Once-Secret City at Crossroads of Nuclear Past, Post-Cold War Future

Oak Ridge was a myth before it became a secret.

Fifty years later, the community created to help build the first atomic bomb faces the reality of an uncertain post-Cold War future irrevocably tied to its past.

“I was in the doctor’s office the other day,” said A.K. Bissell, the city’s 80-year-old former mayor. “Some big man was sitting by me and I got to talking to him.

“I said, ‘Are you an Oak Ridger?’

“He said, ‘No, I don’t want to live in cancer town. That’s what we call it.’ ”

Bissell, who headed a town advisory committee for a decade before Oak Ridge incorporated in 1959 and was mayor for 20 years after, said such comments still bother him.

During a half-century of nuclear research, mistakes made by accident or ignorance have left parts of the landscape polluted. There are “No Fishing” signs in nearby creeks.

Government-financed studies have consistently found the health of workers in the government complex to be better than average.

However, a local doctor, William Reid, recently raised questions about whether environmental contamination is linked to rare cancers and immune problems in his patients.

Only in the past year has the first major health study begun on the atomic facility’s effects on the surrounding population. The state and Department of Energy are sharing the five-year study’s $12.9-million cost.

Bissell, who like most townspeople worked with radioactivity as part of his job in the great governmental complex, takes a typically sanguine Oak Ridger’s view.

“I suppose there is more concern about that outside the city than there is inside the city,” he said. “I never had any grave concern about it.”

Recalling the wartime race to turn a blackboard theory of atom-splitting into a weapon, Bissell said that with today’s knowledge and without the wartime drive for production the results might have been different.

“We also might all be speaking German now,” he said.

Before there was a legacy, there was a curious legend.

According to this, at the turn of the century a local prophet, one John Hendrix, came out of the woods to reveal an unlikely vision to his incredulous neighbors on Black Oak Ridge.

“Bear Creek Valley some day will fill with great buildings and factories, and they will help win the biggest war that ever will be,” the local legend says he told them.

“Big engines will dig big ditches. . . . Thousands of people will run to and fro. They will build things and there will be great noise and confusion and the earth will shake.

“I’ve seen it. It’s comin’.”

Hendrix’s vision came true on Sept. 19, 1942, when Gen. Leslie Groves ordered these quiet East Tennessee valleys 20 miles west of Knoxville bought up for the top-secret Manhattan Project.

Over the next three years, 1,000 farm families were displaced and a 59,000-acre city of prefab houses, muddy streets and windowless, concrete buildings was created behind a fence for a swelling population of 75,000 people.

“We wasn’t treated right, truthfully speaking,” said Ralph McGill, who was 14 when the government paid $3,800 for his family’s 150-acre farm and told them to move.

McGill said he’d like someday to buy back the property, which ultimately served no greater purpose than a power line right-of-way. But he doesn’t cling to the past. “After all is said and done, we all progressed.”

The area was first code-named “Site X” and didn’t appear on any maps. Hundred-car railroad trains went in loaded; nothing came out. Few people knew its purpose, not even then-Vice President Harry S. Truman. Yet Truman, as President, ordered the devastating atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not until the obliteration of those Japanese cities to end World War II did the people of Oak Ridge speak openly of “uranium” and “plutonium.”

“On August 6th, 1945, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, President Truman was on the radio announcing it,” recalled Waldo Cohn, 82, one of the handful of scientists at Oak Ridge who knew what they were making.

“My wife called me up. She said, ‘Now I know what you’ve been doing.’ The whole situation was strange.”

The secret city supplied enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb and plutonium-processing research for the Nagasaki bomb.

In the recollections of wartime residents there is a strong sense of a shared purpose and an enthusiasm for doing something important and patriotic in perilous times, whether they knew what they were building or not.

“It was an exciting kind of place,” said Ruth Carey, an Oak Ridger since 1943.

Most people were under 30. They organized their own entertainment, including a symphony orchestra and what has become the longest-running active community theater in Tennessee.

The school system was good then and today ranks among the best in the state. In 1955, it became the first to integrate in Tennessee.

