Ch. 4. General Groves's Problem: the fluoride deception by Christopher
Bryson from archive.org
General
Groves's Problem
On the edge of the marsh water, near the monumental K-25 factory at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, stands a
solitary blue heron, its head angling for prey. "Danger. No Fishing Radiation," reads a sign.
Across the pond, the gray walls of
the plant glitter in the late evening sun. The smokestacks are cold now, the big machines silent and
patient as the heron, waiting to be
dismantled and hauled away. Close your eyes and the ghosts return. Mausoleum now, this half-mile-long
steel colossus was once among the
biggest industrial buildings in the world. Here, in the spring and
summer of 1945 and throughout the
cold war, tens of thousands of women and
men worked through the night in a cacophony of heat and smoke,
their backs bent to the purpose of
a nation. Here, in the shade of Tennessee's Black Oak Ridge, lay America's biggest wartime secret, where
nature was rendered in man's image
more powerfully than ever before. Here, on the banks of the Clinch River, exotic ore and minerals from the
corners of the globe were
transfigured with an elemental genius by scientists, farm laborers, and migrants from across the
United States, punching time
clocks, sculpting the future, and enriching uranium for the
Hiroshima atomic
bomb. https://www.blogger.com/null I T WAS A cold December morning in 1943
in northwest Washington, DC, and
Brigadier General Leslie C. Groves had another problem on his desk. The portly, tough-talking
engineer was in charge of the United
States biggest and best-kept wartime secret. He was the army s chief of
the Manhattan Project, and its
staff was
CHAPTER FOUR
building an industrial infrastructure to manufacture the world s first
atomic bomb. It was a gargantuan task. In
complete secrecy Groves and the Army
Corps of Engineers were overseeing the work of tens of thousands of laborers, scientists, and engineers who
in just three years would create
factories and laboratories rivaling the size of the entire U.S.
automobile industry. The budget of
the Manhattan Engineer District, as the project was officially known, eventually would run to over $2 billion
and would be concealed almost
entirely from the U.S. Congress.'
The Generals days were a blur of covert action. There were secret flights to mysterious giant new
factories being carved from virgin sites in Tennessee, New Mexico, and Washington State; huddled conferences
in the Manhattan Projects New York
and Washing-ton, DC, offices; and
endless telephone calls, troubleshooting with top military lieutenants.
The United States was in a nuclear
arms race with Germany, Groves believed.
Yet some of the key industrial processes needed to make the U.S.
weapon had not even reached
pilot-plant stage. Much of the nations atomic program, he knew, was still mired in laboratory
development. Groves had a
new headache that December morning. There were disturbing reports of workers and scientists being gassed
and burned in the bomb project's
laboratories and factories. Colonel Stafford L. Warren, chief of the Manhattan Project's
Medical Section, needed help. He wanted
General Groves to use his authority to pry loose some secret
information from the army's
Chemical Warfare Service. Warren wanted to know what the military's poison-gas experts could tell the Manhattan
Project about the toxicity of
fluoride.' General Groves
immediately agreed to help. Getting more information about fluoride toxicity was vital. Despite the many
uncertainties facing the Manhattan
Project that bleak winter of 1943, Groves was sure of one thing: fluoride was going to be essential in
making the United States' atomic
bomb. Manhattan Project scientists were planning to use a
"gaseous diffusion"
technology to refine uranium. In that process uranium is mixed with elemental fluorine, forming a
volatile gas called uranium hexafluoride,
which is then "enriched" by diffusing that gas through a fine
barrier, or membrane. The lighter
molecules containing fissionable uranium GENER AL GROVES S PROBLEM 47 needed for a nuclear
explosion pass though the membrane more
quickly and are captured on the other side. But because only a
handful of the lighter molecules
make it through the membrane each time,
many hundreds of tons of fluorine, and thousands of stages of progressive enrichment, would be needed
to produce enough uranium for a
single atomic bomb. By January 20, 1945 when the K- 25 gaseous diffusion plant on the banks of the Clinch River
was loaded with fluoride for the
first time, the plant's fantastic appetite would include a work force of 12,000, a hunger for electricity
that rivaled the city of New York,
and a diet of some 33 tons of uranium hexafluoride each month. 4
The hunger for fluorine was one of the most closely guarded military secrets of World War II. A
special office of the Manhattan
Project in New York City, known as the Madison Square Area, coordinated much of the fluoride work.
