(General noise)

BUSKE:... if you look up the stream here you'll see um one of the Navy reactors. And so far the Navy reactors they ship in the Navy reactors they ship under I think a cost 180 or something and then they're going to ship approximately 200 ... reactors. By the way ... they are two theories to support that and I'm not sure which way ....

(General noise)

deBRULER: Eight or six years ago ......

(Boat noise)

BUSKE: See when we started working out here it was in the cold war and one of the things would you know we were going to distract and ...(boat noise) anyway the reactor if you do a risk analysis you don't want these reactors like this its usually better to get them off the ship and put them almost anywhere so we'll take Hanford. This is one way.... one wants to say yes to for Hanford you just do it because .... million times more dangerous to have them sitting on the ship it's a floating you know it's a floating reactor.

CALLISON: So where is this?

BUSKE: This is coming from Pugent Sound Navy Ship Yard and it is they have these huge trucks you can see that's a tractor up there with the and then they have a big trailer that's especially constructed trucks, there it is you can see the trailer up here with that whole thing on. They refuel the reactor and nominally take in all the uh you know more or less waste out with whistle blowers have stories like all set to be varied that one of these uh Hanford person noticed that it was leaking (laugh) how can it be leaking right there's nothing in it but .... they got all upset he was the safety officer he called it in and a few minutes later the Navy showed up said who's the safety officer for the site right

CALLISON: Hmm...

BUSKE: ...nobody knew anything .... this is my project you know I'm responsible for this we're going to have to corner it off everything and maybe said no get out of here. (Laugh) so he went to his Mr. Buskeager which I suppose is the site Mr. Buskeager at the time and said you know we got a problem with the Navy here and the site Mr. Buskeager said no (laugh) its not your problem stay away. (Laugh) I said Amy. I have never seen one of these being......

(General boat noise)

How does it feel knowing that having your background knowing that they're importing stuff that is already contaminated?

TRISHA PRITIKIN: Well I know people ask me that and again,(pause) I'm concentrating more on the health implications of what already happened. This is adding to the potential problems that people here now. But I'm asking also how the managers of this site and DOE are going to care for the people who were injured in the past when there were massive releases to the water, massive releases to the air.

So to me, this compounds the problems, the safety problems on the site but I still, in the front of my mind concentrate the time on the lack of government response to the people who have been injured from past releases here. So I see that as another danger for the workers here and it's really a problem. But I'm listening to what Norm's saying to about putting them here verses leaving them on the ships so... What you're going to see when we get up to a stack where all the stuff is released. That's were it becomes really relevant to the past.

(General noise and conversation)

BUSKE: This little dome is the prototype for the FFTF reactor and where in the other part of the 300 area here where they did a lot of the processing. This is one of the first places because it's close to... to open up to the public and basically without cleaning it up if they could get away with it just turn it over to the public ... its your problem. The yellow plum, the yellow plum is the uranium plum ok that means all the ground is saturated and leaking into the ground water which is flowing into the Columbia River so if you were to go swimming,( pointing out area)...follow that shoreline there's massive amounts of uranium just bleaching in the Columbia River now of course down stream here was the bridge.... there apparently drinking....(cut off)

PRITIKIN: 300 area and its kinda amazing to me to think right now that he worked here knowing some of the health potentially dangerous health implications but he let me play right there on that shoreline. Now that's fascinating to me because my father was very protective. So either he didn't know about the dangers or he thought for some reason that they weren't as great as they really were. I don't know this is a confusing thing for someone like me to be thinking about. So there's where I played there's where my dad worked and there's richland where I lived. My dad would go straight up Steven's drive everyday to work right here.

BUSKE: ... a lot of it was I think that the people were not thinking cause you understood they understood it was a secret program they were into and it was now going to save America from the Russians. And you didn't think about, those thoughts would not be goo thoughts you...

PRITIKIN: well if you are a father or a mother and you have a baby there's certain maternal or fraternal extinct that are supposed to override those (laugh) national security concerns is he placing my life down the list from the national security concerns then.

BUSKE: from the researched I've done ....there was a level of safety that they thought that they were being safe.(two people talking) ... but most of the workers didn't know they were not allowed to know where it was released they were not allowed to know where the contamination was.

(Conversation)

BUSKE: ... but he might never know ...... here this is what your getting everyday and of course in those days ..... was much higher than we were today. So for the people down stream a guy by the name of Radioactive Ray Issacson. Ray has lived here all his life and he swears that its perfectly safe to swim in the river and all these kids are perfectly healthy.

(Conversation)

BUSKE: even in the eighties.... I have my family here my wife and children .... the sec. of ... I think it was ... at the time. That his wife there to witness the explosion to say it was ok it was really important to people this is ok and one of the ways to say okay was to put their families in it.(laugh)

(General noise and conversation)

BUSKE: what happened was we were trying to figure out where the waste from central Hanford came into the river and of course the .... sampling prompted by green peace in 1985 we came out and sampling the seeps here and we did not know about river control at that time and actually this is this is part of it right there.

