Plutonium Discovery the Talk of the Town

Fields of sun-parched corn and tobacco line the narrow road that stretches from the Ohio River to Wilma Kelley’s store. In recent days, customers who usually come here to chat have been consumed by a single topic: the frightening discovery of plutonium in their midst.

Visitors lean across the counter and recite illnesses that have befallen their families, listing everything from stomachaches to deadly cancers. The litany always concludes with the same question: Could plutonium from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant be the cause?

“People are scared,” said Kelley, a 69-year-old grandmother working the counter. “Everybody who comes in mentions it.”

Paducah is a one-industry town where mistrust of government is as common as weathered tobacco barns. But within the last two weeks, residents have discovered from news reports that the federal government left them unknowingly exposed for decades to plutonium and other highly radioactive materials that thousands of plant workers were not told about or equipped to handle.

Plutonium, a cancer-causing metal used in nuclear bomb production, was secretly introduced to Paducah in 1953 as part of a plan to recapture uranium from the spent fuel of military reactors. Carelessly handled inside the plant, it seeped into surrounding areas and has been found in nearby public lands, even in deer.

Since an investigation by the Washington Post brought the issue to light, government officials have come to town with apologies and promises. Kentucky Gov. Paul E. Patton toured the plant. Officials from the Department of Energy, which oversees the plant, met with residents and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has promised a broad investigation.

On Thursday night, dozens of residents met to discuss their concern and outrage with federal and state officials. The first hour was tense but generally polite. Then a woman in the audience suddenly shouted, “You don’t care if people get sick!”

Later, tempers flared. Kentucky’s manager of radiation control, John Volpe, thrust his finger at an activist who challenged Volpe’s contention that small amounts of radiation found in streams do not endanger public health.

“Don’t call me a liar,” Volpe said.

The meeting stretched long into the night, heavy with talk of transuranics and technetium-99. Some residents complained that, faced with such complex science, they had little chance of understanding precisely what happened at the plant or how much risk it poses.

As Kelley later put it: “We’re just average people and we can’t prove nothing. I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.”

Some residents always have been a little scared of living next to the plant, a sprawling Department of Energy facility built in the 1950s to process uranium. About 10 miles west of Paducah, population 27,000, rolling fields end abruptly at the plant’s barbed wire fence, and roads are dotted with huge orange signs bearing bold black letters.

“WARNING. What to do if sirens sound. If unable to move away from the area for at least two miles, take shelter in a substantial building.”

A lawsuit filed recently by workers and an environmental group contends government contractors concealed the true radiation exposures at the plant for years and let hazardous metals spread into the environment.

But for storekeeper Wilma Kelley, the proof of the plant’s dangers is in her apple trees.

They grew in her frontyard for years, rising from a drainage ditch that led to the plant, a mile away. Over time, she said, the 15-foot trees began to warp in a peculiar way and died.