|
| YUFFEE: | Was there any biomedical research done on people earlier? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, there was some. There was a batch of goats on
the plant, and one of our guys, Carl Herde, got interested in it. But they were
monitored. We weren't into sacrificing animals at that time. [We] did end up,
eventually, with a biology system, and they were doing research on, oh, yeasts
and microorganisms and mice. |
| FISHER: | Well, and the fish you mentioned, the salmon. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And rats, and the salmon—that was always part of
it. But that got to be part of the biology lab. |
| FISHER: | Then later on, there were dogs and things that you were
using? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And they had dogs, pigs, goats. There was a—I
don't know whether I'll tell you this story. You can delete a few things. They
had some sheep, and they were feeding some iodine to them. And in order to keep
things us able in the lab, they had some pens and living quarters that were
covered with neoprene (artificial rubber, which was pretty tough), and hoofs
wouldn't bother it, and it could be cleaned relatively easily. And they were fed
radioactive materials. And they ended up having trouble with the rams mounting
the ewes, because the floor was slippery.
(laughter) |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And so somebody got hold of some research on the
general subject of experimental work with sheep. One of the stories in there was
a batch of 100 ewes that were separated for a genetics experiment. They were
going to breed them with very specialized sperm from several different places.
One ram got into the pen one night. He impregnated 50 of them.
(laughter) |
| YUFFEE: | A rather potent ram, huh? |
| FISHER: | Despite the slippery floors. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I don't know how many more he tried. |
| YUFFEE: | Did he drop dead at the end of the evening? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | No. No, apparently he was inexhaustible. |
| FISHER: | When you were doing this research in the Biology Division,
and the work that you were doing compiling exposures and things, was all of this
work done towards establishing a standard of maximum permissible dose, or do you
think that it was done in an effort— |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | It wasn't so much establishing a standard, as
establishing the means, maybe, to establish standards. |
| FISHER: | Mm-hmm. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I don't remember what—we didn't have standards
that way, around—really, until they got the NCRP going, with, essentially,
Government sanction and understanding.
We had, at the starting point, that 100-millirem-per-day [standard for
maximum exposure]. In our operating rules for people who were working in the
plant, we investigated anytime somebody got 50 in any one day. And we tried to
find out what was going on. It isn't that we punished anybody for getting over
100. Those were unusual circumstances if they did that. |
| FISHER: | And what happened if somebody received a
greater-than-permissible dose? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, they would just try to find out what it was. We
would record it. Everybody had something that recorded what total dosage he was
getting. So at the end of the year, we would sum things up. I don't know if we
even told them at the beginning. But eventually, we were telling them every
year. |
| FISHER: | But a worker's duty might not be altered or changed if, one
day, he got over the dose? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Normally, not. |
| FISHER: | So there were, in fact, people who were getting— |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, they wouldn't—nobody was getting 5 rems a
year, or anything like that. |
| FISHER: | So the doses were reasonable ones? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| FISHER: | Even by today's standards? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, they've lowered the limits a couple of times
since. |
| FISHER: | Yes. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | But I think the philosophy, what they were doing at
Hanford, kept up with whatever changes were made. |
| YUFFEE: | And there was obviously follow-up to make sure that the— |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. Well, those people that we hired with the high
school educations, they were very responsible people. May I skip around a little
bit? |
| FISHER: | Sure, absolutely. |
|
Nuclear-Powered Aircraft; the Aircraft
Nuclear Propulsion Program |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I left Hanford, went to the Aircraft Nuclear
Propulsion Division of General Electric. We were going to fly an airplane on
nuclear power.47
They had several different kinds of missions that they were working on, and
we stopped with this direction. We finally ended up where we were testing the
device with the cycle that we would expect maybe, would end up in the airplane.
[These tests were run at the GE Aircraft Engine Group facility in Evendale, just
north of Cincinnati, Ohio.]
They had run multiple engines off of one chemical heat source, and we were
testing [a] reactor [at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory].