Elemental fluorine was designated
simply the gas or fresh air. Scientists at the University of Chicago were advised in a secret 1942
memo that all fluorides are to be
disguised ... in that they give definite clues to the chemistry involved. ' Dragooning fluoride into military service was also one
of the cen- tral technological
challenges of the war, requiring the full resources of academia and industry.' While the idea
behind gaseous diffusion was
simple, elemental fluorine and uranium hexafluoride were extraordinarily corrosive and toxic:
Fluorine was easily the Earths
most reactive element, scientists knew, often combining violently
with other chemicals even at room
temperature, vaporizing steel in a flash
of white heat, for example, and presenting bomb-program engineers with extraordinary challenges and
nightmarish hazards. So dangerous
was the pure element that industry had avoided fluorine before the
war, regarding it as "a
laboratory curiosity." 8
Wartime necessity became the mother of invention. Thousands of researchers in crowded laboratories worked
to enlist fluoride in the fight
against fascism. Scientists from Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Purdue, Ohio State, Penn
State, Duke, the University of
Virginia, MIT, Cornell, and Iowa State studied the chemical, along- side engineers from some of the biggest
industrial companies in wartime
America. The companies included DuPont, Chrysler, Allis-Chalmers, Westinghouse, Standard Oil, the American Telephone 48 CHAPTER FOUR and Telegraph Company (AT&T),
Mallinckrodt, Eastman Kodak, the
Electro Metallurgical Company, Linde Air Products, Hooker Chemical, Union Carbide, and Harshaw
Chemical.' Columbia
University scientists made an early technological breakthrough. In December 1940 a tiny two-cubic-centimeter
capsule of a liquid, code-named
"Joe's Stuff," was delivered to the campus in New York City. Researchers handled it with care.
Inside was virtually the entire
world s existing supply of a radical new chemical compound known as
a "fluorocarbon" — in
which carbon atoms were bonded not with hydrogen, as in conventional "hydrocarbon" oil, but entirely
with fluorine atoms. 10 The
Columbia researchers soon confirmed that the liquid had Herculean strengths. The fluoride atom was bound
to the carbon atom so tightly that
even the hyperaggressive elemental fluorine gas was held at bay.
The discovery was crucial. Inside
the Oak Ridge gaseous-diffusion plant, hun- dreds of huge compressors and blowers would be needed to
push the uranium hexafluoride gas
through the multiple enrichment stages. If regular oils were used to grease these engines, however, the
predatory fluorine atom stripped
the hydrogen from the hydrocarbon, destroying the lubricant and the machinery." The bomb-program scientists could now fight fire with
fire. Fluoride, bonded to carbon
atoms in fluorocarbons, would protect the machinery from the fluoride in the uranium hexafluoride gas. In other
words, fluoride would protect the
machinery from fluoride's uniquely corrosive powers. A crash research program at Columbia —
led by a brilliant Russian immigrant,
Aristide V. Grosse — soon found a way of mass-producing the
top-secret compounds. 12 By 1945
thousands of pounds of fluorocarbon oils and seals were being delivered to Oak Ridge. 13 DuPont mass-produced the
fluorocarbons. Their prewar expertise in
manufacturing Freon was vital to the U.S. nuclear program. Thousands
of pounds of similar refrigerants
were now needed to cool the K-25 diffusion plant. DuPont's fluoride-based plastic called Teflon also gave
the United States a key wartime
advantage. Japan's atomic scientists had struggled to manufacture and handle small amounts of the corrosive
uranium hexafluoride. But Teflon —
which had been first fabricated in a DuPont lab in 1938 — allowed U.S. companies to move enormous quantities
of fluoride around the
country.'
GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 49 "The basic problem in making the
bomb, General Groves wrote,
"was to arrive at an industrial process that would produce
kilograms of a substance that had
never been isolated before in greater than sub-microscopic problems. ' Solving that problem required fluorine scientists.
Without their inventions, the
United States atomic bomb would have been impos- sible, noted the Manchester University scientist and
historian Eric Banks. Most
historians have focused on the physics of the atomic bomb, chronicling how the atom was split. The vast
contribution of chemical engineers
to the Manhattan Project — and the radical debut of a powerful chemical element onto the global stage — has
largely been ignored. It is a
striking omission, pointed out Banks. " American fluorine chemists had a huge impact on the production of the
bomb." But exploiting
fluoride was a double-edged sword, as the bomb programs scientists soon discovered. On January 20, 1943,
the senior Manhattan Project
doctor, Captain Hymer L. Friedell, paid a visit to the sprawling New York campus of Columbia
University, where a small-scale
gaseous diffusion plant had already been built. Almost a thousand researchers would eventually
work on bomb-related projects at
Columbia's War Research Laboratory. 16 After his visit Captain Friedell warned of possible health
problems: The primary potential
sources of difficulty may be present in the handling of uranium compounds, as noted above, and the
coincident use of fluorides which
are an integral part of the process.'" His warning was accurate. A fluoride-gas release at
Columbia later that year produced
"nausea, vomiting and some mental con- fusion"; in 1944 another researcher, Christian Spelton,
developed pulmonary fibrosis after
repeatedly fleeing clouds of uranium
hexa-fluoride gas.' Other health problems were also reported. Dr. Homer Priest, a leading Columbia
University fluoride scientist,
complained that his "teeth seemed to be deteriorating
rapidly." Dr. Priest told a
doctor that he bled more freely and that "there has been a progressive increase in the degree of
slowness of healing and of pain in
the period he has been doing this work.'" The epidemic spread. At Princeton leaking fluoride gas
