The above was written in 1998...so it's a bit dated. I wonder what progress has been made since then, in the clean-up effort at Hanford?

The 1944 Hanford test

Documents declassified in August of 1987 indicated that the US Army Corps of Engineers deliberately released several hundred curies of radioactive iodine (iodine-131) at Hanford in 1944, five years before Green Run. The wartime research, for which there was no public warning, was intended to determine how far the winds would carry radiation in eastern Washington, a report indicates. The Army wanted to test how well its measuring devices could detect iodine, a telltale sign of plutonium production.

The document also lists accidental releases of radiation to farming communities in the Wahluke Slope area east of Hanford n home of the Hanford "downwinders" who contend today that their health problems are linked to past radiation emissions.
The experiment was conducted during the Manhattan Project; the top-secret effort to produce the atomic bombs which were dropped in Japan in 1945. It took place during the first reprocessing of plutonium in December 1944.

Carl C. Gamertsfelder, a leading radiation control manager at Hanford in the 1940s and '50s, said that the fuel used contained more iodine than usual because it had been cooled only about half as long as normal.

Detailed records of the experiment, which would show where the iodine was dispersed, were either lost or destroyed.

Information still missing

Judging from the context of the material deleted from this most recently released report, it appears that the Air Force still considers the identity of those directing the tests to be a matter of national security. Jim Thomas, HEAL's Research Director, commented: "We still don't know who authorized the Green Run or these previous tests and now we have the first documentation of potentially serious iodine releases from Oak Ridge."

Sources:

• Perspective, number 10-11, summer/fall 1992, p.21
• GreenNet, nuc.facilities, 30 August 1992 and September 1992
• The Spokesman-Review, 24 Dec 1987.

Nuclear Waste: DOE's Efforts to Protect the Columbia River from Contamination Could Be Further Strengthened

GAO-06-1018 August 28, 2006
Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 33 pages) Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)

Summary

The Department of Energy's (DOE) Hanford site in Washington State is one of the most contaminated nuclear waste sites in North America. The Columbia River flows through about 50 miles of the site. Radioactive and hazardous contamination from decades of producing nuclear materials for the nation's defense have migrated through the soil into the groundwater, which generally flows toward the river. In November 2005, GAO reported on the potential for the Hanford site to contaminate the Columbia River. To address continuing concerns, GAO reviewed the status of DOE's efforts to (1) understand the risk to the Columbia River from Hanford site contamination and to deploy effective technologies to address contamination near the river and (2) strengthen the management of its river protection program. To assess DOE's efforts, GAO reviewed numerous reports by DOE and others, and discussed the problem with federal and state regulators and DOE officials.

DOE is actively assessing the risk to the Columbia River from Hanford site contamination and is addressing problems with deployed river protection technologies. While DOE has extensive knowledge of contaminants that are currently in the groundwater and river, DOE knows less about contamination in the soil below the surface, known as the "vadose zone." Before proposing a cleanup approach, DOE has agreed with its regulators to take vadose zone samples in many of the contaminated areas of the site. DOE is also improving its computer simulation model that will predict future risk from the contamination, and deploying alternative technologies it believes will more effectively contain the contamination that may threaten the river. DOE has also begun to address concerns about its management of Columbia River protection efforts, particularly the lack of integration between groundwater and vadose zone activities.

In March 2006, in response to congressional committee direction, DOE proposed a new initiative to better integrate its river protection activities. The initiative included consolidating most groundwater and vadose zone characterization work under a single project; better integrating vadose zone, groundwater, and surface cleanup decisions; and improving the coordination and control over computer models used to predict movement of contamination in future years. Initiating these management improvements is important, but it is equally important that they be implemented effectively, and past history gives some cause for concern.

For example, one attempt by DOE to better integrate these activities was unsuccessful when key elements, such as putting all activities under a single project manager, failed to continue after project and other changes occurred at the site. In past GAO work, we reported that high-performing organizations sustained improvement initiatives when key elements were in place, such as clear goals, results-oriented performance measures, and evaluation strategies. Although DOE is beginning to develop a management plan for its new initiative, DOE has yet to implement some key elements, such as results-oriented performance measures and evaluations to gauge the effectiveness of its improvements, which could also help sustain the benefits of the improvements over time.

A Brief Guide to Initiative 297: Protecting Washington From Nuclear Waste at Hanford


Executive Summary

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington is one of the most contaminated nuclear waste sites in the world. During four decades of building nuclear weapons, more than 450 billion gallons of radioactive waste was dumped into the soil and into the Columbia River, enough to submerge the city of Seattle in a lake of waste 25 feet deep. Storage tanks for the most toxic liquid waste have leaked a million gallons of highly radioactive contaminants into the groundwater table. Containing the threat to public health and the environment from the Hanford Site will be a daunting and time consuming task, but a vitally necessary one.


Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is advancing a new cleanup plan that will undermine progress and leave Washington at risk. The agency plans to abandon large amounts of high-level waste in leaking underground tanks, weaken groundwater cleanup standards, and ship in additional waste from nuclear weapons facilities all over the country.
To protect Washington from nuclear waste and ensure that DOE lives up to its commitment to clean up the Hanford Site, citizens have banded together to put forward Initiative 297 for voter approval this November.


The initiative would require DOE to properly address the existing contamination at Hanford. This report summarizes the major issues behind Initiative 297 and the role it will play in holding the DOE to a higher standard.


