Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
HOST:
Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr. (USN, Ret.),
Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
DIRECTOR of TELEVISION:
Mark Sugg
SENIOR PRODUCER & NARRATOR:
Ira Shorr
PRODUCERS:
Marguerite Arnold
Glenn Baker
Abraham Dubb
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Jeff Mason
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Stephen Sapienza
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
739
INITIAL BROADCAST:
12 June 1994
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information).
President, Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health
Senator JOHN GLENN (D-OH)
Dr. ARJUN MAKHIJANI
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
HAZEL O'LEARY
Secretary, US Department of Energy
VICTOR REZENDES
Director, Energy and Science Issues, General Accounting Office
LYNN STEMBRIDGE
Director, Hanford Education and Action League
LYNN STEMBRIDGE: Hanford dumped over 400 billion gallons of liquid waste in various forms into the environment.
NARRATOR: During the Cold War, under the banner of national security, the United States designed and produced 70,000 nuclear weapons. In the process, we wound up endangering the health of communities around the country and contaminating tens of thousands of acres of land. This contamination includes radioactive waste that may remain a threat to human health for 240,000 years. How will America safeguard its citizens from the nuclear threat at home?
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
Admiral EUGENE CARROLL, Jr.: Americans are fortunate to live in a democracy where decisions are made openly after public debate. Unfortunately, the system doesn't always work. During the Cold War, arms race decisions were made privately for purely military reasons and without concern for the long term wellbeing of American citizens.
Today, we're going to consider the costs, the consequences and the dangers of this failure of democracy during the Cold War.
NARRATOR: In August of 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. The Cold War heated up. America rapidly accelerated its nuclear bomb-making capacity, expanding to 17 major production sites by the mid-1950s. But in preparing to fight the Soviets, the United States succeeded in "nuking itself." Protecting the environment and communities surrounding the sites from the deadly byproducts of bomb-making was the last thing on the minds of the cold warriors.
Senator JOHN GLENN (D-OH): It was produce, produce, produce, "the Russians are
coming!" "Watch out!" "What's going to happen?" And so, we had to produce, produce,
produce. We didn't want to anybody to be taking over this country. And, "What are we going to
do with
waste?" Well, "We'll put it out behind the plant. We'll worry about that on down the road someplace."
NARRATOR: Democratic Senator John Glenn of Ohio has been a long time leader in confronting the environmental problems of nuclear bomb-making.
Senator GLENN: I think we are all so concerned about the Soviet threat and our need to get the fissile material, the bomb material produced and out there, and nobody wanted to worry about all this hard-to-contain and hard-to-control waste, and there it sits.
NARRATOR: Ironically, while government films of the 1950s and 1960s taught American children to "duck and cover" from the threat of nuclear war, the United States was putting millions of its own citizens at risk with secret medical experiments, atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and intentional releases of radioactive elements from nuclear test sites and weapons plants.
Lisa Crawford is the president of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health, a citizen group in Ohio dealing with the ramifications of life near a nuclear bomb factory.
Ms. CRAWFORD: You know, the early years, I guess were -- they would never admit anything. 'Yeah, we lost some dust.' 'Yeah, we got some wells,' you know. It was kind of this, you know, 'but it's not really a problem and you really don't have anything to be worried about, and you all are just a bunch of hysterical housewives out there just raising hell for no reason at all.'
Years ago, in the mid-80s. DoE kept saying to us 'we've only released 300,00 pounds of uranium dust in your air.' That seems like a lot to me.
NARRATOR: In 1993, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress,
revealed that the US Military and Department of Energy's predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy
Commission, purposely released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere to determine the
practicality of using radioactive fallout as a military weapon. These radioactive releases occurred
at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the Hanford
Reservation in Washington state, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New
Mexico.
The 1949 Hanford experiment released radioactive iodine that spread for some 200 miles. Residents of the area found out about the incident many years later. That particular release of radioactive iodine was a deliberate experiment to see how far it would spread in the environment.
Lynn Stembridge in the director of the Hanford Education Action League, or HEAL, and lives near the Hanford Reservation.
