Interview with Bob Heineman
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0:00:00 Robert Franklin: My name is Robert Franklin. I am conducting an oral history with Robert Heineman on July 6, 2017. The interview is being conducted on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. I will be talking with Robert about his experiences working at the Hanford Site. And for the record, can you state and spell your full name for us?
Bob Heineman: My name is Robert Heineman. H-E-I-N-E-M-A-N.
Franklin: And Robert’s spelled just like “Robert”?
Heineman: Robert.
Franklin: R-O-B-E-R-T?
Heineman: Just like yours, yup.
Franklin: Okay. But you prefer to be called Bob?
Heineman: Yeah, sure.
Franklin: Okay, so we’ll use Bob for the rest of the interview, then.
Heineman: Okay.
Franklin: If that’s okay with you. Okay. So, Bob, tell me how and why you came to the area.
00:00:47 Heineman: Well, I went to school at Washington State University and majored in police science because I took one of those classes as a general university requirement, and I was fascinated that policemen would actually go to school. So I went through and I got done. I was married very early and had a baby, so I had nothing else to do but schoolwork and take care of the baby while my wife worked. So I graduated when I was 20. And I really wanted to be a police officer or a sheriff’s deputy. But graduating at 20, I was too young to go to work. So I stayed in school and got my master’s degree, and then graduated.
Franklin: And what did you get your master’s degree in?
Heineman: In police science and administration.
Franklin: Wow.
0:01:40 Heineman: And then I came back to the Tri-Cities, because I had nothing left except the end of my thesis and I could do that here at WSU Tri-Cities. My mother got an office looking out over the river where I could work on my thesis. So that’s how I got back to Richland.
Franklin: And that’s when it was the Joint Center for Graduate Education, right?
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: Or as they would call it, the GE College of Nuclear Knowledge.
Heineman: Yup, exactly. But--
Franklin: But you had—sorry. So you had pre-existing connection to the Tri-Cities before you came back after going to WSU?
0:02:21 Heineman: I did. We moved here—my father moved here to work at the Site when I was about three or four years old.
Franklin: Do you remember what year that was?
Heineman: That would’ve been 1954 or 1955.
Franklin: Okay.
Heineman: So we lived in a government house on the west side of Richland over on Cedar Street and then moved over—when they sold the houses, we moved over to a house actually on the river, which was great for a little kid, when I was in third grade. And my mother was going back to school to get her master’s degree in librarianship. And she was working at the library in the 300 Area at Hanford. And my father had come here to apply his physics degree from the University of Michigan. Most of the plutonium production work was pretty well staffed at that time, because it was after the war was over. So he decided he wanted to go into breeder reactor research.
So he was instrumental in designing some of the cores for the early breeder reactors, and was the project manager for the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, the PRTR, and was always very proud of having participated in the design of the core and then managed the design and construction of the overall reactor in early operations. And then when he was finished with that, he moved over to FFTF and worked there for years for GE, and then transferred over to Battelle when Battelle took over that part of the work. And so he spent the rest of his career either in breeder reactor research or safety analysis for the breeder reactor research.
0:04:37 So I have a whole generation before me that was Hanford before me. It was really just kind of happenstance that I came back, because I wasn’t old enough to go to work as a police officer. So while I was finishing up my master’s degree and applying to various places, a job came open on Hanford Patrol. I was living with my father-in-law and he handed me the advertisement and said, gee, maybe it’s time you got your own house and moved, you know, go to work, son. [LAUGHTER] So I did that.
0:05:21 Franklin: Wow. So just to back up a little bit—and thank you for talking about your father. That’s a really interesting career trajectory of breeder reactor research. Your mother, though, she also worked onsite, correct?
Heineman: She did. She worked in the 300 Area library, which was the technical library for the whole Hanford Site. And then after she went back to school, she came back to the library, and the decision was made by, at that time, I think it was the AEC and Washington State University, actually in cooperation with the University of Washington and I think maybe Oregon State?
Franklin: Yup, yup. That’s all correct.
Heineman: To develop a joint center for graduate study. One of the things they wanted to do was to build a big, new library. They would take the reading room from the Hanford Site, the public reading room, and take over that function for the Department of Energy, then AEC. And so they asked her if she would be willing to be the interface on the design and construction of the library that turned out to be the library here at WSU Tri-Cities.
Franklin: Wow, okay.
0:06:48 Heineman: So she said, sure, I’d be happy to do that. So she was the primary contact. Then when they got ready to open the library, they asked her if she would run the library. So she did that until she retired. And got to help with the design of the new WSU Tri-Cities library, and was really proud of that. She worked for Brian Vollett at the time. She put everything she always wanted in a library into the design, and they gave everything that she wanted to her. So she worked there until she retired.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great. Our offices were in that library for kind of the first year-and-a-half we were here, and I’ve always really enjoyed spending time in there. So that’s really interesting to know.
Heineman: Well, she really, she really loved helping the students. I mean, when you would sit down and talk to her about her day, all she would talk about was who came in to see her, what they needed for research, how she could help them. She really enjoyed it.
0:08:01 Franklin: That’s great.
Heineman: Yeah, it was cool.
Franklin: We need more library—well, we have lots of great librarians. But that’s a great quality in a librarian. Okay. So, to go forward again, you heard about this job as a Hanford patrolman.
Heineman: I did.
Franklin: Okay, and so you applied.
0:08:19 Heineman: I did, and I got the job. When they took me around to interview with people, they didn’t have anybody actually on Hanford Patrol that had a degree at all, much less a master’s degree. So they were all very excited that they had somebody that was the new model for what they could do for security at Hanford. So that was pretty invigorating for me.
Franklin: Did you feel a lot of pressure, though? Because I imagine you’d be going in, there’s a lot of guys who had a lot of years of experience, and kind of, you’re this young guy with a master’s degree in police science. Did you feel any pressure or anything? Or out of place?
Heineman: I was actually a little bit. But more I was just fascinated by the whole thing, because most of the people that worked at Hanford and almost all of the people in security or patrol had started during the war.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Heineman: So they were 50 to 65 years old. And there weren’t any young people anywhere. In all the interviews I went to, they were all 60-plus and had all this experience and they were so expert at what they did, you know? That part was sort of awe-inspiring. But I didn’t really feel uncomfortable; I was just sort of awestruck by the whole situation and the people. And they offered me a job, and I went to work. So that was pretty cool.
Franklin: That is cool. I bet you heard lots of great patrol stories.
Heineman: Oh, yeah.
Franklin: From the war.
0:12:13 Heineman: More than I could ever tell, yeah. Yeah. I think the folks who worked here during the war and in the post-war years up to when I went to work in the early ‘70s had been through an awful lot of things. The folks in security were—people were a little nervous about them, but at the same time they were pretty much revered because of the effort to keep everything secret during the production years. There were a lot of people that had security clearances at a pretty high level, but the security people, of course, most of them, had access to almost all of the information associated with production of plutonium. So I think people were a little bit standoffish from the security and the patrol folks, but at the same time, there was a lot of respect for what they did. It was a much different world than it is today in that way.
Franklin: Interesting. Did you start out as a patrolman?
Heineman: I did.
Franklin: So how did that—was it like what you had expected, going through school and learning all—going all the way through your masters in police science?
Heineman: Not a bit.
Franklin: Not a bit?
Heineman: Not a bit.
Franklin: I’m wondering if you could describe that discrepancy there.
0:11:46 Heineman: So I had always wanted to be a police officer. And honestly, I really wanted to be a King County sheriff’s deputy. In that role, then, your primary role is law enforcement. So most of the education that I had dealt with the basics of law enforcement, investigative techniques, crime scene investigation and all those kinds of things. We didn’t do hardly any of that here.
Our primary job here—we had some law enforcement functions because we were deputized Benton County sheriffs, and I believe they still are. But if we had what I would call pure law enforcement functions to be taken care of, we would call Benton County, and they would send deputies out to perform those functions. We did investigate thefts; we investigated areas where there might have been violations of the law regarding classified information and the control of it; we did basic traffic enforcement and those kinds of things. But anything beyond that, we would call Benton County to take care of it. Our function was to keep the Site safe and secure. And in that sense, it was completely different than anything I had ever expected to do.
0:13:22 When I came to work, there were only two other young people on Hanford Patrol, and there were only about a hundred Hanford patrolmen anyway. The other two young people had come in six months before me. Everybody else had been hired during the war or shortly after. During the layoffs in the late ‘60s, they got laid off, many of them. And then when they needed to staff up again, they rehired those same people. So everybody was 58 to 65 when I came to work. Boy, they had a lot of—as you said, a lot of stories, and they had a lot to teach me. But it was mostly about what’s going on on the Site, what are we trying to do, what are we trying to protect, and how do we do that? And then if things went wrong, our job was to go get involved and resolve that.
