Atomic Bomb’s Cradle Not Rocked by Worries on Pollution, Radiation

If ever there was a company town, this was it.

Oak Ridge didn’t grow up around the company. The company built it from scratch, filled it with employees, paid them well and told them to keep their mouths shut if they loved their country.

The company is the government of the United States. The Oak Ridge plant built the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, to hasten the end of World War II.

There have long been lingering concerns that the bomb makers put into motion a slow death for residents of the hills outside Knoxville.

Over the years, the government has admitted spilling, leaking, burying, pouring, burning and losing millions of tons of hazardous and radioactive materials in and around the 55-square-mile federal reservation.

But the Department of Energy says that the days of environmental indifference are over, and most of the people who live and work here apparently believe it.

“Questions about the environment or our personal safety never enter my mind,” said Garrett Asher, a real estate broker in Oak Ridge. “I don’t think that’s because we’ve always lived here. I think it’s because we realize any problems they have are on the reservation and not within the city of Oak Ridge.”

Not all citizens think the plants are benign.

“I think it’s awful if it’s as bad as we read in the papers, but you have to keep in mind that, through the years, it was worse that people were ignorant of it,” says Mary Lou Gross, who has lived in Oak Ridge since 1946 and used to work at the bomb plant. She now is personnel administrator for EG & G Instruments.

“During all the years we were doing weapons I thought they were a deterrent, and I still think so, but we need to give more thought to the pollution. We’re at the mercy of the government in this, and I feel sure they’re just telling us what they want us to know.”

Wayne Hibbitts, the Energy Department’s deputy assistant manager for environment, safety and quality at Oak Ridge, said environmental concerns have moved steadily upward in the agency’s priorities.

“We’re smarter than we were,” he said. “The people who were here 40 and 50 years ago did the best they could with the knowledge that was available to them.”

There was no settlement of significance in the valleys 30 miles northwest of Knoxville until the government decided in 1942 that this would be a nice, secluded place to build atomic bombs.

Three plants were built for the Manhattan Project. They were known as X-10, the second nuclear reactor on the planet; K-25, a huge facility designed to increase the fissionable isotope of uranium, and Y-12, a second big plant that used a different technology to the same purpose.

Secrecy was paramount. During the war, few of the employees knew that they were making the most destructive weapons the world had ever seen.

The legacy of secrecy remains today. Critics say it is a veil behind which the Energy Department hides environmental problems.

“There is an absolute, institutional bias within DOE to downplay the potential problems of radioactive material,” said Steven Smith, a veterinary student at the University of Tennessee and father of two who heads the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

“They are constantly on the defensive. I’m not sure I want DOE people, who have a vested interest in seeing this industry flourish, evaluating for me what is an acceptable risk.”

The X-10 plant evolved over the years into the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Y-12 remains in operation as a nuclear weapons factory; K-25 was shut down in 1985 because it was too expensive to operate.

In the 48 years since the plants were built, the town of Oak Ridge has flourished.

The populace of about 30,000 is one of the best-educated and best-paid in the state. The plants employ about 17,000 people and indirectly support numerous satellite businesses in the region.

But there is more than a paycheck. There is a sense here of being part of a great national mission, even if it is making bombs.

“The people here are willing to accept an additional risk because they feel the benefit of what was done here far outweighs the resulting costs,” Hibbitts said.

Oak Ridge Mayor Roy Pruett, who works at the Y-12 plant, said: “I think the farther away from Oak Ridge you get, the more you hear about the pollution. We know where it is. We’ve characterized it and it is no threat to us.”

People outside Oak Ridge don’t understand or appreciate what goes on behind the plant gates, he said.

“If there is a community in the world where radiation is understood, it is this one. I know exactly how much radiation I’m exposed to every day. Do you?” Pruett asked.

An Environmental Quality Advisory Board keeps the city government informed. The chairman is Jerry Kuhaida, a project manager with the federal government’s prime contractor in Oak Ridge, Martin Marietta Energy Systems.

