UNEARTHING

LIDIA YUKNAVITCH

Bombs Bursting in Air

A lot of people have heard of the Manhattan Project, the research and development activity during World War II that resulted in the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded by the United States. The project is lodged within American culture by name partly because unimaginable destruction also engenders endless fascination. Many people have also heard the name Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos lab where the actual bomb was designed. There is an entire mystique that has grown around Oppenheimer. Around the Manhattan Project. From the fictional Doctor Manhattan in DC Comics back through early films and novels that took the program as their source material, the story of how the United States came to create and use nuclear bombs has buried itself in our collective unconscious. The Manhattan Project is at the heart of the dark satirical movie Dr. Strangelove. The Oppenheimer phrase “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” language that has been sourced to the Bhagavad Gita, has also transcended its origins.

Fewer people know the story of the Hanford Site in Washington State, where, beginning around 1943, uranium was irradiated toward the production of plutonium, a key substance in Oppenheimer’s work. Hanford was part of the Manhattan Project. The site was also known by other names between World War II and the present, names that hinted at its nuclear ties: Hanford Project, Hanford Engineer Works, and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.¹

From 1944 to the present, Hanford officials have continued to tell a story that their operation does not pose a health threat to the surrounding land, or animals, or workers, or to people anywhere. The story changes over time, the shape and flux of the explanations, the rate of cleanup, the promise of containment or removal. But the site is still radioactive, the land and water and animals still carry contamination, and the workers, their families, and surrounding civilian communities are still getting sick and dying differently than they might have otherwise. Our bodies carry everything that has ever happened to us, the way the land carries everything of humanity.

I’ve lived in Washington and Oregon for most of my life and still know many locals who do not know the city’s history. If I say “Hanford” out in the world beyond Washington and Oregon, there is even less recognition. But history continues to reassert itself here. At present, the site is overseen by the Department of Energy and a contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions. The current cleanup of more than 60 million gallons of chemical and nuclear waste stored in underground tanks is expected to last well beyond fifty years, maybe one hundred, in addition to the years the waste has already lived.²

During World War II, the Hanford Site produced the materials needed to build the country’s nuclear arsenal. The land near the Columbia River was requisitioned away from the people living there by the U.S. government and military. Farmers and other civilians received letters telling them they had one month to leave. Only a few were mildly compensated. Native Americans, specifically the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, and the Nez Perce Tribe, who all lived in the Columbia Basin, were not compensated at all. They were, however, given “visitation rights”—they could arrange to go up to White Bluffs Island by truck to fish. The Wanapum tribe, who used to live on the land year-round, were forced to relocate to Priest Rapids.³

The workers in charge of the current Hanford Site cleanup and maintenance are still getting sick, just like the workers and residents of the last seventy-seven years. The dead who were poisoned, those who contracted diseases through contaminated water, those who developed deformities and fatal chronic diseases—no one outside of their communities knows their names.

Not like the name “The Manhattan Project.”

The first nuclear devices detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were named Fat Man and Little Boy.⁴

A Boy Story

I knew a boy who lived near Hanford, Washington. In 1976 we were both competitive swimmers. He was a year older than me. I was thirteen. I lived in Bellevue, Washington, quite far from Hanford, but I’d see him at swim meets in Washington and Oregon. Most often, I’d see him in the summer at the Wenatchee Invitational, a swimming event about two hours from Hanford. Wenatchee hails as the “Apple Capital,” and the fruit was emblazoned on the front of the swimming medals, the awards as big as our hands. Faux gold, silver, and bronze with big chains. All the kids loved wearing them. They were my favorite medals. I still have a few, though they are smaller in my hand.

The boy and I were both very fast in the same event: the hundred-yard breaststroke. Maybe that’s why we were friends of a sort. Like friends at a distance. Or friends whose bodies carried something similar. Sometimes we would have a small conversation about races or times or apples. Sometimes we’d just exchange smiles or lock eyes right before one of us stepped toward the starting block. His family lived somewhere between Kennewick and Hanford, downwind from Hanford, where his father worked. In the Pacific Northwest, the Downwinders are people who have been exposed to radioactive contamination and ionizing radiation that has entered groundwater, food chains, air, and drinking water.

