The Atomic Man incident is a representation of the nuclear industry in the late 20th century. It was, even into the 1990s, obsessed with building nuclear weapons. This mission, protected from deep public scrutiny by the often-cited need for national security, seemed to be given priority above any peaceful application of nuclear energy release, and the impression given to the general public continued to erode and distort individual beliefs about the dangerous and the not-dangerous aspects of the industry. It shows that the plutonium production plant in Hanford was better equipped than one might have thought to deal with extreme accidents involving radiation. It also shows that many improvements had been made to the national labs involved in defense nuclear work after the SL-1 explosion, which was a definite wakeup call. McCluskey’s medical treatment was the most advanced state-of-the-art and was expertly applied.
Although it seems illogical, McCluskey’s level of lingering contamination was higher than that of any one person on Earth, yet he was not as affected by it as he was by nitric acid burns on his corneas and clogged arteries in his heart. The nuclear production plants were run with reasonable industrial safety measures in place, but nothing was foolproof, and there were plenty of figurative land mines to step on. Was it any more safe to work there than in a peanut butter factory?
The Hanford Plant made raw plutonium-239, a fissile nuclear fuel, delivered in roughly cast “buttons,” about the size of hockey pucks. It was up to other plants in other states to make it into something useful, and it was always shipped to them in very small batches. Care was taken at every step not to let too much of it bunch up and become an impromptu nuclear reactor, enthusiastically making a great deal of heat and flesh-withering radiation. The next stop in making it into weapons was the Rocky Flats Plutonium Component Fabrication Plant, where it would be formed into shiny, barely subcritical spheres.[161]
Rocky Flats was a flat mesa covered with rocks, devoid of trees, about 15 miles northwest of Denver, Colorado, bought by Henry Church for $1.25 an acre back in 1869. It was good for grazing cows if you spread them out. Then came World War II, which the United States brought to an end with its new and unique weapons, catapulting technology abruptly forward. Shortly after came the Korean Civil Conflict in 1950, and the United States, weary of war, found itself trying to prevent North Korea from invading South Korea.
President Harry S Truman sought to gather his options. “If we wanted to drop atomic bombs on somebody, how many do we have in stockpile?” he asked.
“Well,” he was told, “at Los Alamos if we use all the parts that are lying around, we can probably put together two of them.”
President Truman found this answer disturbing. The other nations are looking to us as the benevolent, all-powerful force, able to crush any aggression with a single, white-hot fireball, and we don’t have atomic bombs piled up in a warehouse somewhere? And so began the extended bomb crisis, soon becoming the H-bomb development scramble. The AEC commenced Project Apple to build a special factory to produce the core or “pit” for plutonium-fueled implosion weapons and hydrogen bomb triggers, operating under enforced secrecy. This would take the strain off the Los Alamos Lab so that it could devote most of its effort to improving bomb designs. Dow Chemical of Michigan was awarded the contract, and Senator Edwin “Big Ed” Johnson of Colorado pushed really hard for his state to be the site of this new venture.[162]
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, real-estate division, acquired the 2,560 acres of Rocky Flats from Marcus Church by the 5th Amendment of the Constitution and took possession on July 10, 1951. They offered $15 an acre, but the purchase price bounced around in the courts for a couple of decades. In the meantime, bulldozers gouged out the foundation of Building D, and construction proceeded at a rapid pace. Building D was for final bomb-core assembly using parts made of plutonium, uranium, and stainless steel built in other buildings. It was eventually renamed Building 991. Building C, or 771, was where the plutonium parts were made.
Everybody who worked at or on the plant, more than 1,000 people, had to have a Q clearance from the AEC, requiring extensive background checks of each person, his or her relatives, and everyone he or she knew. A guard shack was built at the entrance to the property. Three layers of barbed-wire-topped fencing and concertina wire were installed, and security holes were closed. By 1953 the plant was tuned up for full bomb production with 15 shielded, windowless buildings. By 1957, there would be 67 buildings on the site, with only its general mission known to those who did not work there. The Rocky Flats facility was thus a prime example of a Cold War battlefield, where front-line fighting was done in locked rooms, paranoia was actively encouraged, and not a shot was ever fired.
