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| What's in the dust? A haboob blows through Phoenix, Arizona |
One
of the few American politicians to be alarmed by the ongoing dangers
posed by the Fukushima Daiichi ruins is US
Democratic Senator for Oregon, Ron Wyden. He visited the site and
became alarmed by the perilous state of Fukushima Reactor 4
building's spent fuel pool. The earthquake-damaged structure that
holds the spent fuel could collapse in another strong earthquake, and
if that happens there is a strong possibility that the fuel could
catch fire and create a global disaster much bigger than Chernobyl or
Fukushima. There is a sad irony in the fact that it is an Oregon
senator who had to sound the alarm because his state is already
threatened by the massive radiological contamination that has been
left on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington.
Since the 1980s, billions of dollars have been spent to clean up the
site, but it is questionable how successful decontamination will be.
Radioactive plumes are migrating through the soil toward the Columbia
river, so there is a danger that the contamination of the river (and
of downstream cities like Portland, as well as the Pacific Ocean)
will be worse in the future than it has been in the past.
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| Back in the day at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Richland, Washington, USA |
After
living in Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, and after
reading about the contamination of the American West during the Cold
War, I'm not sure which calamity Senator Wyden should be more
concerned about. It is impossible to comprehend the tremendous
numbers and terminology that are used to describe radiation hazards.
All the reported numbers appear to be horrifyingly large. There are
millions of terabecquerels and petabecquerels reported, and other
numbers multiplied by 10 with double digit exponents indicating a
long series of zeros on the quantities given. These are said to be
outrageously harmful, or nothing to be concerned about at all,
depending on whom you talk to. It is a matter of counting the number
of atoms undergoing radioactive decay, after all, and atoms exist in
numbers beyond normal intuition. Even though the exponent is the key
number to notice, at a certain point, the difference, for example,
between 1015
and 1018
(a multiple of 1000) doesn't register for the average person.
Confusion about the meaning of radiation data occurs also because of
the way we describe radioactive material. It is created by man or it
exists in nature. It is left in the environment, or it is released,
contained, or disposed of. The earth and living things are
contaminated and then possibly decontaminated. Depending on whether
one is pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear, radioactive material can be
disposed of or contained, or it can only be moved from one place to
another, if there is any meaning at all in trying. Radionuclides vary
in their duration (half-life), energy level, and the role that they
play in biochemistry. Even the stable isotopes of uranium poison us
chemically as heavy metal toxins. How we perceive the hazards of
radiation depend on how we choose to understand and define the
characteristics and terminology of radiation. There is no agreement
about what the actual hazards are.
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| Hanford is the gray area northwest of the "A" marker. |
After
the Fukushima disaster, I had to make a decision whether to stay in
Japan or return to Canada, and my decision to stay reflected an
assessment that there were possibly no uncontaminated places to flee
to. In addition, any place I might flee to could soon be impacted by climate change. A place that is relatively safe now may not be in the future.
Zones contaminated by radiation exist in Central Asia, (weapons
production and testing by China and the former Soviet Union), South
Asia (India and Pakistan), the Arctic (Soviet Union and USA), the
South Pacific (imminent
collapse of the Murorua Atoll because of bomb tests by France?),
Australia (British bomb tests), Sellafield in the United Kingdom and
La Hague in France (both for plutonium processing), Chernobyl,
Fukushima, Algeria (French weapons testing), uranium mine sites in
Africa, Australia, Canada, and Kazakhstan. The places that are not
radioactive have numerous other chemical hazards that one must
contend with. I'm still not sure if it was the right judgment to stay
in Japan, but much that I've learned in the meantime confirms my
opinion that few places are safe anymore. The Fukushima disaster is
just part of a nightmare that began a long time ago and will continue
long into the future. The only questions now are whether we are going
to stop adding to the harm already done, and whether we will take
some mitigating actions, to the extent they are possible, to reduce
harm to future generations. Unfortunately, much of the harm has
already been done to past, present and future generations, and it can
be undone only to a limited degree. One of the urgent things to do is
simply to teach the history and put up the warning signs to present
and future inhabitants.
This
dilemma is explained well in the book The
American West at Risk,
by Howard Wilshire, Jane Nielson, and Richard Hazlett. Their chapter
concerning radiation hazards in the American West is also published
here.
