Secrets, Lies and Operation Bluenose Radiation Releases

 

October 2000

 

            The old adage “what you don’t know can’t hurt” does not apply to toxic radioactive substances released into the environment by the United States government during secret military operations. These releases continue to affect the health of tens of thousands of Americans living in the shadow of nuclear weapons production and testing sites.

            This article explains what is currently known about one such military discharge program of radioactive substances. The information within it has been gleaned from my reading of hundreds of U.S. documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  Many more documents, however, continue to be shrouded by a cloak of secrecy. The U.S. government’s insistence that documents over forty years old pose a threat to national security does not meet the laugh test much less the most basic test of an open democratic society.

            In the late 1940's and 1950's, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and U.S. the Air Force implemented a secret program code named Operation Bluenose.   The program’s objective was to determine the Soviet Union’s plutonium production levels in order to help them evaluate the extent of the Russians’ nuclear weapons capability.  The general idea behind Bluenose was to analyze fission product gases released into the atmosphere during the Soviet Union’s reprocessing of reactor fuel. ^[1] 

            Although the Air Force had developed a high altitude spy plane, called the U-2, that could over-fly the Soviet nuclear production sites and conduct reconnaissance, it wanted to verify not only that the Soviets were producing plutonium but how much was being produced. In order to accomplish this next level of military intelligence, the Air Force had to refine the fission air sampling process that could be used by the U-2 planes. Operation Bluenose was created to achieve this goal.

            In order to correlate fission product sample data collected by the U-2's flying at 100,000 feet with what was being produced on the ground, however, a simulated experiment needed to be designed.   The solution was to run the U.S. nuclear production plants “Soviet style” and over-fly them with the U-2's. ^[2]  Since the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) knew the U.S. plutonium production rates for each plant on a virtual hourly basis, the U-2 fission product monitoring sample, collected by the U-2's flying at 100,000 feet, could be correlated to a specific production rate.

            To simulate the kind of testing the U-2 monitoring instruments, the Air Force coordinated over-flights with the timing of specific process runs at U.S. nuclear plants at Hanford, Washington, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.  The air sampling instruments available at the time, however, were not sensitive enough to distinguish the variations in the fission product gases released from the U.S. plants, yet there were significant differences.

            In the rush to catch up to the United States, the Soviets were saving time by reprocessing “green” reactor fuel, as opposed to first cooling the fuel for a year before reprocessing.  Cooling the fuel in water pools after extraction from the reactor allows the short-lived fission by-products, like the highly toxic Iodine-131, to safely decay so that when the fuel is eventually processed, less fission products are released to the environment. It was well known at the time that if the reactor fuel is allowed to cool, less Iodine-131 and other highly toxic radionuclides are released into the environment.  ^[3]

            These highly toxic fission products pose a major hazard to public health.   In the early years of the nuclear arms race, both countries reprocessed green fuel; however, the Americans installed some minimally effective filters to reduce emissions and gradually increased the fuel cooling time, except for secret projects like the Operation Bluenose.   These projects benefited from the release of large amounts of fission by-products and thus allowed the U-2's to more easily calibrate the air sample with the amount of nuclear fuel being processed on the ground.

            This is clearly revealed by documents gained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1986 by the Hanford Education Action League.  These documents describe how, in an effort to satisfy military intelligence needs, the AEC recommended that other tests be conducted at Hanford that would release more radiation and also asked that plant filters be disconnected Clearly, the AEC was trying to simulate at the U.S. plants what was happening in the Soviet Union by processing “green fuel.”  The move to “green fuel” was also done for nuclear processing runs at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL), so called RaLa Runs during the 1940s and 1950s, despite the consequences of increased radiation releases to the public health.

            While working on the Hanford Downwinder class-action lawsuit, Owen Hoffman, ^[4]  President of the SENES Oak Ridge Center for Risk Analysis, determined that approximately 900,000 curies of Iodine_131 were released by the AEC’s Hanford plants between 1944 and 1957 during the period known as the Hanford Green Runs.  This amount is 150,000 curies more than the "official" Centers for Disease Control estimates generated by the agency’s Hanford Dose Reconstruction Health Study.  The infamous Three-Mile Island reactor meltdown, acknowledged as the most serious commercial nuclear accident, released about 15 curies of Iodine-131.  Clearly, the most serious nuclear accident in U.S. history pales in comparison to Hanford releases, but they are not the only ones of similar significance.

