Read The Plutonium Files Online
Authors: Eileen Welsome
The Plutonium Files (12 page)
that the physiological hazards of working with plutonium and its compounds may be very great.
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Due to its alpha radiation and long life it may be that the permanent location in the body of even very small amounts, say one milligram or less, may be very harmful. The ingestion of such extraordinary small amounts as some few tens of micrograms might be unpleasant, if it locates itself in a permanent position. In the handling of the relatively large amounts soon to begin here and at Site Y, there are many conceivable methods by which amounts of this order might be taken in unless the greatest care is exercised. In addition to helping to set up safety measures in handling so as to prevent the occurrence of such accidents, I would like to suggest that a program to trace the course of plutonium in the body be initiated as soon as possible. In my opinion, such a program should have the very highest priority.
When Seaborg was asked decades later whether he had meant human experiments, he exclaimed, “Oh, God, no.” The memo, he said, referred to experiments with animals.
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Seaborg added in a subsequent interview that he knew nothing about the human experiments. “We were working in a compartmentalized atmosphere.
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We weren’t told anything other than those things that related directly to what we were doing.”
Robert Stone, by then known by his Manhattan Project moniker of Dr. Rock, responded to Seaborg’s memo a few days later, saying that the Health Division had been planning to do experiments with plutonium. “The question of tracer studies to find its distribution in the body have long been planned as part of Dr. Hamilton’s program, although it has never been mentioned in official descriptions of the program.”
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Hamilton, he added, didn’t see any point in doing tracer studies until several milligrams of plutonium could be made available to him.
As Seaborg and Stone were exchanging memos, the first milligram amounts of plutonium were being produced in the X-10 reactor in Oak Ridge.
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At a high-level meeting in Oak Ridge on January 19, Robert Stone emphasized the “poisonous nature of product.” He noted that one to two micrograms of radium had proved fatal in the dial painters.
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Fortunately, Stone believed, plutonium was less hazardous by a factor of fifty. On the negative side, he pointed out, radium could be measured through the breath or with Geiger counters placed outside the body. But plutonium, which did not decay to radon or emit gamma rays, would be difficult to detect.
Arthur Compton advised during that same meeting that the project leaders should consider plutonium “potentially extremely poisonous.” Using Stone’s rough estimate as a guideline, they then established the so-called tolerance dose for plutonium at five micrograms—an amount that was exactly fifty times
higher
than the tolerance dose for radium established by Robley Evans’s committee three years earlier.
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On February 10 Joseph Hamilton received eleven milligrams of plutonium for animal experiments from the Manhattan Engineer District.
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The allocation, approved by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton, represented a significant portion of the plutonium in existence at the time and reflected not only the bomb makers’ concern about plutonium’s toxicity but Hamilton’s high ranking within the inner circle.
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He was the first scientist to receive plutonium for studies unrelated to the actual task of constructing the bomb.
Over the next few weeks, Hamilton and his colleagues in Berkeley diluted the plutonium, divided it into batches, and used it in dozens of animal experiments. The material was injected into the jugular veins, tails, and hind legs of rats. Fine aerosols containing plutonium were concocted, and the animals were forced to breathe in the deadly mist. The rodents were killed at intervals and their organs analyzed to find out where the plutonium went. Most of the injected material gravitated to the skeleton. The plutonium from the aerosols settled in the alveoli, the tiny blood-rich sacs in the lungs, where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged.
The same month Hamilton received his first allocation of plutonium, Hempelmann and several scientists from the Met Lab and Oak Ridge visited the Luminous Paint Company in Boston.
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Their escort was none other than Robley Evans. Evans had a good hunch why the Manhattan Project officials were there, but the word “plutonium” was never mentioned. “We were always very careful in talking with each other,” Evans once told an interviewer.
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“We gave the other fellow enough information so that intelligent responses could be given, and that was it. Really, the less we knew the better.”