It's a long chapter about the contamination left at numerous sites
where nuclear weapons were made and tested. It describes the hubris
of government scientists who assumed without evidence that
contaminants would dilute in the environment rather than accumulate
in the food chain. They also erroneously expected that radionuclides
would not travel underground and reach water tables. In other
aspects, the weapons program became a disaster just because of
bureaucratic mismanagement, and the mistaken belief that people would
always do what safety manuals said they were supposed to do. In some
instances, the program engaged in the deliberate sacrifice of the
ecosystem and the health and lives of civilians and soldiers –
crimes which were condemned later by US court decisions that finally
acknowledged the harm done.
To
put the problem of the American West in perspective with the
well-known disasters of Fukushima and Chernobyl, and as a way to
summarize the chapter in The
American West at Risk, I've
excerpted below sections of the chapter that contain the data for the
radioactive legacy, and I hope that the figures have been arranged in
such a way that they start to make the relative dangers of the
hazards comprehensible. Making sense of these numbers depends on how
they are embedded in the language we use to comprehend the problem.
One figure is shocking because it represents an amount of hazardous
material sitting “safely” in containment pools, or embedded deep
in the earth over a large area as a legacy of underground tests.
These places are often nearby, but not touching, a source of drinking
water. For now, such places may be harmless, but for future
generations, they may be a gift that keeps on giving. For some
people, the fact that this material was ever created represents an
unforgivable “release” of hazardous radionuclides. For others it
is not a “release” but rather a “ shielded inventory,” a
“containment,” a “proper disposal” or a problem that can be
resolved. How frightening the numbers are depends on how one
perceives the danger posed by the existence of nuclear waste in the
various ways it has been left in the environment.
The
American West at Risk,
is,
of course, not the last word on the legacy of nuclear weapons
production in America. An extensive
study of iodine fallout (funded by the US government Centers for
Disease Control) in the Hanford area found no harmful effects in the
population. It concluded, “The HTDS [Hanford Thyroid Disease Study
Team] found no evidence that exposure to Iodine 131 from Hanford
atmospheric emissions between 1944 and 1957 was associated with an
increased cumulative incidence of thyroid cancer, benign thyroid
nodules, hypothyroidism, or autoimmune thyroiditis.” However,
elsewhere in the report the authors add, “Nevertheless,
there was considerable uncertainty associated with the individual
dose estimates. Consequences of this uncertainty are considered in
more detail elsewhere.” Thyroid
disease was found in the study participants at the same rate (about 13%) as it is
found in the rest of the American population, and there was no dose response
relationship. This leaves open the possibility that there
was no control group.
According to another government-mandated study (Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Test ), all of the American population was exposed to 150 million curies (5.55 x 1018 Bq) of Iodine 131 during the 1950s from 90 tests at the Nevada Test Site, and it made a wildly divergent guess about how many cases of thryoid cancer this caused: anywhere from 11,000 to 212,000. Furthermore, the incidence of thyroid cancer has increased greatly since the 1970s, and there is no certainty about whether this finding comes from better diagnosis or environmental causes. The amount of fallout that all Americans were exposed to would seem to cloud results of the HTDS study which assumed that the Hanford releases contributed only 1/150th of the releases from bomb tests. The control group, the entire American population, was likely to have been affected as much as people near Hanford.
According to another government-mandated study (Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Test ), all of the American population was exposed to 150 million curies (5.55 x 1018 Bq) of Iodine 131 during the 1950s from 90 tests at the Nevada Test Site, and it made a wildly divergent guess about how many cases of thryoid cancer this caused: anywhere from 11,000 to 212,000. Furthermore, the incidence of thyroid cancer has increased greatly since the 1970s, and there is no certainty about whether this finding comes from better diagnosis or environmental causes. The amount of fallout that all Americans were exposed to would seem to cloud results of the HTDS study which assumed that the Hanford releases contributed only 1/150th of the releases from bomb tests. The control group, the entire American population, was likely to have been affected as much as people near Hanford.
The
HTDS study also leaves questions as to who consumed the milk and
other produce of the region. It is unlikely that it was all consumed
by the local people who participated in the study. The study also
omits mention of stillbirths, infant mortality, other cancers and
birth defects in humans and livestock. These are described only in
eyewitness testimony of persons who lived through the period in
question (1944-1957) – the type of accounts that historians use to
understand what happened in social upheavals (the Nazi Holocaust, for
example), but which are dismissed pejoratively as “anecdotal” in
scientific research.
