Roy Haber Hanford Nuclear Reservation Downwinders Case Collection, 1942-1997

Series 1: includes records related to the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project (HEDR). When a digitized version of a document is available, this link is provided and indicated with the phrase, “This item has been digitized.” Files HEDR-202, -203, and 204 in this series have been digitized and are available upon request.

Subseries 1 includes correspondence, reports, data, newsletters, sample analysis summaries, memos and other documents primarily related to the work of the Technical Steering Panel (TSP) of the HEDR project. Subjects include subcommittee reports; project financial matters; communications from invested parties; explications and reports from contracted technicians and scientists; project and subcommittee work plans; environmental data spanning a number of decades; project newsletters for the public; and research on food pathways of exposed populations. Notable documents or groupings include items related to Native American exposure and resultant tribal communications, including correspondence and members from Nez Perce and Yakima tribal leaders; food pathway documents tracing milk and vegetable consumption patterns; epidemiologic studies and press coverage; and meeting minutes spanning the entirety of the project.

Subseries 2: Many of the documents in this series (given the prefix SS by the Haber law office) are scientific and technical reports related to Hanford operations and research, document reviews for both the committee and the Haber law office, committee reports and memos, and plans. Notable documents or groups include annotated architectural drawings, maps, and grounds plans of the Hanford site; waste burial maps; detailed analyses of Hanford infrastructure including pipelines and sewers; waste management technical manuals; and atmospheric analyses.

Subseries 3: Documents with the TSP prefix are directly related to the Technical Steering Panel. Panel meeting minutes, meeting transcripts, draft and final reports, subcommittee work, and research reports are all included in this subseries. A number of documents in this subseries were not included in the original accession; this is indicated with a note.

Subseries 4: These documents relate to the Congressional Budget Justification (CBJ). The alphanumeric identifiers in the CBJ series have a further hierarchy element in the chronological series indicated after the CBJ; for example, CBJ13-153. The documents in this series lack a clear unifying element. Many of them relate to the work of the Technical Steering Panel and its subtasks. Document types include synthesis and summary reports, memos, correspondence, draft reports, document summaries, communication and data logs, work plans, and graphs and charts. Notable subjects include documentation surrounding the Panel’s work on Native American food consumption and exposure pathways, initial radiation dose estimates for a number of tribes, and documentation of focus groups from the Tri-Cities area to assess residents’ knowledge of radiation releases.

Subseries 5: The documents in this series lack a clear unifying element. Many of them are quarterly and monthly reports from the HEDR project, discussions of the HEDR modeling approach, documents on atmospheric and vegetation contamination, and records of waste releases from Hanford and other environmental monitoring data. Notable documents or groups include bibliographies on Native American food consumption and user instructions for systems used in the HEDR project.

Subseries 6: PNL consists of documents originating from Pacific Northwest Laboratory, now referred to as the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Among them are monthly operating or technical reports from HEDR tasks, exposure pathway reconstructions, data on Native American diets and food consumption and short histories of elements of the HEDR project.

Subseries 7: BN is a small subseries that contains documents from 1992 and 1993 concerning software and data collection for the HEDR project through Battelle-Northwest. This led to the dose determination for the project.

Series 2: Depositions, Exhibits, and Expert Witness Files contains records for depositions (plaintiff and defendant), deposition exhibits, supplementary references for depositions, and expert witness reports and interviews. Depositions are often accompanied by documentation showing the attorneys' preparation for the deposition, including annotations, flagging, and notes. In some cases, the deposition is accompanied by supporting exhibits which are taken from the agency's document library (see Series 3: Letter Documents). Depositions and Expert Witness Files show generally how attorneys traced causality in the case. Topics span specific elements of radiation exposure at Hanford, general iodine-131 human ingest pathways, and engineering or management decisions that led to health effects. General office files on deponants and witnesses include contact histories, vetting, and correspondence.

Series 3: Letter Documents lists documents that were part of the legal office's discovery library for research and evidentiary purposes. Together these documents show how attorneys researched their case and compiled their evidence. The law offices of Roy Haber collected documents throughout the duration of the Downwinders case from a variety of archives and agencies in Washington and Oregon, including the Department of Energy, National Archives, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Research Council, General Electric, DuPont, Battelle, and Pacific Northwest Labs. As the documents were collected, legal aides entered these documents into a Filemaker Pro database in the order in which they were received. (Due to licensing issues, the full relational functionality of the Filemaker Pro database was lost at the time of accessioning; a .csv file was created and is available upon researcher request.)

Each "letter document" was given a unique lettered identifier and information was logged about the date ordered, repository, physical location, author, date of creation, and title. Letter groupings did not have unifying characteristics, or a set number of included documents. Additionally, source repositories, agencies, and contractors also assigned unique identifiers to documents (for example, HW-61580, BNWL-1738, CBJ5-51, and PNL-8551). These externally assigned identifiers were also captured in the document database and are retained here.

