HOT TRASH IN BUILDING 4060: AN AIR FORCE COVER-UP
Epstein, Keith C.
HOT TRASH IN BUILDING 4060 BY KEITH C. EPSTEIN In the beginning, there was only a single, simple secret, far away from the corridors of military power at the Pentagon. It started with neither a...
...The Radioisotope Committee knew this...
...Why not...
...Workers on the inspection team found twenty-nine sealed barrels, five without labels...
...Fox, however, opted to call the americium spill a "Faded Giant," a less serious classification...
...A jeweler with a scheme to irradiate diamonds need only say he wants to conduct "research and development...
...Just get a nice letterhead, make a few positive assertions, copy somebody else's paperwork...
...Detectors showed extensive contamination inside the building, and some radioactivity outside...
...Some 23,400 mom-and-pop businesses, hospitals, universities, well-loggers, construction crews, entrepreneurs, and the military are licensed by the NRC to use more than 150 potentially dangerous radioactive isotopes...
...Godwin says he had the impression his advice was taken, that Weinberger knew...
...In 1975, the NRC's first inspection of his operation in Newark, Ohio, turned up workers who had been overexposed to radiation...
...Seven days later, Weinberger signed the letter to Celeste, a letter that downplays the situation as almost routine...
...Ricci found out later he had inhaled the powder, perhaps when he undressed—a factor increasing the probability he will die a premature death from bone or liver cancer...
...Fox insists he personally had "no motives to hide anything...
...Only "a few" are denied, according to NRC official Vandy Miller...
...The task fell to David Wood of the Radioisotope Committee...
...But just as the Air Force announced the end of the cleanup job, new questions arose about the extent of the contamination...
...The NRC "should have probed further...
...The contamination level was by then so high that it took $385,000 to clean it up...
...On January 7, Under Secretary Richard P. Godwin concurred in sending the letter to Celeste—but advised Air Force Secretary Edward C. Aldridge Jr...
...The release of negligible amounts of americium-241," the letter says, "occurred but was contained...
...The Government should be responsible to handle it...
...Rather than dispose of it properly at an appropriate nuclear-dump site, he smuggled it onto one of the nation's most important military bases...
...An executive support group in his office complained in a draft memo on December 31 that "the proposed response is not responsive to the issues which Governor Celeste raised...
...It was 1972...
...The NRC also ordered an extensive series of tests to sample the lake's sediment, plants, and fish...
...What about John Charles Haynes, who now sometimes answers his phone, "Nuclear gangster...
...Cautiously, the team unsealed a drum, not knowing it was the same one opened a month earlier...
...The NRC did not glean the truth about the severity of the contamination until October 23—thirty-eight days after the initial inventory...
...The coverup also involves Caspar Weinberger, then the Secretary of Defense, who misled the Governor of Ohio...
...He is now second in command at the Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, where he participates in high-level planning for the Peacekeeper missile...
...For eight days, the Air Force kept the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the dark about even the occurrence of a spill, however minor...
...For twelve days, those exposed to the spill waited to be given body-count tests, a delay that could have been significant...
...If you have any kind of treatment involving radiation, the odds of getting the wrong isotope in ten times the dose are frighteningly high...
...He estimated cleanup costs at $540,000...
...I'm not emotionless," he says...
...Surface contamination at Building 4060 exceeded the level at which the NRC requires cleanup by a factor of 140,000...
...At first, October 6 seemed like just another day on the job...
...With him was a worker for a military contractor and a higher-level Air Force environmental-health official from Texas...
...After a month's journey through this Pentagon bureaucracy, a proposed response, with attached memoranda, found its way into the office of an Under Secretary of Defense...
...All that remain are concrete chunks of the broken foundation...
...Popular among Air Force employees and their guests for swimming, boating, and fishing, the lake lies only 600 feet from where Building 4060 used to be...
...But, like other watchdogs and the agency itself, Pollard's focus is mainly on the more visible nuclear-power industry...
...But in a subsequent telephone call to the NRC, a senior committee staffer characterized the incident incorrectly as a minor event...
...It started with diamonds...
...And he told the Secretary that "inappropriate action" had kept information from the base commander—a reference to the coverup plan...