Wilshire
et al, citing a book (Atomic Harvest,
by Michael D'Antonio) that related subjective experiences of Hanford
fallout victims, describe the effects of the Green Run experiment
this way:
Following
the Green Run, a very large number of sheep died on farms in Franklin
County, Washington, near the Hanford Reservation - and a large number
of ewes delivered deformed or stillborn lambs. Both before and after
the Green Run, families on those farms gave birth to babies with
deformities and other birth defects, and later suffered from multiple
health problems, including sterility. In the thinly-populated area
closest to Hanford, which came to be known as the "Death Mile,"
more than 60 men and women began dying of heart attacks or cancers
before reaching the age of 60. After more than three decades, Hanford
downwinders finally learned about the Green Run and the probable
cause of their hair losses, anemias, unexplained fatigue, and
reproductive disasters, all common symptoms of radiation poisoning.
Another
eyewitness account related by Wilshire et al documents the problems
suffered by one person immediately after the Green Run experiment.
Many
Hanford victims lived far from the Reservation - one is June Stark
Casey. In 1949 June Stark was a student at Whitman College in Walla
Walla, Washington, 50 miles from the Hanford Reservation. That year,
fatigue and chills suddenly struck her during Christmas break,
followed by permanent loss of her long, natural curly hair.
Throughout her life, she has suffered from severe hypothyroidism, a
miscarriage and a stillbirth, multiple tumors in various organs, skin
and breast cancers, and a chronic degenerative spine disorder. Not
until 1986 did she discover that Green Run radiation had blanketed
Walla Walla on December 2, 1949.
Such
exceptional cases may be rare and escape the notice of researchers,
but heavy contamination could happen to only a few people because
fallout is not distributed evenly. Some unfortunate people may
consume a heavily contaminated dust particle or leaf of spinach. By
the methods of the HTDS study, June Stark Casey's health conditions,
and the timing of their onset, were irrelevant. She would be just one
of the many research subjects whose condition was assumed to be a
“natural occurrence” of thyroid problems.
Some
Perspective on the radiation hazards presented in The
American West at Risk
Many
of the cited figures in the list below are estimates. There are
conflicting reports, as expert opinion and official records are not
always in agreement, and estimates are constantly being debated and
revised. The estimate of the Chernobyl release, for example, depends
on knowing how much fuel is left in the ruins of the reactor
building, but this has never been accurately measured. Where sources
are not given, readers can easily confirm or find conflicting
estimates given by various reliable internet sources.
Units
of measure: 1
curie = 3.7 x 1010
becquerels.
In recent research, becquerels (Bq) are cited more commonly than
curies, so figures in curies have been converted. Other units of
measure have been converted to metric. One Bq is defined as the
activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus
decays per second.
Releases:
- Total atmospheric release of Chernobyl: 5.2 x 1018 Bq.
- Fallout from bomb testing at the Nevada Test Site, Iodine 131 only, during the 1950s: 150 million curies (5.55 x 1018 Bq). (Source: National Cancer Institute Study Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Test ).
- Worldwide releases of cesium 137 from all sources: 270 million curies (9.9 x 1018 Bq). (Source: Robert Alvarez).
- Fallout of Strontium 90 from worldwide weapons testing until 1980: 16.8 million curies (6,216 x 1017 Bq) (Source: UNSCEAR).
- According to TEPCO's estimate of May 2012, 5.38 x 1017 Bq (14.5 million curies) of iodine-131, caesium-134 and caesium-137 were released into the ocean (80%) and atmosphere (20%).
- Three Mile Island releases of Iodine 131: 13 to 17 curies (4.81 x 1011 Bq to 6.29 x 1011 Bq).
- Releases of Iodine 131 from Hanford 1944-1957: 1.1 million curies (4.07 x 1010 Bq).
