Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Hanford

  • The Hanford Plaintiffs

    The Hanford Plaintiffs

    Trisha T. Pritikin’s powerful book, The Hanford Plaintiffs, tells a quintessential American story. A rural community in Washington state is among the first to experience the terrifying consequences of the nuclear age. Beginning in the 1940s, locals began to take notice of strange and unexplainable happenings. Without warning, people began to suffer more frequent nose bleeds, and headaches, muscular weakness and sore throats, thyroid conditions, leukemia, and numerous other sicknesses. New moms suffered miscarriages, and neonatal deaths. More people were dying from heart attacks, and various forms of cancer. In their farmlands, they observed lambs born weakened with terrible deformities, sheep and cattle dying.

    Why was all this happening? What they didn’t know was that a nearby facility producing plutonium for the atomic bomb, was releasing radioactive wastes into the wind, and the water of the Columbia River.

    In a futile effort over many decades, they tried to tell their stories, but were denied justice, by court indifference, interminable bureaucratic delay, and lies by the US government. Now, decades later, through the unrelenting efforts of Pritikin and her colleagues, twenty-four of the Hanford Plaintiffs at last tell their stories, told in their own words, that serve as a stark warning to our world: this can happen to you.

    Frank C. Bognar, D.P.A. is Chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Cancer Threat from Radioactive Leaks at Hanford

    On August 9, 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Within a radius of one mile, destruction was total. People were vaporized so that the only shadows on concrete pavements were left to show where they had been. Many people outside the radius of total destruction were trapped in their collapsed houses, and were burned alive by the fire that followed. By the end of 1945, an estimated 80,000 men, women, young children, babies and old people had died as a result of the bombing. As the years passed more people continued to die from radiation sickness.

    Plutonium for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had been made at an enormous nuclear reactor station located at Hanford in the state of Washington. During the Cold War, the reactors at Hanford produced enough weapons-usable plutonium for 60,000 nuclear weapons. The continued existence of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium-235 in the stockpiles of nuclear weapons states hangs like a dark cloud over the future of humanity. A full scale thermonulcear war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, threatening to make the world permanently uninhabitable.

    Besides playing a large role in the tragedy of Nagasaki, the reactor complex at Hanford has damaged the health of many thousands of Americans. The prospects for the future are even worse. Many millions of gallons of radioactive waste are held in Hanford’s aging storage tanks, the majority of which have exceeded their planned lifetimes. The following quotations are taken from a Wikipedia article on Hanford, especially the section devoted to ecoloogical concerns:

    “A huge volume of water from the Columbia River was required to dissipate the heat produced by Hanford’s nuclear reactors. From 1944 to 1971, pump systems drew cooling water from the river and, after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned it to the river. Before being released back into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basins for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected  by this retention, and several tetrabecquerels  entered the river every day. These releases were kept secret by the federal government. Radiation was later measured downstream as far west as the Washington and Oregon coasts.”

    “The plutonium separation process also resulted in the release of radioactive isotopes into the air, which were carried by the wind throughout southeastern Washington and into parts of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and British Colombia. Downwinders were exposed to radionuclide’s, particularly  iodine-131…  These radionuclide’s filtered into the food chain via contaminated fields where dairy cows grazed; hazardous fallout was ingested by communities who consumed the radioactive food and drank the milk. Most of these airborne releases were a part of Hanford’s routine operations, while a few of the larger releases occurred in isolated incidents.”

    “In response to an article in the Spokane Spokesman Review in September 1985, the Department of Energy announced its intent to declassify environmental records and in February, 1986 released to the public 19,000 pages of previously unavailable historical documents about Hanford’s operations. The Washington State Department of Health collaborated with the citizen-led Hanford Health Information Network (HHIN) to publicize data about the health effects of Hanford’s operations. HHIN reports concluded that residents who lived downwind from Hanford or who used the Columbia River downstream were exposed to elevated doses of radiation that placed them at increased risk for various cancers and other diseases.”

