Buried secrets, plutonium poisoned bodies

Why did a Truchas woman die with extraordinary amounts of plutonium in her body — and why was she illegally autopsied? For this reporter, the answers hit close to home.

Searchlight, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, December 20, 2023

The first reference to her comes, of all places, on an airplane. It’s the end of April and sitting next to me is Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Both of us are on our way back to Santa Fe from Washington, D.C., after the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s weeklong annual gathering. Coghlan, galvanized by the last several days of activities, spends most of the flight ticking down his list of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s most recent sins. But suddenly he turns to the past.

“Did you know that the person with the highest levels of plutonium in her body after the atomic detonation at Trinity Site was a woman from Truchas?” he asks me. The remark, more hearsay than fact, piques my interest. As Coghlan knows, that’s my pueblito, the place in northern New Mexico where I grew up on land passed down through many generations of women. Tina Cordova — co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium — would know more, he adds. “Ask her.” 

Truchas, short for Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Río de las Truchas, sits on a ridge in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level. With some 370 people in town, most everybody keeps up with the latest mitote, or gossip, at the local post office. A regional variation of Spanish is still spoken by elders. Bloodlines go back centuries. And neighbors might also be relatives. If she is from this tiny, but remarkable, speck on the map, I must at least know of her. My mom, a deft weaver of family trees, definitely would. 

Truchas is also 225 miles north of the Trinity Site, the location of the world’s first atomic blast. On July 16, 1945, at the peak of monsoon season, a clandestine group of scientists lit up the skies of the Chihuahuan Desert with the equivalent of 24.8 kilotons of TNT. In the first 10 days, wind would carry the radioactive fallout across 46 states — so far, in fact, that the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, traced spots on film to radioactive material released by the bomb.

It’s plausible, given such an expansive reach, that this Trucheña who Coghlan casually mentions is among a wave of Trinity’s first unknowing victims. Historically, she signals a profound rupture in time — before nuclear weapons and after. But at the moment, his comment seems impossible to grasp. It’s only in hindsight that the single most important question takes form, one that will dog me for more than six months: Who is she?

Incomprehensible autopsies 

Just over a month later, I hear about her for the second time, at a journalism conference………………………………………………….  this time adding the original source of the information: the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project, known as the LAHDRA report.

Published in 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and based on millions of classified and unclassified documents from the earliest years of the Manhattan Project to the late 1990s — the report’s stated purpose was to identify “all available information” concerning radioactive materials and chemicals released at Los Alamos National Laboratory (known as the Los Alamos Scientific Library from 1947 to 1981).

Some of the documents are autopsy records, I come to find. The lab routinely released plutonium into the air from several facilities on its campus, but it wasn’t until 1978 that it began to measure those releases consistently. One question that preoccupied researchers was whether data culled from the autopsies would reveal higher rates of plutonium in people who lived near or worked in those nuclear facilities.

There is another cache of autopsies, too, for the scientific equivalent of a control group — randomly selected people who simply lived and died in northern New Mexico. Cases from the control group were also analyzed, the report added, “in an effort to review the possible plutonium exposure from the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.”

I quickly scroll down to see which person in this group had the highest plutonium levels. And there it is: The highest levels do indeed belong to an unnamed woman from Truchas, alive at the time of the Trinity detonation. 

But what comes next in the report will preoccupy me for months: “The plutonium concentration in her liver was 60 times higher than that of the average New Mexico resident.”

The number is incomprehensible to me. First, the actual amount is never stated, nor is the amount for the average New Mexican. But there is also a glaring contradiction that I detect only after reading the paragraph’s final cryptic line many times over. Fallout from Trinity, it essentially explains, didn’t cascade over Truchas until 12 hours after the initial blast. At that distance, there was no telling whether fallout could be inhaled or ingested — the most direct and harmful paths of entry.  

It’s a paradox. Trinity stood out as the most obvious culprit — she was, after all, alive when it was detonated — but even the researchers weren’t certain. The only fact is the plutonium itself. Somewhere, somehow it entered her body in the form of barely visible specks of alpha radiation. And once there, those particles began a long migration, from her bloodstream to her kidneys and, ultimately, to her liver. The question is how?

