The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River by Richard White

Author:Richard White [White, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Barbara -add to kindle, created by hanna, Cultural Anthropology, Ecosystems & Habitats, Editing -in progress, Fish & whildlife, Hanna -add to kindle, Hanna -to read, Hartmut -cd, History, History -American West, History -NW, History -Pacific NW, History -West, Local, Natural History, Nature, Nature & Animals, Nature & Environment, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Sociology, Tech & Sociology, Technology & civilization, Upload, Environmental Conservation & Protection, Environmental & Natural Resources
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

When the BPA turned to nuclear power it still turned to the Columbia, for at Hanford the river was already part of one of the largest concentrations of nuclear reactors in the world. WPPSS and the BPA hoped to add new reactors to them and create a nuclear park. Hanford, Senator Warren Magnuson said, “could well become in the years ahead, what the Columbia River system has been for the past thirty years.” Its old reactors had produced plutonium for bombs. Its new reactors would produce electricity.

Dams are organic machines that last a long time, but plutonium makes the dams seem as transient as sunlight sparkling on the water. The half-life of plutonium is nearly 25,000 years, and Glenn Seaborg, the physicist who discovered it in 1940, described it as “fiendishly toxic.” A “particle the size of an ordinary speck of dust, about 0.6 microgram, constitutes the ‘maximum permissible body burden’ ” in an adult. Manufacturing it creates a stew of less deadly, shorter-lived, but ultimately more troublesome radioactive substances: radioiodine (1-131), radioisotopes of phosphorus (P-32), zinc (Zn-65), chromium (Cr-51), neptunium (Np-239), arsenic (As-76), and many others.

The Hanford Engineer Works, as the Hanford site was originally named, was a “bomb factory.” It manufactured plutonium. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr had told American scientists that “to get the fissionable material necessary to make a bomb” they would have to “turn the whole country into a factory.” He exaggerated, of course; the factory took up counties not countries. The Hanford Engineer Works became part of an interlocking set of laboratories, manufacturing sites, and testing grounds spread across the nation. The Columbia, too, became part of the factory.

In December 1942, Colonel Franklin Matthias, acting for the Army’s Manhattan Project, had chosen a sparsely populated stretch of struggling orchards, farms, and ranches along the Columbia River beginning a few miles north of the mouth of the Yakima River as the site for the manufacture of plutonium. Hanford itself was a small town tainted with failures. It was a failed irrigation project named for and promoted by an impeached federal judge. The town had survived its failures. It would not survive the success of becoming a major government complex. The government bought out and evicted everyone within the reservation, condemning some of the land and leasing the rest.

The government created a new kind of space—an atomic space—on the Columbia. The 670 square miles of reservation that surrounded the complex of reactors and processing plants was half the size of Rhode Island, a state which exists for the West largely as a convenient yardstick to emphasize western vastness and eastern insignificance. But this fractional Rhode Island was tightly bounded and heavily buffered to keep in not only the toxic substances that plutonium production spewed out into the air but the very knowledge of those dangerous substances. Matthias chose Hanford primarily for its isolation. This land, emptied of its inhabitants, would serve as a buffer necessary because of the great but still largely unknown dangers involved in the manufacture of plutonium.

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