Hanford is America’s Nuclear Waste Dumping Ground

Of all the waste generated in producing nuclear material for America’s nuclear arsenal, the Hanford Site holds:


• nearly 90 percent of the spent reactor fuel, the most radioactive substance on earth;


• almost 60 percent of the most dangerous high-level radioactive and toxic wastes; and


• 60 percent of the equipment and materials contaminated with highly radioactive transuranic wastes generated during bomb production, most of which is buried in shallow, unlined trenches.


These wastes remain dangerous for thousands to millions of years, and will need to be isolated from the human environment to ensure safety.


Hanford’s Land and Water Are Massively Contaminated

Contaminated groundwater beneath the Hanford Site covers an area larger than the city of Seattle, between 80 and 200 square miles in size. The contamination is spreading toward the Columbia River and poses a serious threat to the future health of the region. The groundwater contamination includes:


• plumes of radioactive iodine, strontium, technetium, tritium, carbon, cesium, plutonium, and uranium.


• toxic chemicals like carbon tetrachloride, chromium, nitrate, arsenic, fluoride, and trichloroethylene.


Plumes of radioactive strontium and tritium and toxic chromium have already reached the Columbia River, and are entering the water at levels thousands of times higher than EPA drinking water standards. The tritium plume releases 3,000 curies of radiation into the Columbia River every year (60 times as much radioactivity as was released by the Three Mile Island accident).


The major sources of contamination include:

• Over 400 billion gallons of toxic and radioactive liquids and millions of cubic feet of radioactive solids dumped and buried into unlined trenches and pits over the past 50 years. Some of this contamination has already reached the Columbia River.


• 53 million gallons of extremely radioactive high-level waste, mixed with hazardous chemicals and stored in aging tanks that have leaked at least one million gallons into the groundwater. The DOE estimates that this waste, among the greatest threats at the site, could reach the river in as little as ten years, and continue contaminating it for another 4,000 years.
The Columbia River provides drinking water for more than 1.5 million people, irrigation water for important agricultural areas in Oregon and Washington, and is one of the most important spawning areas for Chinook salmon in the entire Pacific Northwest. River contamination holds the potential to endanger large numbers of people.


The Department of Energy’s Cleanup Plan:


Lower Standards for Groundwater Cleanup, Abandon High-Level Waste in Leaking Tanks, and Ship in More Waste from Other Facilities

In May 2002, the Department of Energy announced an “accelerated cleanup plan” for Hanford. However, the cleanup plan cuts corners, leaving important tasks undone and Washington at risk. Important milestones originally laid out in the Tri-Party Agreement, the legally binding cleanup plan agreed upon by DOE, the U.S. EPA, and the Washington Department of Ecology in 1989, would be abandoned under the new plan.


1) Weakening Groundwater Cleanup Standards

• In a recent decision, the DOE labeled the contamination of Hanford’s groundwater “irreversible and irretrievable.” This label opens several legal doors for the DOE to scale back or abandon plans to clean up the contaminated groundwater.


• The DOE is also planning to clean up waste sites to a weaker standard and checking for compliance farther away, where the pollution is more likely to be diluted. These steps will make cleanup easier, but allow further pollution of the water.


2) Abandoning High-Level Waste Sludge in Leaking Underground Tanks

• The DOE is working with Congress to change the definition of high-level waste, legally allowing the abandonment of highly radioactive sludge in leaking underground tanks. Under this loophole, the DOE would be able extract some waste, then fill the tank with grout and abandon it. Under the original cleanup agreement, DOE is required to remove more than 99 percent of the waste, immobilize it in glass, and store it in a national repository.


3) Shipping in Waste From Other Facilities

• On June 23, 2004, the DOE issued a final decision to import three million cubic feet of radioactive waste over the next 40 years from weapons facilities across the country and dump them at Hanford.


• The plan includes a landfill large enough to accept all the waste generated at Hanford, plus 13 million to 34 million cubic feet of imported waste. The size of the proposed landfill brings DOE’s stated intention to limit waste imports to 3 million cubic feet into question.


• Adding additional waste will distract from the cleanup effort and exacerbate dangers associated with transporting nuclear waste, including terrorism and accidents.


A Better Plan for Hanford: Initiative 297


The Protect Washington Initiative, I-297, would hold the DOE to a higher standard.


It would:


• Focus cleanup efforts on dealing with the contamination already present at Hanford instead of importing new waste from off site.


• Ensure that the high-level radioactive waste in leaking tanks is cleaned up to the standards set in state and federal hazardous waste laws, instead of abandoned in the ground.


• Require cleanup of waste previously dumped into unlined trenches, and monitoring of groundwater to detect any contamination that may have resulted.


• Enable greater public participation in decisions at Hanford.


The initiative is necessary because DOE has a history of making cleanup promises to the people of Washington and failing to follow through, as well as a history of mismanagement of the cleanup effort. Initiative 297 provides stronger legal tools to protect Washington.


Vote Yes on I-297!

Washington voters have the power to reject the DOE’s reckless plan to abandon contamination at Hanford while importing new waste from other states. In order to ensure that the DOE cleans up Hanford and follows the same hazardous waste laws that every private company in the state must comply with, citizens should vote yes on I-297.

[Previous] [Next]
Download the full report.

All interesting, Tera, and concerning, but is it relevant on this forum? I can't see this as a feminism issue or a misandry issue.

Perhaps relevant as an example of a 'benign' western government that cares not a whit for the health and wellbeing of its citizens.

Are you thinking of moving?

Quote from Percy

All interesting, Tera, and concerning, but is it relevant on this forum? I can't see this as a feminism issue or a misandry issue.

