eiteneteneenine UNGE focemey We ie a sr wt 2h Bie ~ t ae. ne The Hanford facility includes reactors like the N-Reactor pictured here, which was used to produce plutonium. production reactors at Hanford and Savannah River were completely shutdown. The Purex plutoniumextraction plant at Hanford suspended operationsin December of that year. Rocky Flats Plant plutonium operations were suspended in November, 1989, six monthsafter it was raided by FBI agents searching for documentary evidence of regulatory viclanons. The Fernald facility’s production operations were suspended in October, 1990. A Union of Concerned Scientists report labelled the weapons complex experience a “catastrophe” and summarizedit as follows: Driven by excessive demands for new nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, plagued by declining in-house expertise and dependence on the questionable compe- tence and good faith of contractors, protected by pervasive secrecy from the discipline of public and congressional oversight, and immune from the environmental, health and safety regulanons that control private industrial activities, the weapons complex suddenly collapsed in the second half of the 1980s and nowlies in shambles.* Loss of Credibility and the Need for Review After 40 yecrs of assurances that no threats to the health of community residents and workers had ever occurred, the credibility of the government was dam- PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY aged beyond repair by this series of revelations. Even Energy Secretary James D. Watkins openly admitted that the weapons complex had been “cloakedin secrecy and imbued with a dedication to the production of nuclear weapons withouta real sensitivity for protecting the environment.” Similarly, the revelations intensified skeptical questioning of the DOE’s epidemiologic studies, the bulwark ofits assertions that there was no serious excess risk to nuclear complex workers. As Watkins’ Secretarial Panel for the Evaluation of Epidemiologic Research Activities (SPEERA) noted after a nation-wide series of hearings: A recurrent theme of wimesses at every meeting has been a lack of credibility in the Department’s epidemiologic activities... there are limits to how well an organization can study itself without facing conflict of interest issues.°! The SPEERA focused primarily on the processes and organization of the DOE’s epidemiologic efforts. Given the constraints of secrecy, only two relatively independent and reasonably comprehensive reviews of the AEC/ERDA/DOE/contractor epidemiologic record had ever been conducted, though many specific criticisms of individual studies had been published in the scientific literature. (In 1980, a review of DOE PRP ee Pm mere e DEAD RECKONING t ‘ s & . wee ies icky fF 2 a , 5