For
reference, the number of atoms in the human body is 7 x 1027
(Source: Jefferson
Lab Science Education). This is a number enormously larger than
the numbers above indicating atoms undergoing nuclear decay, which
suggests that fallout has been spread very thinly among millions of
human bodies. However, the numbers tell us nothing about the damage
that these quantities of nuclear decay may have done to living
things. The exiled Russian spy Alexander
Litvinenko was assassinated in Britain in 2006 with an estimated 10
micrograms of polonium 210. This was 200 times the median lethal dose
of 50 nanograms that was needed to kill him. One
gram could, theoretically, kill 50 million people. Not all
radioactive isotopes are, by mass, this harmful, but the point is
that it takes only a relatively small number of atoms to render
lifeless an organism consisting of 7 x 1027
atoms.
Relatively
contained:
- At the Hanford and the Idaho (INEEL) site, there are approximately 65 million gallons (246,051,766 liters) of high-level wastes with a total radioactivity of 399 million curies (1.2543 x 1019 Bq) (Source: The American West at Risk).
- Estimate of spent fuel inventory at Fukushima Daiichi: 336 million curies (1.2 x 1019 Bq) (Source: Robert Alvarez).
- Radioactive wastes buried in landfills and boreholes in the American West amount to nearly 10 million curies (3.7 x 1017 Bq). (Source: The American West at Risk)
- Estimate of plutonium on the earth awaiting a permanent storage solution: 200,000 – 300,000 tons (Source: the film Into Eternity).
The
American West at Risk
by
Numbers
- Both radioactive and non-radioactive but toxic materials from weapons production and testing currently contaminate buildings, soil, sediment, rock, and underground or surface water within more than 2 million acres [8,903 km2, 0.08% of total national land area] administered by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the 11 western states. Bomb tests created vast quantities of contaminated soils, rock and water that are not identified as waste and do not appear in contaminant inventories...
- Nuclear science has never found a safe way to deal with long-lived radioactive wastes. DOE sites and facilities store more than 1,000,000 tons of hazardous nuclear and non-nuclear materials just from nuclear bomb production, enough to fill more than 11,000 railroad cars of a train 100 miles long...
- The nation as a whole harbors at least 1.3 billion cubic feet (36,811,900m³) of radioactive wastes, emitting 1.01 billion curies (3,737 x 1019 Bq) of radioactivity [most of it shielded and contained, one would assume or hope – the authors don't make the distinction], 10 times the amount of radiation released in the Chernoybl accident...
- In addition, DOE manages lands containing more than 67 billion cubic feet (1,897,228,707m³) of contaminated water, sediment, soil, and rock, and the sites of approximately 5,100 contaminated facilities...
- Some 3 billion cubic feet (84,950,539m³) of radioactive uranium mill tailings - also containing toxic heavy metals - are lying about on the ground, mostly in the 11 western states...
- Hazardous contamination from either bomb making or testing - or both - directly affects 44 areas in the western U.S. The largest threats lie on and under contaminated areas close to population centers, such as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, next to the city of Richland, Washington, and surrounded by farmland on both sides of the Columbia River...
- Initially operated by DuPont, the General Electric Corporation ran the 360,000 acre (1,456.86 km2) Hanford Reservation from 1946 to 1965, the period of its worst intentional and accidental radiation releases...
- The radioactive pollution from Hanford's bomb fuel production is in the form of 25 billion cubic feet (707,921,159m³) of dangerously radioactive wastes - more than enough in liquid form to fill two Great Salt Lakes, and equivalent to the worst contamination at notorious Russian bomb factories...
- Hanford recorded approximately 270 other unplanned releases and spills but information about them is scanty - one spill involved dumping an estimated 25,000 curies (9.25 x 1014 Bq) of radioactive cesium-137 into the ground.
- One 1949 Hanford program, the so-called "Green Run," purposely released radiation over parts of western Washington state, Oregon, and Idaho, irradiating farms, towns, and people - not to mention the soil and water. The Green Run's actual radioactive release is unknown, but reconstructions suggest as much as 11,000 curies (4.07 x 1014 Bq) of iodine-131 and 20,000 curies (7.4 x 1014 Bq) of xenon 133 - more than 700 times greater than the Three Mile Island accident, and 11,000 times the threshold for human radioactivity exposures at that time...
- At Hanford and the Idaho (INEEL) site, approximately 65 million gallons (246,051,766 liters) of high-level wastes with a total radioactivity of 399 million curies (1.2543 x 1019 Bq) - nearly 4 times the officially-reported Chernobyl release - are still stored in tanks as liquids, part-liquid and part-solid sludge, and solids...
