Abstract
What did it take to pry Hanford's secrets from the Energy Department? Tenacity, and a whole lot of time.
In early 1984, i became interested in Hanford, about 150 miles from where I lived in Spokane, Washington. After an 11-year hiatus, Hanford had resumed processing plutonium to supply the raw material for President Ronald Reagan's nuclear weapons buildup. I had recently read Who Killed Karen Silkwood, which suggested that the federal government and the nuclear industry would go very far to prevent information about plutonium and its dangers from becoming public. I wondered if the government had practiced deception at Hanford. After all, Hanford was the site of the first production-scale nuclear reactors and plutonium processing facilities in the world. Was the government covering up mistakes at Hanford?
Within a matter of months, I met other citizens in Spokane who were also becoming concerned about Han-ford's present as well as its past. In September 1984 we formed an organization called the Hanford Education Action League (HEAL) and began pressing an isolated and patronizing Hanford bureaucracy to allow public participation in decisions concerning the nuclear weapons processing complex.
Our initial requests for information were denied by federal officials who said only, “Trust us.” When Hanford's managers told us not to worry, that there was no proof that anyone had ever been harmed by Hanford's past operations, we grew more suspicious and began demanding documentation to support the official contention that everything was all right. We felt the government had lied in other cases, and we wanted to find out if it was lying about Hanford.
Before long, we came in contact with Robert Alvarez, who was then with the Environmental Policy Institute. With his colleague, Bernd Franke, Alvarez was compiling a detailed request for Hanford historical documents that he was planning to file under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Their request followed their success in accessing documents concerning the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina (where the United States also processed plutonium for nuclear weapons as well as tritium). Alvarez asked HEAL and other Northwest groups concerned about Hanford to sign on to the FOIA request, which was submitted in January 1986.
One month later, Hanford released a six-foot stack (19,000 pages) of environmental reports that spanned Han-ford's operations from 1944 to 1985. As we began to read the reports, we were shocked to learn that in the first few years (before filters had been developed), normal operations resulted in large releases of iodine 131. As others in HEAL tried to stop a proposed high-level waste repository and ongoing pollution, I turned to reading each of the 19,000 pages.
I noticed that the documents were only summary reports and did not provide many details. But what the documents did provide were references to other Hanford documents, many of which were still classified. I began to compile a list of the referenced reports and, in a few months, I filed a FOIA request for those reports.
When those reports, totaling more than 20,000 pages, were released in April 1987, we learned a few more answers but were left with a new set of questions—and a new set of references. So, from 1987 to 1993, I filed more FOIA requests, 150 in all, mostly based on the references listed in previously released documents.
The Green Run and Oak Ridge
The Energy Department did not readily release every requested document. Some had to be pried loose through dogged determination that included weekly phone calls to reluctant bureaucrats. Hanford's most highly classified report concerned the Green Run, the December 2, 1949 secret experiment ordered by the U.S. Air Force to test intelligence-gathering devices used to monitor Soviet nuclear weapons production facilities. The Green Run resulted in the largest single release of iodine 131 from Hanford. Only its existence and a few details were revealed when the first documents were released in 1986, and the government repeatedly refused to release the full Green Run report.
After three more FOIA requests and appeals by HEAL, as well as legal action by the Spokesman-Review, the main Green Run report was released in May 1989. The first reference in the newly released report had been deleted; apparently even its title was classified. Following four more FOIA requests and subsequent appeals to both the Energy Department and the air force, I finally gained its public release in August 1992. That document described earlier tests similar to the Green Run, except that they involved monitoring routine emissions from both Hanford and Oak Ridge.
Biggest failure
Although the government continues to withhold certain details about the Green Run, my biggest failure came in 1993, when HEAL tried to access unclassified information: namely, financial accounting records about Han-ford's $1 billion a year cleanup budget. One could get the overall budget number and the broad outline of how it was spent. But trying to find out how much Hanford paid for a hammer or other specific items was an exercise in frustration. Publicly available documents did not list any referenced reports that could lead to the necessary details, and Hanford's contractors did not volunteer to make the task easier. Investigative journalists have also been unable to discover, for example, whether hammers bought by Hanford were cheaper than the famous $600 hammers of the Pentagon's 1980s procurement scandals.
Lessons learned
Most of the FOIA requests I filed asked for specific documents for which I already had the title, date, and document number. Being specific makes it easier for the government to locate the requested material. Still, this method has a major limitation: If you only request documents that have been referenced in other reports, then you may be missing important documents that have never been publicly referenced.
Several million pages about Han-ford's operating history are now publicly available. Most are periodic technical and environmental monitoring reports. Relatively few pertain to how Hanford managers considered the protection of health and safety in making decisions about when to process plutonium. The result is that the public has learned a great deal about what happened at Hanford but not about how or why.
Of all the information I requested about Hanford over the years, 16 documents requested in December 1991 are still undergoing declassification review. In some cases, I simply gave up, focusing instead on getting access to other documents that seemed likely to be more interesting and useful in unraveling the Hanford coverup.
The work has been difficult, but the effort has been aided by scientists, journalists, and historians who know how vital it is to a healthy democracy for government to be held accountable by its citizens.