Ms. STEMBRIDGE: It was a huge experiment. It was not as direct as setting someone in a clinic and giving them a cup of orange juice laced with plutonium, but it was ever bit as deliberate and every bit as unethical and immoral.
NARRATOR: Nuclear weapons testing reflected another example of US Government indifference to the dangers of the nuclear age. Between 1951 and 1963, the Atomic Energy Agency detonated 126 nuclear bombs in the air above Nevada. In addition to the exposure of a quarter million soldiers and civilians who took part in the aboveground tests, there were thousands of "downwinders," who lost their livelihood, their health and, in many cases, their lives to the drifting fallout clouds.
Dr. ARJUN MAKHIJANI: Atmospheric nuclear testing, I think in some ways, was the most devastating aspect of nuclear weapons production.
NARRATOR: Dr. Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and an expert on the environmental impact of nuclear weapons production.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: We did some calculations from global nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere and calculated that, by the end of the next century, hundreds of thousands of people would have died from cancer as a result of radiation doses.
NARRATOR: On December 7th, 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary opened the door to reveal the nation's nuclear skeletons. Secretary O'Leary announced that the United States Government had secretly conducted radiation experiments on hundreds of unsuspecting adults and children in the 1940s and 1950s.
HAZEL O'LEARY, Secretary of Energy: What I felt upon hearing the information -- which
was, interestingly enough, known to a very narrow community -- was "Our government did that?"
NARRATOR: In addition to the nuclear weapons-related activities, the legacy of nuclear bomb-making is soiled by the routine dumping of radioactive wastes at bomb sites around the nation, posing a potential health and safety threat to some 600,000 workers and millions of residents of nearby communities.
Radiation exposure has been linked to higher rates of cancer, leukemia, brain tumors, thyroid disorders, birth defects, sterility and miscarriages.
Ms. CRAWFORD: And I couldn't have told you prior to the Fall of '84 what they did at this facility. There were red and white checkerboard water towers. There was a red and white checkerboard square on the sign that said "Feed Materials Production Center." I think Purina, and a whole lot of other people did, too. You know, nobody ever talked about radiation, or chemicals and wells, or radioactive dust being released into your air.
NARRATOR: Lisa Crawford, a housewife who lived near the Fernald uranium processing plant, recalls being told by a Department of Energy official that it was okay to drink her well water, even though it was contaminated with radioactive waste. She invited a DoE representative to drink the water.
Ms. CRAWFORD: So, my husband and I went to a public meeting and I took a jar of water right out of my tap and I sat it down and said, "I want to see you drink this." You know, "You keep telling me it's fine and it won't hurt me or my family," and they wouldn't drink it.
We have a lot of people in the community who've had cancer. FRESH did a medical -- a cancer map of the area and we have well over 300 names on this map. The persistent diseases we tend to find are colon cancer, breast cancer and kidney cancer.
NARRATOR: In Washington state, Lynn Stembridge is concerned about the impact of the dumping of radioactive waste water into the Columbia River.
Ms. STEMBRIDGE: They pulled water out of the Columbia River, ran that water right over the
fuel rods, and dumped that water, steaming hot, laced with radiation right back into the Columbia
River. The anecdotal information is that it has definitely impacted on people's health.
What has happened to people in their communities around the Pacific Northwest paints just an absolutely incredible picture. Not just thyroid disorders and not just cancer, but
reproductive disorders, and immune system deficiencies, an alarmingly high incidence of MS through that part of the world.
NARRATOR: A tragic legacy of the Cold War is that public health was sacrificed on the alter of nuclear bomb-making.
Dr. Makhijani describes why the process is so polluting.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: Plutonium is produced with uranium as a raw material. You put uranium in the reactor and irradiate it with neutrons, and then some of the uranium becomes plutonium. Then you have to take that -- It's mixed up with a lot of highly radioactive materials from the reactor which are made in the reactor. You have to put that in a big chemical tank with nitric acid and other materials and you separate the plutonium from everything else. And since everything else or the majority of this stuff that you have in the reactor, you get a very large quantity of extremely radioactive waste which is left over from plutonium production.
