Growing up in Richland, Wash.,
in the shadow of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the
Department of Energy produced plutonium for bombs, Trisha Pritikin
never imagined that the milk she drank or the air she breathed was
poisonous. Her father, a safety engineer at the plant, was
supremely patriotic, and the entire family felt proud that his work
was helping to win the Cold War.
What she and the
thousands of other nearby residents didn’t know was that
throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the government intentionally
released radioactive material, in particular, iodine-131, into the
environment. The largest such release, known as the “Green Run,”
occurred in 1949, when the government secretly released about 8,000
curies of radioactive iodine in order to evaluate equipment it
could use to determine the location of similar Soviet plutonium
production facilities.
Radioactive debris fell onto the
surrounding grass, where it was eaten by cows, which then
transferred the radiation to their milk, which local children
— like Pritikin — drank by the frothy glassful.
Scientists knew even then that iodine-131 collects in the
thyroid gland and can wreak havoc, causing thyroid cancer or other
diseases. Yet neither the DOE nor General Electric and DuPont, the
contractors that ran the facility, alerted nearby residents. Not
until the late 1980s, when a newspaper reporter in Spokane sued the
government for access to classified documents, did the truth
emerge.
Meanwhile, Pritikin’s mother and father had
both developed thyroid disease and died of cancer. She herself has
extreme hypothyroidism, a condition resulting in slow metabolism
and excessive fatigue.
Now, she and over 2,000 other
people who grew up downwind of the reservation claim that
iodine-131 emissions crippled their health. Last month, on April
25, after 15 years of legal wrangling, the downwinders opened a
trial in federal court, suing GE and Dupont, the government
contractors that ran the Hanford Reservation for the federal
government in the 1940s and 1950s. But under the 1957 Price
Anderson Act, the government indemnified the contractors, so any
claims, which could amount to tens of millions of dollars, will be
paid by taxpayers.
“Right now, people like me are very
disheartened and disillusioned by a government that told us
everything was safe at Hanford and then basically let us die,” said
Pritikin, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., but traveled to Spokane to
attend the trial. “It’s amazing that you could do this to
people and just not talk about it.”
Even today, the
Energy Department continues to dodge responsibility. The government
is using as its main defense a study that the National Academy of
Sciences says is riddled with flaws. Called the Hanford Thyroid
Disease Study, it was a congressionally ordered $20 million project
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Fred
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. It found no increased risk for
thyroid disease among those who were exposed to Hanford releases of
iodine-131. Yet no parent or close relative was available to
provide information about childhood milk consumption for 38 percent
of the nearly 5,000 individuals interviewed for the study.
Furthermore, the Thyroid Disease Study failed to compare
those living near Hanford to a sample population from the general
public who would not have been exposed to iodine-131 emissions.
When the Northwest Radiation Health Alliance, a group of
scientists and doctors affiliated with Oregon Physicians for Social
Responsibility, surveyed 800 downwinders and compared their health
problems with those in the canon of medical literature, they found
that the downwinders had a 300 percent higher rate of some types of
thyroid disease.
Their research, published last year,
found strong evidence of a link between Hanford’s radioactive
emissions and juvenile hypothyroidism, and hyperthyroidism, a
condition where the thyroid is overactive, leading often to
fatigue, weight loss and depression. They also found that Hanford
downwinders had high rates of cancers of the thyroid, central
nervous system and female reproductive organs.
A friend
of mine just returned from Hiroshima, Japan. He described the
destruction of that city at the end of World War II from an atomic
bomb made in America. What happened there is acknowledged the world
over as horrific. Yet here in this country, victims of our Cold War
bomb production remain unacknowledged.
We can’t
bring back Pritikin’s parents. But we can be honest with her,
and with the thousands like her who suffer from disease and who
need help with treatment. In its rush to build bombs to protect
America, our government failed to worry about the impact on human
health here at home. It is time for us to reconcile that
devastating oversight.
Rebecca Clarren is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). She writes in Portland,
Oregon.
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