Re: Safe As Mother's Milk: The Hanford Project

For more on Hanford and related topics visit infinity city website. Works by Stephen Moore and Ann Rosenthal explore our nuclear legacy.

http://infcty.net/
http://www.etherart.net


Kim Stringfellow wrote:

> The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is located on 565-square-miles of
> desert in southeastern Washington State near the Tri-Cities area of
> Richland, Pasco and Kennewick. For more than forty years, Hanford
> released radioactive materials into the environment on an uninformed
> public while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during
> the Cold War era. Although the majority of the releases were due to
> activities related to production, some were also planned and
> intentional.
>
> Hanford workers, their families and other downwind residents became
> literal guinea pigs for radiation experiments that were carried out at
> the facility by the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Department
> of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense, and civilian
> sub-contractors including DuPont and General Electric from 1944 to
> 1972.
>
> Although civilians were informed of Hanford's plutonium production
> activities by the end of World War II, officials in charge kept secret
> the growing number of radioactive releases, experiments and other
> environmental safety hazards resulting at the facility. During the
> mid-1980s, increasing public suspicion over Hanford activities forced
> government agencies and their civilian sub-contractors to release
> formally classified documents through a request under the Freedom of
> Information Act. With the release of these documents in 1986, the
> public has been able to piece together a devastating chronicle of
> atomic weaponry production that consequently poisoned the people it
> was ironically meant to protect. Thousands of area residents from
> towns and farms surrounding the Hanford Site and beyond have suffered
> an array of health problems including thyroid cancers, autoimmune
> diseases and reproductive disorders that they feel are the direct
> result of these releases and experiments.
>
> Safe as Mother's Milk examines these important events through
> declassified historical photographs, media and documents available
> online at various government archives, including the Hanford
> Declassified Document Retrieval System
> [http://www2.hanford.gov/declass/] and Human Radiation Experiments
> Information Management System (HREX) [http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/].
>
> This project is designed as both a physical installation and Web site,
> originally commissioned for the Cornish College of the Arts ART |
> ACTIVISM 2002 Visiting Artist Series.