(Conversation)

BUSKE: when we found that there were we all had high nitrate values that go with atrinium that comes from central Hanford they called it a plum. But its actually a real long narrow and about 600 feet of shore and these boulders we had to all of these seeps what we did was cut river control at the time of flood in April 1986 and locked the hole river from top to bottom all of the dams at the average annual flow rate, which is a hundred and twelve cubic feet per second. We set up a line of floats stations up stream and down stream and measured nitrate and the nitrates entering the river and what we did was calculated then the flow rate into the river at this location its about 600 feet wide you have these its it was half of the ground water under Hanford ....river.

....This is the big joby at along the Hanford beach and its half the whole flow in Hanford.

deBRULER: So Mark, why should people be concerned about stuff coming into the river?

(People talking at once)

BUSKE: It's not supposed to be entering the river. The second thing is, they are actually importing waste and dumping it and the concept is that it's not going into the river. The reality is already been coming in. And they knew it since the 1960's. And what folks are saying about doing the study and getting the flow rate and the travel time was they had known it for two decades by the time we did this study and what they had done is work out how to hide it see that's the whole system is working out with billion dollar budget how you can do it how you can see no evil, hear no evil, but you get to have evil thoughts and build bombs. Is that a good sound bite?

(Conversation)

PRITIKIN:... this is a mess. This place is such a mess, they'll never clean it up and its just kinda, it was very disturbing to me to think...

( Two people talking at once)

BUSKE: one of the things I have them on on this is, actually in the 1980's late eighties when we were serving the shore down there we hit ...... cobalt 60 in vegetation at the shoreline that's down slope of this and my notion was that they probably actually dumped some rad in something up here so there is some disposal sites here that they say never had radiation and , but I'm into looking at them to see whether, actually their on my sampling list and to see if can pinpoint the source of you know.....

(General talking and boat noise)

PRITIKIN:...this was one of the small towns that were evacuated really fast. I think the people were given maybe 30 days to get everything out their homesteads that had been in the family for a awful long time and the government came in when they picked this site, when Leslie groves picked this site for Hanford, they gave them about 30 days to get out and very, very little pay iminate domain, so you got very little pay. And these people ah didn't have time to, as Norm said, to harvest the crops and there is a picnic or something that happens once a year when people come back together to sort of reminisce about what they lost. But it was this town of White ... one other small community. (Background noise) And these folks then could not repurchase new land at the same size to have a farm of the same activity. These folks could not get land that was as productive as regal a chunk a land for anywhere else the amount they were given by the government so they... this was a big sacrifice property wise by people. People like me sacrifice health wise, these folks sacrifice property wise.

BUSKE: Mr. Buskey of them veterans from world war one...

(Boat noise and Conversations)

PRITIKIN: In the very warm areas closer in to shore where the effluent from the reactors... and warmed up the cold river water and a lot of us as children remember the wonderful warmth of the river. Also we played in the muck and the sand, which I learned later, were infused with cobalt 60. So I was sticking the cobalt 60 in my mouth and swimming in the warm effluent from the reactor. And that was an alarming discovery that I made a few years ago. That was the joy of childhood in Richland.

(Talking)

PRITIKIN: Where we are is near the F reactor, the old F reactor. And right to the right over here are the islands where a lot of us would go and have picnics in the '50s. There is very warm areas near the shore of the islands where the .... from the reactors was dumped right into the river. A lot of us as kids remember the joy of the warm water that we saim in. And in the mean time when you get out of the warm water you would play in the sand and the dirt on the island which was covered with a layer of, about like that, of cobalt 60, so we enjoyed , these were the joys of childhood in Richland.

BUSKE: The F reactor is the source of, actually.... springs go from above mile 19 here down to mile 25. It's the most intensive ground water feature here in Hanford. We discovered it this year. And we discovered it by sampling Mulberry leaves and what we found was that they had nine times background.... We said, oh my god, .... through this complex they have used thousands of tons of thorium and produced U233 which is a bomb material and they had classified that thorium non radioactive material U233. So they had this whole production where you ... production facility which is now oozing into the river and they treated it like iron or steel. No accounting or anything of it and it's just like a normal material and it can be tracked off or carried off, you could do whatever with it and and no accounting. It didn't set off any alarms and they never admitted it.

(Quiet)

(Boat noise)

BUSKE: ....almost natural looking shore is where outpost structure from H reactor used to be and when I was with Greenpeace in 1983 and our first sampling, we sampled seeps coming out and what we did was increase employment in Richland beautifully. Covered it up and finished it off. It's real, real nice window dressing. I really like it.