...Then nuclear regulators check applicants for criminal records...
...Fourteen years later, Haynes's secret snowballed into a coverup involving an entire Air Force chain of command and raised serious questions about the ability of the military and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to protect the public...
...Finally, in March 1985, after a decade of trying to work things out, the Government moved against Haynes, raiding his lab and arresting him for unauthorized possession of americium above his legal limit and for lying to nuclear regulators...
...What if he could artificially induce the change and thus increase their value...
...On September 18,1986, the Air Force finally took an inventory...
...Similar problems recurred...
...I think they forgot they even had it...
...I asked Jim Lewis if they could get rid of it with their waste, and he said, 'No problem.' The only problem was they didn't get rid of it...
...At the same meeting, civil engineer Thomas E. Shoup recalls, Swanson told the group that the suspected source of the radiation was either americium or plutonium (of which americium is a by-product...
...It started with neither a one-star general nor a member of the President's Cabinet, but with an obscure backyard scientist in rural Ohio whose renegade experiments tended to go awry...
...Haynes embarked on his plan to enhance the diamonds using americium-241, a by-product of nuclear reactions...
...Swanson telephoned Lieutenant Colonel John Burr, the committee's chief executive, to apprise him of the seriousness of the situation...
...The commander "selectively withheld information...
...Shoup had learned of the NRC's suspicion that americium had been smuggled somewhere onto the base, but he held his tongue...
...Meanwhile, according to documents later compiled by NRC investigators, they would decontaminate the building "without revealing to various responsible agencies the extent of the contamination...
...Once on base, he headed for the radiology health building, where Lewis accepted the drums and copies of Haynes's paperwork on the waste, and left them in Building 4060, a storage facility about half the size of a basketball court, in a high-security munitions area...
...He says he assumed the Radioisotope Committee had already described the situation...
...It was commission by omission," is the conclusion of one investigator...
...These alpha levels are too high," he said...
...Lewis agreed to receive and store his friend's americium...
...Don't get it on TV.' 'Don't tell your roommate or your girlfriend.' These are direct quotes...
...With members of Congress calling for investigations, both the Air Force and the NRC claim to be tightening procedures...
...An expert in radiological materials, he tends to search for solutions like his favorite fictional character, Sherlock Holmes...
...Haynes, a tenth-grade dropout with a passion for science but no formal training in it, knew from a stint in the family jewelry business that people will pay more for diamonds that are green than for diamonds that are white...
...Even a few grains would be "dangerous in the ingestion," says americium's creator, Glenn T. Seaborg of the University of California...
...The fish, caught in an on-base lake, was contaminated with americium-241...
...The Pentagon took two months to produce a response...
...John Swanson, an Air Force radiation specialist later put in charge of cleaning up Building 4060, found out about the spill on September 26 and told then-base commander Colonel Charles E. Fox Jr...
...Next to an internal query about whether he wanted more information, he scribbled, "Yes, please...
...Haynes recalls that he loaded a van with two thirty-gallon drums stuffed with americium-contaminated rags and paper towels, gloves, jars, test tubes, and other laboratory equipment...
...But it's the inadvertent spreading of the material in an explosion or fire that would be really dangerous...
...But sources privy to an investigation now being conducted by the Justice Department say Fox, who was in line for a promotion, had every reason to hide what he himself described as "a whole host of irresponsible actions...
...We made the decision to provide Weinberger with a full accounting of the information" because it was so unusual and might involve a Federal investigation, confirms Assistant Air Force Secretary Tidal W. McCoy...
...So there, in Building 4060, sat the two drums of deadly waste, undetected for fourteen years...
...You say, 'I'm going to building so-and-so,' " says Haynes...
...On September 26, Fox recalls, he ordered Swanson immediately to inform appropriate higher-ups—those who serve on the Air Force Radioisotope Committee, a unit officially responsible to the NRC for the service's handling of radioactive materials...
...Only eight licenses were suspended last year...
...Then he drove about eighty miles across Ohio and onto the base with no questions asked...
...On September 19, Lewis got together with the two managers of Wright-Patterson's Bioenvironmental Engineering Group—its director, Lieutenant Colonel Maynard Moody, and his deputy Victor Dunn...