(Material deleted. Dr. Gamertsfelder inserts the following for clarity
and accuracy:)
The initial criticality steps had been completed. And when they started to
operate at higher powers, the monitor they had installed in the reactor did not
respond properly.
The reactor had a zirconium hydride material as the moderator.48
It held about as much hydrogen as the same volume of water would, and it could
run at higher temperatures.
(Material deleted. Dr. Gamertsfelder inserts the following for clarity
and accuracy:)
It was replaced by an ionization chamber which, normally, was located
outside of the reactor, and was meant to work like a cruise-control throttle in
an automobile. In order for this chamber to work in this new location, the power
supply for it was modified by adding some filtering circuits. This system worked
very well for several incremental increases in power level. When they started
the next increment, there was a nuclear excursion.49
The excursion had taken place after the normal workday at Evendale had
ended. The next day in Evendale, a meeting in our conference room was convened
to discuss the problem [by phone] with Idaho people in their conference
room. They did not yet know the cause of the excursion. Our management decided
to send a group to Idaho to assist in the investigation and subsequent recovery.
We were told to go home and pack a suitcase, and return. When we returned, we
were taken to an airport, where our airplane (a C-5450 on bailment
from the Air Force, and known officially as the "Site Flight" and
unofficially as the "Slite Fright") then took us to Idaho.
The next morning, after getting to the test site, we were told what had been
learned while we were out of communication. They had not yet discovered the
cause of the excursion. About a half-hour later, the two- man team that was
examining all the instrumentation came into the conference room with a graph of
the response of the modified power supply, which was not large enough to provide
a shutdown signal. |
| FISHER: | When was this? When did this occur, more or less? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Oh, in the late '50s. I can't get an exact year. |
| FISHER: | It was just a brief little interlude you had, because you did
go back to Hanford, didn't you? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I did. I went back to Hanford for a short period of
time[, three years]. It was, overall I guess, a mistake, but— |
| FISHER: | Why do you think it was a mistake? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Hanford was changing. They [were going to break it
up]. |
| YUFFEE: | So this was diversification? |
|
Health Physics Response to Accidents at Hanford |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Diversification. The job I had to do was not what I
thought it was and was disturbed by an excursion in a system, which required my
services full- time for months.
(Material deleted. Dr. Gamertsfelder inserts the following for clarity
and accuracy:)
I was put on an investigation committee, along with four other senior GE
employees, to determine the cause of the accident and evaluate the way in which
it was handled, and to make recommendations to prevent a recurrence. The
chairman of the committee was Carl N. Zanger, of the AEC.
There were two other groups: a "Working Group" to investigate the
ways to safely correct the situation, and an "Advisory Council" to
review and approve the plans of the Working Group. Our committee members were
forbidden to take an active role in the work of the other two groups.
There was a plutonium processing plant in the 234-5 Building in the 200 West
area which produced plutonium-contaminated liquid waste streams. These waste
streams were being treated in the Recuplex51 operation, which had
been designed as a semiworks to develop the best way to recover the plutonium in
the waste stream.
The recovery equipment was in an enclosure made of transparent half-
inch-thick plastic sheets. The enclosure was about 40 feet long, 20 feet high,
and 10 feet thick. There were glove ports for some operations, and a control
panel for pumps, remote valves, heaters, and other equipment. All of the tanks
and piping in the enclosure which contained plutonium were geometrically safe.
Some of the vessels which were used to pre pare solutions to treat the plutonium
were not geometrically safe. |
| FISHER: | Would the delay in reading the badges have affected the
readings? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | No. No, it just delayed our getting the information on
them. |
| FISHER: | I see. |
| FISHER: | And there were no problems, no health problems?
(Material deleted. Dr. Gamertsfelder inserts the following for clarity
and accuracy:) |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, no, there apparently weren't any health
problems. The whole-body doses, including gamma and neutron immediate effects,
plus the doses due to self-irradiation from activation products in their bodies,
were 110 rem, 40 rem, and 20 rem. The RBE [(relative biological effectiveness)]52
for the fast neutron doses was two.