The community was a largely egalitarian society populated by everyone from construction workers to doctoral scientists. Teachers were told to keep quiet if a Nobel winner’s child was among their students.

“Everybody was in the soup together; we were working on something important, and there wasn’t any keeping up with the Joneses because there weren’t any Joneses,” Cohn said.

There was security. You had to have a badge not just to enter the reservation, but to move about within it.

It was somewhat restricting, but it was also a safe haven. A lot of residents fought the removal of the fence when it came down in 1949. They’d never had to lock their houses or cars.

It was also a very muddy place. The Army, struggling to build the giant production plants and houses and commercial centers and the rest of the town, didn’t pause to pave roads.

“The first day I came I lost a shoe in the mud,” recalled Colleen Black. “You put your foot down and away it went.”

The Oak Ridge mud became both a symbol of shared experience to those inside the fence and a stigma to those outside who were wary of the newcomers.

Vestiges of local resentment to the “foreign body” placed here a generation ago remain today, but are dissipating, according to Edward Nephew, the city’s new mayor.

Oak Ridge is at a crossroads as it marks a half-century.

“The question mark for Oak Ridge is how to adjust when there is no longer an intense arms race,” Nephew said.

Oak Ridge’s giant uranium-enrichment operations, K-25 and Y-12, have been shuttered since the mid-1980s.

The behemoth K-25 building, a massive concrete “U” one mile in circumference, is being converted for waste storage.

And the Y-12 plant, used until recently to build nuclear weapons components, is now dismantling weapons and embarking on precision-machining ventures with private enterprise and other government agencies.

The X-10 facility’s graphite reactor, used in early plutonium research, is a national historic site. X-10 itself is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, involved in a variety of research activities, from identifying human genes to developing a bacteria that degrades explosive TNT.

Oak Ridge’s population of 27,000 is roughly unchanged from 30 years ago. Most townspeople and many of their East Tennessee neighbors work for the Department of Energy or its contractors--19,800 people in all. Large-scale layoffs have been avoided.

“Oak Ridge has always relied heavily on the federal government and our fortunes have been linked to the federal activities in town,” said Tom Rogers, president of the Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce.

“We’ve done a remarkable job of diversifying our economic base, relying mostly on the technology that exists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other plants. But we are still dominated by the federal government.”

Nephew, a retired physicist from the Oak Ridge lab, said he hopes the community will become another North Carolina Research Triangle, California Silicon Valley or Massachusetts Route 28.

But Stephen Smith, an environmental activist who has led anti-nuclear marches on the DOE facilities, worries that the city has no clear plan for the future and remains wedded to nuclear weapons.

He thinks the government facilities should concentrate on alternative fuels, conservation, global warming and similar research.

“When we talk about reflecting on 50 years of accomplishments we also need to reflect on 50 years of environmental debt that has been generated that has to be paid,” Smith said.

Oak Ridge has come a long way in cleaning up a legacy of spills, leaks and dumping of radioactive and hazardous wastes, Smith said, although he continues to wonder whether the DOE has told everything it knows.

The whole 34,000-acre federal reservation is classified an EPA Superfund waste site and $1 billion has been spent on its cleanup since 1988.

Brian Walker, deputy assistant manager for environmental restoration and waste management, said most of the time and money has gone more to “moving paper than moving dirt.”

The cleanup, more to drain, bury, cap or cover the waste than remove it, is scheduled through 2017.

At this point, “this is the only program here that is growing,” Walker said. This year $215 million will be spent and next year’s budget promises $330 million. Sixteen hundred people are involved.

Not everyone came to Oak Ridge to work in the complex. Patty Loch, 45, arrived from Florida with her salesman husband, 10-year-old daughter and teen-age son three years ago.

They liked East Tennessee and, after visiting Oak Ridge, “fell in with the people,” the schools and other offerings, she said.

“I wouldn’t leave. I am a native now, a true native,” she said.

As if to prove it, she adds, using a common Oak Ridgerism: “And we don’t glow in the dark.”