Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's Nuclear Arsenal

by Michael D'Antonio

Journalist D'Antonio tells of some of the people and politics involved in the cover-up, and now the clean-up, at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. He writes compellingly but should certainly have included some documentation and references. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 1993

About the author

A Pulitzer Prize winning writer of books, articles, and original stories for film, Michael D’Antonio has published more than a dozen books, including Never Enough, a 2015 biography of presidential candidate and billionaire businessman Donald Trump. Described variously as “luminous,” “captivating,” “momentous” and “meticulous” Michael’s work is renowned for its clarity, balance, and thoroughness.

His works a have been noted as “best books of the year” or “editors’ picks” by The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Businessweek, The Chicago Tribune and Publisher’s Weekly. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes, Today, Good Morning, The Morning Show, America, Larry King Live, Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Diane Rehm, Coast-to-Coast, and many other programs.

Before becoming a fulltime author, Michael worked as a journalist in New York, Washington, and Maine. He has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Times of London Magazine, Discover, Sports Illustrated, The Los Angeles Times Magazine and many others. He has received numerous awards including the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, shared with a team at Newsday that explored the medical, legal, and ethical issues surrounding the Baby Jane Doe case.

In 2016, Michael has became a regular contributor for CNN, both on-air and on their website. His pieces can be read here: http://www.cnn.com/profiles/michael-d...

D’Antonio has been the recipient of the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, the First Amendment Award, and the Humanitas Award for his Showtime film, Crown Heights. Born and raised in New Hampshire, Michael now lives on Long Island with his wife, Toni Raiten-D’Antonio who is a psychotherapist, professor, and author of three acclaimed books.

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is perhaps one of the most frightening books I've ever read. It is the story of the Hanford plant in eastern Washington which produced plutonium for nuclear weapons; first, for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki and later, after the war, for the nuclear arsenal that America amassed. The book details how Hanford emissions have devastated the soil, water and lives of the people in eastern Washington. Ever since the 1940's, there have been both accidents and planned "releases" of radioactive particles. Three billion meters of soil and groundwater have been contaminated. Who was responsible? Were secrets kept? Was the American public--and most importantly, the residents living near the plant--aware of the dangers? The book was hard for me to put down as more and more information was revealed. The fact that it's a true story is horrifying.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may have been published in 1993, but it feels very fresh and current.

One thing really stayed with me after reading this, so much that I had to do a little research to see if anything had changed after nearly 30 years.

As of this moment, Richland High School still uses the Bombers nickname, and yes, the mushroom cloud logo is still very much in use. Even after so many more years of bad news and upsetting information about what was done at Hanford. In 2020. Man. . .

Overall an excellent book. There were some baffling spelling errors though. Astronaut Gene Sirnan? Really?

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Hanford Site, formerly the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington state was the place where plutonium was made for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and many American Cold War nuclear weapons (plutonium for the rest was made at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina). It is one of the most polluted places in the Western Hemisphere, with millions of gallons of radioactive waste in old underground tanks, many of which are slowly leaking. This book profiles several activists who exposed Hanford's damage to the environment and people in the past and tried to limit it in the future.

One was a reporter for a Spokane newspaper who wrote a series of articles about Hanford. She found an old study that showed that infant mortality increased by 50% in Franklin County, WA, on the other bank of the Columbia River from Hanford, between 1943 and 1945; by 160% in Benton County, WA, the home of Hanford; by 60% in Umatilla County, OR, down the river from Hanford; in the rest of Washington and Oregon, it dropped. She interviewed Hanford workers; a former worker turned law student told her that workers routinely tinkered with their dosimeters, since they got extra pay for working in radioactive areas, but not after they received a maximum weekly dose. In 1986 the government declassified 19,000 pages of old documents; the reporter and an assistant went through them, and found a mysterious reference to something called "green run" in a 1950 report. Looking further, they discovered that in December 1949 Hanford deliberately released 200 TBq of Iodine-131 into the atmosphere (for comparison, Chernobyl released 10,000 times as much radioactive iodine, and Three Mile Island 500 times less). A farmer who was born in 1947 and grew up on a farm across the hills from Hanford was on the raw end of the deal: born with bone defects, he was mysteriously paralyzed at age 4 and put into an iron lung; months later, he recovered, but suffered from other diseases as an adult.

