Getting to the Bottom of the Plutonium Mess : O’Leary’s valuable revelations suggests S&L; size problem

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary was “appalled, shocked and deeply saddened,” she said on Tuesday of last week, to learn that the United States had injected 18 human subjects with plutonium during the 1940s. “It just gave me an ache in my gut and my heart,” she added. “Certainly, by the standards of today, it is apparent that informed consent could not have taken place.”

O’Leary was choosing her words carefully. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to man. One millionth of an ounce can be lethal. Its toxicity was known in the 1940s when these medical experiments, all of which ended in the death of the subject, were conducted. What on earth was the rationale?

O’Leary says she plans to release more information in June about these experiments. Why the delay? She says that laws protecting the prIvacy of government employees prevents the immediate release of the names and further information about the deaths, but the length of this delay--given the scandalous nature of what has already been revealed--is sure to arouse suspicions. And secrecy may be difficulty to maintain in any event. The Albuquerque Tribune has already named five people it says were injected with plutonium as part of the work being Done by the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Did Gen. Leslie R. Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project, know about these experiments? If they occurred at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, did J. Robert Oppenheimer, the respected physicist who oversaw the lab, know about them? Injection with plutonium is the sort of horror story Americans are accustomed to hear about Nazi concentration camps, not about American research projects--even weapons research projects. A relatively innocent explanation may yet be forthcoming, but the fullest possible disclosure must be made at the earliest possible date.

The sensational character of plutonium injection must not obscure the more important and more current news O’Leary has brought. It has been known for some time that the United States faces a weapons production cleanup bill in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Nuclear cleanup has been, equivalently, the next savIngs-and-loan bailout. But as with the early estimates of the size of the S&L; bill, the plus-or-minus factor has been staggering. No one has really known what the bill will come to. One reason for the uncertainty is the fact that relevant information about the amount of toxic material produced has been classified.

O’Leary is out to change that, and none too soon. 34 million pages of classified documents, the legacy of the policy that must now change, pose an almost superhuman challenge, but the task must be begun. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported last week that 1,600 pounds of plutonium missing from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado had turned up buried at at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. In its entire history, the U.S. nuclear weapons program produced only 89 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium. This much mislaid plutonium presents not just a nuclear weapons proliferation problem, should some of the precious and deadly material fall into the wrong hands, but also a pollution threat. The Cold War has left behind a radioactively dirty peace, and the nation has no choice but to start the cleanup.