He had swimmer’s hair—you know it? A sheen that overtook the brown.

Green eyes. Extra-broad shoulders. The elongated torso of a swimmer.

His name is in my body, like I’ve swallowed an apple whole.

Art

When I was thirteen my father took me to see a showing of Dr. Strangelove at a theater in Seattle, Washington. My mother may have been there too, but I don’t remember her with us. Ghost woman gone to drink. These were dark years for me with my father. He was omnipresent in the worst ways, magnified with rage and violence, and I’d hit puberty, an event horizon if you are the daughter of a man who abused the women in the family. But somewhere inside him he carried the trace of an artist. He was an architect; he loved literature and film and classical music and stand-up comedy and great television. He loved Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic. He hated Republicans. Terrible things and beautiful things can live inside the same person.

I loved Dr. Strangelove immediately, but I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain why my imagination latched on to it. Something about violence. Something about art. Something about satire even though I don’t think the word satire was in my lexicon yet. I laughed but didn’t know if it was okay to laugh.

At home after the movie, we ate dinner and my father talked about the Cold War. I knew a little about what the Cold War was from school. My father talked. I was thinking about nuclear weapons.

When my father was about twenty, he said, he and his friend had jobs at some plant where spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor were stored in giant water tanks. At that time, he’d recently quit school at John Carroll University, a Catholic school in Ohio. His friend Eddie Garilitus had swum in one of the tanks. In my memory of the story, my father recounted swimming in one, too. But I recently asked my sister, who is eight years older than me, and she thought no—just this Eddie guy. I remember thinking, holy shit. Chernobyl had not happened yet, but would in 1986.

Was it a dare between men?

Something to pass the time at a boring job?

Did radiation get inside the body of the male swimmer?

What might have been born in my father that turned his rage nuclear?

Mind over Matter

For the duration of the Cold War, nuclear technology and plutonium processing evolved at breakneck speed.

Safety procedures and waste disposal practices did not.

For over seventy years, Hanford’s reactors released radioactive materials into the air. Into the Columbia River. Into the aquifer and ground. Into the bodies of everyone who worked there or lived anywhere near it, as well as the area’s animals and plants.

In 1986, formerly classified documents became available through the Freedom of Information Act. There was one experiment called the “Green Run,” documented in a report called Dissolving of Twenty Day Metal at Hanford, in which officials at Hanford released 7,780 curies of iodine-131, as well as 20,000 curies of xenon-133, into the surrounding atmosphere within seven hours. I know. Those numbers are difficult for civilians to understand. Just for comparison, the Three Mile Island accident released between 15 and 24 curies.⁵

The language used to describe the cleanup effort is almost lyric in its epic failure: Weapons production reactors were “decommissioned” after the Cold War but left behind around 53 million U.S. gallons of high-level radioactive “waste.” The leftover material was stored in 177 tanks, including some 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste. Underground tank “farms” emerged. Over the years, some of the tanks began to leak through their “single-shell walls” and into the groundwater and river and air. In 2011 the DOE pumped much of the liquid waste into twenty-eight newer “double-shell tanks.” Those leaked too.

The planned construction of the waste treatment plant has been repeatedly delayed for decades now, and the cost of construction and cleanup keeps rising.⁶ Different administrations have conflicting ideas about what should happen next. The ground and the water and the buildings remain alive with radioactivity, the water threatening to migrate into the Columbia River, metastasizing, stretching out like the fingers of a hand through seep and plumbing.

The holding tanks don’t hold. Neither does the language describing the cleanup. The people and animals there die.

In a 2016 essay for NBC News, Ronan Farrow and Rich McHugh reported on the Hanford Site and the safety concerns of the workers. They interviewed a local neuropsychologist, who reported on having evaluated twenty-nine people with “both respiratory and cognitive symptoms,” including some of the “worst cases of dementia in young people” he’d ever seen.

Farrow and McHugh interviewed twenty workers.

One woman experienced shaking all over the right side of her body.

Another man had nerve damage that sometimes made him pass out.