Franklin: Interesting. So how long did you stay as a patrolman?
Heineman: Three months.
[LAUGHTER]
0:14:38 Heineman: Yup, in three months, I went through basic training all by myself, because, as I said, there weren’t any other new people. So I had three instructors and I spent about six weeks going through basic training. All our classroom instruction, all our firearms instruction, all of that was three-on-one. It was a marvelous opportunity for me. And then I graduated from their basic training after six or eight weeks, and then got assigned to go work with patrol crews in all the different areas at Hanford so that I could get an understanding of what was going on. First in the 100 Areas where the reactors were and where they were producing plutonium and how all of that happened. And then in the 200 Areas where they separated the fuel into plutonium and uranium and waste. And then finally, when I was ready to work all by myself, then they put me in the 300 Area, and I split my time between 300 Area and FFTF, which was under construction at the time. So we had this big construction site security challenge that we had to fulfill.
0:16:12 Then after three months, they called me up and said—the context is that in 1972, the year before I went to work, there was a very significant terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics. By ’73 or early ’74, they had realized that those same terrorists might be interested in diverting plutonium. And it created a huge concern for the government and so they began to expand their security capabilities. One of the things that the company I worked for, Atlantic Richfield Hanford Company, needed to do was to add a couple of professional security people. In those days, they called us security agents. And they had just lost somebody, and so they needed a new security representative that would be responsible for education and enforcement of all the rules related to classified information and plutonium production and control. They asked me if I wanted to go do that. So I said, yes.
0:17:43 Then shortly after I got hired as a security agent, the other person that was working as a security representative retired. My boss was about 64, and sort of struggling with costs, budgets, some of the more basic business aspects of doing work here. So a year-and-a-half after that, they decided that they needed a new security manager. So then all of the sudden, out of the blue, I was the security manager for Atlantic Richfield. And it just sort of, it was like January of ’75, I guess. And I was just barely out of school. I thought, I don’t know if I can do this. I went out and I interviewed with the guy that I would work for, and I said, I don’t know if I’m ready for this or not. He said, oh, you can do that.
Franklin: Wow. That is quite a—
Heineman: Bing, bang, bang.
Franklin: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
0:19:00 Franklin: That’s a really interesting tie into—I never would’ve put the ’72 Munich Olympic terrorist, that PLO offshoot, into increased security at Hanford. I mean, I can understand their desire to want to probably obtain plutonium for probably a dirty bomb, because they probably wouldn’t have the capability to make their own weapon. But that’s a really fascinating tie-in to the Cold War. To kind of these world events.
Heineman: Right. Well, the Munich Olympics event had an effect worldwide on people’s view of what the bad guys were willing to do with their automatic weapons and their willingness to kill people. Those folks, those terrorists, they were willing to die. That was foreign to the country at that time. We weren’t used to people being willing to die for their cause. It had a profound effect on the nuclear industry, and especially the plutonium and uranium production capabilities in the United States. It lasted for—as we talk a little more, you’ll see that it lasted for another 20 years and drove the expenditure of billions of dollars in security upgrades across the AEC, then ERDA, and then DOE production complex. I was lucky enough to come in at the head end of that. So I was right in the middle of the whole thing, and it was really fascinating.
Franklin: Wow. So how long did you stay as—so—well, I don’t want to ask how long. What was your primary job as security manager? Obviously, you took the job, you got the job, right, was promoted to security manager at Atlantic Richfield Hanford.
0:21:00 Heineman: So, my primary goal, I would say, was to work with the production managers and the research managers and the folks that were involved in the 200 Areas where we were taking the spent fuel from the production reactors and converting it into plutonium and uranium. My primary objective in those days was to try to help them understand the risk of what at the time seemed to be a pretty outlandish threat, and convince them that there were controls that needed to be put into place on the people, the production processes and the information in order to assure that Hanford was the last place that those terrorists would want to go at the United States production complex. If they wanted to go attack the production complex and divert plutonium or uranium or obtain classified information, my job was to work with all these production and information control managers and convince them that we wanted to look like the very last place those terrorists would go if they decided to try and get some information or material.
Franklin: So you—
Heineman: And—
Franklin: Oh, sorry.
Heineman: And it was not an easy task. They didn’t understand; they didn’t really believe that it was real. They didn’t fight me, but I spent the bulk of my time in their offices with their staff talking about the history, talking about the risks, showing them how easy diversion might have been in the old days before we put in all of the security upgrades that we did. And then trying to convince them that it was appropriate to take a big chunk of the money they had to produce plutonium and spend it on security.
Franklin: That’s interesting. Interesting for several reasons. So you basically had to kind of bring this threat home to them, to make it real for them, whereas they might have thought you were maybe making a mountain out of a molehill. You know, oh, this happened so far away.
Heineman: That’s exactly what it felt like.
Franklin: It’d never come here, and kind of blinders on. But the money to increase these security upgrades and security systems came out of their—like they had to spend the money out of their budgets?
Heineman: Sure.
Franklin: Is that where some of the resistance came from?
0:24:10 Heineman: Hanford would get a set amount of money every year. And the whole funding situation, even in those days, was very complex. But the bottom line is, Hanford was only going to get so much money. Their primary job was to produce plutonium. I mean, that was the goal. It was like—like, General Motors: the goal is, how many cars can you put off the other end of the line? And anything you do other than building cars takes away from how many cars you can produce. Since Hanford, its primary mission was to produce plutonium, it produced 80%, plus or minus, of the nation’s plutonium stockpile. Anything that they couldn’t spend on plutonium production seemed like a diversion from their primary mission.
It really was so new, actually, to the whole world that people were willing to die for their cause, it was very difficult. Very difficult. But I was a young guy; I had a lot of energy, a lot of emotion. I was awed by these folks and very respectful. And I think that helped me a lot, over the security folks that worked for some of the other contractors that were older. So I just put in as much time as I had to to work with them and help them understand. And help me understand what the challenges were going to be from their side. If we started putting additional controls in place, how was that going to affect their ability to produce plutonium and spend as much money as they could on that primary mission?
Franklin: So, really—it does seem so simple that this would be a concern to us today, but really this was kind of the—you were working in the kind of formation of this idea of how international terrorism could—the idea that terrorists in one place could affect people internationally and that they would use a global supply chain in order to cause havoc or to get material to attack civilians indiscriminately. That’s really—I mean, it sounds so, I guess, maybe 40 years later, we’re much more inured to that kind of thinking, or we see that so much on the news.
Heineman: Sure, if you remember, and maybe you can’t, but in those days, when you went to get on the airplane, you showed them your ticket. That’s all there was.
Franklin: I do!
Heineman: Right?
Franklin: It’s been a while, it’s getting further and further, but—
Heineman: There was just none of today’s mentality that there need to be some basic controls in place to protect everybody.
0:27:23 Franklin: I’m wondering if you can give me an example of a control that was instituted that affected the way in which people produce plutonium, or one of the controls that you instituted in the process to keep materials safer?
0:27:39 Heineman: Sure. There’s lots of examples. I mean, in later years, I had the opportunity to manage projects that put an awful lot of hardware in place to do that. In the days when I went to work, between the city of Richland and the plutonium storage vault, there was the barricade, the Wye or Yakima Barricade that was no fences on either side; it was only controlling cars. There was a hog wire fence around each area with a gate and a badge house. But it doesn’t take very much to go through a hog wire fence. There was another hog wire fence around the separations plants or the Plutonium Finishing Plant. And inside that, nothing. The doors weren’t even locked. In the summer, at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which had 47 exterior doors, two-thirds of those doors on both levels were wide open at night because it was so hot and they couldn’t air condition it. So that’s all there was in security.
So over the next 15 years, we put an awful lot of hardware in place. We spent, honestly, billions of dollars to design and procure and construct barriers and detection technology, to hire additional guards, to set up special tactical weapons teams. We procured boats and canines and helicopters. We bought some of the best weaponry available anywhere in the country. We put controls over the production statistics so that if there was any indication that we didn’t have the amount of plutonium at the end of the process that we predicted at the beginning, that we could stop and go figure out why.
Franklin: Did that also extend to the publication of the amount produced?
Heineman: Yes. That has always been classified.
Franklin: Oh, okay, okay.
Heineman: And was classified all the way up to the end of production.
Franklin: Okay, okay.