The employees who were taken to the hospital were retained there a little
longer than necessary, to see if there were any delayed effects. No dam age of
any kind was found. However, plans were made to check each of them on a regular
basis. |
| FISHER: | Doctor, it's interesting that you said [that] the three
individuals involved—they were in the accident (the excursion) were taken
off the plant site into town. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Into town, yes. |
| FISHER: | Into the local tri-cities hospital? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | No, there was a hospital in Richland. |
| FISHER: | Kadlec Hospital, right? But it—are you talking about
the hospital? Was this a medical facility that was administered by the Medical
Division? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | There were GE doctors there. |
| FISHER: | Oh, okay. It wasn't a public hospital. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, it was public. Richland, unlike Oak
Ridge, has always been an open city. The restricted area began a few miles north
of the city.
Kadlec Hospital was always a public hospital. In the early days, however,
you probably could not get a house to live in unless you were working in
Richland or the plant. Some time in the late '50s, the people living in the
houses were able to buy their homes at very attractive prices. When we came back
in 1961, we bought a house. |
| FISHER: | Was it Kadlec Hospital? Is that where? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes, they were—well, at this time, Richland was a
completely open city. |
| FISHER: | This would have been in the early '60s when this occurred? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| FISHER: | Okay. |
| YUFFEE: | Maybe we can take you back to the late '40s. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | All right. |
|
The Green Run |
| YUFFEE: | To what is well-known, the Green Run.53 |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| YUFFEE: | And we could get your observations on the Green Run? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, the Green Run was requested by the military[,
the Air Force]. |
| YUFFEE: | And did they—
(Material deleted. Dr. Gamertsfelder inserts the following for clarity
and accuracy:) |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Herb Parker called me to request that I, and the
groups that I supervised, cooperate with the Air Force in the conduct of an
experiment which be came known as the Green Run[, which involved the intentional
atmospheric release of radioiodine]. |
| FISHER: | And so the military ran the show? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I am sure that our GE management had some concerns
that the running of such an experiment might not be covered by our contract with
the AEC. I assume that the AEC was able to provide some assurance that they
would be covered. And, as a result, GE agreed to cooperate with the Air Force.
Obviously, some pressure was applied by the Air Force to get the agreement, but
after agreeing, we did cooperate without abdicating any of our managerial
responsibilities. |
| YUFFEE: | Sure. Who were some of the other people involved, besides
Jack [(John)] Healy? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, essentially our whole site-survey group, we
treated it as a special run. And we found out where the [radioiodine] cloud
went, for our pur poses. |
| YUFFEE: | So meteorology was already under your purview at that time? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. And we didn't recommend, we wouldn't have
recommended, that they operate it. We told them that. They wanted to run anyway,
and they did run— |
| YUFFEE: | And were you told the purpose? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | No, we guessed. |
| FISHER: | What did you guess? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | We guessed they were interested in finding things out
so it would help them look into [what the Soviets were doing in their nuclear
program]. |
| FISHER: | You mean, monitoring of plant activities? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | See, what was—that's what we thought. And nobody
told us one way or the other. Earlier than that, we had had a visit from
somebody who we knew was somehow associated with espionage, and had been a
worker with radiation. He talked about getting radiation headaches, apparently
getting radiation levels higher than we [would] ever allow. |
| FISHER: | Sure. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And shortly after that, one of the guys that worked
with Healy, Walt Singlevich, went and joined them—or joined some [other
secret] group, anyway. I ran into Walt several times and never got the hint of
anything that they were possibly doing. |
| FISHER: | Really? Do you think it was necessary to use iodine that was
as "green" as it was for the detection purposes you supposed they were
trying to accomplish? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, the amount of material being dissolved was, I
think, smaller than normal. This was just a batch that had been fixed up
particularly for them. When the reactors had run originally—when the
military was very, very interested on getting their hands on plutonium—they
put out a lot more than was put out in the Green Run. |
| FISHER: | A lot more what? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Iodine. |
| FISHER: | In the early production days? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes, very early production days. There was a lot of
iodine put out. |
| FISHER: | Well, the Green Run iodine was cooled about 16 days, I think? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Something like that. |
| FISHER: | But yet, earlier you expressed alarm that iodine, or Parker
expressed alarm that iodine was cooled for only 35 days originally. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. But that was a rather continuous operation[, with
much more uranium and fission products].54 |
| FISHER: | I see. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | No, they were completely different subjects. The cloud
wandered off and went down to the Columbia River Valley, turned around and came
back and wandered off towards the east. And you could find traces of it in
vegetation. Most of that territory doesn't have very many people in it. |
| YUFFEE: | Was that your role? Your specific role was to monitor the
cloud? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, it was something special. We were prepared. We
knew what was going on—prepared to go and do it. We just didn't agree with
them on the time we were doing it.