One man, who is now dead, was losing his memory and having trouble breathing.

All of the workers were being told the workplace was safe.

Former workers from two decades past said they were not allowed to wear protective work gear, like air tanks and other safety equipment. The workers asked their immediate superiors. The workers told their unions. The unions begged the owners and contacted shareholders. Over and over again they were told that the workplace was safe.

Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States.

In 2015, it was also designated part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park alongside Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.⁷

Eating Apples

I used to faint in the sun. White hair, blue eyes, fair skin. My swim coach would sit me in the shade at outdoor competitions with white towels over my head. I passed out often, especially at the meets in Wenatchee, where summer temperatures could get as high as 114 degrees. Other swimmers teased me, made fun of me for it. But swimmers are a pretty tight squad, so they’d also bring me cups of water.

My dad gave me big round salt tablets about the size of my eye. I think they were supposed to help ward off dehydration? Like Gatorade? They kind of creeped me out, mostly because they came from him.

One time this friend—the boy I knew from Kennewick—sat underneath the white towels with me and we shared a foam cup of crushed ice. Our races were always near each other. Because we were kind of sitting shoulder to shoulder, I could see a weird-looking bump on his shoulder. About the size of a golf ball.

I stared pretty hard at that bump on the boy’s shoulder. Underneath the towels. Shoulders are a big deal for swimmers.

If you’ve ever swum breaststroke competitively, or seen someone do it on TV, you’ve seen their shoulders emerge from the water with great force and skill. You’ve seen them pull their bodies forward by bringing their arms close to their chests underwater, and you’ve seen their upper bodies rise like a graceful new species of water creature, then dive back down following the point of their hands and arms, a beautiful wave making a hydrodynamic curve over their nearly submerged heads.

This boy won nearly every race I ever watched him swim.

So other people were watching the bump on this boy’s shoulder too.

In 1976, workers were not being told much about safety hazards at Hanford.

Neither were Native Americans, whose land still called their names.

Or farmers.

Or swimmers.

Or mothers and fathers.

Or families.

Or boys.

Animal Farm

In the 1950s, Hanford expanded its animal testing and research experiments. First, they used fish. The largest program used sheep. In a project that lasted more than a decade, scientists put concentrated radioactive iodine into sheep feed. Among the sheep receiving high doses of radioactive iodine, some developed malignant tumors. None of the ewes bore any lambs.⁸

Pygmy goats and cows, meanwhile, were used to determine how radioactive iodine traveled through mammalian milk. The scientific research had not caught up yet to the idea that radioactive contamination does not obey any boundary. Radioactive material leached mercilessly into the ground, the groundwater, plants, animals. Children born downwind of Hanford consumed the milk of exposed cows for decades.

Dogs were also used to test the effects of inhaling radioactive particles. Hairless pigs were used to try to figure out what would happen to the skin of human soldiers on a nuclear battlefield. Miniature pigs developed leukemia and bone cancer.

I’ve read about a man-made irradiated pond where maybe fifty-five alligators were kept. I can picture them, those prehistoric and toothed creatures seething under heat lamps. One article claims that the alligators “would hold their breath when they first smelled ether that was used to put them to sleep so researchers could conduct tests. Alligators can hold their breath for up to two hours.”⁹

The alligators escaped once in the 1960s. Most of them were supposedly recovered.

To further study the effects of inhaling radioactive materials, two baboons were flown in once, but they escaped their shipping crates at Los Angeles airport, and when they arrived in Hanford, “One jumped in a water fountain and splashed the people who walked by, and the other climbed to the rafters and raised holy hell for several hours.”¹⁰

In 1970 the radiological animal testing program was scaled down. In 2007 Hanford workers found and removed forty thousand tons of animal carcasses, shit, and other waste from giant burial trenches at the former experimental animal farm. A railroad tanker car had been stuffed with carcasses and buried. The tanks were filled with cats, dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, goats. Apparently when they tried to incinerate them, it didn’t work; when workers looked inside the tanker car, they found no sign of ashes, just animal carcasses wrapped in plastic, rotting.¹¹

Radionuclides were found in ducks, geese, deer, and jackrabbits at Hanford, but they were also found in animals as far away as California and Alaska.

