Review of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America by Joshua Frank (Haymarket, 2022)
By Chris Green
By Chris Green
August 18, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
It may seem odd to say it during this Trumpian era of extreme political polarization, but there is one area where Republicans and Democrats share a remarkably similar policy perspective.That common ground is found in the fact that, at the national level, both Republicans and Democrats have worked diligently to refrain from seriously addressing the epic dangers related to the long inactive Hanford plutonium production facilities located in southeast Washington state.
A few details of this beneath-the-radar bipartisan unity are provided in Joshua Frank’s fine 2022 book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. The book illustrates how Republicans and Democrats have seriously downplayed or ignored evidence of the massive damage to the environment and public health caused by Hanford’s past plutonium production. Both have also downplayed or ignored the potentially apocalyptic ticking time bomb presented by the tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste contained within leaky and aging tanks buried beneath the surface on Hanford’s grounds.
The Deep State Run Amok
Since its original construction during World War II as a site for plutonium production, the federal government has succeeded to a large extent in keeping Hanford’s operations shrouded in secrecy. The extremely modest transparency and accountability mechanisms that have been instituted over Hanford’s operations are due in large part to activism on the part of members of the Umatilla and Yakima tribal nations. These indigenous groups had their land brutally expropriated during World War II so Hanford could be built. The activism helped trigger a massive declassified Hanford-related document release by the federal government in 1986. The document release showed that–in prior decades–federal government officials had engaged in numerous coverups of radioactive leaks and other accidents at Hanford. It included insight about a secret December 1949 experiment at Hanford called the Green Run. The experiment, carried out over two days, saw a substantial release into the atmosphere of radioactive iodine. Frank writes that the purpose of the experiment was not completely clear but it was possibly for the purpose of testing nuclear detection equipment in case of a Soviet attack. He notes that the impact of the Green Run and similar tests was illustrated in a 1996 study which showed that women who “lived downwind from Hanford had a frighteningly high rate of hypothyroidism.” There have been few studies that even begin to approach a comprehensive look at the long term impact on human health and the natural environment caused by Hanford’s operations–probably because powerful people with the capacity to launch them have a vested interest in not doing so.
Other activists exposing abuses at Hanford have included those who have suffered cancer and other severe medical problems as a result of employment at Hanford as well as Hanford scientists and engineers acting as whistleblowers. Frank conducted interviews with a number of these people for this book. The whistleblowers attempted to call attention to the cutting of corners and lack of safety protocols at Hanford on the part of the federal government’s Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors Bechtel and URS. For speaking out, all faced coordinated campaigns of harassment and other forms of retaliation on the part of officials from DOE, Bechtel and URS. Frank’s account of their stories sometimes reads like a spy thriller novel, with courageous whistleblowers being targets for destruction by evil governmental and corporate bureaucrats. According to Frank and Tom Carpenter of the non-profit watchdog Hanford Challenge, circumstantial evidence suggests that the campaign against one whistleblower, Ed Bricker, may have even included an attempt to kill him during the 1980s. At the end of the day, the whistleblowers received financial compensation or other acknowledgement of victimhood from the courts and certain government agencies. However, in spite of the positive resolution of their cases, Frank reports that the whistleblowers often told him that their experiences were heavily traumatic. It was common for them to face daily hostility from coworkers who didn’t appreciate them rocking the boat. The retaliation against one whistleblower (Donna Busche)included sexually harassing comments from a male URS senior manager (who later apologized after Busche complained to HR).
During the George W. Bush and Obama years, Busche and fellow whistleblower Walter Tamosaitis worked on what has been an ongoing centerpiece of the effort to deal with Hanford’s nuclear waste, the site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The project has been a massive boondoggle for Bechtel, the company under contract to construct it. According to Frank, the WTP, begun in 2002, was originally scheduled for completion in 2011. That target date was badly missed and by 2022 the earliest estimates placed the project’s finish in 2037. The cost was originally $12 billion; in recent years, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), estimates place it at $41 billion.