...They came up with a plan: They would mislabel the drums and dispose of them at a commercial dump—in violation not only of Air Force regulations but also of the NRC's and the Department of Transportation's...
...This is what he was told: Unexplained gamma rays were emanating from within Building 4060...
...It was, he insists, as simple as that...
...Many potential hazards have intimate links to the average American...
...Because he has a criminal record...
...Meters suddenly swung upwards...
...The Air Force says this is because labs were closed for the weekend...
...Nor did Fox tell the NRC everything he knew...
...Nuclear regulators rarely visit a lab or business location before issuing a license, and then the first inspection is unlikely to occur before six months have passed...
...They wave you on through...
...At the meeting, Fox's disaster-preparedness adviser urged him to declare a "Broken Arrow," Air Force terminology usually reserved for the most serious accidents potentially involving nuclear weapons...
...For one test, he lay naked in a small room lined with lead, an array of cylindrical instruments pressed against his chest...
...In all, ten unwitting people were exposed to the highly radioactive powder with the deadly potential...
...At that point, Haynes sought to cancel his license, but the NRC told him to clean up first...
...Haynes says he assumed the military had long since disposed of his drums...
...The applicant would have to tell us...
...Air Force got involved through the back door...
...But Aldridge went into no greater detail about the spills...
...In fact, the contamination was severe enough to require military radiation specialists, including civilian contractors and consultants...
...Dressed that way, he entered the plastic shroud draped over Building 4060...
...He had no idea he was about to become the innocent victim of the conspiracies of others...
...The delay in finding out even that much aroused the suspicions of Ohio Governor Richard Celeste...
...They were laughing, it was a big joke," says Senator Howard Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio, who has been made privy to the tape...
...The questions came in the form of a tainted trout...
...By late January of this year, the Air Force believed it had removed the last radioactive piece: the drum of americium itself, sealed in a railroad car behind thick walls of steel...
...He feels more comfortable with the nitty-gritty of writing regulations, checking radiological equipment at the base medical center, or pondering the properties of isotopes...
...Building 4060 is no more...
...For whatever reason, it did not tell the NRC...
...Several times between September 26 and October 17, the committee "characterized the release as minor, notwithstanding knowledge and information to the contrary," say confidential NRC documents...
...Haynes came up with the idea of taking his americium-laden waste to the base, rather than to the more appropriate— and more expensive—nuclear dump at Maxey Flats, Kentucky...
...Applicants face no background or reference checks, nor are they required to spell out exactly why they want to use radioactive material...
...Among them: a plea to tell the Governor why the americium drums were unlabeled and why nuclear regulators took more than a month to conclude the absence of a threat to public health, and to explain exactly "who was notified, when, and what rationale was used...
...The second inspection may not come for another seven years...
...We have to keep the information out of enemy hands.'" The enemy was the public...
...Then how would nuclear regulators know...
...I did not ask any questions regarding the possible connection of these two situations," Shoup admits in a written statement made in early November 1986...
...Celeste wanted to know why...
...both also decline to be interviewed...
...The Air Force says only Ricci suffers lasting effects...
...They looked like astronauts entering a lunar module...
...On January 2, 1987, the Under Secretary's office returned the letter to the Office of Legislative Liaison for a rewrite...
...At times, the NRC isn't even sure about the correct mailing addresses of licensees to which it should send important safety bulletins...
...But I think at least two or three of them are wrong...
...An alpha-radiation detector swung "off scale...
...Acting on a tip, the NRC questioned Lewis in August 1986 about an allegation of hidden americium...
...They sat there and talked about a deliberative coverup...
...be destroyed" so there would be "no written record which could document his decision to implement the proposed coverup...
...Fox got the promotion...
...This highly sensitive job involved remote television cameras, an air lock, more men in moonsuits, and a cost to taxpayers of $ 1 million...
...The Air Force calls this nonsense...
...Shortly before his resignation, Weinberger was asked why he didn't tell Celeste everything he knew and why he made no attempt to correct the record when he was given information inconsistent with what he had said...
...After the men took off their protective gear, their detectors indicated they had suffered surface exposure...
...Anybody could get a license," says an NRC insider...
...One worker's hair was contaminated...