Perhaps relevant as an example of a 'benign' western government that cares not a whit for the health and wellbeing of its citizens.

Are you thinking of moving?

Well it's not a feminism or misandry issue, that's why I put it in the conspiracy theories section and not the feminist/misandry section..lol! Ironically, it was your post (in this same section) that got me thinking...you posted an article that talked about environmentalism becoming like a new form of religion. The article seemed to imply that we humans aren't really responsibe for the destruction of our planet, or at least, that politicians are cashing in on our fears. I started thinking about Hanford, and how serious the problem of nuclear waste really is, and how it most definitely is a man-made problem. And, I found that lawyers are indeed encouraging people to cash in on this. I put this in the conspiracy theories forum because I wonder if this is another case of an environmental issue being made out to be much more serious than it is, or, is it serious enough to warrant all the lawsuits and the dooms-day talk that surrounds it?

Interestingly, I have thyroid problems...so do nearly all the women in my family... Yet, I'm not inclined to believe that Hanford has anything to do with this...though I live in an area that could be considered on the outskirts of the "downwind" territory, and some of the women in my family with thyroid problems were here during that 40's and 50's when the Green Run was conducted.

Interesting excerpts from the book "What To Do About Nuclear Waste" by Tricia Andryszewski:

"Easily the worst of the DOE's problems with nuclear wastes of all kinds are at Hanford. The Hanford Reservation is one of the oldest and largest of the nation's nuclear weapons faciities. At 560 square miles, Hanford is half the size of the state of Rhode Island. Hanford produced plutonium for nuclear weapons from 1943 to 1988, and it is home to nearly two thirds of the weapons program's total volume of solid and liquid hazardous and radioactive wastes, including 65 million gallons of high-level reprocessing wastes stored in 177 underground tanks. In addition, about 440 billion gallons of other wastes have been leached into the ground at Hanford over the years. At least 100 square miles possibly much more, of groundwater have been contaminated with radionucleides from Hanford have been detected 200 miles downstream in the Colombia River.

Nuclear wastes have been dumped at more than 1,400 locations on the Hanford Reservation. The wastes include enough plutonium to build perhaps two dozen nuclear weapons.

In May 1993, after years of argument, government officials, environmentalists, scientific experts, and representatives of Native American tribes and other local interests agreed on an overall cleanup strategy for Hanford. DOE contractors were to move hazardous materials from all over the reservation into a smaller zone, the "200 Area," where the tanks of high-level wastes are buried. This section is so badly contaminated that it may never be completely cleaned up. The 200 Area is to be a temporary storage site for the transported hazardous wastes; a permanent solution has not yet been determined. Concentrating wastes in the 200 Area will allow cleanup to proceed more quickly, it is hoped, on the rest of the reservation.

The thorniest problem in the 200 Area is the leakage of the underground tanks. Every year another two or three of the huge steel tanks, which weren't designed for long-term use, begin to leak into the surrounding soil. By mid-1993, 68 of the 177 tanks were on the DOE's list of "leakers." This leakage has amounted to more than 1 million gallons, in addition to the unknown quantity of liquid that in years past was routinely siphoned off from the tanks and dumped on the ground.

The scariest aspect of the tanks isn't the leakage; it's the threat that gases bubbling up in the tanks might ignite. An explosion of similar waste tanks in the Soviet Union in the 1950's spewed radioactive contamination over thousands of square miles in the southern Ural Mountains. More recently, in April 1993, a waste tank holding a similar brew to what's kept at Hanford exploded at the Russian reprocessing plant at Tomsk-7.

Efforts to forestall such a disaster at Hanford have been mixed. On the one hand, in July 1993 an elaborate $30 million mixing pump was installed in the tank considered the most dangerous. The theory behind the mixer was to bleed the tank's gases off steadily, rather than letting large bubbles build up to be emitted in dangerous "burps." (Technicians timed the installation for shortly after the tank had burped thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen.)

Concerned about the Tomsk-7 explosion, the US Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee looked into the matter and reported that such a disaster might indeed be possible at Hanford. "The potential risk here in the US is real and widespread," according to the committee's chairman, Senator John Glen.

Assuming Hanford continues to avoid such a catastrophe, the problem of disposing the waste in the tanks remains."

Ah, yes. Of course. I hadn't noticed that it was in the 'conspiracy' section. We are both just exploring the 'intersects'.

I put my Enviroment pieces there to show the intersect in that regard. Actually, I see less of a deliberate 'conspiracy' as much as a corruption of the human mind through idleness and viral thinking. This is an 'internal' matter rather than a singularly considered and deliberate one by a group of conspirators, although it is easy to see the bandwaggoners.

And , well, conspiracy or not, it is interesting to note that with the Green Run, a large amount of radiation was released deliberately on an unsuspecting public, just to see what would happen! And the government kept this a secret for many years, until it was forced to release documents that verified this activity.

Another excerpt:

"Hanford's last remaining active reactor, the N Reactor, shut down after Chernobyl. In 1988 the DOE made the shutdown permanent.

The chief controversy concerning Hanford during that time ws not the fear that a Chernobyl-style catastrophe might happen. Instead, concern was focused on a catastrophe that had already occurred: the release of radiation into the environment around Hanford during the many years of its operation.

In 1986 and 1987, Hanford officials released tens of thousands of pages of documents concerning Hanford's operations over the years. The biggest bombshell in these documents ws information about the Green Run- an experimental nuclear reactor run that in 1949 had released 11,000 curies of radioactivity into the air at Hanford. (By contrast, the accident at Three Mile Island released only 15 curies.) Most of Hanford's radioactive emissions, from the Green Run and from more normal operations, were iodine 131, which causes thyroid problems.

