannah River. We developed those</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">same manuals for these other sites. And basically what it was </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span class="SpellingError SCX251492516">was</span></span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> an identification of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">a safety assessment.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And DOE was forcing all to look at the safety of their business. And if something went wrong, how bad could it be?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that's what this manual was, was to identify the facilities and the materials. It was structured originally about</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">radiation, but it became clear that there were also hazardous chemicals and other materials that needed to be of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">concern. And if they had an explosion, if they had a venting, they had a situation, where would that stuff go?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So we developed this. We looked at site boundaries. How far to the site boundary, in what directions, look at wind</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">speeds, all of that. So we combined all of that into a manual so that we could use that here at Hanford, call</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ed</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Unified Dose Assessment Center, UDAC.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And that provided a tool so when an emergency occurred, we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> knew we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> had an indication of how bad it could be. We could</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">flip to the page that was Building XYZ, and we could say, ah, this really is not likely to be any kind of an issue. Or</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">just the opposite, that it was an ABC, it was the top priority, the most hazardous materials on the site handled in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that building. And what were the projected, from the safety assessments, for the actual use of those facilities?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so that was an exciting kind of thing, because we got into sites where they had more security need than what</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I had to do for those. And so yes, we got into those. Matter of fact, some of the materials that we developed were</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">basically classified information on how much material is in this building, where is this building relative to the site,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and so on. So those kind of things we had to tone down, we had to talk about and find ways. And they became,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">essentially, not top secret, but at least they were less.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so we provided not only these manuals for right here, but also DOE headquarters got the same copies. So</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">whenever something was going wrong, they're evaluating what's happening out here, or from Livermore, or from</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Sandy, or Savannah River, or one of the other sites.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So yes,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> that was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> the emergency management aspect. And Battelle, that was one of the things that I moved from that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">development into working with the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Battelle had a contract for the 60 nuclear power plants to do emergency</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">exercises. And I even got involved with my wife with the Red Cross, because Red Cross would get involved in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">emergency exercises, especially for the supply system here. And I remember Mesa School was the first one.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so I got a couple of my health physics buddies, and we </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">would go and be the consultants. B</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ecause the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">farmers would come in and say, well, what should I do? My cows are out there on this potentially contaminated</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ground. What do I need to do? This was just</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">these were what-if type exercises. So that was an aspect I guess I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">just had passed over and forgotten all about. So even had a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">n involvement with my wife </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">indirectly because of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So with these nuclear sites, I got involved as an evaluator to go out either for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">or DOE, and evaluate these exercises. So I was involved not in developing those exercises, but evaluating and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">being there on site.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And also, as </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">a result, I got to go to the Kennedy Space Center and involved in a couple of spacecraft launches</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that had nuclear materials. And so that was exciting, paid to go. And also got involved in many cancellations. You</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">know, weather didn't turn out right, we'd get thunderstorms or a rain, and you'd have to wait it out for a few more</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">days. Those sort of things.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Galileo, I think, was the one major one that we were sending heat sources, radioactive sources into space, so if</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">they were to have</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> aborted</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">not for reentry, but on the launch, that's why we were there, to take air samples,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you know, we were teams spread out. So there's another aspect I'd forgotten about.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Very cool. You had this</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> multiplicity of great jobs, it sounds like, throughout the course of your career here. Is there anything</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that stands out as being the most challenging or the most rewarding?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, I think the challenge came later in the career when</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">as I mentioned, that Battelle was going off in a research</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">wing, and that wasn't where my expertise and my capabiliti</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">es were. And so a challenge to—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">f I'm not going to stick</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">around, what am I going to do? B</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ecause nuclear power was obviously diminishing with time, especially when you</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">get up in the 90s, and so on.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that became one of the challenges, if I were to retire, what would I do? I </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">was young enough, late '50s</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">, I didn't need to retire that early. And the other side, the side as I shared, I think sort of the three or four</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">major things that I was involved in that I very much enjoyed, one</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and I haven't shared this directly</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">involved with Joe Soledad.