PAGE 2
DRAWING BY BOB GALE
4 9 YEARS LA TER
BY THE CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION
The Cold War may be over, but thanks to the huge
mess that remains behind, it will not soon be forgotten. Lethal
leftovers from the Cold War nuclear arms buildup have trans
formed vast tracts of land and water in the United States into
radioactive and toxic wastelands. The names of nuclear weap
ons facilities such as Femald, Hanford and Rocky Flats are to
some as synonymous with environmental disaster as Chernobyl,
Love Canal and Three Mile Island.
For decades America's nationwide complex of facilities
responsible for designing, building and testing nuclear weapons
has dumped, injected, poured, spilled and vented some of the
most toxic substances known into the air, ground and water
According to the U S. Congress' Office of Technology Assess
ment (OTA), 'There is evidence that air, groundwater, surface
water, sediments and soil, as well as vegetation and wildlife,
have been contaminated at most, if not all, of the Department of
Energy nuclear weapons sites." Continued unsafe and imperm
anent storage of radioactive waste and other deadly by-products
of nuclear weapons activities only promises to add to a long
term, tax-funded cleanup bill already estimated at more than
$2 billion.
In preparing to fight a nuclear war with the former Soviet
Union, America succeeded in "nuking" itself. With the Cold War
now behind us, there is less reason to fear that we will die in a
nuclear attack. However, communities in the shadows of nuclear
weapons plants and the workers who made the bombs may
have good cause to fear that they will be stricken with cancer or
other ailments because of the nuclear threat at home. To the
victor of the world, it is said, belong the spoils. In the case of the
Cold War, this is all too true.
The U S. nuclear weapons complex is a vast industrial
enterprise that sprang from the secret Manhattan Project effort
to develop the atomic bombs to drop on Japan in 1945. Its 15
major facilities collectively occupy some 3,350 square miles -
an area larger than Delaware, Rhode Island and the District of
Columbia combined - in 13 states and employ more than
100,000 people. Although these facilities are owned by the
federal government through the U S. Department of Energy
(DOE), they are managed and operated by private contractors
such as Martin Marietta, Rockwell International and Westing-
house.
In the half century that it has existed, the nuclear
weapons industry has manufactured nearly 70,000 nuclear
warheads1. It has produced about 89 metric tons of plutonium
and more than 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, the
primary radioactive materials in nuclear weapons2. And it has
carried out 1,076 nuclear explosions3. In the process, it has
created a legacy of environmental contamination that, in the
view of the OTA, is "unprecedented in scope and complexity."
This happened because nuclear weapons facilities were
permitted to operate behind a veil of secrecy, largely free from
external oversight, public scrutiny and environmental, health
and safety laws. The attitude was "bomb production, whatever
the costs." Facilities treated, stored and disposed of the vast
quantities of waste materials they generated often in a careless
and environmentally harmful manner. Decades of environment
al, health and safety abuses at U S. DOE nuclear weapons
facilities have left an estimated 4,500 contaminated sites
covering tens of thousands of acres of land4.
Nine nuclear weapons facilities have qualified for
inclusion on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA)
"Superfund" National Priorities List of the worst contaminated
sites in America. Much of this contamination was the result of
accidents, spills and leaks. In other cases, however, it resulted
from planned and deliberate acts. In the past, disposal of liquid
wastes at nuclear weapons facilities often meant pouring them
directly into the ground. Wastes also have been injected or
pumped into wells or holes deep underground, buried in landfills,
stored in giant underground tanks and vented into the atmos
phere.
Contamination from nuclear weapons activities has
posed a potential health and safety threat to some 600,000 past
and present workers at nuclear bomb plants and millions of resi
dents of surrounding communities. Radiation exposure has been
linked to higher rates of cancer, leukemia, brain tumors, thyroid
disorders, birth defects, sterility and miscarriages.
Plutonium is readily absorbed by the body and can
remain there for decades. As little as .000001 ounce of
plutonium-239, the radioisotope of plutonium used to fuel
nuclear weapons, may be sufficient to cause lung cancer if
inhaled in fine particles. With an estimated half-life of 24,000
years, half of the plutonium-239 that exists in 1994 w ll still be
around in the year 25994. It will continue to emit radiation and
remain a potential threat to life for about 10 half-lives - in other
words, 240,000 years, or about 10,000 human generations!