0:30:50 Heineman: There is a lot of production data on—open source data out on the internet. But even today, my ability to talk about how much we produced or how much we could produce from a given amount of fuel is limited by the regulations on classified information. I cannot share that. But there is a lot of information in the open literature out there now about that. But in those days, that information didn’t exist, and it wasn’t tolerated. If we saw little bits of data beginning to appear somewhere, our job was to go figure out where did it come from. Was it accidental, or was somebody actually sharing that data, and what did we need to do about that. So we had a lot of control over production data, over production processes, classified information, the hardware side of security.
I think at one point when I was safeguards and security director, we had something over 450 Hanford patrolmen. And that compares with about 80 to 100 when I went to work. So we really went through a huge hiring spree. And our physical standards for those folks and the training that we provided for those folks, the equipment we supplied to them, was by 1980 or ’85 was just orders of magnitude improved over when I went to work.
Franklin: Wow. Hanford was also a pretty early adopter of CCTV and computer alarms, correct?
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: Was that part of—were you responsible for those upgrades as well?
0:33:02 Heineman: Yeah, after about a year-and-a-half as security manager, the contract changed for the production areas on the Site. Atlantic Richfield decided they didn’t want to be in the war business anymore. They didn’t want to be associated with plutonium; they wanted to focus on oil and chemical. And the contract was secured by Rockwell, which had operated the Rocky Flats site for a number of years in Colorado. When Rockwell came in, they asked me if—we were right in the middle of the recognition that we needed to do big things, and we were going to have to go spend a lot of money on upgrades. They asked me if I would be what, in their terms, was the safeguards project manager. And so I worked for two different people: I worked for the safeguards and security director, and I worked for the chemical processing director that had all of the reprocessing plants and the Plutonium Finishing Plant. He was the one that truly controlled the resources. So on one side I worked for the guy that was responsible for the technical aspects of security, and on the other side I worked for the guy that had the resources and the plants that we were trying to protect. It worked very well. It was a marvelous experience to work for both of them. And gave me quite an opportunity to interface with the plant managers in a very different way than I ever had when I was purely security.
Franklin: Did you find it was easier to rationalize the upgrades and the expenditures at that point to security?
Heineman: I think so, maybe partly because of the organizational set up. But partly, too, because a couple of years had gone by and there were other things happening in the world. The plant managers and their staff were reading about that in the paper; they were beginning to understand. So the job got a lot easier then. I think, the other thing that really helped was that the field office manager for the Richland operations office had this philosophy that he wanted to be—he wanted Hanford viewed as the hardest place to go to if anybody wanted to steal plutonium or classified information. And he worked very hard with headquarters—I think we’d just transitioned from the AEC to the Energy Research and Development Administration, ERDA. And he worked very hard with the folks back at headquarters to convince them to go talk to Congress and set up a discreet funding process for the security upgrades that was outside the production budget.
Franklin: Ah.
Heineman: So all of a sudden, I had access to tons of money. [LAUGHTER]—that I didn’t have to talk from the plant managers’ budgets.
Franklin: Oh, okay, yeah.
Heineman: And over the seven, actually, eight or nine years that I did the project manager job and the safeguards and security director’s job, we probably spent somewhere between one and two billion dollars, independent of the production budget to go design and construct and operate all those physical systems.
Franklin: Such as?
0:37:30 Heineman: Well, the standard protection for a vital area in the Department of Energy today would be several layers of security outside that vital area, but then a double-perimeter fence with a goodly distance in between, with barriers on top of the fences to slow people down, alarm systems between those fences. Closed-circuit television cameras observing the whole area and activating immediately if you had an alarm so you could see instantaneously what was there, with a central alarm facility that was watching all of that. A space between the inner fence and the facility itself that was protected. This superior patrol force with the best of the best assigned to the plutonium facilities. Alarms around the entire exterior of the production plant. Alarms throughout the inside of the production plant that detect motion or heat or vibration or a variety of other things. Patrolmen on the inside of the plant looking out to keep people away if there is an attack, not respond too late to get them. And then a similar set that everything I just described, around the perimeter of the actual production area and the actual storage area. So you had eight to ten different layers of barriers, alarms, surveillance capability and response capability before anybody could ever even get to the door into wherever the plutonium was. And that’s a lot of money. [LAUGHTER] It’s a lot of money. And quite a bit of the funding that we had went into hiring, training, equipping and retraining our patrol force so that we had the best of the best available to respond if we did have a problem. Because it does you no good at all to know the bad guys are there if you can’t resolve that situation in your favor.
Franklin: Yeah. Did the training of Hanford Patrol change—how did it change from when you had signed on in ’73 to what you’re describing now when Rockwell took over? You mentioned you went through like a three-month class. Did that expand, was there—I imagine all this would need new training as well.
0:40:50 Heineman: It was six to eight weeks, and the bulk of that was classroom training and just classified information and that kind of thing, and some of the basic production processes. Probably 50% of it was firearms and other similar training. By the time I left that part of the business in ’87, our basic training class, people had to have a background to begin with that was probably equivalent of what I had when I finished basic training. But we were able—we paid enough money and we were attractive enough to folks that we could hire them with that to begin with. Then we gave them anywhere from three to four months of dedicated training. And they had a minimum of two weeks and up to eight weeks a year of retraining, depending on what job they were assigned to. So for our tactical response folks, they were in training two out of twelve months a year, being retrained and optimizing their abilities to respond both individually and as a group. Of course, with the advanced weaponry and equipment capabilities that we provided to them, that in itself required a fair amount of additional training and retraining every year so that they could stay proficient in the use of that weaponry.
Franklin: Yeah, wow. For example in the 200 Area where I imagine there was a lot of these new hardware and controls went in because of the storage and separation, were the alarms and CCTVs, were those managed centrally, or were they monitored in each facility, or was there a central facility—how did that work?
Heineman: Yes, yes and yes.
Franklin: Yes, yes, and yes?
0:43:13 Heineman: Each of the production facilities had its own control center. So the Plutonium Finishing Plant had one, the Plutonium-Uranium facility, PUREX had its own facility. FFTF had its own facility. And then we had a central alarm facility between the 200 Areas that both received duplicate signals independently of the local ones, and monitored how things were going on at each of the production facilities. In the early days, we even had a third level, which eventually we decided was superfluous, which was down in the basement of the Federal Building, that sort of monitored all of that.
Franklin: Yeah, I could see how that—how would that third level respond to an emergency, being all the way out there, how would they have detected something that those first two levels wouldn’t have detected? Yeah. Interesting.
Heineman: It was mostly information control down there.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
0:44:35 Heineman: And it gave them a direct access to—back in the early days, senior site management both for the government and for its contractors were all downtown. None of them lived way out here in the Site. So it gave them information and the ability to monitor stuff from down in the city of Richland that they otherwise would’ve relied on people to tell them instead of see directly. But it was about that same time that we shut that center down that by then I think it was the Department of Energy who said, you know, you contractor management teams, you really need to be out there where the action is and close to your folks and in control. So everybody began to move from the city of Richland out onto the Site. Which, actually, as a support service employee was very helpful to me, because they were now close to the reality of the day-to-day and it was a lot easier for me to deal with them.
Franklin: Oh, yeah, I imagine. Well, great, that’s so interesting. So I see in 1980 you became safeguards and security director?
Heineman: Yes, 1980.
Franklin: So describe that. It seems like you got more responsibility, then, right, with Hanford, not only Hanford Patrol, but also fire and emergency preparedness and nuclear safeguards?
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: So was that kind of a similar work, just kind of monitoring all of the different emergency and security possibilities onsite?
0:46:31 Heineman: Yeah, my job really changed a lot between being in charge of security or the projects to do the upgrades, when I went to safeguards and security director. Because we did, we had Hanford Patrol, Hanford Fire. We had site-wide emergency preparedness. Safeguards, which was the accounting for the plutonium and other nuclear materials. And then the professional security folks that had been years before. And so I had chief of Hanford Patrol that ran Hanford Patrol. I had the chief of the fire department who ran the fire department. That wasn’t my job anymore. [LAUGHTER]
So probably the closest thing to what I’d done before that I was still in charge of was emergency preparedness. Because it was fairly small and the senior managers on the Site really looked to me individually when something went wrong to take charge and organize and run things for them. I mean, they had the final decisions on a lot of stuff. But the rest of it, I was managing professional managers that were in charge of patrol and security and fire. And I didn’t do that anymore. So I could give them advice. I could help them decide how to respond to different kinds of both management and technical challenges in a consultation kind of environment.
