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“The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice”- Book Review

Book Review: Voices From a Slow-Moving Nuclear Calamity, Undark,

BY LUCY TIVEN07.10.2020

In “The Hanford Plaintiffs,” Trisha T. Pritikin gives voice to the downwinders of the notorious Hanford nuclear plant. HE WORLD’S FIRST full-scale plutonium production reactor sits on the 586-square-mile Hanford site in eastern Washington, an erstwhile Manhattan Project complex and the United States’ most contaminated repository of nuclear waste. After coming online in 1944, the Hanford plant supplied the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb and almost two-thirds of the nation’s Cold War nuclear arsenal, all while depositing radioactive I-131 into the Columbia River and nearby tri-cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco.

Aided by local weather patterns, the plumes eventually reached neighboring counties in Oregon and Idaho; it was only when the site’s clandestine operations became public in the late 1980s that the federal government acknowledged that thousands of civilians downwind were caught in the path of the fallout.

In “The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice,” Trisha R. Pritikin, a lawyer and anti-nuclear advocate, presents 24 of their testimonies and provides a definitive history of the 1991 personal injury litigation Hanford downwinders brought against the government. The firsthand accounts painstakingly detail radiation exposure and its harrowing lifelong health effects, and Pritikin’s careful study of the case links the testimonies and anchors them within the larger chronology of the Manhattan Project. Moving between the Pacific Northwest and the Nevada desert, “The Hanford Plaintiffs” also compares the experiences and litigation efforts of exposed populations and maps the geography of Cold War era nuclear weapons production through the downwinders’ tangles with legislatures and federal courts.

Other histories of Hanford have appeared in recent years, including John Findlay and Bruce Hevly’s 2011 “Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West” and Michele Gerber’s 1992 “On the Home Front.” But “The Hanford Plaintiffs”most closely echoes Kate Brown’s 2013 “Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters,” a study of Richland and its Russian counterpart, Ozersk. While Brown’s analysis links the plutonium project to the invention of the American suburb, Pritikin’s history speaks in intimate snapshots of life downwind and downriver of Hanford, detailing the devastating cost of the plant’s culture of secrecy in the words of exposed people.

Tracing the site’s history from the end of World War II to the present, “The Hanford Plaintiffs” chronicles how the victims sought justice in court and documents their lengthy legal battle against the government and its nuclear contractors.  The In Re Hanford personal injury litigation dragged on for two and a half decades of costly studies, as legal fees mounted and the downwinders’ health declined. Out of over 3,000 downwinders who joined the 1991 lawsuit, only six representative “bellwether plaintiffs” ever received jury trials. The lawsuit finally came to a close in 2015, as the last of the plaintiffs reached confidential settlement agreements or dropped their claims. (The filing does not disclose the precise number of downwinders to settle or how much they were compensated, though the agreements have been characterized as pithy and widely derided by the plaintiffs and their attorneys over the years).

Pritikin explains that an advantage for the contractors and government of having 24 years of litigation was that the public forgot about the downwinder’s stories. The public had barely heard from any one, other than the bellwethers in 2005.

The case’s resolution foreclosed the opportunity for most of the exposed to put their stories on the record in court proceedings, which numerous downwinders interviewed by Pritikin say was in part what motivated them to join the suit as plaintiffs.

The heart of the book lies in these narratives, which detail the grueling long-term effects of radiogenic disease as well as the downwinders’ recollections of Hanford and the court proceedings. The illnesses discussed include numerous cancers and thyroid disorders, autoimmune disease, neurological disorders, infertility, miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths. The compensation scheme agreed upon in the case’s 2015 resolution was narrow: Individuals were eligible only if they suffered from thyroid cancer or other thyroid disorders related to exposure…………

She contends that exposed communities were essentially the “guinea pigs” of the nuclear era, a comparison borne out in gruesome accounts of radiation’s effects on animals. “The tragedies of sheep and lamb deaths in Cedar City in 1953 and the farmlands downwind from Hanford in 1961 were early warnings of what was to come for the downwinders,” writes Pritikin of the plant’s secret experimental animal farm, referencing documents declassified in the late 1980s.