    “The most significant challenge at Hanford is stabilizing the 53 million U.S. Gallons (204,000 m3) of high-level radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks. About a third of these tanks have leaked waste into the soil and groundwater. As of 2008, most of the liquid waste has been transferred to more secure double-shelled tanks; however, 2.8 million U.S. Gallons (10,600 m3) of liquid waste, together with 27 million U.S. gallons (100,000 m3) of salt cake and sludge, remains in the single-shelled tanks.That waste was originally scheduled to be removed by 2018. The revised deadline is 2040. Nearby aquifers contain an estimated 270 billion U.S. Gallons (1 billion m3) of contaminated groundwater as a result of the leaks. As of 2008, 1 million U.S. Gallons (4,000 m3) of highly radioactive waste is traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River.”

    The documents made public in 1986 revealed that radiation was intentionally and secretly released by the plant and that people living near to it acted as unknowing guinea pigs in experiments testing radiation dangers. Thousands of people who live in the vicinity of the Hanford Site have suffered an array of health problems including thyroid cancers, autoimmune diseases and reproductive disorders that they feel are the direct result of these releases and experiments.

    In thinking about the dangers posed by leakage of radioactive waste, we should remember that many of the dangerous radioisotopes involved have half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years.  Thus, it is not sufficient to seal them into containers that will last for a century or even a millennium. We must find containers that will last for a hundred thousand years or more, longer than any human structure has ever lasted. This logic has lead Finland to deposit its radioactive waste in a complex of underground tunnels carved out of solid rock. But looking ahead for a hundred thousand years involves other problems: If humans survive for that long, what language will they speak? Certainly not the languages of today. How can we warn them that the complex of tunnels containing radioactive waste is a death trap? The reader is urged to see a film exploring these problems, “Into Eternity”,  by the young Danish film-maker Michael Madsen.

    We have already gone a long way towards turning our beautiful planet earth into a nuclear wasteland. In the future, let us be more careful, as guardians of a precious heritage, the natural world and the lives of all future generations.

    John Avery is a leader in the Pugwash movement in Denmark.

  • Inside Hanford: A Trip to America’s Most Toxic Place

    This article was originally published at Counter Punch St. Clair’s book “Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes From the Dark Side of the Earth” can be purchased from www.amazon.com.

    The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.

    Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.

    Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.

    One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.

    Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.

    A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”

    This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”

    No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”

    Needless to say, the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional hearings after the Inspector General’s report was released, bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson in the art of concealment: The easiest way to avoid bad press and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the most likely to produce unpleasant information.

    It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks since the moment it learned of them.

    How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The DOE isn’t talking. It isn’t even looking for answers. But geologists estimated that the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium, will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia in something like twenty-five years. That means that the first traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.

    This reckless strategy persists. In a document called “Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum, called the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford’s soils and water table.

    If the DOE remains locked onto this course it will never acknowledge or even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward the great river of the West. That’s because the managers of Hanford say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.

    To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of forty feet—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region of the most dangerous contamination.

    There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped into a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now under construction. There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.

    There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive, and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the surface—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had “reached groundwater in this area of the tank farm.”

    Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant. How far have faster moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one knows. No one is even looking.

    The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close down the C Quadrant of the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 percent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks. There is mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.

    John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top environmental engineers and a world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or avoid collecting it entirely.

    A decade later, Brodeur has once again been asked to assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth, this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His conclusions are disturbing.

    “There remains much that we don’t know about the subsurface contamination plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur. “The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify what we don’t know up front and get it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of omission are standard practice and people lose their jobs because they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”

    This essay is adapted from a chapter in Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth (CounterPunch/AK Press).

    Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest books, Born Under a Bad Sky and Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland (co-edited with Joshua Frank) are just out from AK Press. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

  • Downwinders Eligible for Worker Compensation and Health Care

    As seen in media accounts posted onto Downwinders onelist, the Hanford offsite exposure health hearings were held the last week of January in Kennewick, Washington. Almost 200 people were in attendance.

    In spite of numerous requests, the Department of Energy has refused thusfar to hold site hearings (like the worker site hearings held over the last two years) on offsite exposures and health problems. This hearing was therefore convened by the Hanford Health Effects Subcommittee and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).

