Archives Detailing Radiation Closed

Jay Mullan, Trishia Pritikin and Steve Corker all spent their childhoods in the path of radiation emissions from the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Now they and hundreds of others are linked through contributions of health histories and other personal information to a one-of-a-kind archive created specifically for them.

And all three are dismayed that the government no longer funds the Hanford Health Information Archives.

When it opened in July 1996, the archives became the nation’s first public collection of information created to document the personal experiences and health records of people exposed to radiation releases from an Energy Department weapons-making site.

On June 29, the collection housed in the basement of Gonzaga University’s Foley Library closed to new acquisitions because funding ran out.

The archives will remain open to researchers and the public through the library’s William H. Cowles III Rare Books Library.

That displeases many of the more than 650 people--called Hanford Downwinders--who contributed to the archives and would like to add more data.

Many blame Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), whose district includes the Hanford reservation.

“If Doc Hastings and his colleagues were willing to be honest, they would provide us the funding we deserve,” said Pritikin, a leader of the Hanford Downwinders. Reopening the archives would “at least allow downwinders to reflect how big the health exposures were.”

Hastings spokesman Todd Young said the congressman had “never been contacted by anybody with this request. Frankly, we’re mystified. We’ve never heard anything of this subject.”

As many as 2 million people may have been exposed to radiation released from Manhattan Project and Cold War plutonium-making operations at Hanford, a 560-square-mile government reservation in south-central Washington state.

The biggest releases occurred during start-up in 1944-45, but continued until 1972. During that time, Northwest residents were also exposed to fallout from nuclear weapons tests in Russia, China and the Nevada Test Site.

The archives were a project of the Hanford Health Information Network, a public health information agency funded by the Energy Department through health departments and nine Indian tribes in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Federal funds for the network ran out in July 2000, but the archives were able to use some leftover cash to operate for another year.

The archives contain medical health surveys, photographs, poetry, oral history tapes, high school yearbooks and class photographs submitted by 651 people and organizations.

Mullan was an infant living at the Farragut Naval Training Base, where his father was stationed in northern Idaho in 1944-45, when operations at Hanford reactors and plutonium plants released hundreds of thousands of curies of radiation into the atmosphere.

Prevailing winds moved the Hanford contaminants as far away as Idaho, where Mullan believes that he was exposed to radiation that damaged his thyroid.

While attending college in Oregon, Mullan suffered a paralyzing condition that forced the removal of his thyroid gland.

The cause of his thyroid problem was unknown until 1986, when thousands of pages of historical documents about early operations at Hanford were released, Mullan said. They showed massive releases from Hanford as the nation raced to make nuclear materials for the atomic bombs used on Japan at the end of World War II.

“I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mullan said.

Telling Stories to ‘Save Others From Suffering’

The Southern Oregon University history professor said the archives were supposed to become, “ultimately the repository of our story. Many said, ‘I suffered. But if by telling my story, I can save others from suffering. . . .’ ”

Mullan, who wears a “Hanford necklace”--a thyroidectomy scar that distinguishes many of the downwinders whose diseased thyroid glands were removed--said there is cynicism about the government’s motives.

“The fact that there is even an archives at all, closed as it is, is the best thing we could have hoped for,” he said.

Pritikin was born in 1950 in Richland, the closest city to Hanford, where her father was an engineer and her mother was also employed.

Believing that Hanford releases damaged her health and left her with thyroid disease, Pritikin submitted her medical records, as well as her father’s. The archives, through its oral history section, has the only remaining recording of her late mother’s voice, Pritikin said.

Pritikin contends that the government wanted the archives closed to keep the public in the dark.

“This is very much reminiscent of what happened to us at Hanford,” Pritikin said. “We were never informed we were being exposed. We haven’t received any help. I think they are just waiting for us to all die and shut up.”

The archives could serve as a place of healing for families who lost loved ones to cancer, as well as to preserve records, said Pritikin, a Berkeley attorney.

“We’ve lost relatives and haven’t had any healing process and that was supposed to be our place,” she said.

The decision to close the archives to additional contributions cheats the downwinders and others who may want to use it in the future, Pritikin said.

“When you look at an archive, you want it to reflect reality as best it can,” Pritikin said. “What’s happened will freeze this collection so it will never fully reflect what happened at Hanford and elsewhere.”

Corker was a child on a farm near Walla Walla, about 50 miles southwest of Hanford, from 1941-53.

As one of an estimated 32,000 to 34,000 children under 5 living in the critical area of high exposure, Corker believes that the 14 operations he has had for bone cysts, spurs, melanoma and skin cancers could have been caused by Hanford releases.

“I’m just one of those people,” said Corker, a Spokane city councilman, radio talk show host and Gonzaga University business professor. “I don’t know if that was one of those factors, but it is one reason I contributed to the archive.”

Questions Raised as to Cause and Effect

A picture of his third-grade class at a Walla Walla elementary school and copies of insurance claims for his illnesses were among the items that Corker contributed.

“I just wanted to contribute so we would have some understanding of the impact on that age group. We drank goats’ and cows’ milk that was not processed,” he said. “It was the highest risk group. To give researchers, or even historians, some idea why rates of cancer [are] so high.

“I don’t know if you can glean a cause and effect, but it raises the question of why it happened to me.”

Corker, 60, the archives’ former public information officer and advisory board member, is disappointed that the archives are closed.

“I think it’s ridiculous to think the archive would have a life of five years,” he said. “I’m greatly disappointed by the lack of interest by the federal government and the Department of Energy.”

The former archives advisory board members in 1998 formed the Radiochemical Health Effects Archives, a nonprofit organization, to try to raise funds to continue adding to the archives.

Gonzaga agreed to house the archives, in acid-free paper boxes along one wall of movable shelving, using existing library staff.

“It is unique in that it is not a purely scientific collection; it’s more a personal recollection,” Eileen Bell-Garrison, Gonzaga’s dean of library services, said recently at Foley Library. “These are rare materials. They can’t be replaced.”