Particularly chilling testimony comes from Brenda Weaver, a plaintiff whose daughter was born with a birth defect she first observed in exposed livestock. “On the night they call the ‘Night of the Little Demons,’ our lambs were born without eyes, with feet missing, without mouths, some with legs grown together; baby lambs with all kinds of horrible deformities,” she recounts. “Only a few years later, while I was still living in the Hanford area, my first child, Jamie, was born without eyes.”……….

 Unlike Hanford’s nuclear workers, nearby civilians were not monitored medically, so the In Re Hanford case relied on dose estimates calculated retroactively in the Department of Energy funded Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction project……..

While the book is a definitive history of the In Re Hanford litigation, Pritikin also urges a broader reconsideration of the Manhattan Project from the vantage point of those typically relegated to its margins — a history that is as much about public health as it is about nuclear weapons “The Hanford Plaintiffs” offers readers a timely and valuable contribution to the project as well as a much-needed reminder of the staggering costs of nuclear secrecy.   https://undark.org/2020/07/10/book-review-the-hanford-plaintiffs/  

July 11, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

New research shows serious health effects from Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

ncluding erythema, hair loss, nausea, and vomiting5. Researchers later correlated more than a dozen verified reports of medical impacts to simultaneous meteorological conditions

large-scale epidemiological investigations have uncovered health decrements including breast and lung cancer, heart disease, and early mortality among the exposed population within ten miles7 and five miles8,9,10 of the TMI facility.

the emissions from the accident should be considered causative for the observed excess incidence of cancer in the surrounding ten-mile area

Radiobiological shot noise explains Three Mile Island biodosimetry indicating nearly 1,000 mSv exposures Aaron M. Datesman Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 10933 (2020) 

Abstract ………

IntroductionThe 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power station in Pennsylvania released a large quantity of the radioactive noble gas xenon-133 into the surrounding environment. Although it is well-established that gamma ray exposures to the affected population were comparable to or smaller than the annual dose due to background radiation (around 1 mSv), the topic of health effects relating to the accident has always been controversial. The Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (known as the Kemeny Commission Report, after its chairman) asserted that any health or medical impacts affecting the population living within twenty miles of the accident site were due to mental distress1. On the basis of what is known about the accident and the nature of the exposure suffered by those nearby, it is therefore not conventionally believed that any discernible impact to human health caused by exposure to ionizing radiation has been observed2,3,4.

However, contrary evidence does exist, and ought not to be summarily dismissed. For instance, contemporaneous accounts from hundreds of local residents describe symptoms consistent with significant exposure to ionizing radiation, including erythema, hair loss, nausea, and vomiting5. Researchers later correlated more than a dozen verified reports of medical impacts to simultaneous meteorological conditions at the TMI facility6, , at least suggesting the presence of the radioactive plume at the location of the individuals making the reports. Because the persons affected in some cases were not aware that a radiological release from the TMI facility had occurred following an accident, and in most or all cases may not have been knowledgeable regarding the medical impacts of radiation poisoning, a diagnosis of mental distress as an explanation for the acute effects observed is difficult to accept.

Furthermore, large-scale epidemiological investigations have uncovered health decrements including breast and lung cancer, heart disease, and early mortality among the exposed population within ten miles7 and five miles8,9,10 of the TMI facility. Because the doses suffered by the exposed population were small and because the discernible health impacts were not those expected for the nature of the exposure, among other reasons, most investigators have been unwilling to interpret these epidemiological results as convincing evidence relating the observed health impacts to exposure to ionizing radiation. Due in part to their results showing a clear dose response for lung cancer, however, a group of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill contended that the emissions from the accident should be considered causative for the observed excess incidence of cancer in the surrounding ten-mile area11. In order to justify their conclusion, the UNC researchers hypothesized that the doses to the affected population may have been much higher than generally accepted. There is little corroborating evidence for the claim. The Kemeny Commission, for instance, concluded that the greatest exposure to any individual due to the accident was only about 0.7 mSv.

The present article engages specifically with one piece of evidence cited by the UNC team supporting their view: the results of the cytogenetic analysis of 29 individuals, living near TMI at the time of the accident, who reported symptoms consistent with radiation poisoning contemporaneous with the accident12. The analysis produced dose estimates in the range of 600–900 mSv, orders of magnitude larger than the gamma ray doses estimated by the Kemeny Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission13,14, experienced nuclear industry consultants15,16, or the Three Mile Island Public Health Fund17. While the results of the cytogenetic analysis have been published in the open scientific literature and are freely available, the existence of this information does not appear to be widely known.