In spite of its interminable series of delays and budget revisions on the WTP project, Bechtel has kept raking in the taxpayer dollars. Frank writes that its conduct in constructing the WTP has parallels with its actions during the Iraq War. In receiving many US government contracts for Iraq reconstruction, Bechtel engaged in destructive mismanagement and waste of taxpayer funds. In one instance, Bechtel’s work in constructing an Iraqi children’s cancer hospital was so mismanaged that the US government canceled the contract and awarded it to another contractor.
Bechtel has, for the most part, been able to avoid serious accountability for its colossal waste of taxpayer funds. It has spread its money among the campaign coffers of both Republicans and Democrats. Frank notes that in a 2021 interview conducted by Bechtel president Brendan Bechtel, Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg assured the company that it would have more opportunities for government contracts with the administration’s forthcoming infrastructure legislation.
Hanford has almost totally shut down its involvement in generating nuclear power since 1990. All governmental work on the site since then has supposedly been targeted at dealing with the massive amount of nuclear waste buried beneath its surface as well as remediating the land, air and waterways (mainly the Columbia River) which have been ravaged over the decades by its radioactive and chemical pollution. The fact that this recovery work has made such a small headway over a long time period is not just because of the political influence of corrupt government contractors like Bechtel. It is also because the US political class–Republican and Democrat–regard nuclear weapons as a lynchpin of US global hegemony. They would not want to delegitimize the production of such weapons or the military-industrial complex in general in the eyes of the American public by mobilizing a serious and comprehensive governmental effort to address harms caused by Hanford.
Meanwhile, Frank observes, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste bubbling and bursting at the seams beneath Hanford’s surface in rapidly aging tanks–filled well beyond their originally prescribed capacity–could produce an unprecedentedly catastrophic nuclear accident in the not too distant future. In general, those storage tanks have been managed with the utmost carelessness and recklessness by the US federal government and its private contractors.
The Way Forward
Frank’s book is primarily about Hanford–but it places Hanford within the broader issue of nuclear power. For example he devotes a particularly compelling portion of the book’s last part to criticizing progressive commentators George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin: both for their embrace of nuclear power as a solution to climate change and their severe downplaying of the catastrophic dangers of nuclear power plant meltdowns. Some nuclear power advocates claim that it is carbon neutral. In reality, Frank points out, when every stage of nuclear energy development is taken into account–”from plant and reactor construction, uranium mining, milling and fuel fabrication to the transport of waste”–nuclear power creates a larger carbon footprint than natural gas plants.
Indigenous activists seem to be the best hope for wrenching any further substantive change at Hanford from the powers-that-be. These activists too have had their struggles making headway on the issue. Federal and state officials have frequently made a show of consulting tribal groups about Hanford and have co-opted some of their concerns. But they have also sometimes visibly worked to keep the tribes at a distance when designing Hanford policies.
Frank spends some time in the book recounting the Hanford related activism of Russell Jim, Yakama Nation elder, who died from cancer at age eighty-two in 2018. Frank quotes extensively from an interview Jim once gave and it is obvious from his prose that he is personally moved by the steadfastness and dignity Jim showed throughout his struggle against Hanford. Frank places Hanford within the broader struggle of Jim’s people to fight the robbery and contamination of their land: for example he also references the fight against the dams on the Columbia River which, from the 1930’s onward, destroyed traditional indigenous fishing grounds.
The book is based on years of research exploring government documents and interviews conducted with participants in the struggle. Frank is an editor at Counterpunch magazine. I’ve always admired his work as well as that of his Counterpunch colleague, Jeffrey St. Clair.
Overall this book is not only useful in calling attention to an under-reported and potentially epically catastrophic environmental ticking time bomb in Hanford’s haphazardly stored nuclear waste. It also is an important story of corporate and governmental corruption–and shows how courageous ordinary people have resisted it.
