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                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 53

Living Happily Near A Nuclear Trash Heap


The frogs and trees are radioactive, you can't catch the fish or
wade in the streams, and a doctor warns of cancer risks, but that
doesn't ruffle the people of Oak Ridge

By DICK THOMPSON/OAK RIDGE


    Dr. William Reid was new to Oak Ridge, Tenn., and
disturbed by what he was seeing. Soon after he joined the staff
of Methodist Medical Center in early 1991, he was treating four
patients with kidney cancers, an unusually large number for one
small area, and a cluster of other people who appeared to have
weakened ability to ward off infections. Reid suspected that
something in the local environment was attacking the residents'
immune systems.

    It didn't take much imagination for Reid to figure out
possible sources of contamination. For 49 years, federal
installations at Oak Ridge have manufactured the innards of
nuclear bombs. In the process, the plants have produced -- and
carelessly disposed of -- mountains of radioactive material and
hazardous wastes. Even the U.S. government admits the Oak Ridge
labs have littered the surrounding countryside with everything
from asbestos and mercury to enriched uranium. The story is much
the same at all the country's now notorious nuclear weapons
plants, scattered from Hanford, Wash., to Los Alamos, N. Mex.,
to the Savannah River plant. The Department of Energy has
launched a major clean-up effort, but it might be too late to
prevent a host of medical problems in people who have lived in
the shadow of the toxic plants for decades.

    Could a health disaster be hitting Oak Ridge? Reid was
determined to find out. Last August he called Martin Marietta
Corp., which took over management of the government's nuclear
complex from Union Carbide in 1984. The doctor wanted to report
his concerns and ask what chemicals he should test for in his
patients. If Reid thought that Martin Marietta and his employers
at Methodist Medical Center would appreciate his initiative, he
was wrong. Three weeks later, the hospital began a disciplinary
process aimed at forcing him off the staff. The doctor suspects
that the hospital and Martin Marietta were trying to thwart his
investigation. Says Reid: "They are worried they're going to
have a Bhopal on their hands." The hospital denies there is any
connection between the disciplinary action and Reid's
allegations about health problems.

    When Reid's dispute with the hospital hit the Oak Ridge
newspapers this year, the public response was strangely muted.
Residents long ago learned to live with radioactivity and risk.
This, after all, is one of the birthplaces of the Bomb, a town
whose very existence was a by-product of nuclear reactions. The
federal complex is still the largest employer of the population
of 30,000. Even the mayor is a physicist, and newspapers report
levels of background radiation each week. But decades of studies
have failed to find any gross health problems. Says Oak Ridge
physicist Chester Richmond: "People here just don't accept the
arguments that this material is going to give you cancer."

    Still, Oak Ridge is no ordinary place. Earlier this year
a visitor to one of the nuclear facilities accidentally turned
off the main road. When he tried to leave, alarms rang, and the
government bought his radioactive rental car on the spot. In the
reservation surrounding the plants, creatures ranging from deer
to frogs and water fleas have all excited Geiger counters.
Contaminated trees, which take up nuclear liquids through their
roots, have been chopped down and buried lest the autumn winds
spread radioactive leaves. And the streams have carried toxic
chemicals and nuclear products -- including strontium, tritium
and plutonium -- for distances of 64 km (40 miles). Posted along
the town's creek are NO FISHING signs and Department of Energy
warnings: no water contact.

    No one worried much about environmental contamination when
Oak Ridge quietly sprang up as part of the Manhattan Project
during World War II. By 1944, two years after construction
started, Oak Ridge had become Tennessee's fifth largest city,
and it was all behind a guarded fence. At peak production, the
"secret city" used 20% more power than New York City.

    After the products of the Manhattan Project exploded over
Japan and ended the war, the mania for secrecy diminished. The
fences surrounding the city came down, and Oak Ridge started
appearing on maps. But its work was far from done. Once the arms
race with the Soviets began, Oak Ridgers hunkered down to help
produce an arsenal of American hydrogen bombs. A recently
declassified report done for the Department of Energy found that
the weapons factories "operated in an atmosphere of high
urgency" that resulted in astounding environmental and health
assaults.

    Between 1951 and '84, the Oak Ridge plants pumped 10.2
million L (2.7 million gal.) of concentrated acids and nuclear
wastes into open-air ponds, called the "witches' cauldron," from
which the chemicals would evaporate or leach into a nearby
stream. Barrels of strange brews and experimental gases, some
so volatile that they would explode on contact with oxygen, were
sealed and dropped into a quarry pool. A neatly stacked
collection of 76,600 barrels and oil drums, filled with nuclear
sludge and now rusting, is larger than the main building at Oak
Ridge. Millions of cubic meters of toxic material, including
pcbs and cobalt 60, were dumped in trenches and covered with
soil. In 1983 the Department of Energy acknowledged that 1.1
million kg (2.4 million lbs.) of mercury had been lost. It went
up the smokestacks, drained into the soil and flowed into the
stream that runs through town. After that revelation, mercury
was found at the city's two high schools and in the blood of
workers at one of the atomic-research sites. An unknown amount
of enriched uranium went out smokestacks.

    Given this legacy, one might expect Oak Ridgers to be
dying prematurely in droves. But nothing like that has occurred.
Between 1988 and '90, cancer deaths in the county that contains
Oak Ridge were 142 per 100,000 people -- less than the 145 per
100,000 recorded for the entire state. Research shows that Oak
Ridge employees are 20% less likely to die of cancer than
Americans as a whole, perhaps because the nuclear workers all
have health insurance and good medical care.

    Local environmental activists, who tend to live outside
the city of Oak Ridge, suspect the results of reassuring
studies have been skewed. They focus on workers and not on other
members of the community. The studies look largely, though not
exclusively, at cancer deaths, rather than cases of cancer that
haven't yet proved lethal. And the best indication of radiation
hazards might not be cancer but some other disability, such as
neurological damage, immune dysfunction or birth defects. The
worst flaw seems to be that no study has been carried out on
women.

    The culture of secrecy and concern about job security may
have kept information from health investigators. Says Robert
Keil, president of the Oak Ridge Atomic Trades and Labor
Council: "One thing that kept people from coming forward is that
they were afraid they might jeopardize their security clearance
by talking about something that was classified."

    The end of the cold war provides an opportunity to get at
the truth. At Oak Ridge, as at other weapons labs, the threat
of a nuclear conflict has been replaced by the threat of
massive layoffs. The big job in town now seems to be cleaning
up the nuclear trash heap. More than $1.5 billion has already
been spent on detoxifying Oak Ridge, and the end isn't in
sight. The government is beginning an exhaustive medical survey
of the people who live around Oak Ridge, including the women.
The Centers for Disease Control has been asked to look into
Reid's allegations.

    But confident of the outcome, the people of Oak Ridge
still sleep soundly. They have lived with danger for decades and
see no reason to start panicking now.