Atomic Testing Enewetak - Clean-up Atomic Veterans Healthcare Parity
Image - Observers sitting on the patio of the Officers Beach Club on Parry Island are illuminated by the 81 kiloton Dog test, part of Operation Greenhouse, at Enewetak Atoll, April 8, 1951.
DOD Enewetak Atoll Unclassified Documents - Enewetak Atoll Clean-Up Project, Marshall Islands, South Pacific - Read - Documents
The Cleanup begins - Take another trip on Google Earth and you'll see the Dome on Runit. Perhaps some day space travellers will come along and find it and wonder at what kind of civilization it was that bottled up all this virulent poison here so close to sea level. You can get there by clicking “Dome, Runit, Marshall Islands.” A great concrete dome that seals in an old crater and holds 110 thousand cubic yards of radioactive waste. The island stripped bare of buildings. A few palm trees and native vegetation only starting to return. The Marshall Islands were recently featured in a television program as probably the area most threatened by global warming. And here we are storing, in an unlined crater, unfissioned plutonium, and a lot of it. There is no program in place for monitoring leakage from the Runit Dome.
Between 1948 and l958, we detonated 42 atmospheric nuclear tests on or near the surface of Eniwetok.
By 1971, thirteen years after the last nuclear test on the island, two military test programs were still going at Eniwetok. There was a U.S. Air Force space research program, and the Defense Nuclear Agency's Pacific Cratering Experiment (PACE). They were barred from doing any more nuclear testing in the atmosphere, but the Defense Nuclear Agency still had rights to do other types of experiments under the 1946 trusteeship agreement. The objective of PACE was to simulate on Runit the effects of an atomic bomb detonation using 500 tons of normal high explosives. Six tons of TNT were actually detonated and 190 holes had been drilled into reefs and the island for explosives; and 86 trenches dug in different parts of the atoll. The island had already been badly damaged by all the previous atomic detonations, and all the natives had been evacuated. There had been eleven A-tests on the island of Runit alone. In June 1971, the AEC made a decision to terminate use of Enewetak as a test range and return the island to the islanders. Not a great gift, considering the condition it was in.
Review the plight of the Enewetak Atoll Atomic Veterans -
What triggered this shutdown was when the islanders protested the PACE project they found residue from the Quince test, which was described as a fizzle, but actually was a safety test of the W-54, probably was the tiniest warhead we ever manufactured. They wanted to find out if the unarmed football size warhead would explode in a fire or explosion. The W-54 was designed for the Davey Crockett missile and was small enough to be fired from a recoiless rifle mounted on a Jeep. The HE in the implosion sphere was detonated in a one-point explosion that shattered the sphere scattering plutonium over a large portion of the island.
The natives of the island, wanting to come back one day, and upset by the prospect of our exploding large quantities of dynamite on their island, filed a protest against the PACE project, and the senior AEC representative on the committee investigating, Roger Ray, recommended immediate quarantine of Runit. The contractors were “to cease all operations thereon and not remove any vehicles, equipment, or materials until adequate decontamination procedures could be established.”
They found a mess on Eniwetok. When they evacuated the island in 1958, our nuclear testing program may have thought they would be back some day for more testing, because they never cleaned up behind themselves. On the isle they had named Hedren, unfinished memos lay on the desks in some buildings. Landing craft sat rusting where they had been pulled from the water. “Everywhere, nature in the form of impenetrable brush, termite burrows, rot, and rust was reclaiming the atoll from the ruins of an advanced technology.”
“Nuclear testing had left its unmistakable mark on the atoll. The preliminary radiological survey found potentially significant radiation hazards on the islands of Bokombako (Belle), Enjebi (Janet), Aomon (Sally), and Runit (Yvonne) . Robert Ray's recommendation was intended primarily to prevent “further aggravation through dispersion, of something they termed an already difficult contamination problem."