NARRATOR: The United States stopped processing uranium for bombs in 1964 and ceased plutonium production in 1988. But before ending production, we had produced about 89 metric tons of plutonium and 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium for weapons.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: Plutonium is essentially a manmade heavy element. It's a metal. It's very toxic from a carcinogenic point of view. That is, a small amount of plutonium inside your body, if it is lodged there, can cause cancer.
NARRATOR: It might seem that the radioactive threat is only a problem for people who live close to bomb-making facilities. Not so suggests Dr. Makhijani.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: This remote place called Hanford is an agricultural area. Wheat is grown
there. Your Yakima apples are grown not very far from there, and so on. So, there is a reason
when you sit at your dining table to remember eastern Washington,
Ms. STEMBRIDGE: I'd say Hanford itself may not be your problem, but chances are, with 17 major Department of Energy facilities, with fallout from the Nevada Test Site, with various and sundry radiation experiments going on at medical facilities and universities, my hunch is it probably is right next door to you.
VICTOR REZENDES: There's roughly 17 facilities throughout the country that were involved in nuclear bombmaking. Virtually all of them have environmental problems and virtually all of them are closed for environmental health and safety reasons today.
NARRATOR: Victor Rezendes has studied the issue for the General Accounting Office.
Mr. REZENDES: The contamination of these sites varies according to the production that was done there. All of them have typical industrial solvents and hazardous waste that would be involved in most manufacturing processes. Coupled with that is radiological waste that was mixed with these hazardous wastes, and a lot of the materials seep down through the soil and, basically, contaminated the ground water.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: Just to give you a sense of how much waste is involved, there are 177 high-level waste tanks at Hanford, and these are not your small 55-gallon drums. When I say tank, I really mean tank. They range from half-a-million gallons to more than one million gallons each. Fernald has got the largest store of radium wastes in the country sitting in two deteriorating silos whose structures have been compromised.
Ms. CRAWFORD: I think folks that live around Fernald just kind of live from day to day, and you just hope for the best. And we continue to just fight and push very, very hard for a total -- I won't say a total cleanup of the site, but a good, comprehensive cleanup of this site, because we're never going to go back to the way we were.
NARRATOR: Decades of abuse have left an estimated 4500 contaminated production sites
around the country. Nine nuclear weapons facilities have qualified for inclusion on the US
Environmental Protection Agency's "Superfund National Priorities List" of the worst
contaminated sites in America. Parts of some nuclear weapons facilities are so contaminated they
may have to be
sealed off forever from public access, becoming what some have referred to as "national sacrifices zones."
Secretary of the Department of Energy Hazel O'Leary has created a new openness in the government's dealing with the legacy of nuclear weapons production.
Secretary O'LEARY: One of the major challenges is to articulate clearly cleanup milestones, which we have done for Fiscal Year 94 and 95.
INTERVIEWER: Give me an example of what they would mean? What would be a milestone?
Secretary O'LEARY: Clean up 25 sites entirely by the end of Fiscal Year 1995, boom. Begin substantial cleanup on another 110.
NARRATOR: The massive cleanup task facing the DoE will prove to be one of the most expensive government programs in the history of our nation.
Mr. REZENDES: A few years ago, five years ago, the department estimated a total cleanup would be $100 billion. Its latest estimate is $300 billion and takes 30 years. Most experts that we've talked to say that that's probably a rather conservative estimate.
NARRATOR: This massive undertaking involves decontaminat ing, decommissioning, and dismantling as many as 700 buildings, reactors, and other structures within the nuclear weapons complex. The Department of Energy estimates that completing these tasks may take until the year 2050. The culture of secrecy associated with nuclear weapons production has been an impediment to dealing with the problem.
Mr. REZENDES: Everything that was done at these facilities was cloaked in heavy secrecy. In addition, the department and its predecessor agencies were also shielded from the various kinds of oversight and environmental laws that the country was gradually coming to grips with.