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I don't know whether you've interviewed Joe, but I know Joe's been interviewed. I just don't know who were</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">involved. But Joe was developing all the criteria to evaluate all these radionuclides that had been released here in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Hanford, had been released at other sites, or could be</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">weren't necessarily all released, but I mean, if they got</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">into the environment and got into people, what kind of doses could those--Well, I was involved with Joe as my mentor. I developed the numbers that went in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—i</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">n other words, I looked at the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">decay schemes of each of those radionuclides and then built the numbers that would go into the equations. I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">didn't develop the equations for how much got into the human body, but I developed if you had radioiodine, or you</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">had strontium, or you had cesium, or you had plutonium, what could that mean inside the body?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so that was a great opportunity that I had developi</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ng those, because those became—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd still used today—a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ll</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that environmental pathway stuff that Joe had developed is still in use today, used by the EPA, the Nuclear</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Regulatory Commission.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Yeah, they've added more materials and modified things a bit. But the modifications are more related to, now,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">more knowledge about some of those decay schemes and so on, but that impact. So that was one of the exciting</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">things.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">The criticality safety manual. I get the manual done, and I got to move on to something else, because once you've</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">developed the manual, unless you're using it</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">yes, I was. I was out evaluating criticality safety. I was auditing,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">basically. Oh, t</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">hat was, yeah, I could do it, but it was more fun to go out and get involved in the environmental</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">monitoring, choosing which sample, where to sample, what to analyze those samples for, and then write the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">report to show what this means impact-wise for the site.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Going from there, then, into developing what should an environmental monitoring program look like, either for a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nuclear power plant or a place like Hanford. That wa</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">s that exciting and thrilling, a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">nd I felt I made a contribution.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And then to jump over into, now you understand that stuff, and now relate that to emergency preparedness and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">evaluating emergency preparedness. Did you take into account?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I will have to say, because I was involved in a course, and I've forgotten what the course was called, but it was at</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the Nevada test site. And we were there--and I think it was only Hanford person there at the time. That's when I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">was involved in emergency preparedness.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And this was a course to really walk us through scenarios and situations, and see the mistakes we could make.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">We could walk over a wire on the ground that we shouldn't have because it was live, or could've been live, and not</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">recognizing that. You're taking </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">an action for what you see in front of you, but then missing out on something that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you shouldn't have done as part of that.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And that became part of our evaluation, when we looked at mistakes they would make, not take an air sample, or</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">take it where it shouldn't have been. You should have taken it over here instead of over there, you know, those</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">kind of things. So was able to use all that background and material that I had had as part of my career.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I feel like, yes, had I started over today, I think I would've probably gone the environmental, but more from an</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">atmospheric and understanding weather. That was an interest as a kid. I've watched</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">this is before television</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and I would pay attention to the thermometer and what was going on. Is it going to snow tomorrow, or that kind of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">thing.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But otherwise, no, it was great. And the courses and the opportunities afforded by this diverse kind of a field, that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">when I came, and when I was a health physicist, I didn't k</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">now what a health physicist was, but</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> I think I have a pretty</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">good idea today.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So obviously, a lot of my students n</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ow were born after the Cold War.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: Right.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: They</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> don't really understand that time period.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Is there anything you'd like for future generations who may be watching this video to know about what it was like</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">to work during that time period and contribute to that effort?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, obviously, one of the things, being here in Hanford, was because we had all these reactors operating, which</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">meant that there was always contamination going into the river, contamination going into the ground.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Reprocessing was occurring</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> but was stopped at a time period. So then we had to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and of course, today we still</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">hear about whether it's from the west side or else around the country. Even our own family ask questions. What</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">about the leaking tanks? What does that mean? And from my perspective, I have an idea what that means.