It may seem odd to say it during this Trumpian era of extreme political polarization, but there is one area where Republicans and Democrats share a remarkably similar policy perspective.That common ground is found in the fact that, at the national level, both Republicans and Democrats have worked diligently to refrain from seriously addressing the epic dangers related to the long inactive Hanford plutonium production facilities located in southeast Washington state.
A few details of this beneath-the-radar bipartisan unity are provided in Joshua Frank’s fine 2022 book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. The book illustrates how Republicans and Democrats have seriously downplayed or ignored evidence of the massive damage to the environment and public health caused by Hanford’s past plutonium production. Both have also downplayed or ignored the potentially apocalyptic ticking time bomb presented by the tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste contained within leaky and aging tanks buried beneath the surface on Hanford’s grounds.
The Deep State Run Amok
Since its original construction during World War II as a site for plutonium production, the federal government has succeeded to a large extent in keeping Hanford’s operations shrouded in secrecy. The extremely modest transparency and accountability mechanisms that have been instituted over Hanford’s operations are due in large part to activism on the part of members of the Umatilla and Yakima tribal nations. These indigenous groups had their land brutally expropriated during World War II so Hanford could be built. The activism helped trigger a massive declassified Hanford-related document release by the federal government in 1986. The document release showed that–in prior decades–federal government officials had engaged in numerous coverups of radioactive leaks and other accidents at Hanford. It included insight about a secret December 1949 experiment at Hanford called the Green Run. The experiment, carried out over two days, saw a substantial release into the atmosphere of radioactive iodine. Frank writes that the purpose of the experiment was not completely clear but it was possibly for the purpose of testing nuclear detection equipment in case of a Soviet attack. He notes that the impact of the Green Run and similar tests was illustrated in a 1996 study which showed that women who “lived downwind from Hanford had a frighteningly high rate of hypothyroidism.” There have been few studies that even begin to approach a comprehensive look at the long term impact on human health and the natural environment caused by Hanford’s operations–probably because powerful people with the capacity to launch them have a vested interest in not doing so.
Other activists exposing abuses at Hanford have included those who have suffered cancer and other severe medical problems as a result of employment at Hanford as well as Hanford scientists and engineers acting as whistleblowers. Frank conducted interviews with a number of these people for this book. The whistleblowers attempted to call attention to the cutting of corners and lack of safety protocols at Hanford on the part of the federal government’s Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors Bechtel and URS. For speaking out, all faced coordinated campaigns of harassment and other forms of retaliation on the part of officials from DOE, Bechtel and URS. Frank’s account of their stories sometimes reads like a spy thriller novel, with courageous whistleblowers being targets for destruction by evil governmental and corporate bureaucrats. According to Frank and Tom Carpenter of the non-profit watchdog Hanford Challenge, circumstantial evidence suggests that the campaign against one whistleblower, Ed Bricker, may have even included an attempt to kill him during the 1980s. At the end of the day, the whistleblowers received financial compensation or other acknowledgement of victimhood from the courts and certain government agencies. However, in spite of the positive resolution of their cases, Frank reports that the whistleblowers often told him that their experiences were heavily traumatic. It was common for them to face daily hostility from coworkers who didn’t appreciate them rocking the boat. The retaliation against one whistleblower (Donna Busche)included sexually harassing comments from a male URS senior manager (who later apologized after Busche complained to HR).
During the George W. Bush and Obama years, Busche and fellow whistleblower Walter Tamosaitis worked on what has been an ongoing centerpiece of the effort to deal with Hanford’s nuclear waste, the site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The project has been a massive boondoggle for Bechtel, the company under contract to construct it. According to Frank, the WTP, begun in 2002, was originally scheduled for completion in 2011. That target date was badly missed and by 2022 the earliest estimates placed the project’s finish in 2037. The cost was originally $12 billion; in recent years, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), estimates place it at $41 billion.