But my primary job was securing funding for the additional upgrades we wanted to do, which we were by then doing both, not just for security, but the Hanford Fire Department. All the old Hanford fire equipment from World War II was falling apart, breaking down. We’d take three brush trucks to a brush fire out in the desert, and one of them would make it. [LAUGHTER] So probably—
Franklin: Really? You guys were still using World War II-era equipment—
Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Franklin: --in ’80?
0:49:05 Heineman: Absolutely. In fact, there is a road that goes up Rattlesnake Mountain to get to the top. If we had fires on Rattlesnake Mountain or anywhere north of there, sort of like the Silver Dollar fire or the big fires before that, most of the fire vehicles couldn’t go up that road. It was too steep. And they wouldn’t make it. Either they couldn’t make it at all because they weren’t powerful enough, or they’d break down on the way. So we put a fairly substantial amount of money into upgrading all of the fire equipment on the Site, too. And up until that point, we were buying excess equipment. When something would break down and we’d need a new brush truck or a new fire engine or a new ambulance, we would go out on the government’s excess list—[LAUGHTER]—and get stuff that had already been used, mostly used up, someplace else. And we decided we couldn’t keep doing that. So we worked with the government and we worked with our companies to secure funding to go through and upgrade all of that equipment. And we began upgrading training and all the other stuff to go with it.
So at that point my job was almost entirely securing funding, being the liaison between the security and fire functions, security and emergency services functions and the production management, interfacing with the Department of Energy on where we wanted to go years from then. It was a very different job than I’d ever had before and very enriching. I mean, it was—it really was—it was something I was very proud to be able to do, and something I think, between myself and the management team I had, that we did very well.
Franklin: Wow. And you were also still in charge of nuclear productions safeguards and securing that production information, right?
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: And making sure that every bit of plutonium was accounted for from what would be possible to generate.
0:51:39 Heineman: Right, and in fact for a number of years, we hadn’t really had much production going on after the Cold War was over, most of those production processes were either phased out or phased way down. Then under Ronald Reagan, there was a decision that we needed to increase our nuclear capabilities. We moved forward with, again, we spent a ton of money upgrading both our production capabilities and our security capabilities for restarting the PUREX plant to process K Basin, K Reactor fuel that was in storage in the basins and separate out the plutonium and uranium, restart the Plutonium Finishing Plant to purify the plutonium, and restart what was called the UO3 plant to process the uranium from the fuel.
Franklin: And before that, these had all been in shutdown mode?
Heineman: Pretty much in standby, yeah.
Franklin: So not taking a lot of security resources then? I mean, still a basic level, right, but not in active use, so much easier to monitor when they’re in shutdown.
0:53:10 Heineman: Actually, in some ways it’s easier; in some ways it’s harder. Because you don’t have active operations going on, but you still have the presence of the materials, both in the process and in storage. The decision to deactivate plutonium production was always a political decision, both when they slowed it down at the end of the Cold War, and then—I’m not sure I remember which president, Jimmy Carter, maybe—decided that we weren’t going to produce nuclear material anymore. It was always a political decision that had to be executed in days or weeks, leaving a huge amount of material still inside the chemical processes at the various plants. Because it takes a long time to process a batch from one end to the other, and they never gave us enough time to do that clean-out.
Franklin: Right, they just wanted you to turn off the lights, lock the door—
Heineman: Just stop.
Franklin: Yeah, send everybody home.
Heineman: Just stop.
Franklin: Which is where we get the K Basin spent fuel.
0:54:40 Heineman: The K Basin fuel, all the material that was held up and in storage at the PUREX plant. The Plutonium Finishing Plant had—there are some articles, I don’t remember the numbers now—but there were some articles that we published publicly on how much and how many different varieties of plutonium types of products were at PFP, the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the time we couldn’t process anymore. A wide variety of different kinds of materials, each one with its own unique safety and security challenges. A lot of it. [LAUGHTER] And so in some ways, it was actually harder form a security standpoint to control things during the shutdown days than it—or suspended operation days—than it was during the production days.
Franklin: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess that makes sense. There’s less eyes on it. It’s got lots of safety issues of just sitting there. Yeah, okay, thank you.
0:56:08 Heineman: The whole McCluskey room event was purely a function of being directed to shut down a process without having the time and the resources to come back and clean that system out. I don’t remember, frankly, what the instigator was for that particular shutdown in the americium recovery facility, but it was down for a long time and ultimately resulted in a chemical reaction and an explosion. There are examples like that, not as public and not as dynamic maybe, across all of Hanford. In the reactor areas, in the separation areas, in the finishing areas, in the lab areas in 300 Area. Just tons of examples there.
Franklin: Hmm. Wow. So when production is restarted, then, and they were kind of bring back up PUREX and PFP, and UO3, did your job change significantly, or did it kind of feel like the Cold War days again?
0:57:32 Heineman: Yeah, it felt like going back to the ‘70s and very early ‘80s. Mostly in the ‘70s. There was a high degree of esprit de corps across the whole Site. People were focused on a common mission. Everybody was rowing the same direction. We were excited that the government had provided enough money to hire the people and to get the processes upgraded to restart. There was a real energy and an enthusiasm again that had been missing for a number of years. That was really fun.
Franklin: And your job still stayed mostly the same through those years in the ‘80s, then, safeguards and security director?
0:58:31 Heineman: Right. I left that job in 1987. Westinghouse—again, DOE had rebid the contracts and they went to a single site contract. So what had been run by eight different contractors became the responsibility of Westinghouse Hanford Corporation. Westinghouse had their own safeguards and security director at the time they won their contract. I told them I still wanted to work for them even though they already had somebody to do the job that I had, and they had me consolidate the emergency preparedness programs from the eight different contractors into one. So I spent about a year doing that job. And then my world changed yet again. [LAUGHTER] And I started doing something completely different.
Franklin: Which was?
0:59:39 Heineman: They called me and said they thought I’d gotten that done to their satisfaction. They were having difficulty because they were now in charge of radiological control, health physics, radiation protection technicians, all those functions. They were now in charge of radiological protection for the whole Site. Which was bringing together a whole bunch of people that had never worked together, that had different systems, different processes, different procedures, different regulations. The poor manager that was trying to manage all that was really struggling. They had decided that they needed somebody to come in fresh, and so they asked me if I would go do that. And I tried to explained to them I didn’t know anything about radiological protection. I wasn’t a health physicist. I’d never been an HPT or an RPT. I really didn’t know much about it. And they said, that’s not what we need you for. We need you to go create a well-functioning organization. They asked me to go do that, and I did that for the next seven years. That was a very rewarding job.
Franklin: How so?
Heineman: In two different ways. First, again, I was responsible for supplying support and services to all the individual plant managers. So it gave me a chance to reacquaint myself with all of them and some of the newer ones, and to be talking on a different plane than security about what we could do different, what could we do better, where were they frustrated with the support that they were getting, where was I or my folks frustrated with the way they were doing business that might have involved risks, radiological risks we didn’t need to take. So there was a whole new relationship between myself and all the plant managers across the Site. And the other one was that the business agent for the HPTs, health physics technicians, sometimes called radiation protection technicians, was a young, very forward-looking person. He and I really teamed up and resolved an enormous number of management labor problems between radiation protection management and the bargaining unit, RPTs, HPTs. He and I were so in sync with each other over what was best for everybody that there almost was just not a problem that came up that we couldn’t resolve, working back together with the people in conflict.
Franklin: Do you remember his name?
Heineman: John Jeske.
Franklin: John Jeske.
01:03:10 Heineman: And John is still employed at the Site. In fact, when the Site—we sent John over to Idaho late in my radiological protection career. We sent him over to the Idaho site to find out what was going on in this new program, safety—shoot, I can’t remember what we called them. But let’s call them safety stewards, where a union representative would be appointed from every facility. That sole job was to be the safety representative for all the folks that worked there. Something that prior to that time had always been the job of the safety manager or the safety professionals. We gave a job just like that to a union person. That’s what they were doing at Idaho. He came back and was able to sell that concept across Hanford. When he was approaching the time where it was time for somebody else to become the business agent for the RPTs, he decided to start up and run that kind of a program across Hanford. And has been doing that until just this last year when a new person took over that job. So John has—he’s always been ten years ahead of his time. He’s just an amazing person.
Franklin: That’s great. Well, I have two questions—or, I guess a comment and then a question. I’ll start with the question. Did that—radiological control management, did that include environmental control as well, or was it just health physics?
Heineman: No.
Franklin: Just human—okay, so worker-oriented—
1:05:31 Heineman: Yeah, environmental was a completely separate discipline with a different set of skills and capabilities. I mean, obviously, radiological protection is out there to protect the environment as well as the people. But it was strictly from a radiological contamination perspective.