In 1987 the US Centers for Disease Control reported that the people who had lived downwind from Hanford were quite possibly the most irradiated citizens in the United States, and that they were much more likely to experience certain radiation-related diseases. Those who as children had drunk contaminated milk were especially at risk; many developed thyroid tumors and other disorders. (The human body mistakes iodine 131 for calcium, and concentrates itself in bones, teeth, and other parts of the body such as the thyroid.)

In 1990 a preliminary report from the DOE's Dose Reconstruction Project demonstrated that some of the children around Hanford had been dosed with more radiation than children caught in Chernobyl's cloud."

""..Despite this fact, contractors working for the federal government at Hanford repeatedly informed the public that Hanford was safe. When the public asked if Hanford was safe, they were told that "not one atom" had ever escaped from Hanford and that Hanford was as "safe as mother's milk." ""

well as safe as mother's milk from Hanford

DUCK AND COVER(UP): U.S. RADIATION TESTING ON HUMANS

by Tod Ensign and Glenn Alcalay

If you have any lingering thoughts that the government's failure to disclose radiation experimentation on humans was driven by misguided national security concerns, throw them in the nearest nuclear waste dump. At least some officials knew what they were doing was unconscionable and were ducking the consequences and covering their tails. A recently leaked Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) document lays out in the most bare-knuckled manner the policy of coverup. It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified `secret,' wrote Colonel O.G. Haywood of the AEC. *1 This letter confirms a policy of complete secrecy where human radiation experiments were concerned.

The Haywood letter may help explain a recently discovered 1953 Pentagon document, declassified in 1975. The two-page order from the secretary of defense ostensibly brought U.S. guidelines for human experimentation. in line with the Nuremberg Code, making adherence to a universal standard official U.S. policy. Ironically, however, the Pentagon document was classified and thus was probably not seen by many military researchers until its declassification in 1975.2

As these and a steady stream of similar reports confirm, for decades, the U.S. government had not only used human guinea pigs in radiation experiments, but had also followed a policy of deliberate deception and cover up of its misuse of both civilians and military personnel in nuclear weapons development and radiation research. While the Department of Energy (DoE) has made some belated moves toward greater openness, there are clear indications that other federal agencies and the White House have not yet deviated from the time-honored tradition of deceit and self-serving secrecy.

CRACKS IN THE WALL OF SILENCE

The Clinton administration's first halting step toward taking responsibility for past government misdeeds occurred on Pearl Harbor Day 1993, when DoE Secretary Hazel O'Leary confirmed that the AEC, her agency's predecessor, had sponsored experiments in which hundreds of Americans were exposed to radioactive material, often without their consent.

That O'Leary had decided to break with her agency's long tradition of secrecy and deception was something of a surprise. After all, she came to the job after a career in the nuclear power industry. But, confronted by a media firestorm over the government's Cold War nuclear experiments, O'Leary was left with few options.

Her decision to confirm some government abuses and reveal others was precipitated by a series of reports by journalist Eileen Welsome in the Albuquerque Tribune last November and the nearly simultaneous release of a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on radiation releases. *3 Following a six-year investigation, Welsome uncovered details of five experiments in which plutonium was injected into 18 people without their informed consent.

The GAO report, meanwhile, is an important finding that government scientists deliberately released radioactive material into populated areas so that they could study fallout patterns and the rate at which radioactivity decayed. It profiles 13 different releases of radiation from 1948-52. All were part of the U.S. nuclear weapons development program. The report concludes that other planned radioactive releases not documented here may have occurred at ... U.S. nuclear sites during these years. *4 The disclaimer suggests that a good deal of information about radiation experiments remains locked away in government files.

Top DoE aide Dan Reicher pulled O'Leary out of a meeting last November just before the story broke to warn her that People were injected with plutonium back in the 1940s, and there's a newspaper in New Mexico that's about to lay out the whole thing. *5 O'Leary provided information about experiments at major universities, including MIT, the University of Chicago, California, and Vanderbilt. Experimenters exposed about 2,000 Americans to varying degrees of radiation. These numbers may grow as more information about experiments is released.

INCIDENTAL FALLOUT

When O'Leary confirmed the human experiments, she also revealed two other important activities. First, she admitted her agency had secretly conducted 204 underground nuclear tests in Nevada from 1963-1990. These clandestine blasts were in addition to the 800-plus nuclear tests publicly announced during that period. DoE's secrecy may have deceived only Congress and the U.S. public. In 1990, the Soviet Union's minister for atomic energy produced an estimate of U.S. detonations that was very close to the actual number including the secret ones.

O'Leary's other significant disclosure concerned DoE's massive stock of weapons-grade plutonium: 33.5 metric tons of stockpiled plutonium and another 55.5 metric tons deployed in nuclear warheads and for similar uses. *6 This admission calls into question DoE's past claims that national security required the continued operation of unsafe plutonium processing plants to produce unnecessary stockpiles of plutonium.