left sci- entists feeling more
easily fatigued. There were multiple reports of illness at Iowa State and of fluoride acid burns at Purdue,
where 50 CHAPTER FOUR two researchers were
badly gassed with carbonyl fluoride in 1944. Health problems hit industry scientists too. At DuPont rather
severe weakness was reported in
1943 by three chemists who had received "heavy exposures to fluorine. The symptoms were ascribed by them to
the oxyfluorides formed, a report
said' Accounts of fluoride
injury mushroomed as the laboratory work moved into full-scale industrial production. At Oak Ridge in
September 1944, 190 pounds of
hexafluoride gas escaped into a room, drifted outdoors, and formed a chemical cloud 20 yards by 20
yards." Nine workers were
exposed "for periods of twenty seconds to five minutes, injuring
the mouth, salivary organs,
pharynx, skin, eyes and lungs.' The news got worse: that same year, '944, General Groves got shocking new
reports of multiple deaths in the
nuclear program. Details of those fatalities and fluorides role have remained hidden, often for a
half-century or more. The
stories of the DuPont workers, who may have been fluorides first wartime fatalities, have not been made
public until now. (And they remain
anonymous: once-secret military documents describing the deaths do
not record their names.) On January
15, 1944, a laboratory assistant, a chemist, and a girl technician producing the fluorinated plastic
Teflon for the bomb program were
exposed to waste gases. Shortness of breath followed twelve hours later and by the end of 36 hours,
all three were in the hospital,
Colonel Warren was informed.-' 3 The chemist recovered but the other two died terrible deaths, turning purple
and unable to breathe." When the
twenty-three-year-old female "expired at the end of ten days,"
her autopsied lungs resembled a
victim of a World War I poison gas attack. Colonel Warren s deputy, Captain John L. Ferry, suspected
that the DuPont fumes contained
"certain oxyfluorides" and suggested the military investigate the possibilities of this
material being used as a poisonous gas. Although the army ordered up fresh toxicity studies,
fearing " similar compounds
may be formed in some of the other fluoride manufacturing operations," DuPont dragged its
feet, investigators suggested, perhaps
seeking to protect Teflon s postwar commercial potential. The manufacturer considers that we were
buying a pack -aged product and is
not interested in our investigating the toxicity of the materials
involved, reported Captain Ferry.
Several of the
GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM components thus far identified give good
promise for commercial uses other
than that contemplated here, explained a second army official. (Subsequently there were additional
reports of sickness associated with
Teflon. British scientists visiting a DuPont factory just after the
war confirmed that heated Teflon
fumes were linked with "excessive
weakness, tiredness, nausea and sore throat.")" A Philadelphia Story THE SECRET DEATHS continued.
Arnold Kramish is tormented by
injuries sustained in perhaps the worst fluoride accident of World War
II. Sitting in a New York hotel
eating breakfast one October 2001 morning, pastry crumbs sprinkling his shirt, Kramish described how he
still endures painful fluoride
skin eruptions on his legs — fifty-seven years after surviving an explosion that killed two of his colleagues. In
the 1970s he sought medical help
for the recurring sores. A Navy doctor explained to him that fluoride stalks you the rest of your life. He is stalked, too, by memories
of the chemical hell that erupted in
South Philadelphia in September 1944. After the war Kramish became
a top nuclear scientist and
government diplomat, well-versed in the ways of government secrecy. But half a century after the fluoride
accident, in a bid to gain
recognition for the victims, Kramish broke his silence and revealed details of that disaster, including the
names of the men who were killed and
why General Groves kept the deaths secret. 28 On the morning of September 2, 1944,
twenty-one-year-old Private
Kramish and engineers Peter Bragg and Douglas Meigs reported for duty
at the sprawling Philadelphia Navy
Yard. The Yard housed a super-secret
facility using hot liquid fluoride and pressurized steam to enrich
uranium for the atomic bomb. 29
Kramish was one of ten volunteers who had arrived to train on the new equipment. Just three days earlier, at
the Manhattan Project's vast
construction site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Harvard University president James Conant had gathered the men and
asked for volunteers. Conant
warned them that their work in Philadelphia would be one of the more dangerous parts of the Project, remembers
Kramish. James Conant was
acutely aware of the dangers the men faced from fluoride. The chemist was one of President Roosevelt s top
atomic 52 CHAPTER FOUR advisers. He knew
about the DuPont Teflon deaths. And he had seen the secret army reports on fluoride toxicity that General Groves
had requested in December 1943. 10
The reports explained that the military was carrying out wartime human experiments with fluoride gases at the
armys Edgewood Arsenal in
Maryland, searching for chemical warfare agents." The army had received data about
fluoride experiments on humans in
England that had produced powerful central-nervous-system effects. 12
And there were reports from
captured prisoners of war suggesting that the Nazis, too, were investigating fluoride as a war gas. 33 Harvard's
president was so disturbed by the
extraordinary toxicity of certain fluoride compounds, especially those used in the human experiments,
that he issued a secret warning to
a senior U.S scientist about the atomic industrial fluoride work. As an organic chemist, Conant wrote, I think
I should point out to you ... it
is conceivable that similar effects would occur with any fluorinated organic acid, although probably the compounds
would be less striking in their
action. It is further conceivable that these compounds could be formed in small amounts by the
action of fluorine gas on the acids
or related compounds.'
