We’ve talked a lot this week about life and work specifically at Hanford, but not all of the waste stayed there. In the rush to process plutonium at Hanford, plant operators expelled radioactive byproducts into the local atmosphere and waterways. People who were affected by these radioactive toxins call themselves “Downwinders.” Northwest Public Broadcasting senior correspondent Anna King, who has been reporting on Hanford for over 20 years, joins us to talk about the people who were affected by radiation from the Hanford site in previous decades.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you once again from Washington State University Tri-Cities, in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting.
We’ve talked a lot this week about life and work at Hanford, but not all the waste made here stayed here. In the rush to process plutonium, plant operators ended up expelling radioactive by-products into the local atmosphere. Some of that radiation was spread widely by the wind, leading people who are affected to call themselves “Downwinders.”
Northwest Public Broadcasting senior correspondent Anna King, who’s been telling the stories of Hanford and the Tri-Cities for over 20 years, joins us to talk about this and more. Anna, it’s great to have you on the show that you’ve been so indispensable in helping us make over the course of this week. It’s good to have you on the show.
Anna King: I’m so glad you’re here, Dave.
Miller: You arrived in the Tri-Cities in 2003. When did you first start covering the Hanford site?
King: Yeah. I came to the Tri-City Herald as a young reporter and started working. They right away put me on this beat to go cover the Hanford Reach National Monument, which was brand new at the time – it had been formed in 2000. And they were still having meetings at that time, big federal meetings and collaborations with many agencies to determine how they were going to manage this huge swath of land out in the mid-Columbia.
Miller: My head has been sort of spinning just trying to wrap my head around the scale and the complexity, the cleanup numbers, the processes. What was your learning curve like?
King: It was crazy. I mean, when I first started covering the cleanup, it was just super, super tough. I would go to these meetings, listen for a day, day-and-a-half to deliberations about tank waste and all of these different things. And then I would have to write some sort of story about it. I’d be in the parking lot interviewing people and then I’d get done with the interview and I’d be like, “What did they just say? I don’t even know.” And one time it was so bad that I was out in the parking lot crying to my friend Shannon Dininny, who was an AP writer at the time. And I was just like, “How am I gonna put this in a story?” And she’s like, “Just keep going, just keep learning. You’re gonna do it.”
Miller: How close have you been to radioactive waste at Hanford over the years?
King: So I’ve had some pretty close brushes with radioactive contamination and waste. I went out to the 222-S Lab, which is a big laboratory where they test tank waste. I was sitting in front of windows that are oil filled windows that protect and shield you from the highly radioactive material inside a hot cell. And as they moved the waste around with little robot arms, it was pretty intense. Then another time, I was on a pickup truck with Native Americans, the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service and Hanford rad techs. We were all in this pickup truck bumping around on the Hanford Site. They hunted some elk and then they geiger countered the hooves of that elk before the Native Americans took them home for lunch.
Miller: As I mentioned briefly in my intro, some waste in the past went into the air. How exactly did that happen?
King: There’s these things called plutonium finishing plants. They’re long, long buildings. They look like an ocean liner in the desert. And we call them Queen Mary’s around here. They’re long and skinny and you put in radioactive material on one side, and it goes through baths and different processes all the way down the building, and on the other side comes out plutonium buttons. So when they would do that process, there would be these gas releases with radioactive particles in there, and they would go up into the stack and go up into the air, and they would try and release them on high wind days. But sometimes it wasn’t that high of winds and they would go across the landscape. Then those particles were heavy, and they would fall down to the earth on crops and on the landscape.
Miller: How big an area are we talking about? How far did these plumes go?
King: They started in the mid 1940s when the site started to go and when it was producing the plutonium. Then it lasted for several decades … at least a couple decades. And according to the National Park Service website, the “Green Run” happened on December 2, 1949. Now, that was a very highly radioactive test by the government that went out over the landscape and it was reported to basically sicken many people.
Miller: How did these particles end up in people?
King: It’s interesting. It’s actually the milkman [who] brought the contamination to the doorstep of many of the people in Washington and beyond that were exposed to this. That’s because the radioactive particles would fall down over the earth, they would fall onto the grass or hay, and the animals would eat that material up. Then it would be concentrated in the milk through the natural cow’s system. It would be then delivered to doorsteps right away and drank within days. So that’s how a lot of people got sick. And that led to many people having endocrine problems.
Miller: What kinds of illnesses did this lead to?
King: It led to a lot of radioactive material concentrated in people’s thyroids. There was increased cancer rates, lymphatic illnesses, fertility issues. The list goes on, but it did cause what people believe to be a lot of sickness within the community.
Miller: When did this start to really break into the public consciousness?
King: In the 1980s, there were a lot of documents that were released. And they were released from the Hanford Site. It had been a very secretive site for many, many years. And a reporter named Karen Dorn Steele, out of the Spokane area, she actually started writing about this and more people started writing about it. Michele Gerber is a well known author who also wrote about this. And one resident of Walla Walla, according to, again, the National Park Service, had this quote which was basically that in the Three Mile Island incident, people were evacuated, but no one was evacuated during the “Green Run.”
Miller: Did the federal government ever take responsibility for what happened?
King: Information about the “Green Run” did come out and there was two decades of negotiations and fighting and legal wrangling and then eventually a settlement was reached. That settlement basically kind of gave a couple of people $200,000 each, but it wasn’t a huge amount of money, as was expected. And many people didn’t survive to see that settlement go through.
Miller: Is it possible to know how many people were sickened?
King: So the estimation is around 3,500 Downwinders total. There has been people who have said that it’s much higher than that, but that’s kind of the general number people use. And most of those Downwinders were from east and north of the Hanford Site.
Miller: Because of the prevailing winds.
King: Because of the winds.
Miller: Are people becoming Downwinders now? I mean, we’ve been talking about the past, but let’s zoom to the present.
King: Yeah. The site is extremely well monitored now. You have agencies like Washington State Department of Ecology, Oregon’s Department. We also have the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, all out here with offices on site. And so they are not without watchdogs.
Also, there are a lot of programs like the Tank Integrity Program in which the tanks are very carefully monitored to make sure if there’s any structural changes of those tanks. And at Hanford, the Department of Energy actually monitors stuff like roadkill, vegetables, Tribal elk hunts, all to make sure that there’s no radioactive material leaving the site. You know, 12,000 people work out here, Dave. Even my husband, who is a worker, who works with radioactive constituents from the Hanford Site, he has to do a urine analysis twice a year. They drop off bottles on our porch in a cardboard box and he has to give them back within a certain amount of days. And that’s all to protect workers and to protect the public.
Miller: Anna, thanks very much.
King: Thank you.
Miller: Anna King is a senior correspondent for Northwest Public Broadcasting.
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