O'Leary's disclosures about the human experiments have produced a torrent of publicity. Much less attention has been paid to her admissions about secret nuclear tests and plutonium stocks, which have much greater long-term implications for nuclear weapons policy.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

O'Leary's promises of full disclosure by DoE aside, *7 one well-placed source within the agency suggested that the Pentagon, NASA and the CIA were just going through the motions. *8 For example, the CIA announced in January 1994 that after searching its files it could locate only one reference to human experimentation with radiation. Former CIA official Scott Breckenridge charged that in 1973, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the chemical division of the CIA's Technical Services Division, may have destroyed many secret files, including those on human radiation experiments. *9

The history of partial revelation and near complete inaction is long. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission first revealed that the CIA may have conducted radiation experiments, *10 but the records if not destroyed have yet to be uncovered. William Colby, CIA director from 1973 to 1975, recently said, I recall the various drug tests, which were scandalous, but nothing about radiation. *11 So far, the institutional memories of the implicated agencies appear to be as conveniently spotty as Colby's.

SECRET EXPERIMENTS

While officials have dallied, dedicated reporters, angry victims, and a handful of government whistleblowers have exposed a pattern of secrecy and deception. A brief sampling of some of the macabre, secret human experiments uncovered by Welsome and others is chilling.

* In 1945, Albert Stevens, a 58-year old California house painter suffering from a huge stomach ulcer, was injected with doses of plutonium 238 and 239 equivalent to 446 times the average lifetime exposure. *12 Doctors recommended an operation and told his children he had only six months to live. For the next year, scientists collected plutonium-laden urine and fecal samples from Stevens and used that data in a classified scientific report, A Comparison of the Metabolism of Plutonium in Man and the Rat. There is little doubt scientists knew of the danger: The problem of chronic plutonium poisoning is a matter of serious concern for those who come in contact with this material, the report concluded.13 AEC officials in 1947 refused to release the information because it contains material, which in the opinion of the [AEC], might adversely affect the national interest. 14


* In 1947, doctors injected plutonium into the left leg of Elmer Allen, a 36-year-old African American railroad porter. Three days later, the leg was amputated for a supposed pre-existing bone cancer. Researchers analyzed tissue samples to determine the physiology of plutonium dispersion. *15 In 1973, scientists summoned Allen to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, where he was subjected to a follow-up whole body radiation scan, and his urine was analyzed to ascertain lingering levels of plutonium from the 1947 injection. *16


* Beginning in 1949, the Quaker Oats Company, the National Institutes of Health, and the AEC fed minute doses of radioactive materials to boys at the Fernald School for the mentally retarded in Waltham, Massachusetts, to determine if chemicals used in breakfast cereal prevented the body from absorbing iron and calcium. The unwitting subjects were told that they were joining a science club. The consent form sent to the boys' parents made no mention of the radiation experiment. *17


* In 1963, 131 prison inmates in Oregon and Washington state were paid about $200 each to be exposed to 600 roentgens of radiation (100 times the allowable annual dose for nuclear workers). They signed consent forms agreeing to submit to X-ray radiation of my scrotum and testes, but were not warned about the possibility of contracting testicular cancer. Doctors later performed vasectomies on the inmates to avoid the possibility of contaminating the general population with irradiation-induced mutants. *18


* From 1960-71, in experiments which may have caused the most deaths and spanned the most years, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, exposed 88 cancer patients to whole body radiation. *19 Many of the guinea pigs were poor African-Americans at Cincinnati General Hospital with inoperable tumors. All but one of the 88 patients have since died. *20 There is evidence that scientists forged signatures on the consent forms for the Cincinnati experiments. Gloria Nelson testified before the House that her grandmother, Amelia Jackson, had been strong and still working before she was treated by Dr. Saenger. Following exposure to 100 rads of whole body radiation (about 7,500 chest X-rays), Amelia Jackson bled and vomited for days and became permanently disabled. Jackson testified that the signa- ture on her grandmother's consent form was forged.21


WATCHING THE BOMB

While researchers were running tests on relatively small numbers of hapless civilians, the military was conducting a series of potentially lethal experiments on a massive scale. From 1946-63, the military ordered more than 200,000 active-duty GIs to observe one or more nuclear bomb tests either in the Pacific or at the Nevada Test Site. The 195,000 GIs who served as part of the occupation force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may also have suffered the effects of radiation. A vast body of information about nuclear bomb testing and its effects on humans has yet to see the light of day, but some individual accounts are harrowing.

One atomic veteran, Jim O'Connor, provided a detailed account of the Turk blast at the Nevada test site in March 1955. O'Connor reported seeing someone crawling from a bunker near ground-zero after the blast:

"There was a guy with a mannequin look who had apparently crawled behind
the bunker. Something like wires were attached to his arms and his face was bloody.
I smelled an odor like burning flesh. The rotary camera I'd seen [earlier] was going
`zoom, zoom, zoom' and the guy kept trying to get up." *22

At this point, O'Connor fled and was picked up by AEC rad-safety monitors who took him to a hospital where he was treated for radiation overdose. The Defense Nuclear Agency refused to confirm or deny O'Connor's account, although there are reports which refer to a volunteer officer program at several of the test blasts.

Navy officer R.A. Hinners was another nuclear guinea pig. *23 Only a mile from ground zero, he and seven other volunteers witnessed the detonation of a 55-kiloton bomb (four times the Hiroshima blast) on April 25, 1953. While the Army's report, Exercise Desert Rock VII and VIII, covers the 1957 test series and notes that the observers suffered no adverse effects, the Pentagon has not released any material relating to the use of volunteers at any other tests. *24

DELIBERATE ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION RELEASES

Nuclear researchers did not limit themselves to small groups of selected guinea pigs or large groups of soldiers under orders. The U.S. government also deliberately released radioactive materials into the atmosphere, endangering military personnel and untold numbers of civilians. Unsurprisingly, the people exposed during these tests were not informed.