Plutonium is an inherently dangerous material to work with, but there are worse, more radioactive substances. The main problem with plutonium or any of the transuranic elements such as uranium or neptunium is its pyrophoric tendency, or the enthusiasm with which it oxidizes. It is similar to wood, in that a fresh-cut log will burn, but ignition is not necessarily easy. You can waste a lot of matches trying to set fire to a log, even though you know it will burn. It is too massive to heat to combustion temperature easily, and the surface area, where burning takes place, is tiny compared to the volume of the heavy piece of wood. If you really want to set fire to it, then carve it into slivers with a knife. Each thin slice of wood is all surface area, without much mass that has to be heated up. Strike a match to a big pile of shavings, fluffed up and full of oxygen-bearing air, and it will burn like gasoline. The same principle applies to metallic plutonium. A billet of it weighing over a pound (under critical mass!) will sit there in air and smolder. Work it down in a lathe, peeling off a pile of curly shavings, and you have made a fire. No match is necessary. Machining and close work with plutonium components must be done in an inert atmosphere, such as argon.
The problem with a plutonium fire is putting it out. Exposure to the usual extinguisher substances, such as water, carbon dioxide, foam, soda-acid, carbon tetrachloride, or dry chemical, can cause an explosion as the extreme chemical reduction scavenges oxygen or chlorine wherever the plutonium can find it. The predominant nuclide, Pu-239, is an alpha-gamma emitter, but it radiates at a slow, 24,000-year half-life, and it is not difficult to shield workers from the radiation. The smoke from burning plutonium is, however, another matter. If you breathe it, the tiny, alpha-active vapor particles lodge in your lungs, and subsequent cancer by genetic scrambling is practically unavoidable. However, the smoke is extremely heavy, and it drops to the ground quickly. It is not something that will rise into the air, drift with a breeze, and contaminate a large city 15 miles away, or even an adjacent building. It travels beyond the burn site on the bottoms of your shoes.
One cannot work in an argon atmosphere for very long without passing out for lack of oxygen, so the plutonium workpieces and the workers must be insulated from each other. At Rocky Flats in Building 771, long lines of stainless steel glove boxes, raised three feet off the ground, were welded together. A worker standing in front of a glove box would insert his hands in the gloves and perform whatever fabrication task was assigned to that position in the line. The small, always subcritical plutonium units were carried on a continuous conveyor belt, made of small platforms linked together. A plutonium thing would move down the line, from glove box to glove box filled with inert argon gas, and the workers could perform close, precision work using the touch-sensitive gloves, looking through Plexiglas windows, with practically zero exposure to radiation. The conveyor could then turn 180 degrees and continue down the next line in the room, with the plutonium object finally being removed from the line once the nickel plating had been applied.
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Plutonium is a dull-looking metal that quickly corrodes in atmosphere, so the two hemispheres used to make a bomb core were coated with something to keep the air out. The most-used coating was nickel plating, which gave the finely machined parts an attractive metallic shine. You did not want to scratch the plating, as doing so would result in heavy white smoke as the plutonium caught fire.
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Big Ed (six foot two) was one of nine members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) as well as senior member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. He and the other senator from Colorado, Eugene Millikan, were able to divert some big, important projects to their state, including the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD, an A-bomb-proof headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain), the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and a lot of uranium mining. The Rocky Flats plant was their crowning achievement. Big Ed eventually made a disastrous slip of the tongue in a live television show, “Court of Current Issues,” in New York on November 1, 1949. Johnson casually mentioned that the United States was developing the hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than what we had dropped on Japan. Television being what it was in 1949, it took a while for this incredible announcement to sink in, but the