Another person profiled in the book is a 30-year-old safety inspector hired by the company running Hanford. He exposed many ways in which corners were cut and rules were bent at the complex. Once, a guard prevented the inspector from filming a dump truck depositing dirt, even though he had all the necessary clearances. Another employee told him that the dirt was probably from a radioactive liquid spill; in the pile, it would be carried around by the desert wind. The inspector and the other employee also found a pit 30 feet deep and 50 yards across filled with scores of rusting 55-gallon drums labeled "radioactive waste" and other garbage such as discarded work gloves. Another time the inspector found a bunch of 55-gallon drums with a plutonium nitrate solution scattered in hallways; no one could tell, where they came from; the copper seals that were supposed to seal the drums were in an open drawer, inviting anyone to break a seal, steal some plutonium, and solder a new seal in its place. The inspector wrote an audit, but his employer didn't follow up on it. So he spoke to a reporter from Seattle Times, which ran a series of articles on Hanford, which prompted a Congressional investigation, where the inspector testified. Months after the Chernobyl disaster, the plutonium-making Hanford N reactor (which was more inherently stable than the Soviet RBMK reactor, but also did not have a containment building) was shut down for safety improvements. Without the reactor, the plutonium extraction facility and the plutonium finishing plant had no plutonium to process, so they were also shut down. The inspector was fired; he sued the company. The company argued that after the shutdowns it had to lay off hundreds of employees; the inspector objected that he was singled out as a whistleblower; they settled for an undisclosed amount.

In the two decades since this book was written, the Hanford Site has not been producing any more plutonium, but the radioactive waste is still there, and it is slowly leaking into the environment.

[DLanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atomic Harvest by Michael D'Antonio does a phenomenal job of synthesizing decades of bad decisions made by production minded government & corporate contractors and politicians- largely to blame for our current situation regarding the United States' nuclear complex and its condition. From the compartmentalization of the workers (so that no one knew too much about anything in particular), to the propaganda which took place following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the community's outlook on their economic boom as a result of wartime efforts and "ending the war" (although reportedly Japan gave every indication of their impending surrender prior to our dropping the bomb, which was according to some more to prove a point to Russia than it was to actually conquer Japan), to the eventual desensitized outlook and machismo of workers who thought they could "beat" radiation exposure, to lack of environmental education and the outlook of community members who - despite illnesses caused by exposure to Hanford - would rather harm their neighbors than have the reactors spoken badly about - THIS BOOK IS AMAZING, and does a wonderful job of bringing the entire situation down to size. I highly recommend it, and a dose of "open mindedness" to anyone and everyone. Atomic Harvest should be required reading, as it does a superb job of introducing new thoughts on this topic that transcend patriotism and simply communicate about Hanford's reality, from which we will continue to reel for decades to come.

[Dan Jenkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love books by investigative journalist who are good and can expose actions by our government that are meant to be well covered up. In this book, the journalists involved bring to light what our government ( under Ronald Reagan and with his approval ) was willing to do to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race. In my opinion, the most horrible of these crimes, was the release of radioactive material in southeastern Washington (near the tri cities) in order to test, yes test, our ability to detect nuclear releases from Russian arms factories. Many people in Washington suffered from the effects of this release (cancers, birth defects in humans and farm animals, contaminated water, etc.). As a result of these efforts by the journalists, the Hanford Nuclear plant was closed. Without this effort, the plant may still have been operating (it was the same type as Chernoble).

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book. What an eye-opener!