Evans no doubt pointed out the Luminous Paint Company’s fastidious housekeeping procedures. The floors and walls of the plant were scrubbed regularly; the young women wore kerchiefs and caps to keep their hair from touching the paint; eating and smoking in the work area was forbidden; and special ventilation hoods were installed above each desk to suck out dust particles and gases.
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Although Evans understood the hazards of radium better than any
other scientist in the world, he nevertheless sent a proposal later that year to Joseph Howland, a young Manhattan Project physician who worked with Stafford Warren and Hymer Friedell in Oak Ridge. Evans wanted to administer one microgram of radium to “conscientious objectors or other volunteer human subjects” in order to better understand the effects of a small dose.
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The amount would be perfectly harmless, he wrote in a letter declassified in 1994, “because we can be absolutely sure that the subject will excrete more than 90 percent of this material, and will be left with a perfectly harmless amount of radium in his system.” There is no evidence that the Manhattan Project took Evans up on his offer. But Evans was an ardent believer in the poet Alexander Pope’s maxim that the “proper study of mankind is man,” and he would have ample opportunity to gratify his penchant for human experiments in the postwar years.
The month after Hempelmann and his colleagues returned from Boston, the first whole gram of plutonium, a small ampoule of green-colored liquid, arrived at Los Alamos from Oak Ridge. Before the vial was shipped, Arthur Compton, General Groves, Colonel Nichols, and a few others went down to the plant to have a look at it.
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Compton removed the vial from under its ventilation hood and placed it in the colonel’s hands. Then, wrote Colonel Nichols, Martin Whitaker, one of the project leaders, “hurriedly picked up a stainless steel pan and held it under my hand, saying, ‘For God’s sake, don’t drop it on the floor.’ As Groves reached for it [the vial], Whitaker grabbed it and replaced it safely under the hood.”
Although the other Manhattan Project sites would also be confronted with plutonium contamination, the problem would prove particularly serious in Los Alamos, which was responsible not only for designing and putting the bomb together but for the final purification and shaping of plutonium metal. Acutely aware of the tragedy that befell the radium dial painters, Louis Hempelmann and his Los Alamos colleagues did what they could to prepare for the plutonium. They held lectures and passed out safety pamphlets, instructed employees to don coveralls, booties, and surgical caps, ordered plate-glass covers for the desks of people working with plutonium, installed swinging doors to eliminate contamination from “hot” doorknobs, and imported monitoring devices, air dust samplers, and respirators from other sites. Although these and other safety regulations were put into place, they were hard to enforce—especially among the scientists. Hempelmann said years later that many of the scientists were “individualists”
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who didn’t like to follow rules. “Unfortunately,
the more scholarly and inquisitive the person, the greater the tendency to ignore the recommended procedures.
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The janitors, I am sure, always did what we told them to do.”
Sometimes the plutonium that spilled onto floors was so hard to retrieve that maintenance crews simply enameled over the contaminated area. Some of the material was carried offsite by employees who were leaving the tech area with “very high counts on their street clothing.”
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(A “count” reflects the detection of an energy particle or a photon emitted from an unstable radioactive atom.)
Spotty and crude though it was, oiled paper, in the form of swipes, was one of the only ways to detect the presence of plutonium. The paper was swept over contaminated surfaces and placed under counters for measurements. Similarly, the nostrils of employees were swabbed twice a day with paper glued around the ends of sticks. The paper was then spread out and placed under detection devices. Decades later Thomas Shipman, the head of Los Alamos’s health division, could still recall in vivid detail the woman who performed the nose swipes: “She was well endowed with the more important female sex characteristics and she saw to it that they were properly exhibited.
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When she would appear in a laboratory and shout out ‘Nose Swipes,’ strong men could be trampled in the rush.”
The counts registered on the paper were sometimes shockingly high: 1,578 in a worker’s nose, 1,000 on a laboratory floor; 40,000 on a desk; “infinite” in some rooms.