The entry is most striking for its brevity, no more than a paragraph amid the report’s 638 pages. Partly, this has to do with the expansive scope of the LAHDRA project, which covers far more than these autopsies, and partly because of the secrecy and laws that protect personal privacy. 

 Through the prism of science, this Trucheña is a single, mysterious data point. From this same prism, the unwritten parts of her life look like negative space. But when I imagine who she is, I also imagine what would fill that space — all the parts of her story that must exist but have been left out.

For now, I don’t even know her name.

Exotic poison

In an interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation in 1965, chemist Glenn Seaborg described plutonium as “one of the most exotic metals in the periodic table — maybe the most.” Seaborg had created plutonium out of uranium in 1940 and still, 25 years later, at least some of its properties were anomalous.

How plutonium poisoned the body was also largely unknown. The survivors in Nagasaki, Japan, where U.S. forces dropped a plutonium bomb on August 9, 1945, began to see increased rates of leukemia in the years immediately following the blast, most notably among children. Twelve years later, tumor registries were founded to track the cancer incidences in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the United States detonated “Little Boy,” a uranium bomb, on Aug. 6, 1945.

But in Los Alamos, there were only three instances of acute radiation poisoning — Harry Daghlian in 1945, Louis Slotin, in 1946, and Cecil Kelley, in 1958. Daghlian and Slotin both received a fatal blast of radiation while handling the same core of plutonium, the “demon core” as it was later dubbed. Daghlian died 25 days after the accident; Slotin survived for only nine. Kelley died within 35 hours of performing an operation to purify and concentrate plutonium in a large mixing tank. As the tank swirled, the plutonium inside it assumed the right shape and size to produce a brief nuclear chain reaction. The injuries the men suffered were ghastly.

Besides those were the less dramatic cases: Nuclear workers who were routinely exposed to much smaller amounts of plutonium on the job, and citizens exposed through atmospheric testing, which began in Nevada in 1951 and didn’t end in America until 1963. By the time of Kelley’s death, data on those other groups had yet to be collected, much less analyzed.

When I email Joseph Shonka, the primary author of the LAHDRA report, I get my first insights about the Human Tissue Analysis Program, a landmark project that gathered data about how plutonium exposure affected people’s health long-term.

“During the concerns about global fallout in the late 1950s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted a research program to measure the levels of plutonium in US residents,” he replied by email in August. The research was based on “plutonium workers who voluntarily agreed to contribute their bodies to research, as well as appropriately obtained tissues from autopsies from nearby residents of AEC facilities and from random individuals across the US, including New Mexico.”

I can’t help but obsess over two words: “appropriately obtained.” History tells of doctors performing grisly acts in the name of science, but that was before the dawn of biomedical ethics. I’d assumed that those ethics had become self-evident in  modern-day autopsy practices and that tissues were always “appropriately obtained.” That’s not the case here, I realize after an Internet search. How the tissues for this research program were obtained was, in fact, deeply controversial, if not unlawful. 

Autopsy authority from ‘God’

In 1996, Cecil Kelley’s wife and daughter filed a class-action lawsuit against the Regents of the University of California, the school that had managed the lab since 1943, and 10 other defendants, including former lab director Norris E. Bradbury. The autopsies, unlawful and fraudulent, were conducted on both lab employees and the general public “without the knowledge, informed consent, or permission of the families involved,” the complaint asserted. What occurred, it went on, was the “unauthorized and illegal research and experimentation” on the corpses of hundreds of New Mexico residents and others around the country. And plaintiffs only became aware of it, “to their extreme shock and horror,” many decades after the fact. In the press, it was known as the case of the “body snatchers.” 

The human tissue program began on Jan. 1, 1959, a day after Cecil Kelley’s horrific death. Clarence Lushbaugh, who worked for the lab and was also the pathologist and chief of staff at Los Alamos Medical Center, had long been waiting for “an employee with known exposure to radioactive substances to die so that the body could be autopsied and the radioactivity of the lungs could be counted,” legal filings said. “Mr. Kelley’s accident and subsequent death provided Defendant Lushbaugh with the opportunity he’d been waiting for.”

