Interview with Layton James O'Neill, July 2, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Layton O’Neill July 2, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Suzanne Becker © 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 Layton O’Neill July 2, 2004 Conducted by Suzanne Becker Table of Contents Introduction: birth and childhood in Montana, military service ( U. S. Army Medical Corps), education ( B. A., Chemistry; B. S., Sanitary Science, University of Washington), marriage ( 1952). 1 Work for Kittitas County Health Department, WA. 3 AEC Fellowship Program, University of Washington ( radiological safety) and work at Hanford Site, WA. 4 Work as Offsite Fallout Monitor for USPHS, Las Vegas, NV ( 1958). 5 Impressions of above- ground testing. 8 Work for National Reactor Testing Station, Idaho [ NRTS] and description of reactor accident ( 1961) . 9 Transfers to Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO] ( 1966), works for NTS Radiological Safety Branch. 14 Resistance of agencies towards required health physics work ( inspections, recommendations, etc.). 16 Work with Emergency Radiological Assistance Team ( later HAZMAT). 20 Involvement of health physicists as advisors during test events. 28 Job changes: Acting Chief and Chief of Radiological and Waste Management Operations Branch ( 986- 1987), Chief of Defense Waste Branch ( 1990), Director of Waste Management Division, and evolution of waste management at the NTS. 29 Thoughts on waste management and storage at NTS and Yucca Mountain. 32 Work at NTS and in Pacific testing. 36 Details work as sanitarian with radiation fallout in Kittitas County, WA. 42 Radiation exposure education work with Enewetak islanders. 45 Thoughts on radiation exposure of Downwinders. 46 Details of helicopter accident during NTS overflight ( 1971). 47 Conclusion: discussion of his “ brain book” and a wrap- up of career. 51 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Layton O’Neill July 2, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Suzanne Becker [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disk 1. Suzanne Becker: So I guess I just want to begin by— if you could talk about your background a little bit and, you know, your family and where you’re from. Layton O��Neill: Well, I was born in Glendive, Montana and lived most of my early life in Livingston, Montana. And then I was drafted into the Army for the Korean Conflict. I was older than most draftees. I was drafted for World War II but I was 4- F due to my eyesight. And my mother didn’t expect them to take me for Korea, but they changed their rules and said, we’ll take everybody. And they froze me to stateside duty. So I didn’t have to go to Korea but I ended up as a cadre for training troops for basic training. And I also went from there to a Leadership School. I became an instructor in a leadership school for about a year, and then the last of my tour I went back to cadre again, basic training, because they did away with the Leadership School; they didn’t need it anymore. What did they do at Leadership School? At Leadership School? Taught leadership and the philosophy of leaders. And they needed NCOs, [ noncommissioned officers], in Korea. In fact, the guys with the red cross on their helmets were targets of the enemy, and so we lost a lot of them and we had to supply a lot of NCOs that could take charge of medical operations, field operations. Oh, I was in the Army for two years only and then was released to a five- year reserve. And upon getting out of the military, I went to school. I actually had been in school at the University of Montana. It was called Montana State College at the time I went in the service. And so I was going into my junior year when I got drafted. And because I was sort of undecided UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 when I went into school, I didn’t get a deferment. My younger brother was also in school at the same time and he got a deferment because he was a chemist, and I was kind of floating in a nondescriptive. I hadn’t picked a real objective by that time. And then I had started going into pre- medical. Found out I really liked the medical stuff and the biology and all that. And so I had started to major, just before being drafted, as Pre- med. So when I went into the service, that’s why I got selected for the medical corps. And I was in the Army Medical Corps. When I came out of the Army, I went back to school at the University of Washington in Seattle. And I also got married just as I got out. Practically the day I got out back East. I brought my new wife with me to Seattle and we started a family. What year did you guys get married? Oh, my goodness. Well, I was in the service from ’ 50 to ’ 52, and it was in 1952 that I got married. Because I married her back East just as I was headed for Montana, and I’d been dating her for some time and I asked her if she wanted to go back to Washington with me. And she agreed with that, huh? [ 00: 05: 00] She did. Unfortunately, she didn’t stay. Yeah, we were married in September of ’ 52 as a matter of fact. I have my little brain book here. So anyway, I started back into Pre- med, and after two years there I got a degree, just by accumulation, in chemistry, a B. A. in chemistry, and I got an invitation to come for an interview at the medical school there, but I didn’t get in. My grades weren’t satisfactory for them. I’d had quite a bit of trouble with grades when I first got out of the service. I jumped into it maybe too fast. New marriage, new school, new environment, you know, and I just wasn’t able to cut it for some reason. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 And so I had a GI Bill and I so started using the GI Bill. Earlier I paid for my own schooling. I was saving my GI Bill for the medical school if I had got in. And since I had a B. A. degree, the Veteran’s Administration wrote me a letter and said that I’d only used one year of my GI Bill before I got the degree, so they terminated my GI Bill on me. And so I got out the crying towel and knocked on their door. And I was a new experience for them. They had never had a person going to college with a degree on the GI Bill that had previous college work before he was in the Service. And I told them that the only thing I could become— and by that time I had three children— the only thing I could do was be a lab technician, with the B. A. in chemistry degree, and it wasn’t going to pay for what I had in mind. And so they finally decided they would give me another year, and with my earlier poor grades— and I had to pick something that I could get a degree in, in one year. And all of that sort of made me buckle down and I became a much more proficient student. Started getting better grades. I was older. So all that added up to a B. S. in Sanitary Science. So I have two degrees, Chemistry and Sanitary Science. That qualified me to be a Sanitarian in a county health department. Or a teacher, if I went back and took some more courses. So anyway, I started working in Kittitas County Health Department in the state of Washington. And that turned out to be my first encounter— well, not my first, because I had some courses in radiological materials and radiation while I was going to my schooling. And then I was responsible when I was in Kittitas County for the civil defense instruments that the county had. And I became responsible because— And this is in Washington? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 Yes, in Washington state. My boss asked me if I knew anything and I said, Yeah, a little bit, you know. So he put me in charge of all the instruments for Kittitas County for civil defense. Wow! What kind of stuff was that, if you don’t mind me asking? Well, the instruments were just straight monitoring instruments for nuclear war that the Civil Defense provided all the county health departments across the nation. And some of them weren’t working, and I went through them very carefully and found out it was just small electrical shorts and all kinds of things were wrong with them. And then I went back to visit my school on some free time to get some more information. I had a professor that worked in the radiological safety area. And he asked me if I’d like to go back to school. And he said that the Atomic Energy Commission [ AEC] was offering a fellowship program, a two- year program with a possible master’s degree. But I didn’t get the master’s. So I put in an [ 00: 10: 00] application and I did get selected for the fellowship program, Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship Program, at the University of Washington. That entailed a full year of classes in Radiological Safety, which is what they were starting to call it at that time. I was among the first groups to be doing that. Yeah, I was going to ask— that’s a fairly new field. Yeah, it was real new at the time. I had just missed by about three months or four months, when I got done, at being grandfathered into being a certified Health Physicist. Oh, wow, that would’ve been nice, huh? Yeah. To get myself a shingle. So anyway, the entire year included schooling and work at one of the laboratories in the nation, and I was selected to go to Hanford. So I spent the whole summer at Hanford, following the two semesters at the university. And I was able to increase my salary UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 by two thousand dollars a year, just by changing my title. And so when I filled out forms, I said I was a Health Physicist. And another unfortunate thing occurred. I was going to go to work for General Electric, but the day we graduated from the course— they had us all lined up; the only thing we hadn’t talked about was salary. And they came in and announced that the Atomic Energy Commission had frozen all hiring and they would not be able to hire any of us. Here I had three kids and nowhere to go, basically, because I hadn’t put out any feelers or anything because I just hadn’t gone down that road. And so I called a guy by the name of Cy Kinsman. He was an individual in the United States Public Health Service who was touring the country, teaching health departments about radiation. And I had become