Franklin: Did you find quick acceptance from the RPTs and health physicists that you were asked to manage, or was it kind of a—did you have to kind of grow—because you’re obviously coming at this from not their profession. So, would you find a pretty quick acceptance to your management, or did you have to kind of grow into that role and kind of earn their trust?
Heineman: It took a fair amount of growing, I would say probably a good two years of the seven. I was accepted much more quickly by the bargaining unit representatives than I was by the professional staff. The professional staff didn’t understand why they would have a boss that didn’t have a background or know anything about their business. They didn’t understand that I would let them do that job and make those decisions. And it took quite a while for them to begin to trust in that. The bargaining unit folks were pretty—as I said, they were in a lot of conflict and having a lot of trouble as the previous manager was trying to merge all these different cultures and procedures.
Franklin: These are the eight different contractor units we’re talking about?
1:07:20 Heineman: Right, of those, probably four had radiological protection folks. And so the rank-and-file employees, both bargaining unit and non-bargaining professionals at the non-management level, they were not very happy with their management. And my job in the safeguards and security business from almost the get-go had been to create people that had capabilities they never had before. And to equip them with materials and logistical capabilities that they’d never had before. So it was a builder’s job. It wasn’t a manager’s job; it was a builder’s job. So when I went into radiological control, I kind of had that same attitude, that the most important people in the organization were the ones that had the instruments in their hand, just like the ones with the guns in their hands or the firehose in their hands. It wasn’t the managers. It was the people that were going to protect things. And they were really resonated to that. So it was pretty easy for me to connect with the HPTs and the non-management professional people. The management team took a little while.
Franklin: [LAUGHTER] That’s interesting.
Heineman: Yeah.
Franklin: But that kind of makes sense. So during this time while you were doing this or a little before, you were also responsible for shutting down the B Canyon, and upgrades for the waste encapsulation for cesium and strontium.
Heineman: That came after—that was the next—
Franklin: That came after, oh, okay.
Heineman: The next big change in my career. Right.
Franklin: The next, okay, then let’s go there.
1:09:19 Heineman: So—[LAUGHTER] one of the five reprocessing plants at Hanford which separated the fuel into its constituent parts was B Plant. Very similar to PUREX but built in the early ‘50s instead of later like PUREX was so it wasn’t as technically capable. And really never got used for separating fuel.
Franklin: What was it used for?
Heineman: B Plant was built—there’s a long story associated with how the reprocessing plants advanced from T Plant, which was the original one, to REDOX, which was a dramatic new technology over in West Area. And then from REDOX to PUREX. And B Plant was kind of built right in the middle of there. It was almost unnecessary from the beginning, because REDOX and then especially PUREX—PUREX was able to process the fuel from all of the production reactors all by itself. Even though the original design was we needed six reprocessing plants, by the time it was built, the technology had advanced and it did the job all by itself.
Franklin: But it was also producing a different finished product—or, no, sorry, that wouldn’t go to the PFP. Sorry, never mind.
Heineman: No, everything from all five or six or those reprocessing plants was supposed to go to PFP.
Franklin: PFP, okay.
Heineman: And then PFP converted this less-enriched plutonium solution over to the final product, either plutonium powder or plutonium metal. That we then sent to the weapons facilities.
Franklin: Right, but PUREX as an extraction process was able to handle the different fuels coming out of all the different reactors.
1:11:24 Heineman: All of the reactors. So it basically just made all the other four obsolete and prevented the construction of the other one that was going to go up in East Area. So B Plant got the job, because it was there, it was online, it was proven using cold chemicals. It was ready to go, but we didn’t need it. So the government realized that we had a huge amount of uranium in the tanks that went with the tank waste when you extracted the plutonium from the fuel. And the idea was that we could take uranium and pull it out. So they gave that mission to the third reprocessing plant over in West Area, which was U Plant. And the key question for B Plant, then, became how can you contribute?
And about that time, the temperature of the liquids in a number of the waste tanks was becoming hot. The tanks were actually boiling, and there were huge safety concerns developing about how are we going to control this wild combination of chemicals in liquid in these tanks. So they redesigned the process inside of B Plant. Didn’t involve a lot of physical changes, but the chemical processes, to take waste that was sluiced with high pressure water jets out of the higher heat tanks, and through the chemical process separate out the cesium and the strontium, which are the two radionuclides that contribute the most heat. So they would remove the cesium and the strontium and then put the waste back in the tanks, subsequently, much reducing the heat load in those tanks.
Franklin: Right, making the tank safer.
Heineman: So they began to do that and they realized that they needed a way to store the cesium and the strontium.
Franklin: Right, because these are very dangerous radionuclides for human health.
1:14:10 Heineman: Yeah, they’re high radiation radionuclides. That is, they have a very short half-life, so they’re giving off tons of radiation. That’s what generates the heat, and the radiation is pretty dangerous all by itself. So they built the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, WESF, on the end of B Plant. And its job was to take the cesium and convert it to cesium chloride, a powder, and the strontium and convert it to strontium fluoride, a powder. Load those powders into double-thick stainless steel capsules about 30 inches long and about this big around. And you had one welded shut inside of another welded shut. And then store those capsules under 20 feet of water, which both kept them cool, so that the capsules didn’t melt, and protected the people in the facility from the radiation.
Franklin: Yeah, I’ve heard about this facility before.
Heineman: It’s a fascinating facility. And it’s still operating and still has all 1,930 capsules in the pool cells. It’s a beautiful facility when you turn the lights off, because you got a beautiful blue Cherenkov radiation glow. It’s gorgeous. But the sooner they can find a way to dry store those capsules, the better, because they’re—in my mind, once I went over and understood them better, I really believe they were one of the highest risks anywhere at Hanford.
Franklin: More so than the tanks, or equal—
1:16:23 Heineman: Oh, yes, in terms of human health, as opposed to the environment, way, way worse. Way, way worse. We used to joke that if you had a capsule sitting in an empty field and it hadn’t melted yet from the heat inside, you couldn’t get within 100 yards of it, no matter how fast you ran, because you would die before you got there of radiation poisoning.
Franklin: Wow.
1:16:54 Heineman: These capsules—and you can find, I think, some of the data on the ‘net on their radiation levels. Honestly, by now, I’ve forgotten the numbers. But they’re easily the most radioactive things anywhere at the Hanford Site. They contain a third of the—in these, just these 1,930 capsules, they have a third of the radioactivity of the whole Hanford Site. In one little set of pool cells. They’re just amazing, amazing things. And now they have a project going they pretty well completed the design. The heat transfer is the problem: how do you put them inside a dry capsule, or a dry cask and not have them melt inside? Because someday you might have to open that cask, right?
Franklin: Sure, sure.
1:17:58 Heineman: So they’ve pretty well completed their calculations, and thy have a project to move those things from the pool cells, where if they ever got uncovered, you’d have a disaster, to dry storage where they could live for a long time without hurting anybody.
So anyway I was doing this radiological control job, and things were sort of starting to run pretty flat. Everything was going good. B Plant had been—once they terminated the cesium and strontium recovery process, it had been sitting there in a standby condition for, oh my goodness, 20-plus years. And for the staff just to keep it safe, to keep the utilities and the other stuff, to keep it from falling apart and harming the environment, my recollection is it was about $35 million a year for a stay-safe condition. And another $10 million on top of that to operate WESF and keep the capsules safe.
Franklin: Well, I imagine B Plant, processing all that cesium and strontium, it would be pretty hot itself.
1:19:39 Heineman: Yeah. It needed to be controlled. And so they were beginning—the cleanup mission was beginning in earnest then. And they realized that there was a lot of stuff they couldn’t do because they were having to put $35 million a year into the B Canyon. And it was giving them nothing except a safe condition. And they decided if there was some way to clean it up, isolate it from the environment so that you wouldn’t have any leaks or anything, and basically take all the people out, they’d have $35 million they could go use to clean up other stuff. And so they called me up and said, we don’t really have any money—
Franklin: That’s a great way to start a—
1:20:38 Heineman: Yeah, it was a great conversation. The vice president that called me, his name was Ron Bliss, and he was another one of those guys that was always ten years ahead. But he called me up and he said, there’s kind of a no-lose thing here. We’ve got this facility that’s costing us $35 million. We don’t have a lot of money to put into cleaning it up. But would you be willing to go over there, kind of investigate what the money’s being spent on, how it’s being spent, see if you can’t find a way to convert the workforce from babysitters to cleaner-uppers, and see if you can get us out of this $35 million. So I said, I don’t know anything about that either, but sure, I’ll go over there. So I went over, and fairly quickly realized that there was quite a bit of money going in there for the effort that was truly required for safety. A lot of it was just carryover from the production days, and nobody’d ever really looked at, does all this stuff still need to be done? And so I began putting some information together and some different approaches. And the deputy manager for DOE’s Richland office came out to our facility one day, and I think he and my boss, the vice president, had talked a little about how he could help. So he came out. His name was Lloyd Piper. And he had a bunch of get-out-of-jail-free cards in his wallet.