By the program’s end in 1985, 271 lab workers and 1,825 members of the general population, from New Mexico and across the country, had been secretly autopsied and their organs sent to the lab to be studied for plutonium content. Besides the obvious transgressions, the project had a number of other yawning flaws, including 489 tissue samples that were lost when a freezer failed.

Participating pathologists, first at Los Alamos Medical Center, the program’s unofficial headquarters in New Mexico, and then in other cities, ostensibly performed the autopsies to determine a person’s cause of death. But that was just a cover for the real motive, which was to entirely remove and analyze lungs, kidneys, spleen, vertebrae, lymph nodes and, in men, gonads, the class action asserted. 

The pathologists “exercised a clause in their autopsy permit form that allowed collection of tissues for ‘scientific research,’ a U.S. General Accounting Office report later said. “As a result, Los Alamos officials did not feel it was necessary to obtain their own informed consent documentation.” Families, in other words, were never asked for permission.

Among the records, I read about Kelley’s particularly ghoulish autopsy; Lushbaugh stored his entire nervous system in a mayonnaise jar and sent his brain to Washington, D.C., for study. When asked in his deposition who granted him the authority to do so, Lushbaugh said “God.”

Clues without names

A kind of armor protects the lab’s nuclear secrets. For that reason alone, I have little faith that I will be able to identify her — the anonymous Trucheña with 60 times more plutonium in her body than any other New Mexican autopsied in this hair-raising study.  But I keep looking. Maybe it’s that I believe finding her can reaffirm, in some small measure, her humanity. All I know is that I need a tangible public record. And the class-action lawsuit is the best and only place to start. 

…………………………………………………………………………………………….  volume 37 of “Health Physics,” a medical journal devoted to radiation safety. Published in 1979, it contains the biggest lead yet — a list of the Human Tissue Analysis Program’s decedents in New Mexico and across the country, all unnamed.

Each entry reads like a bullet point: Case number, occupation, residence, state and cause of death. A separate column includes sex, age, years of living in Los Alamos — if they did live there — and year of death. The columns reveal, in clinical and unnerving detail, each organ by weight and radioactivity, if any.

Here, there is no whole greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it’s the parts that so preoccupied researchers — line after line of organs measured down to the gram, and line after line of radioactivity measured down to disintegrations per minute. But the story I glean is more complicated than these facts and figures alone. It’s about the scientific desire to reduce people into mere objects of study and the violence of that reduction.

…………………………………………………………………………..“Epifania S. Trujillo, a lifelong resident of Truchas died at the age of 91, September 26, in the Los Alamos Medical Center following a long illness,” reads the October 1972 obituary in the Rio Grande Sun. “She is survived by two daughters, Mrs. Cosme Romero of Truchas and Mrs. Glenn Manges of Gallup; a sister Veronice Padilla of Truchas, 25 grandchildren and 35 great-grandchildren.”

…………………………………………….I tell them (descendants of Epifania Trujillo), she had by far the most plutonium in her body of any other New Mexico resident who was autopsied as part of that macabre program. 

…………………It might explain, she (Cecilia Romero, granddaughter) continues, “why so many in the family have gotten cancer.” She begins to run down the list. 

“My oldest brother, Sam, died of multiple myeloma. Susie had pancreatic cancer. My mom died of pancreatic cancer. Nora got pancreatic cancer, which is metastatic, so she now suffers from lung cancer. Mary Helen and I have both had breast cancer. And Henry had prostate cancer.” Only one sibling, Bernice, was spared. (Cecilia and Nora said they had genetic testing for both pancreatic and breast cancer risk that showed those cancers were not hereditary.) 

I’m shocked. The only time I’ve heard of such a pervasive history of cancer is in conversations with Tina Cordova, Bernice Gutierrez and Mary Martinez White, all members of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who lived within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated. But this is different. Truchas is 225 miles from Trinity. How did a woman living at that distance end up with such an extraordinary amount of plutonium in her liver?