That fall day at Oak Ridge, however, as he asked for volunteers,
Conant did not mention fluoride.
All ten men raised their hands. Any mildly inquisitive guy was not going to opt out, said Kramish. At first the Philadelphia mission
was more Keystone Kops than cloak
and dagger. When they arrived at the Thirtieth Street train station,
a military official in street
clothes ordered them into Wana-makers
department store to replace their uniforms with anonymous civilian garb. But the Navy did not give them enough
money, and all the men could find
were cheap Hawaiian shirts, says Kramish. He remembers ten men furtively changing into their new
outfits in a nearby subway station,
emerging into the sunlight wearing brightly colored shirts and GI
boots. Two days later
Kramish, Bragg, and Meigs were at the Navy Yard, working on the secret machinery. At lunch Kramish received a
two-dollar bill in his change.
"Give it back," his friend told him, warning that it was an omen of bad luck. Kramish pushed the
bill into his pocket. That
afternoon, back at the plant, at 1:20 PM a massive explosion suddenly tore at the machinery. Boiling
steam and fluoride jetted GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 53 onto Kramishs legs
and back, clawing at his lungs and eyes. He fell backward, temporarily blinded. A trained scuba diver,
Private John Hoffman ran into the
smoking chaos holding his breath, pulling the injured men from the room and slicing Kramishs clothes from his
burned body. This act of bravery
would win Hoffman a Soldiers Medal, although the award was kept secret. I pulled three guys out. Everybody
was shell-shocked, Hoffman told
me. Fluorine gas had gotten loose — it was pretty pungent. I had to watch what the hell I was doing."
35 The afternoon detonation
echoed across South Philadelphia. A giant
white plume of uranium hexafluoride gas drifted over the dockyard
and into the nearby battleship USS
Wisconsin. Douglas Meigs and Peter
Bragg lay in their death throes. A priest attempted last rites on
Kramish, whose wife was told that
he had been killed. A once secret report of the disaster makes gruesome reading: twenty -six men had been
exposed to 460 pounds of fluoride
and uranium in a huge chemical cloud. Douglas Meigs was sprayed with live steam containing liquid, solid
and gaseous material in large
quantities ; he died after sixteen minutes. Peter Bragg expired an hour later with third-degree
burns over most of his body. He
seemed in a great deal of pain, the report noted, and became
violent shortly before death and
resisted all attention."
The remaining men survived, although many had serious and slow-healing wounds. Some experienced
intense pain in the scrotum,
penis, or about the anus, probably because of the hydrolysis of the chemicals in these moist areas, the
report notes. Survivors also suffered
unusual "nervous system" effects. One man was temporarily
rendered "almost
incoherent." This "altered mental state" was "more than
could be explained on a purely
fear reaction basis," the report said. "In all probability the injurious effects
observed on the skin, eye, mucous
membranes of upper respiratory tract, esophagus, larynx and bronchi
were all directly caused by the
action of the fluoride ion on the exposed tissues," concluded a military doctor." Kramish reports that at a closed
wartime inquiry, he learned that part of
his suffering had been unnecessary. The head of the Navy project,
Dr. Philip H. Abelson, had known
how to treat fluoride burns, according to
Kramish. But fluoride and uranium were 54 CHAPTER FOUR considered so secret that Abelson refused
to give the medical facts to the
arriving doctors, telling them, I m not sure you guys are cleared,
Kramish recalls. As a result, he adds,
the doctors walked among the injured and
dying men that afternoon guessing what the burns might be. (Fifty
years after the accident, Kramish
reports he cornered Abelson one lunchtime in the Cosmos Club in Washington. Abelson refused to talk about
the accident, Kramish says. "
It was clearly a trauma for him.") The Philadelphia explosion traumatized the entire
Manhattan Project. In addition to
the fluoride strewn over south Philadelphia, it was perhaps the largest release of man-made
radiation that had ever occurred. General
Groves feared that a nuclear fission accident had taken place. The
military quickly suppressed media
coverage. The Philadelphia coroner was not told the cause of the men's death. 37
That disaster night, roused by Groves, the Manhattan Project's top doctor, Colonel Stafford Warren, drove
through the darkness from Oak
Ridge, Tennessee. He arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital in time
to seize the organs of the dead
men, stuffing the heart and lungs of Meigs and Bragg into his briefcase before returning home, he later
told Kramish. (Warren and Kramish
became friends after the war.) Warren explained to him that the organs had become classified material, Kramish
recalled, and that they were sent
to the University of Rochester for examination. The deceased were buried without them," Kramish
added. Family members, such as
Elizabeth Meigs, who was on her way to meet her husband in Philadelphia for Labor Day, would never learn
that fluoride may have killed
their relatives. General Groves kept silent about the fatalities. In his book about the Manhattan Project, Now It
Can Be Told, Groves tells only
that several persons " were injured" in Philadelphia and that the investigation "held up
the work for a while." Groves's fear of admitting the deaths, Kra-mish says, was "not only that
the atomic bomb project might be
compromised, but that if project workers learned of the true hazards of working with uranium,
they might balk. 39 Suppressing
toxicity information "would extend to fluoride," added
Kramish. Working with it was
dangerous. Arnold Kramish
still has the two-dollar bill he received that lunchtime. He keeps it wrapped in lead; it remains
contaminated.
GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM 55 Although fluoride played a nearly fatal
part in Arnold Kramishs wartime
experiences, he believes that few people have any idea of the chemicals wartime importance. It is not
as exotic as the atom, he says.
For most historians, radiation is all they want to talk about. The Fear Mounts FEAR NOW GRIPPED wartime fluoride
workers across the U.S. atomic
complex, and with good reason. 40 Thousands of them were entering an abominable work
environment, beyond even Victorian
horror, with daily exposure to a witch's brew of fluoride chemicals — including, for the first time in
human history, the ferociously reac
tive elemental fluorine gas. 41 "When a jet of pure fluorine strikes most
non-metallic materials," began
one 1946 secret memo detailing occupational hazards, " the surface of the material is instantly
raised to an incandescent white heat.
Personnel may be severely burned by heat radiated from the surface even when they are not directly exposed
to fluorine at all.... NO
PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT HAS BEEN DEVISED TO DATE WHICH WILL RELIABLY AFFORD EVEN
TEMPORARY PROTECTION AGAINST
A HIGH PRESSURE JET OF PURE FLUORINE, emphasized the memorandum. 42 Incredibly, fluorine was not the most toxic gas to
which workers risked exposure.
When excess fluorine was vented to the
atmosphere (a common procedure, as we shall see) a truly venomous family of even deadlier compounds — "oxy
fluorides" — were formed. One of these chemicals, oxygen fluoride, a bi-product of fluorine
disposal, was probably "the
most toxic substance known," bomb program researchers bluntly reported. 43 Another common workplace hazard was hydrogen fluoride
acid ( HF), which had the fiendish
property, if splashed on skin, of ini-
tially escaping detection but then slowly and painfully eating into
a victim's bones. 44 One
especially fearsome compound called chlorine trifluoride, which was used to "condition" or
clean machinery, was so reactive
that Allied intelligence agents suspected Hitlers SS had also experimented with it, as an
incendiary agent. 45 U.S. atomic
worker Joe Harding, who used chlorine trifluoride at the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant in Kentucky,
described the compound as a
violent monster that makes [pure] fluorine look mild by its side. 5" CHAPTER FOUR Working with chlorine
trifluoride was more dangerous than handling TNT while you was climbing a tree, said Harding.' Fluoride posed another hazard. It
dramatically boosted the tox-icity of
other cold war chemicals. The biological havoc wreaked by beryllium,
for example — a key metal that
makes nuclear weapons more powerful — was at least doubled by the synergistic presence of fluoride, bomb
program scientists found. By 1947
there had been nineteen or more deaths reported in the nation s beryllium plants, with the carnage spreading
rapidly. (When newspaper reporters
got wind of the fact that families living near the beryllium plants were also getting sick, the Atomic Energy
Commission tried to suppress the
story.) Beryllium smelters
were felled with an especially devastating one -two punch, said the Manhattan Project scientist Robert
Turner. Men became ill with a
foundry fever marked by shivering, high tempera tures, and profuse perspiration. The knockout
blow from fluoride fumes followed
sometimes days later, the scientist noted, with workers turning purple, gasping for breath, and
coughing up blood. Turner was critical of
other scientists. Investigators studying fluoride had shown a disregard
of the fundamental principles of
modern toxicology. Discovering how
workers were being hurt required considering a range of factors,
including the size of the
particles involved, ways the poison entered the body, and awareness that the action of a compound
is not equivalent to the sum of
the action of its component parts," he wrote" Turner described
the pathways by which tiny fume-sized
particles of beryllium oxyfluoride
penetrated deep into lungs with missile-like force. When the
molecules arrived inside the
alveoli, the atoms of fluorine and beryllium separated "like a charge bursting."
Both beryllium and fluoride were poisonous, the scientist said, but it was the liberation of fluoride deep
inside the lung that produced the
most catastrophic health problems, destroying tissue, choking breath, and leaving permanent lung
scarring." Similarly,
when uranium was converted into hexafluoride gas, that poisonous metal also got a deadly new
punch. This enhanced toxicity of
uranium presented nuclear planners with perhaps their most diabolical quandary. Enormous quantities of
uranium hexa-fluoride process gas
were required for even a single atomic bomb. But when the hex was exposed to air, it rapidly formed a
dense GENERAL
GROVES S PROBLEM 57
white cloud of HF gas and fume-sized particles of a highly toxic compound known as uranyl fluoride or
uranium oxyfluoride ( chemical
symbol UOF z ). The compound injured laboratory animals in microscopic quantities, while even a few
milligrams ingested daily proved
fatal, bomb program doctors reported. Exposure to these two chemicals would be a daily fact
of life in the diffusion plants.'