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I think I look at it in a lot different mindset, because I know that yes, it's of concern, and it should be. But on</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the other hand, it's not going to kill me. It's not going to give me a dose that I won't want to stay here, I won't want</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">to live here. And because, like I said, in the older days, when all the reactors were operating and so on, we had a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">lot more radioactivity to deal with.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But Joe's equation</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Joe Soledad</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">those pathway formulas and equations and so on that we used, we proved</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">with that that hey, yes, there is material out there. It's of low consequence to you and me as residents of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">community. And I think that that was probably a kind of thing that we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the scientists, let's say, the science side</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">were not very successful in communicating that to the public.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I don't think we are today. B</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ecause I can remember one of my daughter's friends, when they had the different</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">kinds of sweeteners, and they would say no, we're going to cut those off. And so when her dad worked in the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">grocery business, he could bring that stuff home, and no, I don't think we want to use that. Again, uninformed</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">about those kind of things</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">. And I think that's the aspect—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that we get a bug, a thought of what an impact could be,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">and yet we don't know the whole story. And I know I tried, but on the other hand, that wasn't my role particularly.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I was aware.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I think that, looking today, we look at so many more things today in terms of hurtful environmental impact</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">kinds of things. I'm thinking just the environmental movement, if you will, because our daughter-in-law is very</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">much involved there, and her daughter is now in college and looking in that same arena. The other daughter-in</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">-</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">law</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">down in New </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Mexico, that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> was one of her areas of interest. And she studied bugs and insects and that sort</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">of thing. Today she's not using that, because she's really into health and doing private yoga and exercise training.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But the Cold War meant that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">well, that's where it was nice when I got to go the other sites, because that allowed</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">me to kind of see, and to put all this together as </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">an </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">understanding</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> the whole package, and not just what's happening</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">in Han</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ford or what's happening at Oak R</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">idge or whatever, to be able to realize that probably some choices</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">mean, </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">making the choice here</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> of </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Hanford, I think, was a wonderful choice. Choosing this remote location</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">it's not so</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">remote today, but I think it was an excellent</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">from all the material, all the information we knew at the time.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And yet places like Savannah River, where you've got all kinds of groundwater and all kinds of those kind of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">issues, maybe that wasn't such a good place, where the ability of stuff to move would be greater than a place like</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">this. And I think what we saw, and what I remember just f</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">rom the public, my own families—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">our own families would</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ask questions, which was very reasonable.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I think the understanding</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—and </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">we've been watching</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I'm digressing for a second, but we've been</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">watching the P</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">residential wives series on television, so we're going back over the history and seeing some of the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">things that were going on as this whole business developed in our lifetime, things that we didn't realize, because</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">some was top secret, not shared. And of course, I was perfectly happy to work in a closed environment, where</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you didn't share everything you did.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">For someone tod</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ay, I think that the question</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> aspect of business, and for the future, is always question what</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">you're doing, how can it impact the environment, how can it impact people, how can it impact you yourself?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Cellphones, all kinds of things that we use and are in use daily, but do we really know what the long-term impacts</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">of these devices are? I think for the moment we feel quite certain t</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">hat we're not creating monster issues that become-- </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">But I like the environmental movement, because I kind of put my life together around that, an interest in seeing</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">that we're doing the right things to keep us safe, and yet not say, you can't do that.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And of course, the environmental impact statement business. I was involved partly in that too, in helping develop</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">those. I guess my last one that I was involved in was in Tennessee, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, because</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">they were going wide with lots of nuclear. And that was in the '90s, as I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> recall, when I went down there and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">involved.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to tell us about? Any other stories that stand out?