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Evidence of contamination was even found inside workers’ respirators. The readings taken from the nose weren’t considered significant, Hempelmann said, unless they were more than fifty counts per minute.
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The monitoring, decontamination, and record keeping were not just humanitarian measures implemented to protect the workers.
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Hempelmann and his colleagues also wanted to protect themselves and the Manhattan Project from possible lawsuits. In a seventeen-page account of the history of the Los Alamos health group from March 1943 to November 1945, Hempelmann observed three times that inaccurate, incomplete records could entangle the lab in lawsuits. “The lack of records of non-exposure of persons not working with radiation or radioactive materials means that we do not have important legal evidence in case of future claims against this project,” he wrote.
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Stafford Warren also worried about lawsuits, as did J. Robert Oppenheimer. The lab director kept a tight rein on information that might reveal health problems or suggest that Los Alamos was contaminating his
beloved desert. After Oppenheimer left Los Alamos, employee J. F. Mullaney asked Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s successor, for guidance on the handling of health reports. “Mr. Oppenheimer, I believe, directed that all reports on health problems be separately classified and issued only at his request.
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I do not know the reason for this special treatment, but I believe it is to give added security protection to safeguard the project against people claiming to have been damaged.”
The Manhattan Project officials had reason to worry. The results of Joseph Hamilton’s initial rat studies contained some disconcerting news. As the medical doctors expected, plutonium, like radium, did lodge in the skeleton. But it was excreted much more slowly, which meant that plutonium would stay in the body longer and cause more radiation damage. Hamilton advised in May of 1944 that wounds contaminated with plutonium be treated like snake bites. “I realize that analogies are frequently dangerous for the purposes of comparison, but the superficial similarities of the parenteral introduction of product [a code word for plutonium] into the body to snake bite come to mind.”
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By the end of August 1944, the month that Don Mastick’s accident occurred, Los Alamos had received fifty-one grams of plutonium from the Oak Ridge reactor.
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In metal form, that amount would not have filled a spoon, but it had been divided up and used in 2,500 separate experiments.
Mastick’s accident was the most alarming the medical personnel at Los Alamos had faced, but there had been other terrifying moments. One of the first occurred on May 26, 1944, when a metallurgist and his technician began trying to reduce a plutonium solution into metal. The experiment succeeded but the metallurgist was exposed to large amounts of plutonium dust.
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Two other minor accidents occurred the same month as the Mastick explosion. On the afternoon of August 19, a small amount of plutonium in powder form spilled on the floor of Room D-101. An open beaker containing ten milligrams of plutonium cracked the night of August 28 in Room D-117, just two doors down from Mastick’s laboratory.
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In a monthly health report for August, Hempelmann noted the rising levels of contamination in D and H buildings. D Building was the elaborately ventilated plant where Mastick worked.
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It had five miles of piping and a complex ventilation system designed to remove dust particles from the air. Despite the efforts to maintain a clean environment, the building grew hopelessly contaminated and had to be torn down after the war. H building contained other laboratories and offices. “As has been anticipated
the amount of contamination throughout both of these buildings is much greater now that larger amounts of material are being used,” Hempelmann wrote.
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After Mastick’s accident, Louis Hempelmann had a near mutiny on his hands. In an August 16, 1944, memo, he advised Oppenheimer that Mastick’s colleagues were deeply alarmed:
A great deal of concern has been expressed during the past two weeks by members of the Chemistry Division about the inability of the Medical Group to detect dangerous amounts of plutonium in the body.
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This concern was occasioned by the accidental explosion of 10 milligrams of plutonium in Don Mastick’s face with the subsequent ingestion of an unknown amount of this material. The questions which have been raised by the chemists are: 1) how much plutonium was absorbed by the gastro-intestinal tract in this case, 2) what fraction of a serious dose does the absorbed plutonium represent and 3) is it safe for Mastick to go back to work in Building D at his old job?