Interview with Bruce Walter Church, April 27, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Bruce Church April 27, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Jeffrey Richardson © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Bruce Church April 27, 2004 Conducted by Jeffrey Richardson Table of Contents Introduction: Mr. Church recalls his childhood in Utah and southern Nevada, his education, and his early career at the Nevada Test Site. 1 Work at the Nevada Test Site intensified after the end of the Eisenhower Moratorium. The Public Health Service began a more active program of off- site radiation monitoring. 3 Mr. Church discusses the Public Health Service’s film- badge program and attempts to detect exposure to radiation in the communities surrounding the test site. 5 Lack of information often caused resentment and a lack of public trust in the government. 7 The Public Health Service, and later the Environmental Protection Agency, tried to combat fear and mistrust by assuming a more open and visible public presence. Public outreach and education programs were implemented to address the situation. 9 Measuring off- site radiation exposure was difficult and often of little consequence, argues Mr. Church. Nevertheless, the need to establish credibility and bolster public confidence forced the government to continue the project in earnest. 13 Mr. Church reviews his education and early career leading up to his current involvement with health physics. 17 The risks posed by low- level nuclear waste are often drastically overestimated by the public, observes Mr. Church. Cleaning up such waste exposes workers to far greater risks than the waste itself poses to the surrounding communities. Nevertheless, the public demands that the government take action to protect these sites. 21 Mr. Church suggests that public education, organized at the local level, is the only effective way to ally the prevailing fear and misperceptions of the risks of radiation. 25 Accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island intensified concerns for nuclear safety. A spate of legislation and lawsuits forced the government to move toward a stance of openness. 27 In the early 1980s, the danger of radioactive fallout became a heated political issue. Scientific research dispelled many prevailing myths regarding fallout, but it failed to assuage public paranoia and mistrust of the government. 30 The 1956 film The Conqueror, starring John Wayne, sparked a controversy as many cast members claimed that they developed cancer as a result of working in an area contaminated by nuclear testing. Mr. Church explains how scientific studies discredit allegations that the cancers were caused by radioactive fallout. 33 Conclusion: Scientific theories also suggest that limited exposure to low- level radiation is far less dangerous than commonly assumed. Many scientists thus argue that complying with the linear no- threshold theory, which strives for zero exposure to radiation, may pose a greater danger than the radiation itself. 36 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Federal government programs to compensate victims of radiation exposure politicized the debate over the risks of radioactive fallout. 40 Secrecy and the complexity of scientific information inhibited the flow of information to the general public during the nuclear test program. 42 Mr. Church discusses his role in the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation and its efforts to provide public access to information regarding nuclear testing and radiological safety. 45 Mr. Church argues that litigation and political agendas have bred inefficiency and contributed the current energy crisis in the United States. 48 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Bruce Church April 27, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Jeffrey Richardson [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 2. Jeffrey Richardson: Mr. Church, I would like to first thank you at the outset for taking the time to be interviewed today. Can we begin by you explaining your background? You could give your full name for the record, where and when you were born, what your educational training was, and how you came to be involved with the Nevada Test Site. Bruce Church: OK, my name is Bruce Walter Church. I was born June 9, 1941 in St. George, Utah. That was the regional hospital, even though we lived in La Verkin, Utah. And those first few years my folks moved around quite a bit— including a year in Henderson, Nevada— so actually the time from when I was one to two years old I actually lived in Henderson as an infant. I’m sure Henderson was quite small at that time. Well, that was the beginning of World War II and the industrial complex at Henderson was growing significantly. And my dad was advised to go down there for employment and he went down there and worked as a chemical lab technician for about a year. And we’d have probably lived there forever in terms of growing up, but my grandfather had a heart attack about a year into that program and my dad was asked to come home and take over the farm while he recuped. So that brought me back to my roots in southern Utah. So I was educated at Hurricane High School, attended elementary and Hurricane High School here in Hurricane, which meant that I rode a bus twice a day. And then I attended Dixie Junior College in St. George. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 On the completion of that, my idea was to also become a chemist and I went to Las Vegas looking for summer employment between college as a chemical technician. And that search ended up at the United States Public Health Service laboratory in Las Vegas on Charleston. And I spent, oh, maybe a month- and- a- half there as a technician, mainly standing at the hoods doing wet digestion. So that means I had lots of involvement with a lot of chemistry and high concentration acids— not a pleasant work assignment. After six weeks or so of that I was ready to bag it. And just at that time, in fact it’s a really interesting coincidence, I walked into the laboratory director’s office one morning and I was going to say, You’re either going to have to pay me a whole lot more money or I’m leaving. And I was not being paid much; I was a GS- 1 [ Government Service, grade 1]. And before I could get that out of my mouth he said, How would you like to go to the test site? I knew what that meant in the way of income because the guys that worked at the test site got per diem and we made about as much money from per diem as we did salary. At least a GS- 1 did. So I jumped at the chance and changed my life forever in terms of a working career. Going to the test site, they put me to work in a counting laboratory. And what that means is, is that my job as a technician was to put samples in a radiation detector and record the activity that was measured by these detectors. That’s why they called it a counting laboratory, because you literally counted the pulses created in Geiger- Muller- type of detectors and gas proportional detectors, where the pulses are created by the ionization from radioactivity. And what year was this? This is 1961, the summer of 1961. And when I got to the test site in this early part of August it was desolate, desolate in terms of just very few people. There was no activity to speak of and [ 00: 05: 00] very few workers. And my job at that time was to go around to all of the old work UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 locations and change out air samples from the samplers that were scattered around the test site. We did that on a weekly basis, monitoring the equipment and collecting the samples. And then I would bring them back to the laboratory and measure the beta radiation and the alpha radiation, which was just background. It was very dull and very boring in terms of the radioactivity involved. From my standpoint, as I was learning about measuring radioactivity, it was very interesting. And then on September the first of 1961 the Russians broke the moratorium that had been in effect since 1958, and overnight it seemed to me the test site changed. All of a sudden it was full of people. Commonly the few colleagues we had there at the Public Health Service, after work during the weeknights that we stayed out there, we would go to the recreation hall and have it to ourselves. We could shoot pool, play ping pong, and that’s mostly what we did, we played ping pong, or table tennis. And we were basically the only ones there. And overnight the recreation hall just became so crowded, we couldn’t even get in it. So our recreation after that became one of playing hearts down in our trailer complex, around Building 155. Building 155, I think, still exists. But that was the focus point of the Public Health Service operations in those years. Their job, the Public Health Service job, and had been since 1954, was to monitor the off- site radioactive contamination situation, monitor the environment, collect samples out of the environment, and put out film badges during the test period. But during this period of moratorium, they had stopped doing most of that in the off- site. The Public Health Service had very few people actually. One of the things we did in the laboratory in Las Vegas is we still collected samples from cafeterias all around the country. And the cafeterias would send a daily diet. They would put a tray through the cafeteria line and put the same things on the students UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 were eating and that would go into ice cream cartons and be shipped to the Public Health Service laboratory. Once it arrived there, then it would become blended and then we would have to do this wet digestion that I mentioned, which meant that by using concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids, that we would dissolve all of these food solids into a clear liquid and then dry it onto a planchette that would go into the counting room for measurement of the radioactivity in the food. And they did this ongoing during the moratorium to basically measure the change as the fallout from the atmospheric testing of the 1950s diminished, and that’s what they saw. And that’s what we saw in the air when I was measuring the air radioactivity when I went to the test site. Well, a few days— I can’t remember exactly how many, it wasn’t a lot— three or four days after the Russians tested in the atmosphere on September 1, I started to see an increase of background in these air samples that I collected around the test site. And each day they would steadily go up. And that started to become very interesting to me as a young man. Lots of activity increased in the Public Health Service. New young engineers started to arrive on the staff and training classes began. And the United States embarked on a very aggressive— as it turned out for that year and the subsequent few years— underground test program. United States fired its first underground test on the fifteenth of September. And reflecting back it [ 00: 10: 00] seemed like the whole place was transformed almost overnight into a very, very busy place with a huge influx of people of all kinds: a lot of miners and drillers and support staff that Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company hired, as well as the national laboratories, Los Alamos,, Sandia, Livermore, the Defense Nuclear Agency, probably DASA [ Defense Atomic Support Agency] at the time. They all brought in a lot of people. The Public Health Service brought in a lot of people. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 And because of my knowledge of the off- site area around southern Utah, they asked me to do some interesting things. One of the first things they asked me to help do was to reestablish the film badge program. And because I was a native of the St. George area, and I also was a football player and had a letterman’s jacket, they asked me to go around the test site and wear my letterman’s jacket so I would be readily accepted by the off- site public. And that did open a lot of doors. And what were your duties with the film badge program? It was to basically reestablish it. It had ceased, and so we went around to all of the people who had formerly worn film badges in stations where they put them. For example, I ended up going back to my old Dixie College president, Arthur Bruhn, and I had a meeting with him. And he wasn’t too interested or concerned about wearing a film badge. He was more concerned that I was not back in college. And so our discussion actually was spent more on getting myself back into college and finishing my degree than it did almost anything else. But I visited the county sheriff and other prominent people as we reestablished that film badge network, and I did that all around Washington County of basically covering a loop up through Enterprise and over into Panaca and Pioche and Caliente, Alamo, Ely, as I came down the eastern side of Nevada. I met a lot of interesting people. One of the incidents I remember, because it was a negative incident, was talking to a lady, it was probably around Caliente or Pioche or maybe even Ely. And she was still very upset because sometime in 1955 or 1957 people— no, it might have been earlier than that because I know they were not Public Health Service people. She claimed they were AEC [ U. S. Atomic Energy Commission] people, which meant they were probably Los Alamos technicians because Los Alamos had the off- site assignment in 1951, 1952, and 1953. So it might have been as early as 1953. But she was upset still in 1961 that these UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 people who wanted her elderberry jam as samples to measure didn’t ever come back and tell her about the results, or compensate her for the jam. So she was under the opinion that that was a pretence in order to confiscate her elderberry jam. But this was not feigned anger; she was visibly still upset. And I always remembered that years later as I became a DOE [ Department of Energy] official, and an AEC official, and as I talked to our public affairs people. That was always a lesson to me on how we should conduct public affairs, in terms of always completing a promise or a commitment to people. If you say you’re going to give them results back from something, you always wanted to make sure you did that. Oh, because they had said that to her, that they would get results back to her. Yes. Either they promised her or she believed from some reason that they owed her something back— and I think it’s only normal to do that— that they owed results or compensation or at least [ 00: 15: 00] close the loop. And because they never did that she resented that for many years later. And I think that kind of— I’ll use the word “ arrogance”— I think that kind of arrogance in those early years on the part of people making contact on the off- site, and sometimes I think people used classified requirements— which probably were honest in those early years— gave them the appearance of being arrogant when they may not have been, when they just simply were following regulations and rules. But I know that a lot of that kind of interaction led to a lot of misunderstanding in the off- site as I dealt with it considerably later on. Which probably got worse over the years? Well, I think it got worse because of the telling and retelling of experiences and stories. I think the folklore actually did get worse, and it still exists today and it is compounded significantly as people springboard off of their beliefs of what occurred in those years and have never really bothered to find out the facts. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 So if something would have been done more on the government end with getting more information out or a better understanding of the information. I actually came across a 1955 AEC booklet— it was distributed near the test site— that said, Your best action is not to worry about fallout. I mean there seemed to be, Just don’t worry about it, was the attitude. You think if more information would’ve been given early on, things could’ve been different with the public in regards to safety issues? I absolutely believe that a more aggressive program to interact in the way of information— I’ll call it handholding, showing interest other than— I’ve read those same bulletins, those same brochures, and they’re correct. They’re true. I hear today, and I read it in print almost every other week, as politicians tend to use this same platform today in 2004 as they did years and years ago, that this statement, Well, the AEC lied to us, the government lied to us. And they refer back to these same brochures as the government having lied to us, because the government said then, There is really nothing to worry about. And they think that they lied to them in those publications, when in fact they told them the truth then, that is the truth today. But because of the lack of education, certainly a much less aggressive program than what we’ve done later on, I think all of that— because the whole thing was new, it was mysterious. And even today public education is totally deficient on atomic physics, on radiological principles, on the basics of even understanding radioactivity in our environment. A lot of that is in the back of high school physics textbooks but they never seem to get there. And I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of science teachers through a program that we’ve had over the years and ask them the question, Why don’t you teach that? And the excuse they give me is because it is— several excuses. One is, It is in the back of the book and we never get to it. The other is It’s too controversial and so I [ 00: 20: 00] skip it. So from an UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 education standpoint we were fed on this same void, this lack— and our whole country does not get exposed to some of these more what I call exciting scientific things because it takes a little bit of work. Do you think the recent moratorium has added to that, the fact that we aren’t testing anymore so the issue for some has kind of disappeared? Well, in this area it doesn’t seem to have disappeared. There’s several things that keep it on the table. One is the issue of radioactive waste, both high- level and low- level. Because they’re so close to Nevada, they are exposed to the issues