In spite of its interminable series of delays and budget revisions on the WTP project, Bechtel has kept raking in the taxpayer dollars. Frank writes that its conduct in constructing the WTP has parallels with its actions during the Iraq War. In receiving many US government contracts for Iraq reconstruction, Bechtel engaged in destructive mismanagement and waste of taxpayer funds. In one instance, Bechtel’s work in constructing an Iraqi children’s cancer hospital was so mismanaged that the US government canceled the contract and awarded it to another contractor.
Bechtel has, for the most part, been able to avoid serious accountability for its colossal waste of taxpayer funds. It has spread its money among the campaign coffers of both Republicans and Democrats. Frank notes that in a 2021 interview conducted by Bechtel president Brendan Bechtel, Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg assured the company that it would have more opportunities for government contracts with the administration’s forthcoming infrastructure legislation.
Hanford has almost totally shut down its involvement in generating nuclear power since 1990. All governmental work on the site since then has supposedly been targeted at dealing with the massive amount of nuclear waste buried beneath its surface as well as remediating the land, air and waterways (mainly the Columbia River) which have been ravaged over the decades by its radioactive and chemical pollution. The fact that this recovery work has made such a small headway over a long time period is not just because of the political influence of corrupt government contractors like Bechtel. It is also because the US political class–Republican and Democrat–regard nuclear weapons as a lynchpin of US global hegemony. They would not want to delegitimize the production of such weapons or the military-industrial complex in general in the eyes of the American public by mobilizing a serious and comprehensive governmental effort to address harms caused by Hanford.
Meanwhile, Frank observes, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste bubbling and bursting at the seams beneath Hanford’s surface in rapidly aging tanks–filled well beyond their originally prescribed capacity–could produce an unprecedentedly catastrophic nuclear accident in the not too distant future. In general, those storage tanks have been managed with the utmost carelessness and recklessness by the US federal government and its private contractors.
The Way Forward
Frank’s book is primarily about Hanford–but it places Hanford within the broader issue of nuclear power. For example he devotes a particularly compelling portion of the book’s last part to criticizing progressive commentators George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin: both for their embrace of nuclear power as a solution to climate change and their severe downplaying of the catastrophic dangers of nuclear power plant meltdowns. Some nuclear power advocates claim that it is carbon neutral. In reality, Frank points out, when every stage of nuclear energy development is taken into account–”from plant and reactor construction, uranium mining, milling and fuel fabrication to the transport of waste”–nuclear power creates a larger carbon footprint than natural gas plants.
Indigenous activists seem to be the best hope for wrenching any further substantive change at Hanford from the powers-that-be. These activists too have had their struggles making headway on the issue. Federal and state officials have frequently made a show of consulting tribal groups about Hanford and have co-opted some of their concerns. But they have also sometimes visibly worked to keep the tribes at a distance when designing Hanford policies.
Frank spends some time in the book recounting the Hanford related activism of Russell Jim, Yakama Nation elder, who died from cancer at age eighty-two in 2018. Frank quotes extensively from an interview Jim once gave and it is obvious from his prose that he is personally moved by the steadfastness and dignity Jim showed throughout his struggle against Hanford. Frank places Hanford within the broader struggle of Jim’s people to fight the robbery and contamination of their land: for example he also references the fight against the dams on the Columbia River which, from the 1930’s onward, destroyed traditional indigenous fishing grounds.
The book is based on years of research exploring government documents and interviews conducted with participants in the struggle. Frank is an editor at Counterpunch magazine. I’ve always admired his work as well as that of his Counterpunch colleague, Jeffrey St. Clair.
Overall this book is not only useful in calling attention to an under-reported and potentially epically catastrophic environmental ticking time bomb in Hanford’s haphazardly stored nuclear waste. It also is an important story of corporate and governmental corruption–and shows how courageous ordinary people have resisted it.
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