The Columbia River is North America’s largest river that flows into the Pacific Ocean. Before it became the most radioactive river in the United States, it ran like a vein through the body of the land, giving life to animals, peoples, farms. The native salmon runs . . . well, they used to be something. The Hanford Site was chosen partly because of the Columbia’s abundant water, so it could cool the temperatures created during reactor operations to facilitate plutonium production.

Radioactive contamination showed up in fish, waterfowl, algae, insects. All the way into oyster beds in Oregon.

Native American communities were at the highest risk of contracting cancer, since their diet consisted of Columbia River contaminated salmon. As Robert Alvarez pointed out in his article “The Legacy of Hanford,” according to a 2002 study conducted by Indian tribes and the Environmental Protection Agency, “tribal children eating fish from the Hanford Reach have 100 times the risk of immune diseases and central nervous system disorders as non-Indian children,” and the risk of “contracting cancer among tribal people was estimated at 1 in 50.”¹²

Humans swam in this water, children played on the shorelines. In the 1960s, families preferred swimming near Hanford because the water was warmer, an effect of radioactive contamination.

Atomic Man

In 1976 a blast accident happened at the Hanford Site that irradiated a technician with five hundred times the occupation standard. His name was Harold McCluskey. I know that because I eventually learned about it from the news and at school. People called him the “Atomic Man.”

When I say “Harold McCluskey” to people I know from the Pacific Northwest, they get a look on their faces like maybe they might know who I am talking about, but then the look mostly fades. Many more peoples’ faces light up when I say “Doctor Manhattan.”

When the accident happened, the room Harold was in was a space used for recovering a radioactive by-product of plutonium. After the blast, Harold’s body was covered with blood. He was dragged from the room, put into an ambulance, and sent to a decontamination center. He was moved to a steel-and-concrete isolation tank by remote control, his body too contaminated for human touch.

Doctors had to remove tiny pieces of metal and glass from his skin.

Nurses bathed him and shaved him—every part of his body—every single day for months.

Harold lived and was released back into his community, but he suffered severe health problems the rest of his life. Friends and community members often avoided him.

In 2008, the Department of Energy and the contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company began preparing the Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant and the “McCluskey Room” for demolition, which has since been completed.

There’s another reason I know about Hanford, and why that knowledge never left my body. My father died years ago, but his company has been in the news my entire life. CH2M Hill won the contract for cleanup at Hanford. In 2019 there were several incidents in which workers’ skin was contaminated with radioactive waste, and the DOE said that the company needed to improve its radioactive and chemical exposure assessments, but one year later, in 2020, CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company was awarded $7.8 million by the Department of Energy.¹³ In 2019, the DOE released a report that stated the expected cost to complete the Hanford cleanup had tripled—again—in three years. Somewhere between $323 billion and $677 billion.¹⁴

My father was an architect who worked for an engineering firm called CH2M Hill. It’s funny how life carries echo effects and the traces of all the things that have happened all around you.

My father told me the story of the “Atomic Man” at dinner one night. So many years later, it’s become as buried in me as his rage and violence.

Dead Family

My swimmer friend showed up at the “Apple Capital” Wenatchee Invitational one more year. That next summer.

I didn’t faint that year.

I didn’t have to sit underneath white towels.

He didn’t bring me a cup of crushed ice.

He didn’t win his race, either.

The golf-ball-size bump on his shoulder had grown, like a third shoulder, and everyone sort of pretended not to notice . . . but of course everyone did.

I’ve had skin cancer twice in my life. One time it was on the bridge of my nose—a little red scab or sore that just wouldn’t heal. For the longest time I thought it was just that place where my glasses were rubbing. Everyone around me could see it. Students, fellow teachers, my husband. Sometimes it bled. Until my gynecologist sort of insisted, no one anywhere had ever said to me, you know, maybe you should get that checked out?

Another time I had a basal cell carcinoma removed from my back.

Who can see their own back?

A fellow swimmer probably could have.