- One hundred and seventy-seven radioactive-waste-filled underground tanks are buried at the "200 East and West sites," near the Hanford Reservation's geographic center...
- Sixty-seven of the tanks have leaked, draining between 600,000 and 900,000 gallons (2,271,247 to 3,406,870 liters) of radioactive pollution into the ground - enough to fill 4 to 6 railroad tanker cars.
- Adding to the accidental leaks, between 1946 and 1966 Hanford bomb makers ran out of storage room in tanks and intentionally poured more than 120 million gallons (454,249,413 liters) of liquid wastes from the tanks directly into the ground...
- Dumped into ditches called "specific retention trenches," these wastes contained more than 150 million pounds (68,038,900 kilograms) of corrosive chemicals, enough to fill 75 railroad cars, along with materials having total radioactivity of more than 65,000 curies (2.405 x 1015 Bq)...
- The result of all these disposal and storage failures is an estimated 370 billion gallons (1,400,602,358,600 liters) of groundwater with various radioactive and other hazardous contaminants beneath the Hanford waste site - enough to fill the Great Salt Lake nearly 5 times...
- By 1983 the tritium-containing plumes had entered the Columbia River, demonstrating that groundwater actually takes a maximum of 10 or 20 years to move the 14 miles from the 200-site contamination source to the river. The time for ruthenium to migrate 14 miles is now estimated at 7 to 8 years, while the faster-traveling tritium takes only 6 to 7 years. These pollutant "travel-times" require speeds of about a half a mile to 2.5 miles per year, much faster than the "thousands of years" estimates that DOE scientists had calculated before finding tritium in the Columbia River...
- Largely to save money, the Cold War's atomic bombing relocated to U.S. soil, at the 865,000-acre (3,500 km2) Nevada Test Site (NTS), adjoining World War II Nellis Air Force Base. More than 800 underground tests have turned tracts into a whole-earth version of Swiss cheese. Another source of extensive radioactive contamination - both above and below ground - comes from failed radioactive waste "disposal."
- In all, radioactivity contaminates approximately 565 million cubic feet (15,999,018m³) of soil, sediment, and rock on the riverless NTS and 280,000 cubic feet (7,929m³) of groundwater.
- Radioactive wastes buried in landfills and boreholes amounted to nearly 10 million curies (3.7 x 1017 Bq) by January 1996 - 4 times the minimum amount of radioactivity released in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant melt downs.
- An unknown amount of radioactive and chemical wastes also are buried at 1,800 so-called "industrial sites," including leach fields, sumps, disposal wells, leaking tanks and others. DOE expects to identify another 1,500 industrial-site disposal areas.
- In addition, 828 below-ground nuclear tests blasted out subterranean cavities, which remain thoroughly permeated with radionuclides.
- At least 33 early NTS nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, called "safety" or "equation of state" experiments, now seem as unbelievable as plot devices in horror films. Experimenters blew up packages of plutonium and uranium with high explosives "...to determine the size and distribution of plutonium particles which might result from fires and conventional explosive accidents involving nuclear weapons." Although the scientists could have traced plutonium dispersal patterns using a non-radioactive material with similar physical characteristics, they chose instead to dust more than 3,000 acres (12 km2) with plutonium and other dangerous contaminants, having radioactivity in excess of 40 picocuries (1.48 Bq) per gram... A level of 10 pCi/g (0.37 Bq/g) is considered a lethal dose.
- Inventories of radioactivity in surface soils as of January 1, 1990, suggest a total greater than 2,000 curies (7.4 x 1013 Bq) within the NTS.
- An estimated 110 million curies (4.07 x 1018 Bq) of radioactive contaminants, about equivalent to the minimum Chernobyl release estimate, melted into the rocks surrounding explosion cavities, both in water-saturated rock below and unsaturated rock immediately above the water table...
- The other 512 underground blasts left nearly 200 million curies (7.4 x 1018 Bq) of tritium and plutonium fission products, and approximately 4,400 pounds of unfissioned plutonium, in unsaturated rock and soil...