And then just down stream a bit is where, actually its where they admitted to having .....chromium coming in. They made a huge huge point of remediating with..... and so on because of their terrible concerns of this it might be any little harm. They did all of this sampling and some how forgot they had a radiological site here. And so they didn't analyze the samples for radio nuclides and the missed the, where the mulberry trees are we have a ... channel which is chromium and .....strontium 90 coming into the river.

And what was interesting was Hanford took a lot of credit for, the salmon seemed not to spawn where the chromium was. And so the salmon maybe a fairly smart fish and don't like .....chromium, which is extremly toxic. Well, there is one exception to them not spawning where the chrome is and that's where the.... comes in and so when you put strontium with it they think they really like it and they go even where the chromium is to, shall we say, die. And so they missed all that. It's, what they were willing to look at was the chromium because that doesn't suggest anything like a nuclear .... and nobody will get upset. They're taking care of it, right. But the radioactive problems, radiological problems are too frightening to be addressed, so they didn't. Now what do you have....

PRITIKIN: Now when Norm was working with the salmon reds there was a lot of public reaction to that because it started to make people think about consumption of fish and food and how that relates to the river. And I think that really raised public awareness when you started working with the salmon reds. And the mulberry bushes and the mulberry jam raised even the awareness of the grandmas in the society over in Spokane. I heard two grandmas talking about radioactive mulberry jam man. So he had two areas that were of great concern to the public and still I'm not convinced that there isn't some danger from the salmon reds being, ah, you know affected by the strontium 90. It's, ah, definitely got the public intrest in a way that dealing with the ........intrest.

(Talking and laughing)

BUSKE: ...as soon as they admitted that, okay they got strontium 90 coming into the river all up and down the river. Then we told them about the ...(laughing)

(Conversation and boat noise)

PRITIKIN: Well, (cough) it's the year 2000 now and ...(interruption) well being back here it's the year 2000 now and (interruption) coming back here in the year 2000 when I'm almost 50 years old and its been forty years since we lived here on the river. I just can't imagine how awful it would have been if, when we lived here in the 1950's if we've known what our future was going to be. My father is dead of thyroid cancer, my mother is dead of milgnante melanoma. They killed my mother, they killed my father, they killed my brother and now their killing me.

CALLISON: Is this where your dad worked?

PRITIKIN: He worked in the two 300 area and uh probably went throughout the site as a safety engineer. But had he known that this was destroying his entire family. I'm glad we didn't know what the future had to hold. I couldn't have dealt with that. Think of all the people who have died here, think of all the people who've died of cancers, you can't see them but they used to be there working and now their dead. 3 out 4 people in my family are dead. They were patriots, my dad was a patriot and a military man, and he believed (cough) the reassurance of the operators of the plant that there wasn't any harm here. And here we are in the year 2000 people like me have no help, no monitoring, no exposure sub-registry, no healthcare not even an apology from the president. My dads dead and my mothers dead. Something's wrong with this picture.

(Talking)

BUSKE:... background behind its intake structure the B reactor was the reactor that produced the plutonium for the Trinity explosion, which was a test explosion and then after at Oakridge it produced the uranium used on Hiroshima and back to test it full scale of plutonium production, the plutonium bomb that came again from B reactors. So this was trinity, the first world, the worlds first nuclear explosion in Nagasaki.

PRITIKIN: And interestingly it killed so many people at Nagasaki but it also killed a whole lot of people here in this country.

BUSKE: ...and everywhere else in the world. The fallout from it, and they want, what they would like to do Hanford, historic Hanford what they would like to do is have another round of it. And their proposing to restart a reactor here called FFTF under a so called mission of of medic producing medical isotopes to save people where as the reality of their mission is a ...nuclear weapons plant to bring the armies dream finally to.... of the nuclear battlefield to save American peacekeeper lives.

(Conversation and boat noise)

BUSKE: This is the intake structure for B reactor, MC also and if you sorta pan around you can see all the concrete sorta dumped in and it has this hurried look to it. This was the race to get nuclear weapons into production before the Japanese would do that yucky thing of surrendering.

(Talking)

BUSKE: There was real concern that we would not have time (laughing) that they would surrender before the weapons could be used and then the concern was that everybody responsible because like 4 billion dollars has been spent on it .... spend the rest of their lives in a penitentry. So the Japanese had to have this tested on them(laughing) to keep everybody out of jail.

(Conversation and boat noise)

BUSKE: These are our K reactors, K west and K east, and they have storage basins next to them where they have, keep... fuel that's really, really still radioactive. Huge amounts of it and there's concern from whistle blowers that in fact there's basin are leaking and concern for many of the people the basin my rupture they'll be an earthquake something will happen the water be lost and they'll have either criticality or losses of radioactivity into the river.