    The verbatim transcript and videotape of the testimony made during this hearing provide clear evidence of significant health problems amongst offsite exposed populations, as requested by the DOE. To many, of course, provision of further evidence would seem unnecessary, as many family members of nuclear workers, who themselves suffer today from cancers, autoimmune thyroiditis, other autoimmune disorders, and other serious health problems, testified during the DOE site hearings on worker health problems held over the past two years. This evidence of offsite exposure health problems, and serious health problems amongst Nevada Test site exposed populations who are not currently eligible for any kind of help within the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) is already out there. Why are we asked by the DOE for even further evidence to be provided?

    We want to be clear that we are very supportive of compensation and health care for those within the DOE nuclear complex who have developed cancers and other serious health problems which are more likely than not caused by their exposures on site. But, there are those exposed outside the site fenceline who have developed the same cancers and other health problems as have developed in workers, and who have been subjected to the same exposure health risk as workers.

    If these individuals were nuclear workers, rather than offsite exposed persons, they would be eligible under the new DOE compensation and health care initiative. To deprive these eligible individuals of government help based on the fact that they were exposed outside rather than inside the site fenceline is not only illogical but entirely unjust.

    EQUAL EXPOSURE HEALTH RISK, UNEQUAL TREATMENT

    THE TEST CASE: The only radionuclide for which “official” reconstructed doses have been provided by the government, is radioiodine, or I-131. Currently, estimated, reconstructed I-131 doses are available for those exposed to Hanford nuclear reservation historic offsite airborne releases, for Nevada Test Site atomic test fallout releases, and for Oak Ridge offsite plus Nevada Test Site I-131 releases, combined.

    It is for this reason, that radioiodine logically serves as the test case for inclusion within the DOE health care and compensation initiative, of offsite exposed persons who qualify within the eligibility criteria defined for that initiative.

    DOWNWINDERS MEET ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

    Under the DOE nuclear worker compensation and health care initiative, the exposure to the worker in question must fall within guidelines for determining whether the worker’s cancer was at least “as likely as not” to have been caused by his or her exposure on the job.

    The determination of exposure dose received for workers provides workers with a range of possible doses, when worker exposure records are not available. Eligibility under the new law requires that the specified cancer be “at least as likely as not” related to exposure on the job. This is based upon a reconstructed radiation dose at the upper 99% confidence limit of the estimate of probability of causation in the published radioepidemiological tables. Probability of causation refers to the probability that an exposure resulted in the cancer or other health outcome that a person now has.

    Where is the logic or the justice in depriving involuntarily exposed members of offsite populations (which includes, of course, those exposed to Nevada Test Site fallout, which contained I-131 as well as a range of other biologically significant radionuclides) of this compensation or health care if certain offsite exposed persons (“downwinders”) have cancers or any other health problems which are within the recognized list of health problems of the DOE nuclear worker initiative, and if these individuals also have reconstructed doses which, when translated to probability of causation, would qualify them for compensation and health care if these individuals were nuclear workers?

    These were involuntary exposures. These were very often childhood exposures. These infants and children were exposed before they even had a chance to say NO.

    People who were children in the l950s and l960s were exposed involuntarily to several significant sources of I-131:

    l. Nevada Test Site: (1951-1957) released 150 million curies of I-131, along with a range of other biologically significant radionuclides.

    2. Marshall Islands (l952-1958) thermonuclear tests released 8 billion curies of I-131.

    3. Former USSR- ( 1958-62) thermonuclear tests released 12 billion curies of I-131, much of which deposited globally.

    These doses must be added together, each within an uncertainty range, in order to obtain a person’s total exposure dose, for a particular radionuclide (in this test case, I-131). It is well known that one predictor of radiogenic thyroid disease is the size of the thyroid as vs the size of the dose. A baby’s or child’s tiny thyroid absorbs virtually all of the radioiodine over its decay time, delivering therefore a dose twenty times the dose to an adult thyroid.

    Note that radioiodine is only one of a range of biologically significant radionuclides released from local DOE sites, released within Nevada Test Site fallout, from Marshall Islands tests, and from tests in the former Soviet Union. All of these sources contributed to the overall dose, and exposure health risk to which people were involuntarily subjected.