...Then they came across a peanut-butter jar...
...The cleanup money came from the Government, some of it from the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund...
...Even if something goes wrong, "you'll be back in business within six months...
...Lewis, say NRC documents, "denied both verbally and in a written statement an allegation that he had improperly and illegally received for disposal radioactive material from a former associate," and he backed up his story with Air Force transfer and disposal records...
...The letter also fails to mention that an Air Force officer helped to sneak the substance onto the base and that the matter was the subject of an investigation...
...It was an opportunity to set the record straight...
...Only now, with the publicity generated by the Haynes case, is the lab demanding proof...
...On January 5, a phrase incorrectly characterizing the release of radioactivity as being in "negligible amounts" appeared in the draft for the first time...
...They tried to wash themselves in a muddy puddle and then at a water spigot, but it was too late...
...John Charles Haynes needed to get two thirty-gallon drums of highly radioactive trash off his hands...
...Eight days after the first spill, an official Energy Department statement had appeared, but state officials only learned of it a month later...
...Ricci grew alarmed...
...Because of the NRC's mid-1980s dealings with Haynes, the mere mention of his name in connection with the substance would have raised eyebrows in Ohio...
...He gave fecal and urine samples weekly...
...Haynes got one easily from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1970...
...The Air Force, says spokesman Don Swan, decided to destroy it rather than clean it up "for economic reasons...
...A major supplier of isotopes such as americium-241 is the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory...
...Sometimes too many cooks spoil the broth," observes Colonel David Wood, executive secretary of the Radioisotope Committee, when asked about the Pentagon effort to respond to Celeste...
...When Miller, who oversees the NRC licensing, was asked if Haynes could get a license today, he responded firmly: "No...
...Such a question, Weinberger responded, was based on six or so incorrect assumptions "with which I think I don't have immediate memory or familiarity...
...Radioactivity had spread to a nearby trash incinerator and a garage, and into Haynes's sewage and water pipes...
...He means it as a joke, but it isn't funny...
...My basic message was that some stuff from the civilian sector had got onto base and cost big bucks to resolve, and that the NRC was upset with us for good reason," says Wood...
...Fox immediately summoned aides to an emergency meeting...
...In November, the Governor wrote a letter to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger...
...Though such substances can injure, cause cancer, prompt premature death, and are considered hazardous enough to regulate, NRC officials acknowledge that enforcement of those regulations, which date to 1954, is almost nonexistent...
...Hadn't he, after all, boasted of inventing a nuclear battery that would last 400 years...
...Twice over the next two days, James Lewis entered the building and tried to clean up the mess himself...
...To see what was inside, they opened one, releasing the hazardous powder in a puff...
...Two years later, he still had not finished the task, complaining that he couldn't afford to...
...But if I don't have the power to change something, I'm not going to worry about it...
...Even fewer are revoked...
...Hadn't he claimed to have "done things with diamonds that no other man has done...
...I've been particularly alarmed by medical misadministration," says Robert Pollard, a nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists...
...His mission: Find out what was causing them...
...Air Force officials claim this was because the Air Force itself was in the dark...
...The Air Force says both of Ricci's companions emerged without lasting health effects...
...Then, when NRC investigators did visit the base, they neglected to check Building 4060...
...In place of a pipe and deerstalker, though, Ricci dons double gloves, a respirator, and a white moonsuit sealed with silver duct tape...
...But, as the NRC documents also say, the "radiation safety officer lied...
...It took months of tests to find out...
...The web of damage control and deception encompasses a lieutenant colonel who ordered his men to destroy records to cover their tracks, and a brigadier general who neglected to part with important knowledge...
...Still, say NRC insiders, getting a "byproducts materials" license is about as easy as getting a driver's license...
...The "scientist" knew James Lewis, the officer responsible for radiological safety at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton...
...But it doesn't dispute that Haynes brought in the americium...
...Radiation detection devices purred...
...The Air Force says it doesn't know who inserted the words...
...Showers became a new ritual, scrubbing his body with decontamination foam...
...And a spokesman for Aldridge confirms that Aldridge did brief Weinberger on January 13 "per Godwin's memo...
...Slabs from Building 4060's foundation had been sandblasted and left beside the ditch...