After I found this strontium 90 entering the river at H reactor, because of the high values of strontium 90 on shore I did a shoreline survey and found that next to these two mulberry bushes back here we had almost ... of strontium 90 values right at the river shore. Is that I was serving that last summer the Hanford patrol came over two barbed wired fences with these oozies and took me prisoner. The county released me because, well they basically the argument was that the Hanford patrol was just trying to seize my stuff and didn't have enough to do.

deBRULER: Are you saying they don't want to look?

BUSKE: (laugh) they may .... a point of not wanting me to look, much less them. That case is basically settled where I had the first critics access agreement to Hanford site. On the one day I had an site one of the things I wanted to do was to track this pathway back but they disallowed me from doing that. So this one of the real treats to the river right here and its something they're working on but we might say they still haven't come close to the truth. And what we see, like with my arrest, where I'll be arrested and they'll try to seize my equipment is how vigorously they still deny the truth and then if one says "well where does the real effect" and the answer is the real effects are in the people like Tricia and the other down winders the families and the workers and then the whole American public that's down wind of the Nevada test site and the global population that was down wind from all the atmospheric nuclear testing.

It was "what does the Department of Energy want to do about it?" Well, more of the same. They'll like to start a reactor here. It's a modern reactor in the DOE facilities and we'll take a look at that tomorrow. But the idea is to go back into it lets do more of the same in a way that hope that the American public will allow it is by that the truth will not leak out as the radioactivity is leaking into the river.

(Talking)

deBRULER: You have this little tree here, what are you going to do with this little tree?

BUSKE: This little tree is going to Endsprings, which is our next stop and Endsprings is important for several reasons. One is it showed in the 1980's that the whole system had collapsed and they're unwilling to admit the problems we had ..... entering the river and they just refused to look at it and what I did was sample mulberry.....

(Boat noise with talking)

deBRULER: What you got is a strontium 90 spring coming in from those rocks in front all the way do that shoreline, there is massive amounts of strontium 90 coming in here. In fact in the water right now, like a foot off shore, a foot deep there's four..... per liter of strontium 90 about 8 ....per liter is what they call safe. But you have to think about fish. Fish bio-concentrate up to 2000 times in some studies have shown that they bio-concentrate the strontium 90 up to 10,000 times. So if you have 4 ... per liter in the river and a fish is living there on the side he's getting mega dosed but they say "no problem."

(Talking)

BUSKE: What we just did was plant a mulberry bush, at Endsprings and the one that we used for sampling is that it's a reference point for Endsprings that's right behind you and it's been repeatedly cut off. And is been chainsawed, clipped, and herbersided in an attempt to kill it so I can not collect samples. Its basically DOE killing the messenger if you will. The messenger tells them they have a problem. This is all public access here and you could go right up to the shoreline and collect clams that are radioactive and when the water is a little lower you have edible um greens.....its extremely radioactive and the interesting part or part of what's interesting, the site the people can not come here from the site because it's considered too radioactive and you need a RAD 2 training and they screen everything so it can't be taken out. But the public can come here. And they of course can't deal with that or understand it whether than just putting signs in saying, okay this is radioactive, we have a problem, we're dealing with it. They have to kill the messenger and pretend they don't have a problem and then they get real upset if anybody does anything of course like what we're doing here, which is trying to put a sampling location... this is a sample for strontium 90, a sampling medium that we use as a reference in trying to reestablish it here.

(General noise and conversation)

BUSKE: .... this was the mulberry jam of 1990 I sent one copy to the governor and one copy to the Secretary of Energy and it was from mulberry... this used to have mulberry trees all along the shore here. They, they cut them down. Sent them to Oakridge to incinerate, then they were, they had all these problems with the cost. It cost $300,000 to try to figure out what to do with the uh mulberry trees, and this basically background see this would be, if I sent them something really radioactive it would be a terrorist act, this is to make a point it was that we could make radioactive jam from what was in the public access.

(Talking)

BUSKE:Oone of them was auctioned off for Hanford Education Action League. One ended up at the Smithsonian that was the DOE copy the governors I don't know what happened to and I have two copies here....

(Talking with noise)

BUSKE: .... if one says okay (cough) lets see how that really works. I mentioned an edible in here I had collected curly dock. This is in a plastic bag then its in a plastic bottle ..... meters so nothing gets through, right? So if I take that out of the plastic bottle it just screams but the state of Washington actually tried to confiscate this. (laugh) You shouldn't have that....

(Boat sounds and talking)

BUSKE: ...their story is that they like to produce medical isotopes and they learned this in this cunning trick to have all these cancer victims. You sorta' pull out of the woodwork. I should not and I don't wanna say that exactly on tape (laugh) anyway they they take all these people who have been saved and there's no argument against that. The first question my notion is anything that you can do that's even halfway reasonable to help people out you should do it.