No one had linked Eniwetok to Johnston Island until Robert Ray said that the plutonium particles they were finding on Runit were very similar to the particles they were finding on Johnston Island. These were tiny fragments of beryllium, stainless steel and other metals alloyed with plutonium and other actinides. The CPM ratings sometimes ran in the millions. The cat was out of the bag, an advocate for the decontamination of Enewetak about heard it, the information travelled to a concerned legislator stateside, and eventually leaked to a ex-Marine working as an investigative journalist for a Chicago paper. The military had clamped down on release of any information on the state of Johnston Island, but this round-about route eventually got the information out to Mike Thomas and many atomic veterans.
It was strong action that this AEC scientist recommended. Shut down a DNA project? On the threshold of letting natives reclaim the island as their own, the PACER experimenters planned to take actions that would recontaminate it. The harm the plutonium could do natives was limited unless they were digging up the ground to restart farming. Drilling holes in the reefs and detonating TNT would have resulted in throwing tons of contaminated earth up into the air to drift with the prevailing winds. The planning of PACE was done at Livermore Labs, my favorite whipping boy. I sense the malevolent ghost of Edward Teller, barred from nuclear testing, still pushing for weapon effect tests using TNT. It shows a cavalier indifference to environmental concerns.
In response to the AEC's recommendation, the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Test Center (SM1TEC) put the quarantine into effect on 22 May 1972. The quarantine irked the DNA. Since the quarantine stopped PACE operations on Runit, DNA asked the AEC Nevada Operations Office (AEC-NV) for additional data on the nature of the hazard which might then allow completion of PACE.” On 30 June 1972, DNA and AEC representatives met and agreed that an additional survey should be made to determine whether the hazard was really serious enough to enforce a quarantine. It was. The particles that they found at Johnston Atoll and Runit were similar. Extraordinarily deadly. The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory sent the DOE a report on four samples from Johnston Island.
It turned out that the natives of Eniwetok, unlike the servicemen of Johnston Island, had some rights. They had a council, there was some United Nations oversight, they had, most importantly, a lawyer. On 22 May 1972, the District Court in Honolulu ruled that the plaintiffs were entitled to an injunction because the government had failed to file an adequate impact analysis, and therefore, PACE activities, including core drilling and seismic surveys at Enewetak, were prohibited. The court said that people living in the Trust Territories had all the rights that U.S. citizens had, and they interpreted the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, broadly, as applying to all U.S. territories. The Pentagon in June 1973 called off the PACE tests.
Once it was clear that the Department of Energy and the Defense Nuclear Agency had to mitigate the contamination, they were back arguing the case for disposal of the plutonium and other contaminated debris by ocean dumping. It was what they had always done.
“The basic argument was one commonly heard: compared to the amount of long-lived alpha contamination already dumped in the ocean, the amount from Enewetak would be insignificant. The DOE estimated there were only a few hundred grams of actual plutonium in all of the contaminated soil of Enewetak, and that at least a hundred kilograms of plutonium had already been dumped in the ocean from 1947 through 1974. In other words, the additional damage that might be done was negligible compared to the possible damage that had already been done. The counterargument was also familiar: past damage probably cannot be undone, but any additional abuse to the system should bestopped completely.”
The project committee vetoed ocean dumping. The Defense Nuclear Agency contained the debris in an unlined crater on Runit Island, and capped it with that cement dome. An eight year cleanup program was started, involving thousands of troops and civilians. A costly program.
Read about it at OPLAN700 - Enewetak Atoll Clean-Up Project (1977-1980)
When Oak Ridge National Laboratory brought in their sampling equipment and started their study at Johnston Atoll, their first problem was finding a base line for background radiation. “Weapons-grade TRUs (uranium,plutonium, and tritium) “are not naturally present in background in measurable quantities, but at Johnston Atoll are ubiquitous.” Ubiquitous means everywhere, and weapons
Grade TRU means all the various atomic weights of bomb material, including thorium, uranium, and plutonium were part of the background radiation that troops and civilians were exposed to every day. There was the plutonium from the years of atomic testing.
"The primary focus for this group is to urge Congress to change legislation and recognize soldiers of this seemingly forgotten cleanup mission as “veterans who participated in radiation-risk activities during active service.”
Follow our cause: Atomic Veterans of Enewetak Atoll