Ms. CRAWFORD: The Department of Energy said, 'We're a good neighbor. We haven't hurt
the environment and no one has been hurt by what was done.' And HEAL responded by saying,
"That's wonderful. Show us the documents that prove that." Unfortu nately, what happened
every
time they produced a document was it said the exact opposite.
Secretary O'LEARY: Someone found, at one of our sites, a one-line contract that said, "This is a contract to build a secret weapon." That was it.
NARRATOR: One of the worst examples of abuse occurred at the Rocky Flats plutonium processing facility, located 16 miles northwest of Denver. After a 1989 raid by FBI agents, the former plant operator, Rockwell International, pled guilty to ten charges of violating environmental laws. Rockwell was fined $18.5 million. While that sounds like a lot of money, it was actually $3.8 million less than bonuses the US Government paid to Rockwell during the period in question.
Ms. CRAWFORD: I think they should absolutely be held liable. I think that a lot of these people have gotten away with murder. And they have cost the taxpayers of this country a lot of money and we are all going to pay for this over the next 30 years to even begin to try to clean up these sites.
NARRATOR: As a result of previous abuses, Secretary O'Leary has called for major contractor reform.
Secretary O'LEARY: The old regime simply said 'do the job. If you do it -- If it takes you five months longer to do the job, fine, we'll pay you for that, too.' That's unacceptable. I think there can be a better sharing of the burden, and that's frightening to the contractors. They're going to have to live with that.
Mr. REZENDES: Under the environmental restoration management contract, the contractor is paid based on the progress he makes in actually cleaning up the facility.
NARRATOR: Past secretaries of energy have overseen a department that has overemphasized nuclear weapons production and minimized or even ignored environmental concerns.
Ms. CRAWFORD: It was damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. We don't care who we hurt, we're going to do this.
NARRATOR: In the last few years, there have been changes at the Department of Energy,
particularly under the stewardship of Hazel O'Leary.
Ms. CRAWFORD: And here we are, in 1994, and we have public participation, and we have a lot of it. I mean, sometimes we have it to the point where we can't fit anything else on our plates here.
INTERVIEWER: Because DoE is more open to it, you're saying?
Ms. CRAWFORD: DoE has opened up the door. It was open about this much, and now I think it's open about halfway. We've got some more to go here.
Secretary O'LEARY: I think it's clear that protecting the environment was certainly not a top priority in the department. What you do is you look at the history and you look at several things. One, I don't think people clearly understood, who were doing the work, certainly at inception, the danger.
Ms. STEMBRIDGE: The response of the Department of Energy has been more forthright, certainly, under this administration. I will say, however, that there is a great deal of history retro-fitting going on. Discussions of past experiments or past pollution is frequently couched in, 'Well, they just didn't know better, that was a different time.' And the fact of the matter is, they knew darn well that they were over even the high limits that were on the books at that time.
I have seen documents where, at one point, they thought perhaps they should close the Columbia River to fishing, but they did not do it because they thought it would probably be a public relations disaster. So, for the Department of Energy to say they didn't know, that's a lie.
NARRATOR: While the debate on the environmental legacy of the nuclear arms race is more open, no solutions have yet been found on where to permanently store the radioactive waste produced by the nuclear weapons complex. Congress created the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada mostly for civilian wastes, but high level military wastes will be sent there, as well.
Another site in New Mexico, will handle less radioactive material. The projects have been delayed because there are huge problems to be solved before the sites are ready.
Mr. REZENDES: Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. So, the question is do you just bury
the plutonium someplace for 24,000 years and assume that no will dig it up, or mine it, or
somehow stumble across it?
NARRATOR: And there remains the problem of the tanks where wastes are currently being held. A 1957 waste tank explosion in Russia left large parts of the surrounding countryside uninhabitable.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: We've got these wastes in tanks at Hanford and Savannah River. Especially the ones at Hanford are going to pose very severe problems. We've put the wastes in the tanks, but we don't know how to get them out. These wastes are very complex in their nature. They're radioactive. They contain explosive materials. So, assume that Yucca Mountain was the perfect place to bury radioactive waste forever. The big question is can we get those wastes out of the tanks and have we developed the technology.