While much information about past contamination
releases is not yet publicly available, in the last year there have
been some startling revelations. In 1993 the General Accounting
Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported that the U.S.
military and DOE's predecessor agency, The Atomic Energy
Commission, purposely released large amounts of radiation to
the atmosphere in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of
secret experiments to design a weapon that would kill enemy
soldiers with radioactive fallout. Two such experiments took
place at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Another six tests occurred at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving
Ground in Utah.
In a 1949 experiment referred to as "Green Run," scien
tists at the Hanford Reservation, a plutonium processing plant in
Washington State, deliberately released a cloud of radioactive
gases to test new equipment for detecting radiation far from its
source. The cloud, which contained radioactive iodine, spread
radiation for some 200 miles. Residents of the Pacific Northwest
did not learn of the tests until 1989, and some details still remain
secret. Additional tests took place in 1950 at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico. In one case, scientists, after
exploding a nonnuclear bomb that contained radioactive
materials, tracked radioactive fallout to a town 70 miles away.
A 1993 DOE report on the status of nuclear safety at
weapons plants concluded that "the likelihood of a disaster is
high." Foremost among DOE's concerns is the possibility of a
chemical explosion or fire involving underground tanks that
store high-level radioactive waste. The buildup in waste tanks of
flammable hydrogen gas and potentially explosive ferrocyanide
and organic nitrate compounds poses the risk of an accident
similar to those that caused casualties and widespread radio
active contamination surrounding nuclear weapons facilities in
Russia in 1957 and 1993.
According the Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio), a long-time
observer of the nuclear weapons complex, 'The potential for
explosions is widespread throughout the entire DOE weapons
complex." Of most concern are waste tanks at the Hanford
Reservation, many of which are also either known or assumed
to be leaking.
According to Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environ
mental Restoration & Waste Management Thomas P. Grumbly,
DOE's second-highest priority after waste tanks is its unsafe
storage of "spent," or irradiated, nuclear fuel. Until 1988 the
United States routinely reprocessed spent fuel in order to
separate and recover plutonium for use in weapons. Since then
millions of pounds of the highly radioactive fuel have been left to
sit in aging and corroding storage facilities.
A 1993 DOE report identified more than 100 "vulnerabil
ities" associated wth spent fuel storage, defined as "conditions
or weaknesses that may lead to radiation exposure to the public,
unnecessary or increased exposure to the workers, or release of
radioactive materials to the environment." Some fuel has
already leaked from rusting canisters. Other fuel "was buried
without protective barriers or containers."
Efforts to clean up contaminated sites and bring DOE
nuclear weapons facilities into compliance wth the nation's
environmental laws are expected to take at least 30 years and
cost more than $200 billion. This cleanup and compliance bill
amounts to more than $2.8 million for each nuclear warhead the
nuclear weapons industry manufactured and almost $800 for
every man, woman and child living in the United States. It is
more than twice what the country spent on the Apollo space
program to put a man on the moon!
NOTES:
z j 4 Tenth Street
J\jtoria, Oregon
3 Lf - ' 3 6)
A N c rtu rc d /fo o d t'Grocery
e t t l9 7 4
1 3 8 9 V ucm &
1. According to DOE, more than 53,000 of these 70,000
wartieads have been retired and disassembled. The U.S. has
produced no new nuclear warheads since 1990.
2. The U.S. has produced no new plutonium for nuclear
weapons since 1988. It has produced no new highly enriched
uranium for nuclear weapons since 1964.
3. This number includes 23 British tests on U.S. soil and
the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6
and August 9, 1945. The U.S. last tested a nuclear weapon in
September 1992.
4. DOE defines a contaminated site as "any location,
ranging from very small to as large as a thousand acres, where
radioactive, hazardous or mixed waste has been released, or is
suspected to have been released, to the environment." Radio
active waste contains atomic elements that emit radiation.
Hazardous waste contains materials that are toxic, corrosive,
flammable or reactive Mixed waste is both radioactive and
hazardous.