of Yucca Mountain. They are exposed to the issues surrounding the disposal of low- level waste in Nevada. Plus in northern Utah there is a low- level waste disposal facility which disposes of waste slightly above background and that’s about it. And that particular company has been trying to increase their ability to dispose of higher classes of waste, like class- B and class- C waste, and the Utah legislature continues to turn them down. And it’s all over the paranoia and misunderstanding, in my opinion, of radioactivity and radiation effects and radiation biology. It is such an emotional, political problem in the state of Utah that you can’t even hardly have an effective dialogue with anybody because it’s overrun with emotion. Then the politicians have capitalized on that. Every time there’s an election in this state, politicians try to capitalize on the fear of the people by stating that they are opposed to disposal of waste or they are opposed to testing. When the Congress reacted to the president’s proposal here a few months ago of perhaps resuming limited testing at the test site— and I think the Senate passed a resolution basically supporting that— that examination of going to some limited testing to look at specific designed weapons that would be earth penetrators and destroy deep- based bunkers, when that was mentioned it caused quite a stir in this state. The Democratic representative from the state of Utah— they have I think four representatives now; one of them is UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 a Democrat— has actually introduced legislation worded to protect the Downwinders, if you will. It’s an interesting piece of legislation. The people in the downwind area have not been comforted by the fact that the tests moved underground, which shows a real ignorance on their part because they have an absolute lack of knowledge of the amount of radioactivity released from atmospheric tests versus underground tests. They don’t know that you can— just by having an open shaft, you don’t even have to stem it— just by putting a nuclear device down an open shaft and detonate it below ground, still retains huge percentage of the radioactivity in that local area, as opposed if you were to fire it in the atmosphere. And you would say they’re not willing to learn about the issue. Well, they haven’t shown any overt knowledge in the discussions you hear either in public forums, from politicians, and DOE doesn’t go out and educate. They have really hunkered down. Should they? [ 00: 25: 00] Oh, absolutely, in my opinion. Especially if they’re going to renew a program, and maybe sometime they will. But DOE has an off- site program that I was instrumental in starting in 1980. It’s the Community Environmental Monitoring Program. It’s operated for DOE by the Desert Research Institute. And they have stations in St. George, Cedar City. They ring the test site. Ely, Alamo, Tonopah, Goldfield, Indian Springs, Las Vegas, Overton. That program was set up in 1980 to do just some of the things we’re talking about. It was to bring DOE’s experience, the information concerning the underground test program, to the public. One of the first things we did in 1980 was to have a town hall meeting in every community around the test site and we held them in a number of communities that didn’t have sampling stations or monitoring stations. And we brought the DOE manager, we brought various DOE assistant managers, other officials that UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 could answer questions— technical people, as well as the managers— to be in front of the community to answer their questions. And we did that for— I think I participated in something like sixty meetings, and we had just shy of a hundred. I didn’t make it to all of them. At that time I was division director. I was director of the Health Physics division for DOE. And so I attended most of these. In fact my division basically managed that program and I was personally instrumental in getting it set up and convincing management we should do that. And we I think had quite a bit of success. It depends on how you measure success but we had communities that turned out well in terms of numbers of people and those communities basically were Cedar City and St. George, Alamo. What did you do at these meetings? Explain what you were doing? We had a presentation where we showed them what the off- site monitoring program and the on- site monitoring program was all about. We shared with them some data. We tried to help them understand what those numbers meant. And we told them basically what we could about what the program was all about. But specifically we took with us the EPA. The Public Health Service in 1970 transitioned into EPA. So the Las Vegas became an EPA laboratory, but it was basically the same people and the same mission. Just the name changed in 1970. And they still had the same mission, to do the off- site monitoring. And because they had been doing it so many years we felt that we needed to do something different. And even all those years we had sampling stations around the test site. They were just air monitoring stations that EPA operated— Public Health Service, then EPA. But we wanted to become more visible and we wanted to have something in front of the public that they could more easily understand. Now this particular program, the idea was really born by observing what happened at Three Mile Island in 1979. A lot of the staff in Las Vegas went to Three Mile Island to support UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 the downrange monitoring around Three Mile Island. And one of the things they did around Three Mile Island to help the off- site public was they established gamma ray monitoring devices [ 00: 30: 00] out in the public that had a meter that they could actually see go up and down. Had a chart, in other words, and that soon transitioned into electronics to where you could see a digital meter that would change as it measured the ambient radiation, and we put a very sensitive detector in connection with this meter that they could see change. Well, that enjoyed quite a