YAKIMA — We usually associate the term “downwinder” with the people living in the American Southwest who were exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb tests.
But sadly, the term can also be applied to more than 3,500 residents of the Pacific Northwest who were exposed to radioactive particles released into the air.
They weren’t subjected to fallout from above-ground testing, however. Instead, some of it was from the work done at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, including one test that deliberately polluted the air to see how well radioactive emissions from Russia could be tracked.
Hanford, near the Tri-Cities, was constructed as part of the Manhattan Project, the United States’ race against Germany to develop the first atomic bomb.
It was at Hanford that plutonium was created to fuel the bomb that was detonated in the Trinity Test at White Sands, N.M., and the “Fat Man” bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and forced the Japanese to surrender.
While that bomb ended World War II, it was the start of a nuclear arms race between the United States and its former ally, the Soviet Union.
With help from spies and their own nuclear research, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as “Joe-1,” in August 1949, four years after the American bombs were dropped on Japan.
Americans were concerned with this threat, and wanted to know if they could detect Soviet bomb development by looking for radioactive material in the air, just as there had been from Hanford in the early days of its operation, particularly radioactive iodine-131.
After detecting high levels of the isotope in the vegetation around the installation, Hanford workers installed filters to contain the material. But in 1949, the U.S. Air Force wanted to release radioactive iodine into the air and see if it could be traced.
In “Operation Green Run,” scientists, duplicating Soviet processing steps, allowed the uranium only 16 days to cool down instead of the three to four months that Americans waited. This would allow for detectable amounts of radioactive iodine to be produced.
Then a ton of this “green” uranium was dissolved and the radioactive iodine that was subsequently released was allowed to waft into the air from the “T plant” at Hanford.
The test was run Dec. 2, 1949, with scientists hoping that a thermal inversion would protect the ground from emissions. They were also counting on winds blowing from the west or southwest, and no rain.
The wind blew from the northwest to southeast instead, and the inversion didn’t keep the radioactive iodine off the ground, with 600 times the tolerable amount detected in vegetation near Kennewick.
Radioactive iodine was also detected as far away as Klamath Falls, Ore., and Yakima. And when it rained, Spokane and Walla Walla received measurable amounts of radioactive material.
The test released more radiation than anticipated. About 8,000 curies, possibly 12,000, were released instead of the 4,000 that researchers had planned on.
To put that in perspective, the nation’s worst nuclear accident at Three Mile Island released 15 curies into the atmosphere in 1979, while the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine emitted 35 million to 49 million curies. Over Hanford’s life, 739,000 curies were released into the environment through the industrial processes there and the Green Run test.
While Three Mile Island prompted evacuations, the government never mentioned anything about Green Run to the people living in the affected areas, who either breathed in the material or were exposed after drinking milk from cows that had eaten contaminated grass. Information about the tests was released in the 1980s.
In 2005, six people filed suit in federal court alleging that radiation from Hanford, including Operation Green Run, had damaged their thyroid glands, as the thyroid absorbs iodine. They were to be the test case for all other downwinders.
The problem was proving that the plaintiffs’ illness was related to Hanford. Both the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center found in 2002 that there was no evidence that thyroid cancer rates were higher for those exposed to radiation but also couldn’t rule out radiation as a culprit.
Three plaintiffs were awarded no money, as their thyroid disease was noncancerous, and of the remaining three, two split a $545,000 jury award, while a jury in a second trial found that the final plaintiff’s cancer was not caused by radiation.
Other downwinders received settlements from the government, with the last one paid out in 2015.