    Thusfar, only one radionuclide, I-131, has been addressed by our government. There is significant danger than, unless the public loudly and repeatedly demands that the other biologically significant radionuclides be addressed as well, through government funded provision of estimated, added doses and health risk from exposure to these other radionuclides, that I-131 is the only radionuclide for which we will EVER have any sort of dose information. Dose information is required before dose can be translated into probability of causation for offsite populations who have existing potentially radiogenic disease. If only I-131 doses are provided (at the present time, Marshall Island and former USSR I-131 fallout doses have NOT been provided), those exposed offsite will forever be kept from the knowledge of their true exposures, and from knowing how those exposures may have damaged their health. Why should workers be given this information, and helped by our government, while their children, friends and neighbors who were subjected to the same exposure health risk, are left out in the cold?

    ALERTING CONGRESS, THE MEDIA, AND THE PUBLIC

    We must alert the media, Members of Congress, and others concerned with the welfare of people whose lives have been damaged by the legacy of bomb production and testing in this country, to the need to include offsite exposed people who meet the eligibility criteria for exposed workers within the DOE nuclear workers compensation and health care initiative, to the importance of providing these offsite exposed individuals (including Nevada Test Site exposed) with the health care and government funded help they need and deserve.

    These individuals exposed outside the fenceline have sacrificed and suffered for our country no less than those who were exposed within the fenceline.

    Trisha Pritikin

    Daughter of Hanford nuclear workers

  • Betrayal

    It’s as safe as mother’s milk, they’ll say When wanting to assure you that it’s all O.K. But mother’s milk can be a deadly dish If mom, a downwinder, eats Columbia River’s fish, Or consumes white snow – garden salads on the spot Then mother’s milk can become a deadly lot.

    So I fed poison to my nursing son With radioactive iodine-131. Just because we lived in the wrong place I maimed my babe for that nuclear race.

    This was written by a woman who has lived all of her life in Eastern Washington and remembers consuming local milk and produce around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Her husband loved to fish the Columbia River downstream from Hanford. Her name withheld by request. She says, “When [my youngest son] was seven – and again when he was eight years old – I had two surgeries for thyroid cancers. I didn’t tell people because it would be hard on our children….

    “In 1985 my husband died quite suddenly. Early in 1986 word got out that radioactive iodine-131 and other pollutants had been released in large amounts by the government just to see what would happen to us downwinders from the nuclear plant at Hanford, Washington.

    With the injuries from my thyroid cancers and the worry over my husband’s bladder and bone cancers, I was very angry and felt betrayed by my government. They used us as guinea pigs but we weren’t even that good because the government never followed up to see what did happen to us downwinders. I write poems, but they are all too mild for my anger at my government.” [Reprinted from the Hanford Health Information Network.]

    This atrocity against all people is once again in the news.

    In an extraordinary but not surprising statement, the Department of Energy has admitted that an explosion of a toxic radioactive waste container at the plant on May 14, 1997 exposed workers and released toxic materials into the atmosphere, including plutonium. This from the supposedly “closed” plant, the former flagship of the Department of War’s nuclear bomb plants (that’s what the Defense Department used to be called until the name was changed after World War II – it makes easier to get money from the taxpayers when you are asking for a “defense” budget rather than a “war” budget). Hanford may now rival Chernobyl as the most toxic site on planet Earth, with cleanup costs (if cleanup is even possible for such a site) estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The site promises to be toxic for tens of thousands of years.

    The May 14th explosion and series of errors is just part of the legacy of this nightmarish place. We as human beings must be angry about that place and what it represents. We must learn what is going on there and use our power to get something done about it.

    Since 1943 when 600 square miles of land in Washington State was legally condemned and 1,500 residents of the towns of Richland, Hanford, and White Bluffs were ordered to leave their homes within 30 days, Hanford has released hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactive iodine-131 and other radioactive by-products into the atmosphere. Between 1944 and 1972, Hanford released as much as 740,000 curies of iodine-131 into the air!

    For comparison, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant partial core meltdown in 1979 released 15 curies of radioactive iodine-131 into the air; the Chernobyl accident released 35 million to 49 million curies of iodine-131 in 1986.