            Based on his research for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Health Study, Hoffman also believes that the RaLa Run Iodine-131 releases (the Oak Ridge equivalent of the Hanford Green Runs) are grossly underestimated by the public health agency.  This RaLa program, like the infamous Hanford Green Runs, also processed green reactor fuel, but for a different purpose: to extract isotopes used for AEC radiological warfare experiments.  They were also used by the Air Force to meet the needs of Operation Bluenose.

            The RaLa Runs program was transferred from Oak Ridge to INEEL in 1956 because the huge releases of radioactivity threatened populations living close to Oak Ridge.  Operation Bluenose, the Hanford Green Runs, met the Air Forces Operation Bluenose requirements to simulate the Soviet plutonium production practices, so they too were used for this purpose.

            The term  RaLa is an abbreviation for Radioactive Lanthanum-140 which is a decay product of Barium-140. RaLa refers to all phases of Barium-140 production.  These isotopes were produced for the Los Alamos National Laboratory and used in radiological warfare tests designed to kill people but not destroy infrastructure. Barium-140 shared some of the physical properties of plutonium and could be used to disperse radiation.  With a shorter half-life of twelve days, it did not permanently contaminate the environment the way plutonium does.  The importance of fully disclosing these secret operations and quantifying the amount of Iodine-131 is of critical importance to public health.  Iodine-131 is one of the more biologically hazardous radionuclides with a well-known causal effect on the thyroid gland.

            Initially, Air Force U-2 spy planes over-flying U.S.nuclear production sites and the INEEL RaLa runs, conducted between 1954 and 1963, were distinctly separate programs.  The Air Force, however, opportunistically used them all in their Bluenose over-flights.

            Initially, the U-2 planes sampled for Iodine-131, but in later years, switched to Krypton-85 as the signature of reprocessing.  Iodine-131 is a particulate that reacts with dust or water vapor and therefore is prone to precipitating out of the atmosphere.  Krypton-85 was monitored because it dispersed into the stratosphere where the U-2's were forced to fly to avoid being shot down by the Soviets.  The switch to Krypton-85 has been confirmed in the partially declassified Operation Bluenose documents obtained under the FOIA.   From a public health perspective, Krypton is not as toxic as other fission by-products.  However, its releases are indicative of large concurrent iodine, strontium, cesium, and dozens of other highly toxic radionuclides that do pose significant public health hazards.  By knowing the Krypton releases, it is possible to estimate the amount of iodine and other fission product gas that disperses in the atmosphere.  It has a half-live of 10.7 years as opposed to Iodine-131’s half-life of less than eight days. Therefore, this information must be fully declassified to meet the public’s right to know what pollutants were released.

            The environmental emissions data on Operation Bluenose, RaLa, and other secret military programs continue to remain classified forty years later despite public demands for full disclosure. The importance of declassifying this information lies not only in the public’s right to know what we collectively were subjected to without our consent, but also in establishing the government’s liability to compensate those who suffered from those radioactive releases.

            Robert Alvarez, former senior DOE official Department of Energy (DOE) policy advisor, states that the rationale for keeping radiological release data classified on the grounds that it could be used to estimate U. S. plutonium production is no longer valid and is a clear-cut abuse of secrecy.  ^[5]   Arjun  Makhijani, head of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, adds that  the US plutonium production rates are publicly known because of treaty disclosure requirements.  Clearly, Makhijani notes, the refusal to declassify emission data cannot be supported on the basis of national security. ^[6]

            David Albright, Director of the Institute for Energy and International Security, is a member of DOE Secretaries’ Openness Advisory Committee.   He thinks that continuing to classify the Iodine and Krypton and Iodine releases is an unwise policy. ^[7]  According to Albright, no single individual DOE or Air Force declassification officer should decide what radiation emission reports to declassify and what to keep secret.  Albright also contends that the amount of Krypton releases are known because Frank von Hippel conducted a publicly available study for the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) for all nuclear production facilities world wide. ^[8]   The IAEC developed its own Krypton tracking system to verify zero fissile nuclear bomb production under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.   Albright believes that the Air Force and DOE’s iron-fisted control over old secrets has more to due with current U.S. secret international monitoring of nuclear releases.

            Despite the IAEC disclosures, the information is not detailed enough to isolate individual nuclear production site releases, information vitally needed to establish the amount of radiation released for specific plants during specific periods.   Dose reconstruction health studies require fission by-product environmental release data from a specific nuclear plant, sometimes on an hourly basis, so it can be merged with meteorological data, thereby, allowing scientists to determine what pollutant went where and who was affected. That is why the detailed operating history and throughput of each nuclear production plant must be declassified.  National security is no longer a credible government defense.