In four of these tests at the AEC's facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, bomb-testers set off conventional explosives to send aloft clouds of radioactive material, including strontium and uranium. When the AEC tracked the clouds across northern New Mexico, it detected some radioactivity 70 miles away. According to a Los Alamos press officer, there may have been as many as 250 other such tests during the same period.25

Nor was this intentional release the largest. During the December 1949 Green Run test at the Hanford (Washington) Nuclear Reservation, the AEC loosed thousands of curies of radioactive iodine-131 several times the amount released from the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster into the atmosphere simply to test its recently installed radiological monitoring equipment. Passing over Spokane and reaching as far as the California-Oregon border, Green Run irradiated thousands of downwinders, as civilians exposed to the effects of airborne radiation tests are known, and contaminated an enormous swath of cattle grazing and dairy land. *26 A team of epidemiologists is now looking into an epidemic of late-occurring thyroid tumors and other radiogenic disorders among the downwind residents in eastern Washington state.

The plant's emissions control systems were turned off during the experiment, releasing into the atmosphere almost twice as much radioactive iodine-131 as originally planned. The GAO report notes that the off-site population was not forewarned [nor] made aware of the [test] for several decades. It also notes that although adverse weather patterns kept the radiation from spreading as far as expected, monitoring Air Force planes detected hot clouds over 100 miles northeast of the site. *27

SACRIFICIAL LAMBS

Even when the government took steps to create the appearance of openness, it was less than candid.

You are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation's atomic test program, proclaimed a 1955 AEC propaganda booklet widely disseminated to downwind neighbors of the Nevada Test Site. Some of you have been inconvenienced by our test operations, and at times some of you have been exposed to potential risk from flash, blast, or fallout. You have accepted the inconvenience or the risk without fuss, without alarm, and without panic. *28

The AEC's concern for inconveniences or honesty, however, did not extend to the 4,500 Utah and Nevada sheep who died mysteriously in 1953 after exposure to fallout. The AEC denied any causal connection between the sheep's exposure to radioactive fallout from the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests and their deaths. *29 In a 1956 trial, Utah and Nevada sheep ranchers lost their lawsuit against the government.

But years later, Harold Knapp, a former AEC scientist who analyzed the 1953 sheep deaths, challenged the AEC's accounts. The simplest explanation, he told a 1979 congressional committee, of the primary cause of death in the lambing ewes is irradiation of the ewe's gastrointestinal tract by beta particles from all the fission products ingested by the sheep along with open range forage. *30

In a 1982 retrial, A. Sherman Christensen, the same judge who presided over the 1956 trial, noting that fraud was committed by the U.S. Government when it lied, pressured witnesses, and manipulated the processes of the court, ruled for the ranchers. *31

PARADISE LOST

U.S. government callousness and deception extended halfway around the world. Another nuclear experiment was underway in the Marshall Islands a de facto strategic colony of the U.S. located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. exploded 67 atomic and hydrogen bombs at Bikini and Enewetok, two Marshall group atolls. Once again, the full impact and consequences of this experiment would not be disclosed for decades, and then only reluctantly.

The largest and dirtiest of the Marshall Islands blasts was code-named Bravo. At 15 megatons more than 1,000 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb Bravo rained lethal radioactive fallout over thousands of unsuspecting islanders under circumstances which remain mysterious. The people of Rongelap atoll were especially hard-hit. They were evacuated from their home islands two days after Bravo, following the absorption of massive doses of high-level fallout.

Following the Rongelap evacuation, the AEC considered repatriating the islanders to their home atoll in order to gather vital fallout data. In 1956, Dr. G. Failla, chair of the AEC's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine, wrote to AEC head Lewis Strauss: The Advisory Committee hopes that conditions will permit an early accomplishment of the plan [to return the Rongelap people]. The Committee is also of the opinion that here is the opportunity for a useful genetic study of the effects on these people. 32 Three years later, Dr. C.L. Dunham, head of the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine, reiterated the AEC's interest. Studying the Rongelap victims of the Bravo blast will, he wrote, ... contribute to estimates of long term hazards to human beings and to an evaluation of the recovery period following a single nuclear detonation. *33 Having established the near-perfect longitudinal human radiation experiment in 1954, DoE continues to compile data from their Marshallese subjects.

It appears that AEC was guilty of both negligently disregarding the well-being of the Marshallese and then lying about its actions. On February 24, 1994, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, convened a hearing on Bravo. Recalling weather data that demonstrated prior knowledge that islanders would receive substantial fallout, and that winds had not unexpectedly shifted, *34 Rep. Miller declared that We have deliberately kept that information from the Marshallese. That clearly constitutes a cover-up. *35

A PATTERN OF IGNORED DISCLOSURES

The record of U.S. government lies, misrepresentation, and cover-ups to support its nuclear research program is incontrovertible, if not yet complete. From the inception of the U.S. nuclear program, government policy has placed military and scientific interests above both the well-being of thousands of people and the truth. And, Secretary O'Leary's evident openness notwithstanding, the government's record in responding to earlier disclosures is not reassuring. When faced with damaging disclosures in the past, the government attempted to stonewall. When that would not suffice, the government only grudgingly responded. A few examples:

* In 1980, Congress issued a stinging report, The Forgotten Guinea Pigs, which concluded that the AEC chose to secure, at any cost, the atmospheric nuclear weapons testing program rather than to protect the health and welfare of the residents of the area who lived downwind from the site. *36