    Thousands of lives have been adversely affected by this subtle, insidious, and mostly intentional radiation poisoning. Only today are some of these victims realizing what has given them cancer, killed their mates and children, and so horribly affected their lives. This information was kept secret until February 1986, when public pressure resulted in the release of 19,000 pages of U.S. Department of Energy documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

    During the 30 years of Hanford’s operation, a staggering 440 billion gallons of radioactive toxic wastes were dumped into the ground! Underground nuclear waste tanks have leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of waste. No complete records of the exact contents of these waste containers were kept, so the clean-up teams don’t even know what they are dealing with most of the time.

    But the Cold War is over, you may say, right? Is it really. Is there anything behind the talk we hear of peace from our leaders? Has much of anything changed? It doesn’t appear so. In fact, it could be argued that things are much worse. Things are different, but the building of our nuclear arsenal has not stopped.

    Did you know that in 1990, the amount of plutonium in the civilian sector of the world was 654 metric tons and in the military was 257 metric tons? By the year 2010, the amount of military plutonium is expected to remain the same while the civilian plutonium will grow to 2,100 metric tons! Civilian plutonium is plutonium produced in power generating nuclear reactors. Plutonium is a by-product of these reactors and many countries are planning to use this deadly material to power other reactors. This plutonium could conceivably be used to make a nuclear bomb.

    We still spend over a trillion dollars world-wide on the military. Countries all over the world are building nuclear weapons stockpiles. The U.S continues to test nuclear weapons – they call them “sub-critical tests” to get around the current moratorium on testing – because the military wants to build a new generation of smaller, more powerful nuclear bombs. Scotland, of all places, is estimated to have as many as 266 Trident submarine warheads, many purchased from the U.S., each one a powerful nuclear weapon. It is estimated that Britain builds a new nuclear bomb every 8 days!

    Five countries have nuclear-powered naval vessels: Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France and China. Even India is currently building a nuclear sub! The submarines of the Western countries typically have only one reactor on board, whereas two reactors power most Russian submarines. Excluding Russia, these nations have 132 nuclear submarines. Russia has 109 nuclear subs in its fleet. Britain has 13 nuclear subs, France has 11, and China has 6. The United States, the country of “peace,” has a staggering 101 nuclear submarines. Two hundred and forty one nuclear subs in the world!

    At least 20 nuclear bomb-carrying U.S. subs are at sea 24 hours a day, each ready to fire on virtually any target in 15 minutes. One U.S. Trident submarine carries the explosive power of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. The locations of these subs is the most closely guarded of secrets.

    And we are still building more! Nine nuclear submarines are under construction in the U.S. alone. So much for the end of wartime.

    “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,” said Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe and later President of the United States, referring to the atomic bomb dropped on Japan.

    And we must remember the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities murdered by the U.S. But we had to do this to end the war, didn’t we? Well, diaries and documents released since then tell a different story. It seems that President Truman and his senior staff did not believe that we needed to drop the bomb on Japan to end the war. They believed that Japan would surrender without an invasion. In fact, diplomatic contacts and decoded Japanese wireless transmissions proved that surrender was imminent. So why was the bomb used?

    Records suggest that Truman and his advisors believed that if they showed the world that they were willing to use the bomb, it would aid them in negotiating with Stalin over the future of Eastern and Central Europe. There was also a pervasive, racist disregard for Japanese life. The bomb was used to literally burn a memory into the minds of communist and non-European nations of an image of scientific and technological superiority for the Allied countries.

    So, for the sake of image and to test the effects of our new weapons, 200 000 human lives were horribly ended and since 1945, more than 680,000 people have died or have been affected by the radiation released in those blasts.

    These are sobering revelations. I wonder personally what to do with all this awareness. During an Environmental Science class I taught yesterday, I was trying to share environmental awareness with people who had never considered these issues before. Three of my students were police officers who, in the course of their duties, have witnessed the aftermath of illegal toxic spills and see the effects of a disconnected world daily. They fight each day for personal survival, let alone have the time for global thinking. I sometimes feel deflated at the daunting task of opening my fellow travelers’ eyes. But we must go on. We must love the beauty of this world and work towards stopping the folly.