            The focus on Krypton-85 is also confirmed in the partially declassified Operation Bluenose documents obtained by the Environmental Defense Institute.  Krypton is a “noble gas” which refers to a class of gases that generally do not biologically interact. More recent studies are credibly challenging this theory that noble gases are not as toxic.  However, large Krypton releases are indicative of large concurrent iodine, strontium, cesium, and dozens of other highly toxic radionuclides that do pose significant public health hazards.   By knowing the krypton releases it is possible to estimate the iodine and other fission product releases and, therefore, this information must be fully declassified to meet the public’s right to know.  

            Secret document title lists, obtained during the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Study, confirmed that the INEEL was involved in the Operation Bluenose program in the 1950s.  Starting in 1991, the Environmental Defense Institute, representing a coalition of groups called the INEEL Research Bureau, filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with DOE Hanford, INEEL filed FOIA requests to DOE Hanford, INEEL and the Air Force for documents related to the Bluenose project.  Although Hanford sent eight of the twenty-eight documents requested, portions of these secret reports were blacked out or otherwise censured because, according to the government, release of this information would compromise national security.  The data quantifying radioactive releases were blacked out as well as page numbers, so it is impossible to determine if pages were deleted and what the magnitude of the release was.  Including the filing of appeals on the FOIA denials, the process took eight years, and we do not know much more about Operation Bluenose than when we started in 1991.

            The CDC is currently conducting an INEEL Dose Reconstruction Health Study to determine what radioactivity was released from the site over its operating history.  Although it would seem as if the government is doing all it can to answer the public’s questions, history proves otherwise As a member of CDC’s INEEL Health Effects Advisory Committee at the time, I solicited CDC’s support of our Bluenose FOIA’s and was shocked when, in 1994, the CDC publicly announced that Operation Bluenose did not involve radiation releases and, therefore, was not relevant to their INEEL Dose Reconstruction Study.

            The CDC also blocked its own Advisory Committee attempts to recommend that DOE release an index of classified INEEL documents.  It was the Hanford index that first disclosed the existence of Operation Bluenose.  The index of classified INEEL documents index was the only way the public could independently determine if the CDC was accessing all relevant information needed to establish the INEEL radioactive releases including, particularly, Operation Bluenose and the RaLa Runs.

            At a 1997 public meeting in Ketchum, Idaho, CDC and its sister agency the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety linked arms with the DOE Idaho Operations Office, and the U.S. Navy opposing our request for the document index. The agencies collectively stated that an index did not exist, and even if it did exist it would be of no use in the INEEL health studies because CDC already had full access to all relevant information. 

            The Environmental Defense Institute’s partially successful appeal of our INEEL FOIA denial of the index forced CDC not only to acknowledge the existence of the index but also that the agency had received a copy of it in 1992.  CDC simply did not want the public to have access to the index and be able it to see if CDC was using all relevant emissions data.

            CDC’s contractor confirmed that in June of 2000, approximately 900 boxes of documents related to INEEL’s radiological releases were destroyed. ^[9]   These boxes, archived at INEEL and the Seattle Federal Information Center, contained millions of pages of information that has been lost forever.   Hanford also acknowledged twenty seven “lost” (or perhaps destroyed) Bluenose documents. The DOE’s systematic destruction of this information means we may not have anything substantive left to uncover under the Freedom of Information Act; the American public may never know the whole truth. 

            Allen Benson, author of Hanford Fallout,  the first comprehensive analysis of the Hanford Green Runs, says no federal agency can be trusted to tell the truth about U.S. radioactive releases. ^[10]  As a scientific consultant on the Hanford Downwinders class action suit, Benson believes that the only hope lies in well-financed class-action suits, litigation that can bring in independent scientists to reveal, through court ordered discovery, what harm the public was really subjected to from radioactive releases.

            Operation Bluenose is only one of dozens of major nuclear releases to the environment that caused serious harm to those living downwind of this nation’s nuclear weapons’ production facilities.  Continued denial of federal agencies to declassify information needed to reveal the truth about what hazards we collectively are being subjected to without our consent is a travesty of democracy.   The only national security issue at stake here is the American public’s shattered confidence in our government’s willingness to put health and safety above minimization of liability for past negligence.

 

 

End Notes