Franklin: You mean like from Monopoly?
1:22:30 Heineman: Yeah. Yeah. Except he’d had them made for him, with his name on it.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Heineman: And it said, one get out of jail free card, on one side, from Lloyd Piper. And on the other side it said something like, if you don’t strive you never achieve, or something like that. So he came out and met with me and my team. He said, I’ll tell you what, he said, I’m going to challenge you to try to get this done in three years. And I’ll give you access to x amount of additional money on top of the $35 million a year, because I know you’re going to have to go separate WESF which used all the B Plant utilities: power, water, all that stuff.
Franklin: Oh, so you’d have to get separate utilities out to it.
1:23:26 Heineman: Right, because WESF still needed to be functional. He said, so I’ll give you this amount of money or access to that much money if you need it to do that separation. But I’d like you to try to get done in three years. In three years, let’s see if we can’t have WESF separated, and nobody working at B Plant at all. And we said—and he handed out these cards. And so we said, ah, hell, sure, it’s free, right? Get out of jail free. So we took that challenge on and over the next—it took us about six months to do the detail planning. We put together various task teams and at the end of the six months, we had a plan. We had to hire a few more people that we didn’t have at B Plant that we needed. We had a lot of piping work to do, because we had to flush the entire system, as you said. The residual cesium and strontium was pretty high radiation levels and we needed to clean the inside of the canyon out. So we had to hire a few additional staff, and mostly craftsman. Over the next three years—the original challenge was out the gate in ’98. And we did that. We did that. We got it done, and we put a padlock on the front door. We found jobs for all but two of the 150 people that worked there.
Franklin: Wow.
Heineman: So we didn’t have a big layoff, and the $35 million went to like $500,000. The cleanup was completed for about $100 million less than the long-range plan for environmental cleanup of B Plant. So we saved that $100 million in addition to making the $35 million a year go away. Marvelous opportunity. It was really terrific. Had a great relationship with the DOE folks here and with the DOE folks at headquarters. So we did that and B Plant has a padlock on it today and WESF keeps operating and doing its thing and everything’s cool.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great. You should be really proud.
1:26:09 Heineman: Yup. Yeah! We were. It was a great team. We had people that did some stellar things, that came up with some incredible solutions to what seemed to be intractable problems. We had—the team got along so well, we really had a good time.
Franklin: Wow. So after B Canyon shut down, you switched to your last job on site, right?
Heineman: Right.
Franklin: Which was—
Heineman: Wasn’t supposed to be my last job, but it was.
Franklin: Okay. [LAUGHTER] The beginning of decommissioning the PFP, right? I’m wondering if you could talk about, why’d you come over to PFP?
1:26:51 Heineman: Well, we were about three months from putting the padlock on B Plant, and the rest of it was just sort of, kind of the last few things. And we’d found jobs for almost everybody in. So I felt like I was pretty well done. PFP had been shut down by the government. It was in its cleanup mission, which was really critical. As I said earlier, there were a lot of different kinds of materials, some of them not very stable left at PFP when they said shut down, because we didn’t have time to do anything, we just had to stop. So it was a fairly fluid situation in terms of trying to keep everything safe. But they had made some errors and had three what are called criticality violations over about a two-week period where employees had done things that were prohibited by criticality preventions standards. The government stepped in and said, stop. You can’t do anything. You can’t move anything. They even had to get special permission from the government to move bags of used laundry. It was a terrible situation. And they had been in that mode for about nine months, and had tried twice to upgrade their operations, prove to DOE that they could do it better than they did it before DOE shut them down, and failed.
And so I start thinking, well, what’s my next challenge going to be? And I thought, well, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. But I went to my boss, who was by then the president of Babcock and Wilcox, B&W Hanford Company. And suggested to him that since we didn’t really know what I should do next, the guy that had finished up putting a padlock on PUREX was available. So I suggested that he come over and do the final three months at B Plant and that I go over to PFP and help the plant director there with upgrading all the operations and procedures and things and trying to convince DOE to give us another chance to restart the cleanup operations. And so I went over there in June of ’98 and thought I would be there six to nine months, until we could get it restarted. And by then I would find something else fun to do. And I retired from there in 2012. [LAUGHTER]
Franklin: 14 years later.
Heineman: I never got out. That’s right. That’s right.
Franklin: So what happened? What turned what you thought would be a six-, nine-month job and took the rest of your career out there? Was it something about the job that made you want to stay, or was it the job so big that you felt like you couldn’t walk away from it?
Heineman: I think it was both. The Plutonium Finishing Plant is easily, easily the most interesting place that I’ve ever worked at Hanford.
Franklin: Why is that?
1:30:50 Heineman: The variety of processes, the degree of control that’s needed over the process, the procedures, the people, to be able to do work safely and avoid a really serious problem. The history of the facility, the nature of the commitment of the people who worked there. There was nobody that worked at the Plutonium Finishing Plant that couldn’t, based on seniority, have transferred out and gone to work someplace else. And there were a lot of people that transferred over to the PFP, didn’t like it because of all those controls, and turned around and left. But the people who stayed were people who were really committed and really good at what they did, and very willing to accept controls because they understood the safety implications and why it was necessary. The whole place is just the most fascinating production plant I could ever imagine. So that was certainly part of it. The people, the quality of the people and their commitment was part of it. Part of it was, frankly, the personal challenge, because there was not one day that things ran steady in trying to clean up that Plutonium Finishing Plant. Not one single day, from the time I went to work until I went home at night, went the way it was supposed to. Dynamic, exciting, energizing, making a contribution. I just never, never felt a desire to go do something else, and frankly as I looked around at the cleanup activities in other areas, nothing compared in complexity and importance to PFP.
Franklin: What were some of the milestones that were accomplished while you were at—sorry, was your job managing the decontamination—or what was your specific job at—
Heineman: Until—
Franklin: At PFP.
1:33:40 Heineman: Until CH2M Hill took over the contract fairly recently at that time, I think I spent three-and-a-half years with CH2M Hill. But up until the time that they took over the contract, I was variously the deputy director for PFP or the senior project manager for cleanup. I had a variety of titles, depending on the organizational structure. But I was typically the number two guy at PFP, and responsible for, I would call it, the strategy of how to go about cleaning it up as quickly as possible for the least amount of money in a safe way. The director, then, was responsible for all the crews that made that happen, once the plan was laid out. So he managed all of the folks that worked in the plant; I managed the people that strategized and designed the cleanup processes. As far as major milestones, I think those are, as I look back now, they seem fairly obvious; they weren’t obvious at all at the time.
But there were, let me just say, 15 completely unique kinds of plutonium compounds left in the plant. Some of them liquids, some of them powders, some of them metal. All different kinds with different qualities and characteristics. One by one, we took each of those types of plutonium from whatever condition they were in at the time we shut it down, to the point that they were a stable material that could be containerized and stored without risk of a chemical reaction or causing other kinds of problems, like fires, et cetera. So, there were like 15 mini-milestones as we completed—because every one of those 15 needed a different process to convert it from this unstable form it was in, into something that we could put it in a can and be confident it was safe for the long-term. We could talk about some of those kinds of processes, but each one of those processes had to be designed, had to be proven in the laboratory with small quantities, had to be constructed, operated, and then we’d claim victory on that particular product. So there were 15 little mini-milestones.
1:37:15 But the completion of the plutonium stabilization mission, to me, was huge. Because it gave us material that we could store safely, that we could ship across country. Because we couldn’t—if we’re going to clean up and shut down PFP, we couldn’t have all this plutonium in there. So we had to ship it someplace. It had to be safe to ship. So getting all of that stabilized and put into the vaults, waiting to be shipped across the country, either to Rocky Flats in Colorado, or mostly to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina—huge. Huge, from a safety standpoint, a money standpoint, manpower, the type of mission. Because that was very technical, very research-intensive. We needed plutonium chemists. We had all kinds of capabilities that we would never again need at PFP once that was done. So that was a really key point.