- In addition to radionuclides, the bomb tests added huge amounts of hazardous nonradioactive materials to NTS rock and soil. No comprehensive inventory is available, but a single underground test can involve more than 125,000 pounds of lead, along with a wide variety of other toxic metals, plus smaller amounts of other inorganic and organic chemicals...
- At the other major atomic sites, principally Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL), Idaho; Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site, Colorado; Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, more than 12 million cubic feet (339,802m³) of radioactive waste lie buried in trenches or pumped into the ground.
- The only comprehensive attempt to track historical records on buried transuranic waste at INEEL revised a prevailing estimate of 73,300 curies (2.701 x 1015 Bq) upward to an uncertain figure between 640,000 and 900,000 curies (2.368 x 1016 to 3.33 x 1016 Bq) - in comparison, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs together produced 1 million curies (3.7 x 1016 Bq) of radiation...
- Tests showed that the soil over more than a 19 square mile (49km²) area around the Rocky Flats reservation can have plutonium concentrations as much as 380 times above natural background levels...
- More than 2 million people live within a 50 mile (80km) radius of the Rocky Flats site, and new towns such as Superior, Colorado, are springing up within sight of Rocky Flats. DOE's proposed cleanup standard for Rocky Flats could leave "unprecedented levels of plutonium - at the site," but would require preventing all future public access.
This
astounding litany of numbers leaves us feeling numb and confused, and
in the end, they don't help much with the task of interpreting phenomena and
drawing conclusions. The effect of all this radiation on human
populations remains unconfirmed by scientific studies, but there is no disagreement about what radiation can do to individual organisms. It is also clear that rates of cancer and many other diseases have
increased since the mid-twentieth century. Since we know that
chemical pollution, poor diet, lifestyle changes and radiation are
all contributing and confounding factors, it makes sense to stop
worrying about the numbers, to no longer expect that research will confirm what we want to know. Instead, it would be better to
follow the sensible course of not making any more poison and cleaning
up what exists. And, oh yeah, we have to do this while shifting the global energy system toward something that will
mitigate the additional harm that is being done by climate change.
Additional
note:
There
are some grounds for optimism in the fact that American activists
were able to push the government to react and deliver some degree of
justice to the victims of nuclear weapons production and testing. The
victims of Chinese weapons tests never got any from their government.
The curious thing about the American case is that both the US government and
activists expressed almost no concern for the fallout that landed on Canada
and Mexico. Internet searches on this topic come back empty. Only
this brief report from Beyond
Nuclear mentions how it is strange that the American fallout maps
stop at the border. Canada is only 290 kilometers from Hanford, and
the American desert tapers northward into the Okanagan Valley of
central British Columbia. If the US government felt an obligation to
carry out research and eventually offer compensation to victims, it
should have done the same for neighboring countries that were
affected. The Canadian government seems to have never expressed any
concern over the issue, aside from testing some caribou meat in the Arctic, and it
is likely the Mexican government never did much, either.
Sources
and Further Reading
- Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, Richard W. Hazlett. The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery. Oxford University Press. 2008.
- Scott Davis, Kenneth J. Kopecky, Thomas E. Hamilton, Lynn Onstad and the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Team. “Thyroid Neoplasia, Autoimmune Thyroiditis, and Hypothyroidism in Persons Exposed to Iodine 131 From the Hanford Nuclear Site.” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). 2004; 292(21):2600-2613. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=199905
- National Cancer Institute. Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests. 1997.
- Michael D'Antonio. Atomic Harvest. Crown Publishers. 1993.
- Senator Wyden on the problems at Hanford.
- Senator Wyden on the problems at Fukushima.
- B.L. Tracy and G.H. Kramer. Radiocesium Body Burdens in Northern Canadians. Bureau of Radiation and Medical Devices. Department of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa, Canada. www.irpa.net/irpa8/cdrom/VOL.2/M2_169.PDF
- Keith Schneider. “Dying Nuclear Plants Give Birth to New Problems.” The New York Times. October 31, 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/31/us/dying-nuclear-plants-give-birth-to-new-problems.html
- Enformable.
- Radioactive Fallout from Nevada Test Site Impacted Canada. Beyond Nuclear. January 27, 2012. http://www.beyondnuclear.org/canada/2012/1/27/radioactive-fallout-from-nevada-test-site-impacted-canada.html
- Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization
- The US government's information site for Hanford
- Hanford Watch
- Hanford Challenge