[My only instructions about the Green Run was a verbal request to cooperate
in the running of the experiment. Our role was to do what we normally did when
the separations plants were going to dissolve irradiated fuel. We advised them
about the weather and expanded our environmental sampling schedule because of
the magnitude of the purposed release.
While we did not know what kind of measurements were going to be made with
the airplane, we thought that a smaller release would have been adequate]. |
| YUFFEE: | Who had the final say as to the exact time of the— |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | [I am sure the colonel who decided to run the
experiment was given the weather forecast, and the time chosen was consistent
with the forecast of suitable weather. They had an airplane. I never saw the
airplane. I don't know whether it operated out of the airport or out of an
airport that was at Richland. |
| FISHER: | It may have operated out of Othello, Washington. There was a
radar station in Othello, across the river, just north of the reservation.55 |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I don't know where the airplane took off from. I never
even saw it. |
| YUFFEE: | Did it tag the cloud, or was it— |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I don't know what it did[, and I don't know what
results they obtained]. |
| FISHER: | How vocal were you with your team? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, we were loud enough to let them know what we
recommended. But we were told to cooperate, and we cooperated. |
| YUFFEE: | Were there any AEC officials who were present for the Green
Run? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I don't know of any. There was—there were AEC
people as part of—they had an office. |
| FISHER: | They had an operations office out there? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. Whether they had any people in the field or not,
I don't know. |
| FISHER: | Are you familiar with the name Walt Williams, Walter
Williams? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | No. |
| FISHER: | He would have been the Deputy General Manager of the AEC at
the time. He was one of the only AEC high officials who was around at Manhattan
Project time. He was also an instrumentation person, a technical guy. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. Well, they had some technical people, but at that
time—I don't know of any contacts that we had with the AEC at that time. |
| YUFFEE: | One of the reasons why we're interested in these questions
is: there's a basic lack of documentation that we can find on the specifics of
the Green Run. In fact, we're curious as to whether or not this was done on
purpose.
