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First the good news: Citizen outrage has helped sway Hanford managers into performing a full-blown environmental impact statement before firing up the ol' Plutonium Finishing Plant one last time prior to decommissioning. (They like to call it a "stabilization run.")
You may also remember a Free Press article a few months back in which whistleblower Casey Ruud questioned the safety of a "stabilization run." He has been hired by the Energy Department to monitor the even more dangerous liquid waste tanks. Watch out for those nasty hydrogen-burbs, Casey.
But lately the news has been dominated by a nasty blast from the past that calls out, "Time for your plutonium injection!"
Obviously, it's always worthwhile to examine the medical and scientific community's arrogance and failure to apply basic moral standards while conducting human experiments. The United States did sign the Geneva Convention, which explicitly defined cruel human experimentations (such as those conducted by Nazi scientists) as "crimes against humanity."
Tom Carpenter, the West Coast director of the Government Accountability Project, passed along a 1963 Hanford document in which a General Electric manager (GE was the Hanford contractor at the time) raised questions about a rogue testing project not even authorized by the government.
C.E. Newton Jr., now deceased, wrote, "The experiments do not appear to have been in compliance with the criminal codes of the State of Washington and there is some question as to whether or not the experiments were conducted in compliance with federal law."
Nonetheless, he continues, such experiments "may be conducted with or without having established formal compliance with federal and state laws." But should the tests continue, Newton advised that "an official endorsement of such program testing should be specifically stated or received from the Atomic Energy Commission." (The AEC was DOE's predecessor agency.)
In other words, illegal tests are okay as long as the government knows about it. The law doesn't apply to them anyway, right?
What kinds of "good things" was GE bringing to life? No one seems to know - and if they do, they ain't telling. Carpenter speculates that GE and/or the AEC knew its reactors were dumping radioactivity into the Columbia River, and site managers wanted to know the effects on humans of consuming Columbia fish. It is also known that experiments on humans using radioactive phosphorus began in 1963.
The revelations of these experiments are important. However, it is worrisome that the government might willingly compensate victims of medical experiments, but continue to resist claims by the thousands of Hanford, Utah, and Marshall Islands downwinders exposed to secret releases and bomb fallout. Not to mention Bremerton Navy yard workers who refitted the radioactive ships that returned from the Marshall Islands tests.
At a DOE hearing last month in Seattle, Hanford farmer and downwinder Tom Baille pleaded with Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary not to differentiate between downwinders and the victims of medical experimentation. "We were just a bigger laboratory," Baille said. He then pointedly referred to the Hanford personnel - who monitored his exposure as a child by taking blood and urine samples - as "nuclear Nazis."
Despite nearly irrefutable evidence that Hanford releases caused Baille's and others' subsequent health problems, the government continues to spend millions feeding the sharks at Davis Wright Tremaine and other law firms to defend claims brought by Hanford downwinders and whistleblowers. Isn't it about time to admit that these people were injured by the actions of the government and government contractors?
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