...In the shadows of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the NRC and its critics have tended to focus on the nation's 110 nuclear-power plants rather than on tens of thousands of other, virtually un-policed radioactive hazards—such as the americium used by Haynes and smuggled onto Wright-Patterson...
...Some changes were suggested, but none ever reached Celeste...
...After the second spill, after the NRC was finally informed in late October, all the outside world knew was that Wright-Patterson had endured some kind of minor spill...
...The Air Force says it's only a laboratory error but has agreed to do more tests...
...Linking the two was an overflow drainage ditch...
...He says Swanson's reply was "No...
...I doubt very much," adds Shoup, "that Colonel Fox could make any connection" between the smuggled americium and the spill...
...He recalls meeting privately with the Defense Secretary for at least fifteen minutes on February 18...
...Two weeks later, in another written statement requested by Fox in preparation for a Congressional inquiry, Shoup changes his story...
...His sloppy methods led to frequent run-ins with the Commission's successor agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), but Haynes held onto his license for a decade...
...The cooks were dozens of military scribes, bureaucrats, and strategists...
...By contrast, a medical professional like Air Force Major John Ricci tends to operate at a distance from the corridors of power...
...Could it happen again...
...To obtain such substances as ameri-cium legally, a person must have a license...
...For example, the crash of a B-52 would be a Broken Arrow, because it could result in a release of plutonium...
...It reveals their laughter as they conspired, their jokes about their hair turning gray...
...The U.S...
...no matter how the Air Force characterized the incident," acknowledges Hugh Thompson, the NRC's director of nuclear-materials safety...
...It will make a sale even if the buyer only claims verbally to have a license...
...On March 2, Aldridge sent a follow-up letter to Celeste dealing with notification procedures...
...By 1983, the lab's walls, floors, sinks, and shower drains were extensively contaminated...
...Inside it, they poked through gloves, glasses, and other laboratory paraphernalia...
...He says he slapped four placards on the van, making it clear that he was carrying radioactive materials...
...You could drive in there with a bomb and nobody would stop you...
...Airborne radioactivity was roughly one million times the NRC limit...
...And Weinberger passed none of his new information—that the contamination involved "significant amounts," not "negligible amounts" of radioactivity—on to Governor Celeste...
...which would have alerted the NRC to the release" of americium, according to the documents...
...Ricci, a boyish-looking thirty-nine-year-old, has a calm, scientific demeanor befitting a health professional with a doctorate in radiation physics...
...This time, he says he asked a question, after all: He asked Swanson whether the spill contained americium...
...Each year, there are about 3,500 applications...
...Moody also ordered that his men keep the plan to themselves, and that "evidence of both the plan and the agreement to implement it...
...I do get angry at times...
...A judge fined Haynes $129,580, but he has so far paid only $1,000...
...Resentment or anger isn't going to change anything...
...I'm not trying to give the impression of cool, calm, collected...
...I don't feel responsible for the radioactive contamination at the base," he says...
...Destination: a nuclear dump in Idaho...
...Keith C. Epstein is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Cleveland Plain Dealer...
...Let's leave...
...But, adds Ricci, "I do wish people had been more straightforward...
...But Weinberger must have had lingering questions...
...He had no idea he was about to confront americium...
...But the officers tape-recorded their conversation, and the tape has survived...
...The tape is now in the hands of Federal prosecutors who are investigating the case...
...In a panic, the workers fled...
...His new rank: brigadier general...
...to give Weinberger additional information...
...The reason: Officials there were trying to figure out what to say...
...He specifically recalls telling Weinberger the spills involved "significant contamination...
...The isotope is a deadly powder, a thousand times more potent than the radiation involved in a typical medical diagnostic procedure...
...Godwin wrote to Aldridge: "Have coordinated your memo, but believe you should advise Cap of the unusual circumstances of the presence of this material at [Wright-Patterson] and on-going investigation...
...For four months, the NRC waited to probe Haynes's own statement that he had taken americium to Wright-Patterson...
...When an NRC investigator called on October 1 to discuss the status of the investigation of Lewis's alleged smuggling of americium onto the base, Fox saw no reason to mention the spill...
Vol. 52 • March 1988 • No. 3
