Hanford Site

At some point I may have to run through the database here and figure out what percent of reviews tagged “history” are also tagged “nuclear”. And then how many have the much more specific tag “Hanford Site”. I’ve got an area of interest, you see; considering how nearby it is, one of these days I really ought to make a trip out there, and have a photography post join that collection.¹

This was a fun one, which I stumbled across entirely by accident—I was looking for a copy of Atomic Days and instead came up with Atomic Frontier Days. Which was, in point of fact, about the same thing—the history of the Hanford Site. Having not yet read Atomic Days, I can’t do the direct comparison, but reviewing the cover blurb thereof, I suspect that the distinction will be something Atomic Frontier Days was leaning hard into: it’s not just about the “woo, look at how awful Hanford was, look at all the ways it polluted the area and was terrible to the people who lived there!”

And, sure, that’s present, but this also had a lot more discussion of the other side of the story. People were proud to work at Hanford; they were contributing to national defense, they were on the cutting edge of technology, they were pioneers in a way that wasn’t really a thing anymore.

Past that, there were people looking at the ‘company town’ nature of the tri-cities, and trying to avoid the problems that always face company towns. What happens when the company goes out of business? What happens when the Cold War ends and we no longer “need” to keep manufacturing nuclear weapons? Even if the plan is just “last one out the door, turn off the lights”… moving to a more established city isn’t cheap, and it’s pretty hard to get a good sale price on your home when everyone is moving away. So, instead, the folks who liked living there said: how do we diversify our economy? What else can we do here that isn’t just “work at Hanford”?

It’s an interesting perspective, and one I haven’t thought much about before. Honestly, the final chapter kinda sold me on going out there for the sort of tourism I’d usually do over in eastern Oregon; I love the Columbia Gorge, so why not go see some more of it and also poke my nose around a historical area of interest?

That said, the one flaw I felt in this book was that it felt like it ended at about 2000. Given that it was published in 2011, it does feel like there could’ve been a bit more mention of the aughts, at least. Even just some notes in the epilogue would’ve been nice.

Still, I enjoyed the read; if you want to join me in being a big ol’ Hanford nerd, check it out.²

Well, it wouldn’t be tagged ‘review,’ within the way I use that tag. I’m not much of a location-reviewer. ↩
This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩

“Plutopia”

Kate Brown

I’ve always had an interest in the technological arms race of the Cold War, which fits right alongside my interest in infrastructure. And, as with every other aspect of technological arms race, the nuclear technology race was ridiculous; where it differs is in the degree. Cyborg cat to spy on the other side? Ridiculous. Space race? Very cool, some actually good civilian uses, conceptually ridiculous if you didn’t grow up knowing it’s possible to put stuff in orbit.

Deliberately creating tons upon tons of one of the most toxic substances known to mankind, and in the process creating other incredibly toxic substances in amounts that render massive areas uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years? That’s not just ridiculous, that is obscene.

Plutopia focuses on that—the two cities, Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, that were built around the production of plutonium. And boy howdy, does nobody look good in this story; the similarities in mistakes made would be comic, if it wasn’t a tragedy that’s going to be screwing over our great^100-grandchildren. In addition to just about everyone involved from the time the cities were founded onward.

Two anecdotes stand out in my mind. First, in what reminds me of the Uber business model, a fun fact: the third-worst radiological disaster in human history officially listed zero casualties from the cleanup. Pause for effect. Because the USSR only tracked the health outcomes of paid employees working on the cleanup, which effectively meant they were only worrying about the people managing the people doing the cleanup work. Hey, careful handing out those orders, pal, you don’t want to get any of the radioactive waste on yourself!¹

Second one, which immediately feels like fodder for HBO to do a second season of Chernobyl:

A week after the explosion, radiologists followed the cloud to the downwind villages, where they found people living normally, children playing barefoot. They measured the ground, farm tools, animals, and people. The levels of radioactivity were astonishingly high. S. F. Osotin, a monitor, remembered that a colleague went up to the children and held up his Geiger counter. He said, “I can tell with this instrument exactly how much porridge you had for breakfast.” The children happily stuck out their bellies, which ticked at forty to fifty microroentgens a second. The technicians stepped back, shocked. The kids had become radioactive sources.

Overall, this book fascinated me. And horrified me! But I grew up downstream of Hanford, and this is apparently just the world we live in now, so what else can you do? Better to be informed, I suppose. Check it out.²

Don’t get all patriotic about this, my fellow Americans—the Hanford site did the same thing in their statistics, as well as a repeated trend of calling anything other than “died of their skin melting off” or “died of a thyroid full of radiation” a death not caused by radiation. Grew up drinking from the aquifer that the high level waste pond was seeping into, got cancer of the everything at 20? Unrelated, we assure you. ↩
This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