As I keep talking to the two sisters, I realize the answer might lie closer to home — Los Alamos.

Cosme (Cecilia’s father) was the only one in the family who worked at the lab. That he could have unwittingly carried home undetectable radioactive particles on his clothing and boots and trigger illness throughout the family had long flickered in the Romeros’ minds. But they never could have guessed that Epifania might be the bellwether. She lived to the age of 91 — no small feat — and did not suffer from cancer herself. But over the long arc of time, almost everyone around her did. 

…………………………………………………. Cosme worked at Technical Area 8, a “hot site.” 

Rare photos from TA-8 

Technical Area 8, also known as Gun Site, was named after the gun-type design used in Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The War Department built the facility off of Los Alamos’s West Jemez Road, complete with three “bombproof” concrete buildings and a firing range for scientists to study projectiles and ballistics. Research there involved “high explosives, plutonium, uranium, arsenic, lithium hydride, and titanium oxide,” as one lab document read. 

……………………………………………………… What, precisely, did Cosme do at the lab? And could he have brought home the plutonium that affected Epifania?

……………………….Safety measures at LANL have changed since Cosme’s time and today include shielding, protective clothing, air sampling, radiation safety evaluations and other precautions, all aimed at safeguarding workers, the environment and the community, according to LANL spokespeople.

………. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has recorded instances of radioactive “take-home toxins.” How many times might workers have taken toxins home and never known?

“I’ve visited hundreds of nuclear workers’ homes over the years, possibly thousands,” says Marco Kaltofen, a specialist in nuclear forensics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who wrote a 2018 report on nuclear workers’ house dust.

…………………………………….. The kind of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons, plutonium 239, has a 24,000-year radioactive half-life. With that lifespan, the particles could still be present today in a forgotten corner of an attic, cellar or basement, Kaltofen says. Radioactive dust is not only a “potential source of internal radiation exposure to nuclear site workers,” his report warned: It could also expose their families “via secondary contamination.”

Plutonium and cancer 

Health studies have shown that residents downwind of the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, where plutonium was first produced at full-scale, have high incidences of all cancers, including uterine, ovarian, cervical and breast. 

There is also evidence suggesting that exposure to ionizing radiation, which includes alpha particles emitted by plutonium, is linked to an increase in pancreatic cancer. Additional research at LANL — the unpublished Zia Study — posits that increased radiation exposure among male employees between 1946 and 1978 led to increased rates of pancreatic cancer deaths. Any cumulative exposure to low doses of radiation is associated with higher risks of death by cancer, recent research shows. 

………………………………………..It’s almost too easy to think of all the ways the Romero children, and the cousins who occasionally lived with them, could have come into contact with radioactive dust, and how their bodies, still growing, could have been poisoned. 

The last clue

…………………………………………………………………………. Seeing her name among the court records is definite proof — Epifania was unlawfully autopsied as part of the Human Tissue Analysis Program.

……………………………………Indeed, it’s not until over a decade after the suit was settled that the Romeros get all the wrenching news at once: Their father might have brought home toxic plutonium on his work clothes; their grandmother was unlawfully autopsied; the family was left out of the settlement altogether; and Los Alamos had a hand in all of it. Epifania, emblematic of so much, fell through the cracks in every way possible…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Alicia Inez Guzmán

alicia@searchlightnm.org

Raised in the northern New Mexican village of Truchas, Alicia Inez Guzmán has written about histories of place, identity, and land use in New Mexico. She brings this knowledge to her current role at Searchlight.   https://searchlightnm.org/buried-secrets-poisoned-bodies/?utm_source=Searchlight+New+Mexico&utm_campaign=c42014a33e-12%2F20%2F2023+-+Buried+secrets%2C+poisoned+bodies&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8e05fb0467-c42014a33e-395610620&mc_cid=c42014a33e&mc_eid=a70296a261

December 21, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, health, Legal, USA | Leave a comment