In the hidden chambers of the massive K-25 plant, where precious uranium for the Hiroshima atomic bomb was
first captured, "there will
be a continuous escape of U0 2 F in the cold trap rooms," officials warned. Those workers would be exposed
8 hours per day regularly,
explained Medical Captain John Ferry in a secret June 16, 1944 letter to an Oak Ridge contractor." "Just Watch Anyone That Has
a Tie On" AS PREDICTED,
WHITE fluoride smoke became a familiar sight and smell to generations of workers in Americas gaseous
diffusion plants. I have never
seen it that there wasnt a thick haze of process gas smoke in the air, said Joe Harding,
remembering his almost thirty years
inside the gaseous diffusion plant at Paducah, Kentucky.
It does have a pungent odor, confirmed another worker, Sam Vest, who in 1970 followed his father and two
uncles into the Oak Ridge nuclear
factories. In a 2001 interview in his home near Oak Ridge the fifty-four-year-old Vest tugged on a
never-ending cigarette, recalling
his own three decades at America's first gaseous diffusion plant.
His soft Tennessee drawl
transported a visiting writer back inside the cacophonous K-25 building and to the apprentice
electrician's first encounter with
uranium hexafluoride gas. Vest watched one morning as clouds of smoke belched from equipment he was replacing.
He asked a more experienced worker
about the strange white fogs' "I said, "What is that stuff?' And he said, "That is
process gas.' And I said,
"Should we be here? I don't see anybody with respirators on. -
The older worker explained an Oak
Ridge safety rule: "Just watch anyone that has a tie on." He added, And if he leaves
hurriedly, you leave behind him.
That was my first indoctrination," Vest said. "I was just a kid." Medical advice given to men who had been in a chemical
release, said Vest, was to go home
and drink a six pack of beer.'" Vest 58 CHAPTER FOUR remembered thinking, "I dont know
anything about chemicals or uranium
hexafluoride or anything like that. But none of this looks on the level
to me. These men are standing in
this fog with no respirators. I thought "My God, what kind of a place is this? On another occasion Vest found himself high above the
plant in the pipe gallery,
replacing electrical heaters. We were wading though this yellow powder," he recalled.
"I asked [a colleague] Clyde, I said, "Clyde, what is all this yellow lying around
here?' And he said, That is product. I
said, What do you mean? And he said, "Well, that is UO F 2 . After
it cools down, it solidifies and
that is enriched uranium.' And I said, "Shouldn't we have some kind of breathing apparatus
or something? And he said, Hell no,
we work in this all the time. It wont hurt you.'" Similar official safety
reassurances, from the highest levels of the United States government, were given to tens of thousands of
fluoride workers throughout the
cold war. The assurances were false. Fluoride was a state secret. Workers were neither told what chemicals they
were handling nor of the warned
dangers. "The people hired by the contractors were not, because of security, told of the hazards involved
in their work," Colonel
Stafford Warren wrote to a deputy, Dr. Fred Bryan, in September 24, 1947. 60 Despite an early awareness that cancer and
occupational injuries were
extraordinarily frequent at the gaseous diffusion plants, work ers
could never prove that such was
the case. "All medico-legal and insurance statistics which refer directly to process hazards"
were classified "secret,"
an AEC document noted. 61 In data that were declassified only in 1997,
for example, it was revealed that
during the earliest months of the K-25 plants operation, from June 1945 to October 1946, there were 392
chemical injuries from uranium
hexafluoride, 58 injuries from fluorine, 21 from hydrogen fluoride, and six injuries from fluorocarbons.
62 Area C WORKERS QUICKLY GREW suspicious
at the endless medical testing.
Behind a barbed wire fence at a secret plant in downtown Cleveland,
Ohio, known as Area C, segregated
young African Americans — who loaded a
chalky green salt into furnaces — gave regular urine samples to government doctors. GENE RA I, GROVES S
PROBLEM 59 "You had to be
tested all the time, said Allen Hurt, an employee of the Harshaw Chemical Company, which ran the secret plant
under contract for the Manhattan
Project. He was one of five former workers who agreed to talk about his experiences. The industrial complex on the
Cuyahoga River was one of the
Manhattan Projects most important sites. Harshaw engineers had invented a way to add extra fluoride
molecules to uranium tetra
fluoride — the green salt the workers were handling — manufacturing the vital hexafluoride
process gas needed for uranium
enrichment. ( Hex means six and tetra means four.) By June 1944 the plant was capable of producing a ton of hex
each day for shipment by truck to
Oak Ridge for the K-25 gaseous diffusion
plant. The government
reassured the workers about the tests. In a 1948 visit to Cleveland, for example, a Manhattan Project senior
doctor, Bernard Wolf, gathered the
workers together to tell them that all our records indicate that no unusual hazard existed. The truth
was very different. Secretly, on
August 5,1947, the AECs W. E. Kelly had
informed Harshaw s senior manager, K. E. Long, that the status of health protection at Area C is
unsatisfactory is several respects. He
cited in particular:
1 . Contamination of the Area C plant, Harshaw plant area and an unknown amount of
contamination of the surrounding
neighborhood with uranium and fluoride
compounds. 2. Exposure
of operating personnel to uranium and fluorine compounds by direct contact and inhala-tion.