The next key milestone was easily when the last of the plutonium was shipped offsite. When we shipped the last safe, secured transport vehicle—they’re high-security shipments to move plutonium—when we loaded and watched the last of these shipment vehicles leave PFP for Savannah River, knowing we now had no more discrete plutonium anywhere in the plant—we had residual contamination in the pipes, the ventilation ductwork and stuff we were going to have to go clean up—but the product was now gone. That was another major milestone.
Franklin: You kind of closed out the whole—I mean—it was the last shipment.
Heineman: That was the end of the production mission, yep.
Franklin: Yeah, that was the actual end of the production mission. Wow. That’s really something. With the 15 different processes, did it get easier as time went on? I imagine the first couple would be, you know, you’d be doing something new here. Did it get easier?
Heineman: They were all completely unique.
Franklin: Really? Okay.
Tom Hungate: Sorry—oh, I’ve just got to change the battery.
Franklin: Oh, okay.
Hungate: Yeah.
Heineman: We’ll take a break.
[VIDEO CUTS]
Hungate: Sorry, you can go whenever.
Heineman: I think we were talking about those 15 types of plutonium?
Franklin: Yes. Yes, we were.
Heineman: And each one of those was so entirely different from another that I wouldn’t say it got easier or harder. Each one started out as a material that we would need the scientists for characterize for us: what’s the safety risk, what are the bad things that could happen, what causes that to happen, what do we need to do to it so that it’s safe and stable and can go in a can? And every one of them was different. So, for example, one of the largest quantities we had to deal with was—I think we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of relatively rich plutonium nitrate solution, which was the product of the PUREX plant.
Franklin: Yes.
1:40:54 Heineman: Late in the PUREX process, we installed an oxide conversion line where—we didn’t want to ship that liquid by truck across the Site anymore because of the safety dangers—so we converted that liquid into powder before we took it over to the Plutonium Finishing Plant. But prior to that being installed, there was all this plutonium nitrate liquid that had been sent over to PFP. And PFP actually generated a fair amount of plutonium nitrate liquid in the plutonium reclamation facility. When you had product that didn’t meet specification, we had to burn it or dissolve it in the PRF and dissolve it in nitric acid. And then that would be the head end of the PFP processes to create metal or powder. So we had 4,000 or 4,500 liters of plutonium nitrate solution. Well, you can’t ship it. It’s not safe. The containers had to be vented because they create pressure, they generate hydrogen, because of the acid inside. So you have hydrogen being generated inside these enclosed containers.
Franklin: Hydrogen’s very explosive.
1:42:31 Heineman: Absolutely. And it’s just a bad situation, unless it’s for a short-term. So we had to design processes that would take that plutonium nitrate liquid and turn it into a stable powder, plutonium oxide. We couldn’t use the massive plutonium production processes. There wasn’t near enough material to be able to do that. So we had to build a new process.
Franklin: Well, I mean, it was also to clean those processes up in the first place, so why would you want to run a crew—
Heineman: Yeah, we had crews in there doing clean-out of all the gloveboxes and everything at the same time that we were trying to stabilize all these types of plutonium.
Franklin: So you basically had to scale-down the refinement process and create—like, create a scaled-down version for each type of plutonium.
Heineman: Yes. Yes.
Franklin: Wow.
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: And do all this in the PFP.
Heineman: At the same time crews were cleaning out the rest of it.
Franklin: Wow.
1:43:37 Heineman: So, it led to an amazing series of projected plans and milestones and then accomplishments when we got each one done. We just started filling the vaults up with all this stabilized material getting ready to ship it.
Franklin: It’s easier to see now why that cleanup mission took so long.
Heineman: Oh, my goodness.
Franklin: I mean, I’d never known about that specific aspect of it. And that seems—very important work, but also very time-consuming, too.
Heineman: And I neither remember, nor do I know if I can talk about, how much plutonium, in terms of stabilized kilogram product we produced. But we probably did get to talk about that in some of the interviews and articles that were generated during that process, probably have some of that data in it. But let me just say, it was an enormous amount of plutonium. I would guess that there wasn’t that much plutonium in one place anywhere in the United States.
Franklin: Wow.
Heineman: We had to get it all stabilized and packaged and shipped out of here if we were going to clean up the plant.
Franklin: Wow. That’s really fascinating. I’m definitely making a note to look to see if I can find out that number. So, after these 15 processes—after this 15 different types of plutonium were done, when did that finish, by the way? When did the last shipment go out? Do you remember? It’s okay if you don’t. I was just curious.
Heineman: I don’t, actually.
Franklin: That’s fine.
1:45:35 Heineman: You’d think that would be burned in my memory, but it was just another step in the process, as I say. It’s easier looking back to pick out what some of those key milestones were than to remember. I remember we had the public and politicians out. We did speeches, we did all kinds of things. So it’s out there in—
Franklin: Oh, sure, sure.
Heineman: Yeah. And the folks in CH and MSA communications should be able to very simply—from their archives, should be able to very simply pull out some of the briefings and things we gave to the press on quantities and dates and all that kind of—I mean, it’s all out there. I just don’t—
Franklin: Oh, no, sure, I understand.
Heineman: My mind’s too full.
Franklin: No, I understand. And we work for MSA, so it’d be easy for me to get ahold of that. Okay. So what else happened in that time you were out there?
1:46:46 Heineman: Since you work for MSA, one of the best sources for that kind of data that’s still out at the plant is the business manager at PFP.
Franklin: Okay.
Heineman: Her name is Julie Widney. She and I managed the two groups that did all the planning and we created almost all of the presentations and briefings and things. So she still has all that in her files. If you said, what were the major types, how much plutonium was in them, when did they get done? She’d just send you a little summary of that.
Franklin: Oh, that’s great. I actually made a new contact at CHPRC when we had our initial problems with the interview. I found Tanya Reyes—
Heineman: Oh, did you?
Franklin: --in Pop Fone. And we had a really interesting conversation about what they’re doing at—because they’re doing that mini-documentary about—
Heineman: I have no idea what they were doing. I thought it was you guys.
Franklin: I know! But it was actually really great, because it opened up a new source of information, and she’s talked to people out at Site. So it was very interesting to hear about what they were doing—
Heineman: Did you explain to her, by the way, what happened?
Franklin: Yeah, because she was confused, because she was confused because she didn’t know about us. So she thought she was scheduling you for something and then you didn’t show up to that; you thought it was us. So she was also very confused. But it made sense how the confusion happened. As soon as I got to talking to her, I was like, everything makes sense now. You got caught in the crossfire of two different worlds, two different projects.
Heineman: Well, I just didn’t understand it was two different things.
Franklin: Yeah, it was just really funny. It was a very good conversation, though. Okay, so anyway. So, you do the 15 different types, and then was there any other major milestones out at PFP besides those, the last shipment and the cleanup of these 15 types?
1:48:48 Heineman: Well, sort of like finishing the cleanup of all the material was a major milestone that was supported by a milestone for each of the 15. So the cleanup of the facility itself, which obviously was completed for the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and for the Americium Facility, what they call the McCluskey Room. The cleanup was completed for each of those and there’s a milestone associated with when they said this is now ready for demolition. But the main plant, the 234-5 Building, has a whole series of sub-milestones associated with cleaning out various geographical portions of the plant. There were three different laboratories inside the main PFP facility. There were three different primary production process areas. There were a lot of storage and support areas that needed to be cleaned out. You had—I don’t even remember the number anymore. I thought I would never forget, but—gloveboxes. There were x number of gloveboxes, hundreds and hundreds of gloveboxes.
Franklin: Mm-hmm. Stacked on top of each other—or not—
Heineman: Yeah, sometimes they were some-four high. But mostly the production ones were long. And the material would move from liquid at one end, and then go through a whole series of things, all the way down the line until you had plutonium oxide powder or plutonium metal at the other end. So you had all those gloveboxes that all had to be cleaned out inside, through the gloves. Then they had to be isolated from the work area somehow, and cut up, and separated from ventilation and piping and everything, and all the instrumentation, and then removed. So all of those things, like cleaning out the analytical laboratory was a milestone. And when it was done, there were no gloveboxes. It was virtually clean.
Franklin: I just realized, we’ve been talking about cleanup so long, I—how does one—I understand removing these things and putting them in, like, ERDF, like solid waste. But how does one clean up, like, contaminated ductwork? Is there a special chemical process that one uses to neutralize the radiation, or how does—what exactly does “clean up” mean?
Heineman: So, let’s talk about a piece of ventilation ducting.
Franklin: Okay.
Heineman: There were a few areas in the ventilation ducting just like the drain lines and sewer lines in your house that have a tendency to collect material as it goes through.
Franklin: Sure.
