Unmaking the Bomb by Shannon Cram;

Author:Shannon Cram;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520395138
Publisher: University of California Press

A tumbleweed waits at one of Hanford’s entrance gates, 2017. Photo by author.

Other tales have become legend with decades of retelling, their details softening with time. There is Norm Buske’s jam, made with mulberries he picked near the N reactor and sent to Washington’s governor as evidence of site hazards.39 There is the worker who set off radiation alarms after eating oysters from Willapa Bay (more than one hundred miles downstream of Hanford).40 There are the irradiated alligators that escaped from the site’s Experimental Animal Farm in the 1960s, slipping into the Columbia River unseen. Project scientists recaptured two of them and a local fisherman caught the third, displaying it in a nearby sporting goods shop until Hanford officials confiscated it. “The last two were never found,” a retired worker warned a group of us on our way to the B reactor in 2017. “Keep a look out,” he winked.41

The story I return to most often, however, is the “fruit fly incident” of 1998.42 It began as a mystery, a health physics technician (HPT) named Tracy told me at her kitchen table as we sipped hot mugs of cherry tea.43 In September of that year, her fellow HPTs had identified a strange pattern of contamination in a mobile office trailer that workers were using as a lunch room. First, they noticed that the trailer’s light switch was radioactive, followed by a small kitchen knife and cutting board, leading them to believe that the source was someone’s contaminated hand. When they found radioactive chewing tobacco in the trailer’s garbage bin, they worried that the individual may have been internally contaminated as well. Later that night, when a worker reported a pair of contaminated socks in their home, the question appeared to be answered.

However, bioassays of the worker’s urine did not show elevated levels of radioactivity.44 Instead, an HPT identified the source the following day when she noticed a speck of contamination in the same trailer “fly away.”45 Perplexed, she called her partner and together they repeated the exercise, realizing that fruit flies—a previously unidentified vector at Hanford—were to blame.

In the weeks that followed, DOE offered multiple hypotheses for the flies’ radioactivity before pinpointing a waste diversion pit that had recently been sprayed with a monosaccharide-based fixative. The insects had been drawn to the sugary-sweet substance, laid eggs in the waste, and their progeny had spread contamination across the site.46 Subsequent surveys detected their tiny footprints in a bathroom, the ironworker shop, the canister storage building, the clothing of at least three workers, several dumpsters, and eventually the city landfill.47

Evoking the plot of Them!, a 1954 horror film about mutant killer ants, the incident made for easy headlines: “Hanford’s Nuke Site Produces ‘Hot’ Bugs,” “Bugs May Be Spreading Radiation at Nuke Plant,” “Radiation Bugging Hanford.”48 The local Tri-City Herald published its first article after an anonymous tip, and the story spread rapidly across the country.

DOE management leapt into action, struggling to contain both the flies and the meaning of their escape. It

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