Senator GLENN: Some of the scientists propose we can encapsulate this material, radioactive material in these glass bricks. And that's great. The glass will take care of it and that's it. We can put it down in deep geologic storage and never have to worry about it again.
Well, so we had them go ahead and start doing some of this stuff, getting ready for it. Well, they found out that after about I think it was two, or two-and-a-half years, some of this glass that they had thought was going to be so permanent was leaching out, the glass was cracking, material was coming out; it was not nearly as good as we thought.
NARRATOR: Even if a safe, reliable storage method is agreed upon by the government and scientific community, how do we mark the site to prevent future generations from disturbing the repository? A team of scientists, educators, creative writers and futurists have devised a few suggested "signposts" to warn away future generations. But serious concerns remain.
Mr. REZENDES: Those are extraordinary time periods we're talking about. Recorded history is only 5000 years. Understanding geology, understanding how climate changes and various other things change over hundreds of years, let alone a thousand years is very, very difficult. Those are very complex issues, ones that we have to study very carefully.
NARRATOR: When looking at the problem of nuclear waste cleanup and disposal, it is clear
that the Congress must play a larger role. Not just in pushing for more effective cleanup
programs, but for ensuring that Americans are told the truth about the dangers involved and for
guaranteeing
all our citizens a voice in cleanup decisions.
Senator GLENN: And I think our role has got to be to keep the pressure on this, keep the budget flowing to make sure the cleanup continues. That's the way we make this country safe for everybody.
Secretary O'LEARY: My goal is to squeeze the costs out of these contracts, to get value for every taxpayer dollar paid, and to hold folks accountable to deliver what we say they should.
Dr. MAKHIJANI: And I think Congress should assist that process on the positive side, not always wield the stick, but assist the environment, safety and health department with more funds and personnel and elbow room. I think financial accountability without kind of wielding a butcher knife to the cleanup budgets is also very important.
NARRATOR: In Fiscal Year 1995, the Clinton administration proposed spending only $5.4 billion on the nuclear weapons complex cleanup. By comparison, the Pentagon wants to spend as much money this year for just two aircraft programs left over from the Cold War, the F-22 fighter and the C-17 transport.
Secretary O'LEARY: The other major challenge is to keep the cost reasonable. One of the things we've discovered here is are we paying a fair price for cleanup. Well, we've discovered that we were not. The federal government was paying 30 percent more for projects than its private sector counterparts.
Senator GLENN: If you figure somewhere over $200 billion is going to be required to do the cleanup job, and it's going to require 20 to 30 years, that's pretty simple math. You're going to have to have somewhere around eight to $10 billion a year on a steady basis. And it's going to take that kind of steady funding and steady government support to really get this problem under control and eradicate it once and for all.
NARRATOR: The legacy of nuclear bombmaking is a costly one. America will pay the price for
centuries with our tax dollars, our health, and our peace of mind. In the headlong rush to garner
security through the stockpiling of nuclear bombs, our nation wound up endangering the
wellbeing of its own citizens, its own communities.
Americans must now demand full accountability from their government not only for the mistakes of the past, but for keeping their promises in the future. Cleaning up and storing the toxic wastes of the nuclear arms race will demand new technologies, adequate budgets, efficient government oversight and follow-through, and an openness that will bring citizens into the decisionmaking process.
By seeking further reductions in nuclear stockpiles and ending all efforts to develop new nuclear
weapons, we can ensure that future generations won't stumble blindly into a new nuclear age.
Admiral CARROLL: What you've just heard and seen clearly illustrates the dangerous legacy of the nuclear arms race. But it even more clearly illustrates the need to make democracy work in America. Secretary O'Leary is operating in the true spirit of democracy by uncovering the deceptions which so long have masked our problems. We can help her by insisting that all government officials are equally open and equally ready to act to solve our pollution problems. We must do this so that our children and their children can grow up in a clean America.
For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I'm Eugene Carroll.
[End of broadcast.]
(C) Copyright 1994, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.