* In 1982, the New York Times provided evidence that policy-makers foresaw dangers and acted to cover them up. The story included a statement by a former Army medic, Van R. Brandon, of Sacramento, that his medical unit kept two sets of books of radiation readings at the Nevada Test Site during the 1956-57 tests. One set was to show that no one received an [elevated] exposure, Brandon told the paper. The other set of books showed ... the actual reading. That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning, he recalled. *37 DoE officials simply denied Brandon's allegations, and no further investigation was pursued. *38


* In 1986, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) released a report detailing human radiation experiments that AEC and its successors conducted between the 1940s and the 1970s. Many were designed to measure the effects of radiation on humans, and according to Markey, American citizens thus became nuclear calibration devices for experimenters run amok. 39 The Markey report, American Nuclear Guinea Pigs, described 31 grisly experiments involving 695 people who were captive audiences or populations that some experimenters frighteningly might have considered `expendable.' 40


When the Reagan administration refused to investigate the disclosures, the Markey report was quickly forgotten. There was a massive public relations relationship that existed between the [Reagan] administration, the defense contractors and experimenters in America, charged Markey, that worked very effectively throughout the 1980s. I'd say something, and I'd get attacked, and it would be a one-day story. *41

A LONG, HARD ROAD TO JUSTICE

From the beginning of the nuclear age, the federal government not only ignored or suppressed knowledge of abuses in the nuclear experimental program, it also fought all attempts to hold it accountable for damages. A series of Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1950 bars both atomic veterans and downwinders from suing the federal government. *42 Veterans are denied the right to sue for injuries suffered while on active duty because the Court believes that this would interfere with military necessity and national security. *43

Downwinders have also encountered many obstacles in their long struggle for medical studies and compensation. One group of Utah residents who lived under the fallout during the 1950s and early 1960s finally succeeded in bringing their federal lawsuit to trial in 1982. They scored an important victory when the trial judge found the bomb tests were responsible for their cancers and awarded them damages. *44 But the appeals court reversed this verdict by re-defining the discretionary function exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act to make the government immune from lawsuits of this kind. *45 In essence, the court held that setting off nuclear bombs was within the discretionary power of high-ranking officials and could not be questioned in a lawsuit for damages.

After the federal appeals court stripped the downwinders of their victory, in 1990, Congress finally stepped in and adopted the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act for downwinders and some groups of uranium miners. Claimants must document residence in the fallout area and that they suffer from one of 13 cancers linked to radia-tion exposure. The program, administered by the Department of Justice, places a ceiling of $50,000 per claim, although many awards were smaller. Justice granted 818 claims out of 1,460 which were submitted as of January 1994.46 In 1988, Congress acted on behalf of atomic veterans, forcing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to establish a limited compensation plan with a $75,000 cap. It provides presumptive disability to veterans who can prove that they suffer from one of a list of 13 cancers (e.g., bone, breast, skin, stomach, thyroid, leukemia, etc.), and that they were present during one or more nuclear test blasts.

Of more than 15,000 veterans' claims filed as of January 1994, only 1,401 have been approved, indicating that most claimants are unable to qualify under the terms of the program. *47 One problem confronting many veterans is inaccurate or missing military records that omit service at a nuclear test site. *48 Another is to prepare a radiation dose reconstruction that estimates the amount of exposure the veteran received. Many vets have challenged the accuracy of dose estimates prepared by a private contractor, Science Applications International. This privately held research corporation includes among its stockholders Defense Department officials including Secretary William Perry and Deputy Secretary John Deutch, and one-time nominee Bobby Ray Inman. The Defense Department has little to say about potential conflicts of interest. We're going to decline to comment on this. I don't think we would have anything that would be meaningful to say, said Pentagon spokesman Capt. Michael Doubleday. *49

A final obstacle is that just having cancer isn't enough; veterans must prove they are disabled by it.

WHAT WILL CLINTON DO?

The Clinton administration is about to undergo a test of its own. The key question will be how it defines who will be considered a nuclear test victim for purposes of health research and compensation. Given the decades-long record of coverup and callousness, there is little reason to assume that the recent revelations concerning human experimentation will produce any lasting benefit for the tens of thousands of veterans and civilians harmed by nuclear weapons testing and radiation experiments over the past half century let alone the estimated five million U.S. citizens exposed to dangerous levels of radiation during the Cold War. *

Early indications are that the White House will stake out a restrictive position. DoE head O'Leary also appears to be seeking some remedy short of compensating all categories of victims. So, apparently, is the GAO.

The GAO's report on atmospheric radiation releases provides a glimpse of the emerging strategy. In assessing the significance of the Green Run test, the GAO struck a cautious note. The test [was not] intended to be a radiation experiment or a field test of radiobiological effects. [After] examining still classified passages [we] found that they don't refer to any such intentions. *50 This interpretation could provide the basis for a restrictive reading of who is entitled to compensation and follow-up health studies.

STACKING THE DECK

The Clinton administration may also be moving to head off potentially monstrous payouts to victims. To deal with the predicted avalanche of claims, as well as to fend off adverse publicity, the administration has established an advisory committee and an interagency working group to define policy. The advisory committee's mission statement, as well as the backgrounds of some of the people appointed to the panels, give victims cause for skepticism.

The President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments is composed of scientists, medical ethicists, and lawyers and is chaired by Dr. Ruth Faden of Johns Hopkins University. The White House announcement stated that its mission is to evaluate the ethical and scientific standards of government sponsored human experiments which involved intentional exposure to ionizing radiation. *51 (emphasis added) When read in conjunction with the GAO report's cautious conclusion, this language appears to sharply limit possible claimants.