    Nuclear madness must stop. We can stop it. Everyday, we should do these things:

    1. E-mail or write our elected representatives (the Resources section below will tell you how) and tell them to stop this nuclear madness.
    2. Not support nuclear power in any form. Governments and corporations cannot be trusted with that power. There is no way that the relatively small amount of electrical power that is produced can justify the nuclear waste, the excess plutonium, or the temptations to make bombs.
    3. Insist that our elected representatives do something NOW about those who are suffering from the effects of Hanford and all the other bomb-making plants in the country. Insist that they stop all the studies and simply use the abundant money available in the world to help these people. We must stop letting them whine about who should be responsible and simply make them take responsibility. (Still think that money is an issue? See the Resources section below.)
    4. All nuclear testing must stop. Now. The U.S. must show the world that it is willing to take the first step.
    5. The U.S. must get out of the arms business. We sell our weapons of destruction to other nations. This is nuts and it must stop.
    6. All nuclear submarines should come home NOW. Set them up in ports around the country, build impenetrable “caskets” around them (NASA has the technology to build these cases – they do for their deep space probes) as museums so that people can learn of how insane we can be.
    7. Refuse to trade with any country with nuclear war technology.

    But there are so many other horrors in our world? How can we invite this awareness into our lives and survive? I think we can, every day.

    • We must surround ourselves with this knowledge and awareness and get very very angry. Feel the obscenity of these numbers, feel the horror of these events.
    • Then, feel your feet firmly on the ground and take a deep breath. Center yourself. You have work to do.
    • Look at your own personal priorities. What does your day look like? Do you take the time to nurture yourself – take a bath, do something creative, take a nap, exercise? Do you take the time to spend meaningful moments with those in your life that you love? Or do you feel hopelessly driven from one activity to another, not really in control of your own time?
    • Change your priorities. Make the time for nurturing activities and communication with loved ones. Don’t wait for someone or something to come into your life that will allow this to happen. Do it now.
    • Decide what is important to you. What values do you want to have? What values do you want the world to have? What do you want to be remembered for when you are gone? What do you want children to think of you?
    • Make “mindfulness moments” part of your every day, time when you will fully allow the awareness horrors in the world to come in. Visualize the starving child, the suffering and frustrated person poisoned by Hanford, the homeless, the nuclear stockpiles, the Trident submarines traveling at sea, waiting to strike, and whatever else you have chosen to care about.
    • Take an action of some kind every day. Teach someone about what you know. Send e-mail messages to your elected representatives making your demands clear. Choose to not buy something from a socially irresponsible company and write them a note telling them about it. Use your power every day.
    • Allow yourself an occasional “day-off.” Bring your vision for change to mind in some quiet moments, pray for peace, and then go do something for yourself or your loved ones. After a while, you won’t need a day-off.
    • Look at each day as a precious, vital collection of moments that must be savored, for they will never occur again.

    Awareness does not have to be feared. Your day can include walking around the block in the morning, loving your partner, going to work, taking time to see the trees at lunch or wishing there were some, writing an e-mail message to your senator, and having dinner. We can make the desire for change a daily part of our life rather than a feared, unfulfilled dream.

    We must take our power now. Hanford will always be there to remind us of what can happen when people believe the unbelievable – that those in Washington have anything other than a personal agenda of terror and greed. And those nuclear subs will continue to sail – until we say STOP!

    Please, dear mother Earth, Help me to stand firm on my own two feet Drawing on the solid earth below me Help me to know the constancy of your strength the power that is you, oh dear mother earth Help me to walk with the blood of rivers in my veins and the dark crumbling soil of earth in my flesh let my muscles be strong as tree trunks that rise up out of your belly To dance in the sky and sing praises to the life all around Beating, pulsing, rich and full with your sweet energy. Oh dear mother earth live in this body today. Sing loudly in every breath I take Stretch wildly and flow freely with all the directions I move and come home with me, come home to my belly live deep in my soul oh mother earth, SING!

    — Stephanie Kaza

    Ah, not be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner – what is it? if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

    — Ranier Maria Rilke

    * Jackie Giuliano is a Professor of Environmental Studies for Antioch University, Los Angeles, the University of Phoenix, and the Union Institute College of Undergraduate Studies. He is also the Educational Outreach Manager for the Ice and Fire Preprojects, a NASA program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to send space probes to Jupiter’s moon Europa, the planet Pluto, and the Sun.