64 Harshaw workers knew
something was in the air. The moment you
stepped out of the time clock office, there would be an odor, a
burning sensation, recalled Henry
Pointer. It would sting your face, you
would inhale it too. Union organizer John L. Smith was sick one day after repairing a pipe. It was the
fumes — next thing I felt breathing
difficulty and started vomiting and went to the first aid and
started shitting in front of them
at the same time, he said. ( Although he never knew what had poisoned him, Smiths symptoms were of acute fluoride poisoning.)" 60 CHAPTER POUR There were fluoride
fatalities at Harshaw as well. Young black women made up about half of the Area C workforce.
Twenty-two-year-old Gloria Porter
started at the Cleveland works in 1943, filling hydrogen fluoride tanks. On October 9, 1945, she saw a
man eaten alive by the fluoride acid
when a storage tank at Area C exploded." I heard this rumble,
remembers Porter, who had just
finished her shift. All of a sudden this cast iron [storage tank] just burst open and the smoke, the fumes from
the acid, you just couldnt see
nothing, and that stuff was rolling and the more it rolled the further we would run." A male worker helped Porter to
scramble over the barbed wire fence that
surrounded Area C. As she stared back, a horrific image was seared in
her mind. She watched men
struggling through a giant cloud of hydrofluoric acid. I saw all of them coming out with hunks of flesh just
falling off of them, and the
stomach, and their arms, and I said "My God, I cant look at that. That man cant live. He looked
just liked bone, but he fell right then.
Two men were killed in the accident, and a good friend was badly burned, recalls Porter, who left Area C the
following year." After the explosion, I just wanted to get out, she added African Americans may have been hired for fluoride
work in order to conceal the
chemical s toxic effects. Most fair complexioned men could not be employed in the production
plant, reported a once classified
wartime study of Harshaw fluoride workers. 68 Acid fumes produced
skin that was dehydrated,
roughened and irritated, the report noted. Some workers had "hyperemia" or acute reddening of the
face. When that report was
published, however, the black- and-white language of segregation had grown less stark. The chemical
sensitivity to the fluoride was now more
subtly described as "more severe in fair complexioned men." 69 Harshaw veterans confirmed that
only African Americans were
employed inside the heavily guarded Area C plant. Outside, white
male supervisors oversaw the big
cylinders being hoisted onto trucks for the journey to Oak Ridge, remembered a former worker, James
Southern. Yeah, but they werent
pulling, interjected worker Henry Pointer, the labor people were all black. One young white laborer, John Fedor, who joined the
company in 1939 with a tenth-grade
education, was never permitted to enter the GENER AL GROVES S PROBLEM 61 Area C complex. He
had no idea that the plant was performing secret war work for the government. To work there you had to be
cleared and I was not cleared to
go in, he explained. Nevertheless Fedor grew worried about fluoride exposure at Harshaws big hydrogen
fluoride (HF) plant, which
supplied Area C, and about the terrible conditions those workers endured. (He became a union organizer after
the war.) His Safety Committee
invited state inspectors inside the HF plant. Inside, fluoride levels as high as 18 parts per million were
measured, six times the permitted
safety standard. 70 "There were men walking around with rags over their noses, there were no
respirators, there was no safety
program," Fedor remembered. Burns and acid splashes were common. "The good Lord knows what it did
to the inside of a person's body.
How many people may have suffered
fatalities over the years I have no idea, he added?' Allen Hurt carries visible
reminders of his years at Harshaw
Chemical. He pulled a trouser leg up to reveal fifty-year-old scars
he blamed on fluoride. They didnt give
you protection, he said. It would
eat the clothes and it would do the same thing to your skin. Sickness has stalked former employees,
survivors claim. By the time the
plant closed in 1952, an estimated 400 to 60o workers had been employed at the Area C plant. Cancer
and heart ailments have been
especially frequent among former workers, John L. Smith claims. The people who worked there are dead. Those
that ain't dead, there's five of
them in the nursing home." The remaining veterans smolder with anger. Mostly, they wish they had been
given the dignity of choosing
their wartime fate. "At least we should have been properly
informed," said Smith.