And one of the advisory panel members, Washington, D.C. lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, has credentials that have raised eyebrows. Feinberg played a controversial role in forging an 11th-hour settlement of the class action lawsuit against Agent Orange manufacturers in 1984. Working at the direction of trial judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn, New York, Feinberg helped ram through a $180 million settlement. Although the figure seems large, it is grossly inadequate in light of the 250,000 veteran-claimants and the severity of their disabilities. Since the settlement, Judge Weinstein has blocked every subsequent lawsuit against the Agent Orange makers even for veterans whose cancer appeared years after the settlement was reached. *

The Interagency Working Group has representatives from every federal agency involved in radiation research and also includes a lawyer member whose past clients raise questions about his impartiality. Joel Klein, recently named White House Deputy Legal Counsel, was previously a partner in Klein Farr Smith & Taranto, a Washington, D.C. law firm which represented a number of corporate defendants in cases involving the due process rights of class action members. In 1985, Klein's firm won a Supreme Court decision in Phillips Petroleum v. Shutts, which narrowly interpreted the rights of claimants in class actions. Klein also has a case pending before the Supreme Court, Ticor Title v. Brown, which experts expect will further diminish the rights of injured parties in class action suits.

CLOUDED HORIZONS

It is too early to tell what role either Feinberg or Klein will play in determining compensation for nuclear test victims, but their histories don't lend cause for optimism. And given the administration's efforts at damage control, some advocates of radiation victims are dubious that the recent disclosures will bring any more change than those in the past. Rob Hager, a public interest lawyer in Washington, has been fighting the DoE for years. He has waged an 11-year legal battle on behalf of the widow of Joe Harding, who developed cancer after working at a DoE uranium processing plant in Paducah, Kentucky.

The DoE's approach to compensation is a scorched earth policy; settle no claims and litigate to the hilt, Hager charges. They've changed their head, but it doesn't seem to be connected to the body. *52 Eileen Welsome agrees. The Albuquerque journalist, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on this issue, was asked what she learned. She responded, The DoE of today is no different from the DoE of 50 years ago. It's an obstructionist agency; it doesn't follow the law. I think it's an agency that bears careful scrutiny and constant scrutiny. 53 <h4>***************************

THE BUCHENWALD TOUCH

***************************

</h4>The still-emerging history of nuclear experimentation raises important issues of medical ethics and calls into question the scientific community's sensitivity to and awareness of these issues. It also raises the question of whether these experimenters, in furthering the Pentagon's military and security demands, violated international standards on human experimentation. Even at this late date, it seems that some scientists involved are unable to see any problems with their behavior. Patricia Durbin, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California who participated in plutonium experiments, recently said:

"They were always on the lookout for somebody who had some kind of terminal
disease who was going to undergo an amputation. These things were not done to
plague people or make them sick and miserable.
They were not done to kill people. They were done to gain potentially valuable
information. The fact that they were injected and provided this valuable data should
almost be a sort of memorial rather than something to be ashamed of. It doesn't
bother me to talk about the plutonium injectees because of the value of the
information they provided. *1"

And Dr. Victor Bond, a medical physicist and doctor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently defended the Fernald experiments, in which retarded children were deliberately given radioactive substances in their breakfast cereal. A question arose as to whether chemicals in breakfast cereals interfered with the uptake of iron or calcium in children. An answer was needed, declared Bond. In reference to the entire series of cold war nuclear experiments, Bond offered that It's useful to know what dose of radiation sterilizes; it's useful to know what different doses of radiation will do to human beings. *2

While Drs. Bond and Durbin rationalized such programs, other scientists have spoken out. Referring to the Cincinnati experiments in which 88 cancer patients were exposed to massive whole body doses of radiation, Dr. David Egilman, a former Cincinnati faculty member, said, The study was designed to test the effects of radiation on soldiers. It was known that whole-body radiation wouldn't treat the patients' cancer. What happened was one of the worst things this government has done to its citizens. *3 And Dr. Joseph Hamilton, a neurologist at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco, referred to his own human radiation experiments in the 1940s as having a little of the Buchenwald touch. *4

THE BUCHENWALD TOUCH is not limited to Cold War-related experiments. In what has come to be known as the Tuskegee Study, 412 African American sharecroppers suffering from syphillis were rounded up in Tuskegee, Alabama, in the early 1930s. For forty years, the men were never told what had stricken them while doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service observed the ravages of the disease, from blindness and paralysis to dementia and early death. Even after penicillin proved to be an effective treatment for syphilis, they were left untreated. *5

Nor are such experiments a thing of the past. Recent congressional hearings revealed studies on schizophrenia in the late 1980s where doctors intentionally worsened patients' symptoms, causing relapses and leading to the death by suicide of at least one of the patients. Dr. Michael Davidson, who led a study at the VA Hospital in the Bronx, defended the study, saying, it would not be advisable to [warn] the patients about psychosis or relapse. *6

This a clear example of the new world order's interest overruling the will of the people.
Never mind that the people exposed to it get red skin rashes.

They are far and well protected from any radiation harming them or their children.

NEVO

This is why I don't belive in government. Because no matter who they poison, murder, enslave, or ruin it will always be viewed as NO BIG DEAL.

I'd think that releasing radiation into the air I breathe would cause more of an outcry... but not if it's NBD, i.e. caused by the government.

Let me ask, when did the government buy all the air we are equally entitled to? Cuz you'd thin they'd have to have bought it to poison it right? Not if it's NBD.

Fuck the State
Fuck World Trade
Fuck Society