“I’ve lived in places that were a heck of a lot worse, because of the unknowns,” Kuhaida said.

“Here, you know, generally, what you’ve been exposed to. I think there is an effort on the part of these facilities to keep some control over those discharges.”

The Energy Department claims to have spent more than $1 billion to clean up the area in the last 10 years. There was a time when radioactive and hazardous waste was just buried in shallow trenches. The cleanup effort involves digging up that waste and packaging it in more stable containers. The agency also has drained settling ponds and paved them over.

Not everyone is satisfied with the cleanup effort.

Lawsuits have been filed over mercury contamination of the watershed. Creeks near the plants are posted “no fishing or swimming.”

Environmental scientists are measuring hazardous materials in the bottom of a lake downstream.

Statistics on the work force from the 1940s on show no substantial rise in mortality, said Donna L. Cragle, deputy program leader for the Center of Epidemiologic Research at Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

“I would say it’s not any worse than any other place,” she said. “There are mortality studies related to many industries and, generally, these workers look like most of those. There aren’t any of the real strong mortality relationships you see with some of the others.”

She said there has never been a thorough study of the plants’ public-health impact on the general population around the reservation.

Hibbitts called living in Oak Ridge a matter of “adjusting to a perception of risk.”

“The sorts of things we talk about, as far as the risk of working or living here, are very small compared to the risks I live with on a daily basis,” he said.

“The amount of radiation exposure I get from working here is a very tiny part of the radiation exposure I get just for being a human being. If I want to manage my risk in terms of exposure, I don’t move from Oak Ridge. I ventilate my house to get rid of the radon.”

Some critics of the plants are opposed to nuclear weapons on principle. They stage a protest demonstration here every Aug. 6, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, and usually manage to get arrested for trespassing on government property.

The Peace Alliance headed by Smith is the most visible critic of the Energy Department’s management.

“Even if we pardon the past, they’re still experimenting, putting citizens at risk because they’ve got such a mess they don’t know what to do with it,” Smith said. “They have tremendous problems out there. I’m not trying to just criticize, because I know they’ve got some good people out there doing their best, but it’s time for this entire country to reassess its nuclear policy.”

He said the question that should be asked is whether the plants “have been protecting us or poisoning us.”

“We’re just shifting the burden to the next generation, and I can’t go along with that,” he said. “The fact that they’re still producing nuclear weapons is not acceptable. The greatest threat to me and my children is the pollution, not some other country’s nuclear weapons.”

Smith suggested that another mighty national effort may be the only way to reverse the legacy of the earlier one: “We need a Manhattan Project II to clean it up.”

Smith said that his group, with a core of about 50 people and a mailing list of 3,000, encounters some enmity in the region.

“But we’ve found there is a lot of support out there for what we’re doing. I think there would be more, except for the economics. . . . We’re constantly being forced to choose between short-term economic well being and long-term environmental well-being and, to me, that is blackmail.”

Hibbitts disagreed. He said that people here are not shrinking violets and would, if convinced that their lives were endangered, raise as much of a protest as necessary to change the situation.

The latest environmental flap to ensue from the government reservation is the pollution of Watts Bar Lake, just downstream on the Clinch River.

The Energy Department held two public hearings this summer to explain the problem and what is being done, which is mainly studying the nature and extent of the pollution.

Department of Energy officials said that most of the pollution is buried in the deepest and most stable sediments of the lake, and is therefore safely out of the way.

Bob Humphreys is mayor of Kingston, a small town on Watts Bar just southwest of Oak Ridge. He attended the first hearing, he said, and “felt some assurance after that. I think they’re doing more than people realize to monitor that situation.”

Humphreys said that residents are concerned, but added: “We’ve run every kind of test in the world and, according to those, we have nothing to be alarmed about.”

In the end, Humphreys said, people probably will find little to worry about. Certainly not enough to call down the economic force that may be putting bread on their tables.

“Oak Ridge is the livelihood for a big percentage of Kingston. That makes a difference in the way they think.”