While the dose estimate based upon cytogenetic analysis is sufficient to explain contemporaneous reports of acute effects, then, it contradicts firmly established estimates of the gamma dose to affected individuals. Because those gamma ray dose estimates are anchored to actual, physical measurements taken by dosimeter at the time of the accident, the cytogenetic results are difficult to explain. Although the conflict seems irreconcilable, in fact its existence illuminates a fundamental oversight in the health physics body of knowledge18 While the phenomenon of shot noise19 deriving from the discrete nature of electrical charge has long been known to apply to biological systems at least in the context of nerve-muscle junctions20 and membrane conduction21, its application to radiobiology has up until the present time been neglected.

It will be shown (contrary to the assertions of authorities) that the gamma ray doses suffered by those in the path of the Xe-133 plume were far from the most significant exposures that occurred. The results of cytogenetic analysis are instead consistent with the effects of internal exposure to beta radiation. Correcting a fundamental oversight in the health physics body of knowledge—relating to shot noise in the context of radiobiology—resolves the apparent paradox

The finding should motivate a comprehensive re-evaluation of the conventional understanding of the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station, especially regarding its impact upon the population of the surrounding area.Materials and methods……….. …..   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67826-5#disqus_thread  

July 11, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge   

Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of civilization is a near certainty within decades’  MAHB, Damian Carrington | July 9, 2020   This interview was first published in The Guardian on March 22, 2018

Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge   

A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.

In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever.

The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.

Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but “the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual ‘world destroyer’ meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen”.

Continue reading →

July 11, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Anniversary of nuclear bomb test on Mururoa Atoll

ACE Nuclear-Free Collective   No Nuclear Waste Dump Anywhere in South Australia, 2 July 20

This day on July 2nd 1966, the first French nuclear test took place at Mururoa Atoll. [Image description: slides with blue and orange text on black background with text that reads, On this day in history, an orange radioactive mushroom cloud ruptured Pacific skies, seas and engulfed the atoll of Mururoa. It was the beginning of a toxic reign of radioactive negligence by the French in the Pacific region. The French President who upon witnessing the July 2nd detonation remarked, “It’s beautiful”.

The colonial power had been testing in Algeria, but as their independence became more evident, the French moved into the atolls of Polynesia. From 1966 to 1996, the French conducted 193 tests on the atoll; some of the explosions 200 times the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Information on safety, and the lasting impacts for environment and human health, was scarce if not, misleading. The sovereign peoples were led to believe testing was not only safe but would benefit their communities through military-based economic opportunity. People who worked only 15kilometres away from test sites often had no more protection than the shorts and t-shirts on their backs.

French testing, was a theatrical power display, an assertion of their priority to grasp tight to global dominance rather than world peace. Resistance to testing was prominent from the outset. Pouvanaa a Oopa, a fierce and enduring anti colonial leader, led the first protection action in 1950, collecting signatures for the Stockholm Peace Appeal. He remained an important leader and agitator, even throughout his political imprisonment and exile to France.

During the thirty years of French testing, condemnation swelled internally and across Pacific nations including Aotearoa and so called Australia. Mass protests, demonstrations, flotilla solidarity, trade union bans and boycotts on French products took place. “If it is safe to test, test it in Paris” was a phrase used by key collective, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific.

The radioactive fall out has had devastating impacts on both environment and human health. Tahiti the most populated island was exposed to 500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation. Tahitian socialist, Richard Tuheiava outlines the continuing struggle for justice, ”The fact is since the nuclear testing most of the diseases were cancer, leukaemia. Most of the diseases were as a result of the nuclear testing, so we collectively also put a request for the state of France, the colonial power to not only compensate directly the veterans, but also compensate this fund, this public health care fund.”

Today, July 2nd 2020, we honour the ongoing impacts of nuclear colonialism in the Polynesia, and the enduring fight for justice, truth and accountability.]    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1314655315214929/

July 11, 2020 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment