Meanwhile, Ted visits the reactor core and finds a surprise

Contaminated

In 1976, Harold McCluskey was a chemical technician for the Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant of Washington state. He was sixty-four years old at the time. The plant had been refining weapons grade plutonium since the days of the Manhatten Project, supplying some of the radioactive material for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

On August 30th, McCluskey had just returned to work after a four month strike had halted production. During a fairly routine day, McCluskey noticed smoke at his work station and tried to run. Unfortunately he wasn't quick enough and he was caught in an explosion. Shrapnel-like flecks of cracked resin and broken glass were hurled into McCluskey's face and neck, along with a hot blast of nitric acid. Worse yet, McCluskey had been exposed to americium 241, a radioactive waste-substance that was produced by the plutonium refinement. The americium sank into his skin. McCluskey was found by his fellow workers and immediately taken to an on-site emergency center. Once there, it was discovered that his contamination was far greater than anticipated.

McCluskey had absorbed 500 times the "occupational standard" of americium 241, and consequently posed a severe exposure risk to all other people. They had no choice but to hold him in strict quarantine, while he underwent an intense decontamination procedure. The doctors working on him had to wear protective uniforms. He was called "the Atomic Man."

After a gruelling five months, McCluskey's radiation levels had been depleted by 80% and he was finally released. Having heard of his scarred face and fearful of lingering radioactivity, McCluskey's community shunned him. It took the insistence of the local minister to convince even his friends that it was safe to be around him. He also had to adapt to vision problems stemming from eye injuries he sustained in the explosion. A lawsuit for one million in damages failed, although he did receive a $275,000 settlement and paid medical expenses. Throughout all of this, McCluskey was stoic. Remarkably, he remained a proponent of the nuclear industry until he died at age 75 of a heart attack.


Meanwhile, 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste remain on the site of the deactivated Finishing Plant. McCluskey may not be the last "Atomic Man" from Hanford, although it's doubtful that any successors will live as long.



Would you like to know more?
-Read this account of McCluskey by the doctor who treated him.
-Read this timeline of Hanford area plutonium manufacturing

Even Hell Has Its Heroes

This is a tragic story.

When the Chernobyl reactor exploded in April of 1986, the Soviet Union at first tried to conceal the event, informing the citizens that "an accident had occurred" in one of the reactors, all while evacuating entire towns. It quickly became clear that the enormity of what had happened could not be hidden.

When the reactor exploded, it threw a two thousand ton reactor lid into the air. The explosion released a cloud of Strontium-90 and radioactive debris, carried by the strong winds across the region of Pripyat. The intensity of the fallout was forty thousand percent greater than that released during the detonation of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima.

The accident had to be contained in order to prevent radioactivity from contaminating other areas of Ukraine and Belarus. A group of eight hundred thousand men and women was assembled, comprised of soldiers, firefighters, coal miners, demolition experts, medical workers, and a Civil Defense brigade. Clad in protective suits, they were charged with redirecting the flowing radioactive coolant water to prevent it from leeching into the region's ground water, as well as carrying all the debris to the remains of the Chernobyl plant, where it could be covered in concrete.

They were called the Liquidators, and sometimes Bio-Robots.

They knew that they had been deemed expendable.

Unable to work more than forty seconds at a time due to the hazardous environment, they would haul a cart-load of concrete and scrap metal a few meters and then run away, to be replaced by another worker. Eventually it was all piled high in the shell of Chernobyl, whereupon helicopters blanketed the site in lead and boric acid. The entire process took eight months, and when completed the resulting structure was finally sealed in what was called "the Sarcophagus." For many of the Liquidators, its construction was their final act.

The entire affected area is a vast wasteland of crumbling apartment complexes and abandoned vehicles, all soaking in radioactivity. It is cordoned off and referred to as the "Zone of Alienation." Of those that worked to contain the site, six hundred thousand suffered from radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand of those men and women perished, and one hundred sixty five thousand are permanently disabled from their injuries. For their sacrifice, they received minimal health care and compensation, with soldiers often being denied anything altogether as they were not "salaried workers."

In 2006, the Liquidators finally received a gesture of gratitude in the form of a statue honoring them in a Moscow Cemetery. It provides a somber tribute to those endured a pocket apocalypse.