Breaking News: The Green Run (1980s) скачать в хорошем качестве

Breaking News: The Green Run (1980s)

In 1984, Karen Dorn Steele, a reporter for the Spokesman-Review, began to report on cancers in farm families and heart attacks in young men working the fields in the farmlands across the Columbia River from Hanford. In 1986, the Department of Energy, responding to growing public concern over the safety of Hanford as a nuclear neighbor, declassified thousands of pages of early Hanford environmental monitoring records. These documents disclosed the secret widespread release of radioactive iodine-131 and other harmful radionuclides and chemicals that occurred beginning with the start-up of the facility in late 1944 and continuing over forty years thereafter. The Green Run Experiment of December 1949 was disclosed by these records. Karen Dorn Steele began to cover the revelations contained in the declassified documents as she and several Spokane journalists who were members of HEAL, the Hanford Education Action League, combed through them. Steele’s reports on the Green Run and the chronic, secret releases of radiation to the air and to the waters of the Columbia River stunned the public. Over 750,000 curies of I-131 and a range of other biologically significant radionuclides had been released throughout eastern Washington, northern Oregon, into Idaho, Western Montana, and into British Columbia. Steele’s reports also galvanized support for the Federal Facilities Compliance Act of 1992 that required facilities’ compliance with all Federal, State and local hazardous and solid waste laws.