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, of course, we did have accidents. We had things that</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">yeah, I got involved in a cleanup in the 3</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">00 Area</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">,</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">where an underground pipe had broken. And this was americium, was a principal nuclide that had gotten into the</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ground. And </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">we ended up digging that all up. B</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ut just chasing it, deciding where to sample, and digging up and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">then discovering, oh, the pipe is all corroded. So yes, everything that went down that drain.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so those kinds of things, I really enjoyed those, because you were evaluating a condition that was really an</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">unknown. And I think that's part of what the environmental restoration contract</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the Bechtel work that I was</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">involved in, we were doing some of that, too, because we were making measurements and then determining, did</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">those measurements give us what we need to know so that we can take the appropriate steps for remediation?</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And so I think that aspect, so to speak, of research piece might have been</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">if I were to start again, I might be</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">more interested in research. But at the time, I was more interested in what we need to know so that we can take</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">the right steps to move forward.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I think that those are my observations. I was an enthusiastic worker. I just loved the opportunity and the people to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">work with. And we did a lot of group things. You know, I can remember bac</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">k in the old days, Ron Kathren</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> and I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">would have an equation on the blackboard we were trying to solve, and then leave it up there for a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">while with</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">getting more information to make things fit. You took the information you had.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">And I was successful, probably published about, I don't know, 50 different papers in Health Physics Journal. And I</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">also was involved in the Society for Radiological Protection in the British Isles. I gave two different presentations</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">over there in the '80s and '90s, which is always nice to go and experience others. I had even looked at that as a</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">possible exchange.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: And as a result of those visits, I got invited to go to the Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and work on an</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">environmental plan with folks from all over the world. And we had interpreters, because we had Russians, and we</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">had Canadians, and we had French and Germans. And so</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> on—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">all that was nice. And they paid my way, and I got to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">spend</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">--</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">matter of fact, I made two trips in the same year on that activity. I had a third one, but the Department of</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Energy wouldn't allow me to go on the third one.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">So that adds to your enjoyment, your understanding and working with people who have come from different</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">places, and yet have similar issues and proble</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">ms, and how are you addressing—</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">especially when we're trying to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">write a manual, an international manual that would be used wherever, in developing countries as well as</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">advanced countries and so on, to protect people in the environment.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Is there anything else at all?</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Not that's coming to me at this point. </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">[LAUGHTER] </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">I'm just delighted to have had this opportunity to share with you, even though</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">it's </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">very</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> uncoordinated.</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> [LAUGHTER]</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> I certainly rambled.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">No, that was wonderful. You gave us some great detail</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">s. That’s always</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> exciting for us to hear about. And I want to</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">thank you so much for sharing with us. We really appreciate you taking time out.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">Well, Laura, it was a pleasure sharing with you and getting to know you. I wish you well in your</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">—</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Arata</span>: Thank you.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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<p class="Paragraph SCX251492516"><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Denham</span>: --</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">future work and</span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516"> </span><span class="TextRun SCX251492516">finishing your PhD. I never got there.</span><span class="EOP SCX251492516"> </span></p>
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Location
The location of the interview
Washington State University - Tri-Cities
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:06:42
Bit Rate/Frequency
Rate at which bits are transferred (i.e. 96 kbit/s would be FM quality audio)
5261 kbps
Hanford Sites
Any sites on the Hanford site mentioned in the interview
300 area.
Bechtel Hanford
Years in Tri-Cities Area
Date range for the interview subject's experience in and around the Hanford site
1947-2013
Years on Hanford Site
Years on the Hanford Site, if any.
1961-1995
Names Mentioned
Any named mentioned (with any significance) from the local community.
Parker, Herb
Kathren, Ron
Soldat, Joe
Carter, Jimmy
Junkins, Bob
McCreedy, Clarence
Mitchell, Dean
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 Dale Denham
Description
An account of the resource
An interview with Dale Denham 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
12/12/2013
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.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2016-05-24: Metadata v1 created – [J.G]
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.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Hanford Site (Wash.)
Nuclear weapons plants--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site.
Nuclear weapons plants--Waste disposal--Environmental aspects--Washington (State)--Hanford Site.
Nuclear instruments & methods
Richland (Wash.)
Kennewick (Wash.)
300 Area
Battelle (Wash.)
Bechtel Hanford
Kennewick (Wash.)
Livermore
Los Alamos
Oakridge
Richland (Wash.)
Savannah River