1:52:31 Heineman: And in the case of ventilation ductwork, it’s going through as an airflow. And at certain points in the way the ductwork is designed, it would collect material. It’s generally distributed in a fine layer on the inside of the entire duct. But there were some areas that had enough plutonium that it was of a criticality concern, which means you could have an uncontrolled reaction if you added water or you consolidated it into a particular form or configuration. So we had to go into those—and you find that by using instrumentation that measures the radiation being emitted through the wall of the ductwork. We would have to go in and remove those concentrations of plutonium and that was all almost by hand. You would penetrate the duct under tight radiological control so that you didn’t lose plutonium into the environment or your workspace. And you would go inside, and with various tools and instruments, remove those deposits of plutonium, package them, and prepare them for disposal. The bulk of the ductwork simply had this fine deposit of plutonium, which might have a lot of plutonium, but it’s over 250 feet of ductwork. When you break it down into removable sections that will fit in the disposal boxes, it’s a small enough amount of plutonium that you don’t need to do anything except cut the pieces of pipe out so they’ll fit in these boxes. And then ship those boxes, when it was operating, down to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant out of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Which is where the majority of the waste from PFP has to go because the law says over a very small amount transuranics—of which plutonium is one—transuranic material has to go to WIPP. It cannot go into ERDF or any of the onsite burial grounds. So it has to be very dilute in order for us to send it over for onsite burial in the ERDF facility. So, all of that ductwork would be measured, cleaned out if it was needed, then they would separate it into sections using giant plastic sleeves, and then cutting inside the sleeve.
Franklin: Oh, wow.
Heineman: And then tying off the ends and putting it in a box. Then you’d go back and do the next section.
Franklin: And the workers, of course, would be wearing full radiological—
1:56:02 Heineman: Completely outfitted in protective clothing, often two layers. Respirators, hoods, everything.
Franklin: Wow. That sounds really challenging to perform even basic labor in that kind of suit, in those suits and in that environment.
Heineman: As I mentioned earlier, there’s a reason I never left PFP. And it’s because it’s such fascinating work. And the people that do it, they’re like nobody else at Hanford. They are so inventive and so capable of operating in such a highly controlled environment that I just have nothing but respect for those folks. They’re just amazing people. It is just a struggle, everyday, to make progress when you have to do the work under those controls.
But the downside is somebody has an accident and gets contaminated or, god forbid, an uptake, inhaled or whatever, you just can’t afford that. Just can’t afford it. So, a simple thing like removing 50 feet of ductwork turns into one to three months’ worth or work and a bunch of burial boxes. And when you take that and you start thinking about what you have to do to clean out and cut up a glovebox that might be 50 feet long and eight feet high, or 15 feet high, because it’s a double-layer box—when you start thinking about expanding the challenge to something like that, where you’re actually cutting sections out of this box, always having to keep it contained, and using that machinery inside that plastic containment, it’s just incredibly challenging.
Franklin: Because they’re stainless steel, right?
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: Yeah, we have one in our collection, which was never used, but it’s eight feet tall, it weighs about 10,000 pounds, had to come in with a really big forklift.
Heineman: I think that one originated at FMEF and went to PFP and we never ended up using it. So we sent it down as kind of a demonstrator.
Franklin: Yeah. And it’s great. It’s one of the best things in the collection. But now, thinking, all right, how would you be inside a facility and cut that thing up when it’s hot, radiologically hot—you need heavy equipment to move that thing. People can’t—
Heineman: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Franklin: It’s not like ductwork, which is very—
Heineman: Oh, no. Well, even the ductwork is super-thick stainless steel. So even the ductwork needed machinery, hoists, and lifts and all kinds of stuff, just to handle a five-foot piece that would fit—actually those boxes are only four feet long, so—wow.
Franklin: Yeah, wow. That’s amazing. That’s such an intense job. Yeah, I can see why you would stay so long. So, you ended up retiring in 2012.
Heineman: September of 2012.
Franklin: September of 2012.
Heineman: Yeah.
Franklin: And what—was it just time to go, or--?
Heineman: It was.
Franklin: Yeah?
Heineman: Yeah, I’d been at it long enough.
Franklin: 39 years, right?
Heineman: I was a month short, I guess, of 40.
Franklin: Wow.
Heineman: Yeah, I went in September and I think October was my anniversary date.
Franklin: Yeah, that’s what I have here. Wow. That’s really—that’s quite a career out there.
Heineman: I loved every day of it.
Franklin: Yeah, I bet. It sounds really fascinating.
2:00:22 Heineman: And who would ever have the opportunity to do such a wide variety of things as they let me do over that period of time? I mean, it’s just, even today, it boggles my mind that they would give me that opportunity, you know? It was really fun.
Franklin: Yeah, you really moved around and managed some really like amazing projects. So I just have one kind of final reflective close-out question, and that’s, what would you like future generations to know about working at Hanford and/or living in Richland during the Cold War?
Heineman: During the Cold War?
Franklin: Yeah.
2:01:05 Heineman: Well, the Cold War was ending as I went to work. It was that post-Cold War environment that I came into, which was a huge transition for all the people that were here. So the perspective that I have on the Cold War and the attitudes and that sort of thing are what were held by the people that I was working with when I came to work. As I said, there were very few young people; it was mostly people that start work here after the war or afterwards. Even if they’d been recently hired, it was because they were re-hired, not starting. And I guess I would say those folks were beyond proud of the contribution that they had made. I think they were distressed that the government was beginning to make decisions not to use their talents and these amazing facilities to continue doing what they’d been built for. I think they were afraid of what was to come. Partly on a personal level: what’s that going to mean to me as far as my job and my welfare and the welfare of my family? But partly, it was just a complete unknown regarding this Hanford Site and everything it had always stood for, and it was never going to be the same again.
What it was going to look like was never clear. What cleanup meant was never clear. It evolved over decades. The first ten years after we shut everything down, I’m not sure we even understood the scope of everything we were going to have to do to clean up the Site. But those folks were very proud, and concerned, and I think a little fearful of what the future might bring. If that’s what you were asking.
Franklin: Yeah, I mean, it’s just, you know, that’s a very understandable and very human reaction to these very large events and the role that Hanford plays in them, and how Hanford’s fortunes are tied to politics and to international events. Yeah, I’m guessing—I want to ask you kind of a follow-up that’s not on my sheet but kind of directed towards your experience, and that’s, so you started kind of at the draw-down of the Cold War, although there’s that Reagan kind of blip. But then you spent a large, majority of your—at least half of your work in the cleanup area. I wonder how you felt about—what are your thoughts on cleaning up all the waste generated because of this Cold War mission and where—just your thoughts about that. I don’t want to put anything into your mouth.
2:04:29 Heineman: Well, it gave me a great career, so, from that perspective, I’ll never think badly about the Site and the opportunities that it provided to me. But in hindsight, using information that the government and the Army would never have had access to, I think nobody would ever make the kind of investment in manufacturing if they understood even 10% of what the cost of cleanup would be. And it’s not just monetary, either. It’s in terms of human beings and the environment. I think it’s a real dilemma now. The advantage they had is they had no idea. And if they did, cleanup defined in the context of 1950 or 1960 would be very different than cleanup in 2000 or 2020. And in fact, cleanup as defined—cleanup of the Hanford Site and the end of that cleanup is incredibly different, incredibly more complex, incredibly more costly than we ever envisioned in the first 20 years of the cleanup mission. We had no idea where society was going to go in its values, where science was going to go and its ability to detect and predict and all those—just amazing. And I think it’s pretty hard to judge people in 1940s or even late ‘30s by today’s standards. So I’m hesitant to do that. But if we were facing an equivalent question today, we would never have built Hanford. Never.
Franklin: Interesting. Maybe because we knew—we have a greater understanding now of the long-term costs and risks.
Heineman: Yes.
Franklin: With building that—with producing that kind of material.
Heineman: But we wouldn’t have had to do it in a couple of years. We wouldn’t have had to do it with technology that was being upscaled from a lab to a 570-square-mile production complex. So it couldn’t ever happen again. But we would never do it again. I know that.
Franklin: Interesting. Well, Bob, thank you so much. That was a really thoughtful—what’s the word I’m looking for?—reflection. And thank you so much for coming in and interviewing with us.
Heineman: Sure, it’s fun.
Franklin: I had a great time.
Heineman: It’s fun to go back and think about it again and kind of put a little different perspective on how I think about things, too, so I appreciate the opportunity.
Franklin: Well, great, thank you so much. I think this interview’s going to be very interesting to a lot of folks, so I appreciate it.
Heineman: Cool. I hope it’s helpful.
Franklin: Well, great. All right.
Heineman: All right, thanks.