Was there a message sent by the [Air Force] that documents—things
should be said and not written, with regard to the Green Run, or was there—do
you remember there being pretty good documentation about what happened? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | [I don't know of any message or document from the Air
Force concerning anything about the Green Run. I am sure that our routine
activity reports included data about the Green Run.] I don't remember the detail
of our reports. We would have had to have gone through Parker. |
| YUFFEE: | But they were written reports? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | There's other reports, internal reports. And I don't
know whether they've found them now or not. The good copies of all of that stuff
went to Du Pont. Du Pont lost those. And some of the things—I went up and
talked to Battelle56 about some of these things—and some of
those documents are very hard to read. |
| YUFFEE: | I'm sure. They probably were done on onionskin. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, either that or copies made by that kind of
blurry purplish ink process [(mimeograph)]. But I don't know of communications
with the AEC at that time. I don't know what-all was written down by Herb
Parker. |
| FISHER: | Sure. Okay. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | But we did make surveys. We knew where the stuff
went[, and I don't know of any restrictions on our normal internal reporting]. |
| FISHER: | How far away did you monitor? Did you get to Walla Walla
[(Washington)]? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I'm sure we got to Walla Walla. The furthest that I
know of would probably have been down the Columbia River Gorge, probably as far
as [the Dalles]. |
| FISHER: | That would have been [south]west? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| FISHER: | I see. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And for the other, we might have even gotten
[northeast] to Spokane [(Washington)]. |
| YUFFEE: | How many years were you at Hanford that first time? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | The first time? About—well, I got there in '44. |
| FISHER: | Or '43? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Forty-three, '42— down to Oak Ridge. |
| YUFFEE: | In '43? So it would have been '44. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And this would be— |
| YUFFEE: | Because you were out in Chicago for the [pile startup] in
December. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| YUFFEE: | And then you stayed until '43 for a little bit less than a
year, then you went down to Oak Ridge. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| YUFFEE: | For about a year? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. It was '44. |
| FISHER: | So that would have brought you into '44. |
| FISHER: | Okay. August of '44. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
|
General Electric Takes Over the Hanford Contract (1946) |
| YUFFEE: | Okay. And when did you leave to join GE? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, GE joined me.57 |
| FISHER: | Oh, GE joined you?
(laughter) |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | That's right, when Du Pont left [as prime contractor
for running Hanford], after the war. |
| FISHER: | That's a good point. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Oh, we had fought—in moving from the technical
division, which is where we would have been ordinarily, because of Herb Parker's
insistence, we ended up without all of the job titles available to the other
people. We ended up with senior supervisors reporting to senior supervisors
reporting to senior supervisors. |
| YUFFEE: | Sure. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And we had just gotten that settled. So we got to use
some other titles, like Area Supervisor and things of that kind. |
| YUFFEE: | "Supervising Supervisor." |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | And GE came in, and everybody was a manager.
(laughs) |
| FISHER: | Oh, too many chiefs and no Indians. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Philosophies of operation were different, and— |
| FISHER: | How so? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Du Pont was, "Grandpa knows best." (laughs)
GE listened a little bit more, or it was a little further down the line, or
something. |
| FISHER: | That's surprising, because Du Pont really only agreed to
build the Hanford plant "kicking and screaming." They weren't wild
about it from the outset. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Oh, I know. And they stuck by their guns. They got out
when they said they were going to get out. Then they got back in. |
| FISHER: | Yes, down at Savannah River.58 |
| YUFFEE: | And so, when GE joined, where were you? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | GE— |
| FISHER: | I think it was '46, '47, right after the war ended, I think. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes, it was about—it was— |
| FISHER: | Because, by '45, Du Pont was saying that they were going to
stick to the contract [allowing the company to back out after the war, if it
chose], and they wanted out. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| YUFFEE: | So when did you begin work on the aircraft, the
nuclear-powered aircraft? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I went in '52, in the fall. |
| YUFFEE: | And you moved out to Cincinnati? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | To Cincinnati. |
| YUFFEE: | And that's where they were doing the work? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Yes. |
| YUFFEE: | Up there, were they using the facilities at Fernald59
for the— |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Fernald? I don't know that we had anything that we did
there. I went through Fernald once. |
| YUFFEE: | And how many years did you live in Cincinnati during this? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | [Till] '61, about [nine] years. |
| YUFFEE: | And then you went back to Hanford in '61? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Hanford for three [years]. And then I went to
Philadelphia. |
| YUFFEE: | When you went to Hanford the second time, we know [that]
again, there were some more field releases, not [of] the magnitude of the Green
Run. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about those? |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | I don't know much about them. |
| FISHER: | Well, there were some of the milk studies in '63 that you
participated in. |
| GAMERTSFELDER: | Well, the milk study I participated in, I drank some
milk.60 |