I didn’t live anywhere near Hanford. Hanford is about three hours from Bellevue. Upwind a long way.

I don’t know why I never asked the boy from Kennewick about the bump.

I haven’t been back to Wenatchee since the last year I saw him.

I still swim, but at fifty-six years old, my shoulders ache. I wonder sometimes what they ache from. Or for.

Art

In 1983 I saw the movie Silkwood. I was twenty years old, in my second year of college, before I flunked out. In it Meryl Streep plays Karen Silkwood, a nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist who was maybe, to my mind probably, murdered—she died in a car crash while she was investigating dangerous labor practices at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant where she worked. I cried so hard at the end of the movie I couldn’t breathe.

I had a kind of echo image in my body already—the Hanford story, the Atomic Man, my father’s rage . . . the bump on a boy’s shoulder.

Karen Silkwood had forty times the legal limit of radioactive contamination in her body.

My son is nineteen. He’s never heard of Hanford, though he’s heard of the Manhattan Project. He’s never heard of the movie Silkwood either, but that’s about to change. His father and I are progressive parents who are also educators. It seems time to show it to him, even as time right now is carrying a tumor, an echo effect of other times, different fears, different brutalities. His favorite movie of all time, so far, is Dr. Strangelove.

Shoulder

The swimmer boy from Kennewick died.

Two of his brothers got thyroid and liver cancer, respectively, and they died, too. His sister developed a brain tumor and died. His father didn’t live to see fifty-five years. I don’t know about his mother. I hope she left. Kennewick is forty-one miles from Hanford by Route 4. If she stayed, it’s in her body too. Everything of Hanford. And a spent grief that no body could hold.

I just carry a story in my body, and a will toward making stories. I believe my will to make stories comes from my unwillingness to let things lie.

Something about land and animals and the bodies we bury.

Something about unearthing.

Notes

1.“Science Watch: Growing Nuclear Arsenal,” The New York Times, April 28, 1987, www.nytimes.com/1987/04/28/science/science-watch-growing-nuclear-arsenal.html.

2.Ronan Farrow and Rich McHugh, “Welcome to ‘the Most Toxic Place in America,’” NBC News, November 29, 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/welcome-most-toxic-place-america-n689141.

3.“Civilian Displacement: Hanford, WA,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, July 21, 2017, www.atomicheritage.org/history/civilian-displacement-hanford-wa.

4.“Hanford Site: Hanford Overview,” United States Department of Energy, updated January 8, 2012, archived May 11, 2012, web.archive.org/web/20120511135540/http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/HanfordOverview.

5.“RELEASES: The Green Run, Safe as Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project,” accessed February 27, 2021, www.hanfordproject.com/greenrun.html.

6.John Stang, “Spike in Radioactivity a Setback for Hanford Cleanup,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, updated December 22, 2010, www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Spike-in-radioactivity-a-setback-for-Hanford-916438.php.

7.Terry Richard, “Washington’s Hanford Becomes Part of National Historical Park,” The Oregonian, updated January 9, 2019, www.oregonlive.com/travel/index.ssf/2015/11/washingtons_hanford_becomes_pa.html.

8.Annette Cary, “Hanford, Animal Farm Advanced Radiation Research,” Tri-City Herald, October 6, 2013, www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article32146353.html.

9.Annette Cary, “Workers Uncover Carcasses of Hanford Test Animals,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, updated March 31, 2011, www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Workers-uncover-carcasses-of-Hanford-test-animals-1225341.php.

10.Cary, “Hanford, Animal Farm Advanced Radiation Research.”

11.Cary, “Workers Uncover Carcasses.”

12.Robert Alvarez, “The Legacy of Hanford,” The Nation, July 31, 2003, www.thenation.com/article/archive/legacy-hanford.

13.Annette Cary, “Hanford Contractor Awarded $7.8 Million in Annual Incentive Pay as Contract Is Expiring,” Tri-City Herald, April 3, 2020, www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article241730461.html.

14.Annette Cary, “Hanford Cleanup Costs Triple. And That’s the ‘Best Case Scenario’ in a New Report,” Tri-City Herald, updated May 1, 2019, www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225386510.html.