bit of success and public acceptance at Three Mile Island— and I went to a seminar in Washington, D. C. where that was presented and came away from there with a very positive impression that it would serve us well around the Nevada Test Site. So I convinced my boss [ Mahlon E. Gates], the manager, that it was something we ought to do. He agreed. That led to funding and then I got with the EPA folks and we set up a new, more aggressive program where DRI was involved as well as EPA. We thought it would be prudent to bring in a state organization that would be a little more independent, closer to the people of the state of Nevada. And so DRI was given the mission to go to the communities, meet with the community fathers— either a mayor or a town council or whatever was available in that particular community— and brief them on the kind of monitoring station that we wanted to put into the community. And we wanted a local person to operate it, to be trained so they could be very knowledgeable and be able to talk about the numbers and the data that were created from the measurements. We suggested to these people that they choose a high school science teacher. We felt that they’d be the best qualified to understand the program, to go through the training we had in mind. And so they set about doing that. They went to, oh I don’t know, fifteen or twenty communities around the test site to establish those stations and set up a station manager. That UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 station manager actually became a part- time employee of DRI. And that situation exists today. These people still exist as part- time employees of DRI. We moved four or five different kinds of sensors into these stations because we wanted to measure not only the ambient gamma radiation— which I just talked about, that they could see changing momentarily— but we also brought in several different kinds of air samplers so we could sample for not only particulate radiation— and that’s where you actually have a vacuum cleaner that pulls air through a filter and the filter pulls out the particulate— but we wanted to sample the other gases that might occur, particularly if we really had a release from an underground test because an underground test, when a release is made, releases what we call radon and xenon, which are noble gases. In other words, they’re very difficult to contain. So we put some noble gas samplers at these stations, and to do that you actually have to pump the air and compress it. So we actually had compressors that would compress the air and liquefy it and put it in a container, and then those containers were exchanged routinely. We also wanted to sample tritium. Tritium takes a special sampling device. We actually had to have small refrigerators that would pull the air into the refrigerator and actually collect that on special material inside the refrigerator that would have to be sampled. So we had these four different sensors, if you will. Three of them were passive collectors where you actually have to take the material back to the laboratory to do the analysis, and then we had a direct readout that was an active sensor where they could see what the gamma radioactivity was. We took these station managers to the University of Utah and engaged a professor that [ 00: 35: 00] was again totally independent of the test site, and DRI hired him to run a two- week course to train these schoolteachers. Do you remember his name? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 Gary Sandquist. Dr. Gary Sandquist is the one that did the training for about the first twelve or fifteen years. Did you guys ever notice anything out of the ordinary, anything extremely bad during any of these sensorings? No? No, for two or three reasons, and we didn’t think we would. We would’ve had to have a really bad accident, almost beyond the capability of what an accident would happen, to have a positive sample. There’s a lot of things that come into play to make that statement. See, the last venting that occurred, oh when was that, in 1970, I think it was, Baneberry, December the eighteenth, 1970. That venting was really the last venting that occurred during my tenure there, in a sense, because there hasn’t been any testing since 1982. Or was it 1992? Nineteen ninety- two. Nineteen ninety- two. I was going to say, we did a lot of testing in the 1980s, I thought. Since 1992. And even as bad as Baneberry was, it was difficult to measure radioactivity off- site. And the reason for that is, and one of the very important factors as we got ready to test, was the weather conditions. The wind conditions, especially wind speed, is very critical with respect to dose off- site and getting radioactivity off- site. We almost had dead calm, as calm as it ever is, on the day of Baneberry. And as a result of that, the cloud basically stayed right on the test site. We actually had more of a problem on the test site than we ever could’ve had off- site because of those conditions. If it’s difficult to measure off- site, why go through everything that you just talked about? To convince people that there’s nothing there. To let them see it, let them participate in it. Because they don’t believe us. They didn’t believe the government. And the idea was to build up credibility with the public by having a public person, a schoolteacher, operate the equipment, UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 observe the measurements, train them so they knew that the sampling devices were all about, how the samples were collected, how they were analyzed. They visited the laboratories. They understood the process of the analysis. And we taught them to understand the data. And the idea was to have them knowledgeable as a person in the community who could talk to people. That paid huge dividends. Some of the largest dividends took place with the station manager in St. George who had referred to him by the Chamber of Commerce and the city council, as well as other people became aware of him and they would contact him. When you drove through St. George today, you could see that it’s a growing area. When I grew u