personally acquainted with him. I also had taken out a position in the United States Public Health Service Reserve as a Sanitarian. And so I had this rank, military rank, and by that time I had got an increase in grade with them. I think I was a First Lieutenant in rank. And so I called up Mr. Kinsman and said, I have this problem. Can you use me somewhere in the Public Health Service? And he said, You want to go to Las Vegas? And I said, Sure! I’ll go anywhere. So I sent my family to Montana with my mother, and I headed down here to Las Vegas on the next plane, the next day. When was this? This was in 1958, in September of ’ 58. And I came down here and worked with the United States Public Health Service as [ USPHS] an Offsite Fallout Monitor underneath Oliver Placak. Anyway, the organization had their office out at the test site. When I came here, I reported to the little AEC office that was on Main Street first, and they sent me out to the test site to Warehouse UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 6 in Mercury. And I became an USPHS Offsite Fallout Monitor, using the field monitoring instruments and working in the laboratory. And that only lasted about four months. The President of the United States [ Eisenhower] at that time decided that he was going to have a moratorium on testing, and we were all turned loose. Well, in the meantime, I had been visited by a gentleman from Idaho. His name was John Horan [ Director of Health and Safety Division, Idaho Department Office] and he had come to the test site to visit and I got acquainted with him. And I had [ 00: 15: 00] attended an industrial hygiene conference in Seattle and met him there, actually, when I was still a Sanitarian. And I reacquainted my relationship with him when he came here to the test site to visit. And I told him I was going to be looking for a job because we sort of knew this was coming, that moratorium. And so I called him up the day it happened and he said, Send me an application. And I said, Well, fortunately for me, you’ve already got one in your file. [ And he said] What? I told him when they froze the hiring I was at Hanford. The Atomic Energy Commission as a stroke of friendship had made multiple copies of the applications on each individual in the class and sent them out to each of the operations offices. So I surmised I had one up there, and he called me back in about four hours and said, Yeah, you got one here. I was as surprised as he was. So what happened then, I went to the Mercury Medical Facility here, right across from where the mess hall is, and got my physical for the Atomic Energy Commission, while I was still in the U. S. Public Health Service. And what I did was go back into the USPHS reserve, instead of being active duty, and I have been in the reserve until just recently. I, just about two years, ago finally dropped my Public Health Service ties. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 But anyway, John had recommended that I stay down here and get as much nuclear testing education as I could, and experience, which turned out to be very good. And what we did was chase radioactive clouds in those days, and we were to find the edge of the cloud and the hot line in the cloud, which could be anywhere within the cloud path, and then find the other edge, and then turn around and do it again. And at that time, we wore nothing but civies. And we got into contaminated fallout quite often. And I had a couple of experiences of high readings. We had the instruments in the vehicle— one day we were headed for the North Gate of the test site, and they had just had a couple of tests out there on Yucca Flats, and we were proceeding through the test site. Another guy was driving and I was watching the instruments, and I figured he knew where he was going because he was more experienced than I was. He’d been here for quite a while. And so I related to him, I said, You know, we just went on the second scale of this instrument, which was the second higher ranged instrument. I had started with the GM monitoring in the car, when I started monitoring, and it went up and pegged that instrument, and so I went to the next instrument. Now, did you guys ever worry about being exposed? I never did. And did they ever say anything to you about the potential of exposure? Oh, yes, we were fully informed in my schooling and from the PHS leaders and con- monitors. In fact, when we’d come in, in the evening, if we didn’t wear a hat, our hair was contaminated if we were out in the fallout, and we’d have to decontaminate and they’d check us all over when we come in, in the vehicles. If the vehicles were highly contaminated, we had to take them up to the vehicle decon area. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 But you know, it was a great experience. And we traveled all over, clear down into Death Valley, California, in the heat down there in the summertime, and we went clear up into Utah. And they had systems to notify the citizenry if there was clouds coming in and for them to get in their homes and stay in their houses. Did you have to do a lot of notifications? Yeah, whenever a cloud went over a populated area. And so you guys would basically follow this cloud. [ 00: 20: 00] Yeah, that’s what we did. We were tracking the clouds. At the Control Room they knew exactly where we were, and they were plotting the data back here at the Nevada Test Site. We’d radio. We had shortwave radio, and they were plotting all our data as we got it. In fact, they would even, if we’d go through a cloud and we’d still be getting these readings, they would call us and say, We think that that’s an erroneous reading because you should be out of the cloud. Would you stop your vehicle, get out, check the ground, clean up the monitoring instrument, and determine what the situation is? And most of the time, they were right, that we were out of the cloud and it was contaminated, the probe was contaminated. And so we had to start over again and go back up and find the edge of the cloud again. Right. That’s interesting. Sounds like it could be time- consuming? Yeah. Well, we were out in the field all day. We left early in the morning, before sunup, because they always shot the events real early in the morning so that we had all day to monitor. And then we’d be out until late. Then we’d head back in, late in the evening. So I guess you saw the shots and the clouds. Oh, yeah, I got to witness about five or six of them. Wow! What’d you think about that? What was that like? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 They were beautiful. They were outstanding— you know, they were very fascinating. I was close enough one time to encounter the shock wave. It was like somebody slugging you in the shoulder. It rocked the car. I was standing beside the car. But the radiation exposure was zero at those points, where we were, so there was no exposure from that, and we were always upwind. But when we were out monitoring, we were downwind, purposely. We didn’t monitor on the test site. Reynolds Electric and Engineering Company [ REECo] monitored onsite, and they were out in the clouds, at higher levels of radiation than we were. We were out where the cloud was starting to be hard to find. And so when I got done with that and called John and he got my application, he called me back and I went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission in Idaho. It was called the Site Survey group— well, first I ended up first in John’s office, and then he decided I needed to get additional training, and so he farmed me out to all the different groups that he had at the National Reactor Testing Station ( NRTS) [ now called Idaho National Engineering Laboratory ( INEL)], the whole body counter group, where I worked with the whole body counter for quite a while, about six months, and then went to another group for six months. Dosimetry, I worked in Dosimetry, and I worked in the Chem Lab a little bit. Well, the whole body counter was part of the chem lab, but I had affiliation with the chem lab. And then I finally ended up in what was called Site Survey. And there was another group, an environmental group. I don’t remember their name. But anyway, he’d farmed me out into each of his organizations, so I got three to six months in each group. I ended up in what was called Site Survey, and that seemed to be my best forte, was monitoring downwind. So we did that kind of monitoring for reactor releases, and we were a part of the Emergency Response Team, and every time a reactor had a release, we UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 monitored those releases. And we never, ever, that I can recall, had— well, we carried respirators but we never had any release bad enough that we wore the respirator. And you were never worried about exposure? No, never was. And the state of the art was not as sensitive as it is today. And I’m still a basic believer that a little bit of radiation is good for you. And I was never really worried about it, except if the level was high enough I took precautions when I thought they were appropriate. [ 00: 25: 00] And in 1961, up there in Idaho, that was, let’s see here, there was a reactor accident at Idaho called the Stationary Low Power Number One Reactor. It was an electrical producing reactor, and it was supposed to be used for the DEW [ Defense Early Warning] line, which was the defense line that was going to go across the Arctic and Canada to give early warning of incoming Russian bombers or missiles. And the idea was to make it out of available products that they could get locally, such as corrugated metal silos for the walls of the building, gravel— river gravel was put into the areas inside of the building between the reactor and the outside wall as shielding. And it was a water cooled reactor, and they had large steel vessels in the center of them, maybe, oh, five to ten feet in diameter. And then the building was pretty large. I don’t know what the diameter was. But anyway, let me look up a date here because I can’t remember what it was. Nineteen sixty- one. I was right. Yeah. On September 3, 1961, that reactor was shut down for some time and was being reassembled, and there was an accident [ that] occurred, which the three military guys— and these were all run by military, overseen by a civilian group. And the HP [ health physicist] who was my friend and also a person that I had reviewed his program a couple of times— this is something else that I want to tell you, so don’t let me forget. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 One of the things that I became involved in, and this was true the rest of my career almost, was that the Atomic Energy Commission early on did not have health physicists, and I was among one of the first groups to be AEC or DOE [ Department of Energy] health physics people. And they started us on new programs with new documents, coming out of Washington, on doing appraisals of the health physics programs. So I was the first person to enter four or five of the reactors up in Idaho, underneath the AEC’s new program, to do an appraisal of the health physics program that was being conducted by my friend. So you were basically evaluating the program and the work that they were doing. Evaluating their program per the specifications sent to us from Washington. And so we ran into a lot of opposition from the people running the facilities, primarily management. From other health physicists or—? No. Or from— OK. Well, yeah, kind of, a little bit, other physicists. They didn’t like the government looking over their shoulder. And the engineers, scientists and the other people who had, you know, maybe six or seven years of experience by the time I got there, they didn’t look too highly at a fresh graduate from an AEC program. And I ran into that when I came to Nevada, also, heavily. And in fact, my career was many times in a room like this where I was the sole person telling them what was wrong with their program. And some of them didn’t take it very well. Some of them did, you know. Did they ever implement any of your recommendations? Oh, yes. They had to, huh? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Yeah. And I had two or three people, you know, our supervisor that we were working for, Don Hendricks and another guy, Art Whitman, that we worked for out at the test site, they were good help and they reviewed all our documents and our cohorts reviewed them also. So we thought they were truthful, you know, and we went back and always showed them in draft to the people we looked [ 00: 30: 00] at, to ask, Is what I said here the truth? They didn’t like some of it, but we only changed it if they said it wasn’t true. Most of the time, it was true. I didn’t have any trouble. They’d say, yep, that’s right. That’s right. But going back to the accident back in Idaho, that night I ended up in the second wave of the initial response group by the Atomic Energy Commission. And on the day after the accident, I made an entry into the reactor room to see how the third person could be held up on the rafter. And when I stepped through the door of the reactor room, the instrument I had, which was a Radector, which was the highest reading instrument that was available at the time, it went up to 500 R per hour. And when I went through the doorway into the reactor to do what I was supposed to do, the instrument pegged. And so I was there briefly, and there was a gentleman’s body hanging from the ceiling. He’d been bayoneted up there by part of the apparatus from the reactor, the control rod extension. Wow! How was that, walking into that? Well, what happened was, it was later proven that this center control rod, which had more worth in terms of its worth on controlling the reactor— and they called it “ worth.” They actually used a dollar sign— and it was able to make the reactor go critical by that one single rod. And after this accident, they tore down the two reactors in the nation— the one we were at and another one back in Ft. Belvoir— they got rid of the one control rod capability. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 But the GI was lifting on that rod at the time of the accident, and at home there was also a family squabble going on, believed by me, at least, and a number of others, but not by the health physicist who was there, that the GI had deliberately pulled the rod up to where it was supposed to have went critical and vaporized the water around the reactor core and created a moving column of water sixteen feet deep, moving at high velocity up through the reactor vessel that hit the top and shot out the control rod extensions. They were putting the control rod extensions in, and it shot those into the air, and the GI got bayoneted to the ceiling. And it also opened up part of the reactor flooring and shot out a whole bunch of metal punchings that had been used for shielding. And the other two guys were carrying rod extensions, and we could see that by the pattern on their bodies, that the debris was fired at them like buckshot, in such velocity that one of the guys had his head caved in by a piece of steel about two inches in diameter and an inch or a half- inch thick. Wow. Everybody in this accident die? All three of them died, yeah. And they died before we could talk to any of them. One of them lived long enough for— well, my boss and this company HP I been talking about were called out and they made the initial entry, and they found this one person living and brought him out, but he’d died by the time they got him down to the intersection of the access road with the main highway, in the ambulance. And he would’ve died anyway from the radiation exposure. He had had tremendous radiation exposure, because the reactor became bare and the reactor building and the whole facility was quite radioactive. Thousands of R/ hour. So what did you think, walking into all of this? Well, I didn’t have any problems, you know. When I walked into it— I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I just was not afraid. The first job I had was to go up with another guy by UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 the name of Sergeant O’Neal out of the Army and retrieve all the recording instrument records that were in the [ 00: 35: 00] operating control room, and it was reading like 200 R/ h in the control room at the time we went in there. And then when I went back up and made that entry I just spoke to you about, the readings actually later on were determined to be over 1,000 R per hour. But I was in there twice, only briefly, and out and I only got, according to my dosimeter, I only got 2.8 rem dose for those three entries, which was less than the quarterly amount that they were shooting at for people in the work. See, at that time, you were allowed to get twelve rem a year and three rem a quarter [ rem stands for roentgen equivalent man]. Has that changed? Yes, that’s changed considerably. First in the early ‘ 50s the maximum permissible limits were 0.3 rem per week which totaled 12- 15 rem per year. After 1958 exposure becomes dependent upon age. It’s down to point- zero— it’s unbelievably down. And the environmentalists and the geneticists are the ones that caused that to go down. But I’ve experienced all that changing and going down. So anyway, I’m laboring on this too long. No, it’s interesting. Yeah. So I worked at the SL- I reentry for two weeks straight. I ended up in the Decon Trailer, which was the trailer we set up to handle contaminated people coming out of the operation, and getting them back into their clean clothes and making sure they weren’t carrying any radiation with them. No radioactive materials, really; I shouldn’t say radiation. So after that, George Mapes, who’s a friend of mine, yet today, was there working, and he came down to Nevada when they opened up this office. I think it was 1962, approximately that date, they started the Nevada Operations Office [ NVOO] and they were looking for people and he called Idaho and talked to one of my bosses and asked if I would like to come down to the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 NTS, and I said, Yeah. So I came down and went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission here. And I started out at the test site in the Radiological Safety Branch part of the NTS Support Office. So, if you don’t mind me asking, I’m curious as to what your initial thoughts— I mean, had you been familiar with the test site prior to coming out here and—? Well, I had been here in ’ 58, so I was familiar. Right. Yeah. Right, but before that. I mean, what were your impressions of it when you got out here? Seems like it was, you know, fairly— Well, my impressions of it were that things seemed to be running quite satisfactory. I didn’t see any things that were done wrong. At that time, the exposure limit of radiation exposure was higher than it later became, and the people were allowed to get those levels. And I received, you know, almost three rem in Idaho. And the interesting thing is that later when I tried to get my exposure record from Nevada, and the Public Health Service, they couldn’t find them. So I don’t know what my real total is. Really. When was that, that you tried to do that? Oh, after I’d been here a short time, in ’ 67. And so I don’t have what it is, but I haven’t had any things as a result of it, that I know of. I had a heart attack a year ago, and I’m seventy- seven this November. Really? Well, you look fantastic. Well, I jokingly say that radiation’s why I’m so young looking. [ 00: 40: 00] It’s helping to preserve. I would have never guessed seventy- seven. Yeah. I haven’t had any problems that I can lay on the radiation. Do you know people that have? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 Yes, I’ve had friends, a couple guys that got large exposures early here, working at the test site, that much later died of leukemia. And there’s been people that have got eye problems, cataracts in their eyes, due to radiation. My experience has been quite interesting because I’ve gone to bat for some of those people, you know, and tried to get them compensation and get operations to take care of their injuries. And we had a very difficult time. I had a lawyer ask me if I was a medical doctor. And I said, No, I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a health physicist. And he says, Well, what give