"What few is left is as pissed off as they can be." 72 Hazards to the local population
could occur" WHEN HE
WAS shown several declassified documents describing how fluoride and uranium were regularly vented from the
Harshaw smokestacks, union
organizer John Fedor was suddenly concerned. "I wonder about the immediate area," he remarked,
"whether there were illnesses
caused by that, or whether it just dissipated when it got in the air?" Fedor is right to be concerned about the effects of
fluoride on the area around
Harshaw. It was not, of course, just the atomic 62 CHAPTER FOUR workers who were secretly at risk from
fluoride. From the beginning of the
nation s nuclear program, officials worried about families living near
bomb factories. Hazards to the
local population could occur if large amounts of fluorine or if fluorides were to be discharged in effluents,
wrote the medical director Colonel
Stafford Warren. 73 Again,
the fears proved accurate. Fluoride was secretly vented, and it spilled across communities in New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Ohio. 74 Those releases increased as the United
States expanded its cold war
atomic arsenal and built two mammoth new gaseous diffusion plants, at Paducah, Kentucky, and Portsmouth,
Ohio. 75 Environmentalists
often cite Cleveland s Cuyahoga River — which burst into flames in June 1969 — as the lurid spectacle that
helped bring about the Clean Water
Act. The shocking sight of a waterway ablaze precipitated a moment of national clarity, focusing
attention on the dumping of
chemical wastes into the environment. Less well remembered, however, is a $9 million lawsuit
brought in 1971 by the local Sierra Club
against the Harshaw Chemical Company for fluoride pollution, which, the organization charged, had eaten and
corroded the main Harvard Dennison
Bridge over the same Cuyahoga river." That bridge had to be
rebuilt. The government had
watched the situation in Cleveland nervously. Following complaints in 1947, a team from the University of
Rochester s Atomic Energy Project
was quietly dispatched to measure fluoride pollution. The scientist Frank Smith secretly reported
levels of 143 parts per million of
HF venting from the Harshaw smoke stacks. (By contrast, 3 parts per million is the stan dard
considered safe today for workplace
exposure.) The results are on the low side, Smith wrote, since the efficiency of the sampling procedure we
used is not too good for
[elemental] fluorine and oxygen fluoride; if considerable quantities
of these two gases were present in
the air, we probably missed a part of
them. 77 The AEC was worried about lawsuits. Dr. Smith pointed to
several lower fluoride readings in
his data. Those measurements, he said, might prove the most valuable ... [as they] in no case exceed the
level declared legally permissible
in Massachusetts, California and
Connecticut.
GENERAL GROVES S PROBLEM G 63 Storm clouds continued to gather over
Cleveland. A July 1949 AEC report
warned that although the complaints from civic organizations have been concerned with general atmospheric
pollution, and neither fluoride
nor uranium have been mentioned specifically, it is likely that as
time progresses, the extent of air
pollution by fluorides will receive attention " 78 The AEC ran more secret tests after a
consultant, Philip Sadtler, was hired
in 1949 by the local community to investigate Cleveland air
pollution. While uranium releases
were within permissible levels, they concluded that the fluoride data, however, satisfied none of the
criteria.'" Several of
the former Area C workers confirmed that pollution was rampant. Allen Hurt parked his car
downwind from the plant whenever he
worked the night shift. Overnight, fallout would come, and my black car was full of gray dust, and I washed if
off and I could see little fine pits
where it had ate into the paint. If it does that in metal, what would it
do to us? he wondered. Hurt
recalled that local residents complained: They had a problem with the people up on the hill, because it was
coming up there and bothering
their homes. Environmental
damage around atomic bomb plants was often widespread. At Oak Ridge, officials planned, in 1945, to
dump 500 pounds of fluorides each
day into the nearby Poplar Creek; a decade later, airborne fluoride emissions had scarred a
fifty-square-mile area of wounded and
dying trees, officials stated, and posed a clear threat to grazing
animals. And in 1955, some 615,000
pounds of fluorine was "lost in the vent gases" from a single in-house plant making
uranium hexafluoride at Oak Ridge. 80 Lawsuits alleging fluoride human injury and
destruction of crops and farm
animals were sparked against DuPont's Chamber Works in New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Salt
Company's plants in the Pennsylvania
towns of Easton and Natrona.' At a second gaseous diffusion plant
in Portsmouth, Ohio, which began
operations in 1954, fluoride exposure was
immediately declared a "significant liability" for both
employees and the general
public," a document noted. 82 - At the AECs giant Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, Ohio,
waste fluorides were the biggest
single problem, where some 15,000 pounds of fluorides were being disposed of each month in the nearby
Miami River, according to a pollution
expert, Arthur Stern.
83 64 CHAPTER FOUR And as late as the
mid-1980s, thirty years after it began operation, the gaseous diffusion plant at Portsmouth, Ohio, was still
dumping 15.6 tons of fluorides
each year into the atmosphere." Darkness hid fluoride releases at the K-25 plant in
Tennessee, according to former
supervisor Sam Vest. "I could pull into the parking lot at night and smell it. I could tell
they were releasing fluo rine from the
fluorine plant. They waited until after dark to release it, because it
was just a horrendous cloud."
Some workers found a strange beauty in the nighttime releases at Oak Ridge, Vest added. "Operators
described it as being just
beautiful, to just stand there and watch crystals on a clear cold night go up [into the air]." 5 General Groves's
Solution Dr. Harold Hodge
and the University of
Rochester 
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