Most of this series was not retained after acquisition and the present series is a small portion of the original letter series representing particularly unique content, or content representing products of the legal action or of the Haber office. In the original library documents were often missing, incorrectly logged, or were unreadable photocopies of a government document microfilm/copy. Most government documents (which can be requested from their original agencies) were not retained. Letter documents can also be found in Series 1 and Series 2. Markers of attorney/office use have been retained and include, but are not limited to, highlighted passages, sticky notes with or without annotations, paperclipped sections, annotations, or notes. Of particular note in this series are the large number of press releases for many important events in nuclear history from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and later press releases General Electric while operating Hanford. Newsclippings documenting the history of radiation exposure and fallout are also a particular feature of this series, and show how the general public was informed on these issues as early as the late 1940s. Copies of early, rare documents from the Chicago site of the Manhattan Project are also included, and show the thoroughness of attorneys' attempts to contextualize radiation exposure. Also of note are photographs of Hanford facilities taken by attorneys during the lawsuit, as well as audiocassettes and videotapes of depositions from other lawsuits.

Biographical / Historical Notes

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, or the “Downwinders Case,” is one of the most controversial legal struggles in the history of atomic energy. It raised scores of environmental, scientific, civil rights, health, and legal questions. It focused on the chemical separation plant at Hanford, near Richland, Washington, built during the Second World War to extract plutonium from spent uranium. The plant produced the fissionable material used in the atomic bomb that leveled Nagasaki, and for decades thereafter it produced bomb material for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The legal case, begun in 1990, consolidated thousands of plaintiffs who alleged that Hanford’s environmental contamination was responsible for health problems, specifically thyroid disease, over a wide area that included several U.S. states. The case centered upon the radioisotope Iodine-131, its release into the atmosphere and Columbia River, and its links to cancers. As early as 1943, scientists involved in the U.S. bomb program at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory warned that releases of I-131 could cause physiological harm due to its concentration in the thyroid gland. At that time, scientists hoped to ward off such concentration by administering potassium iodine pills to workers. In the meantime, scientists during wartime established a threshold exposure level of one rad per day from I-131. Although concerns about radioactive iodine convinced scientists at Hanford to recommend that contractors allow fissioned material cool for 54 to 62 days prior to chemically separating the plutonium, average cooling times were often much less than that, especially during the war. Paths of exposure to I-131 included inhalation, ingesting exposed plants, and ingesting milk from exposed cows.

As the case unfolded in the early 2000s, the companies that had operated Hanford for the U.S. government, DuPont and General Electric, presented an array of extenuating circumstances to avoid accountability. For example, they called to mind that during the war, Hanford had been the best site they could find; that dangerous operations had been justified for military reasons; that they acted out of patriotic duty, taking only $1 profit; that Hanford’s value to the nation outweighed danger to nearby communities; that the state of Washington should not be able to hold them responsible since the federal government was in charge of safety regulation; and that no definitive causal link could be made between the I-131 and specific cancers. They did not, however, contest the environmental releases, their magnitude, or exposure to humans. On these, according to court documents, “no genuine issue of material fact exists” (Wilson, 2003; US District Court, 2004).

The material fact of environmental release of I-131, treated as indisputable by the U.S. District Court, was in reality a product of intense negotiation, scientific extrapolation, and historical interpretation. Between 1944 and 1992, Hanford purportedly released some 740,000 curies of I-131, and this large number became the basis of holding DuPont and General Electric responsible for thyroid problems. The figure of 740,000 curies came from a team of experts who had the job of reconstructing, using historical data and complex modeling, an understanding of the environmental releases at Hanford over nearly five decades. In addition to calculating past releases, they also provided data about human exposure during the same period.

This team’s efforts were known as the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project (HEDR). Initially the project was coordinated “in-house” by Battelle’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory, and the results published between 1987 and 1990 (Schumacher, 1990). Its findings sparked scores of lawsuits and became the basis of litigation in the Downwinders case. In 1990, the Department of Energy signed a memorandum of understanding to make the study less “in-house” and transferred responsibilities to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To signal even further detachment between the facilities that produced the doses and those studying them, the CDC requested that the National Research Council evaluate its reports. The subsequent National Research Council reports did not fully endorse the HEDR scientific work, but instead observed that the studies were flawed efforts to look into the past and generate defensible data.

The law offices of Roy Haber in Eugene, Oregon were one of 19 offices representing the plaintiffs. Many cases were settled outside court without waiting for trial. Over 21 years, Haber represented hundreds of Downwinders and used this collection to create his arguments.

Author: Anna Dvorak

Administrative Information

More Extent Information: 27 boxes; 45 photographs; 18 audiocassettes; 20 videotapes.

Statement on Access: The collection is open for research.

Acquisition Note: The records were donated to the Special Collections and Archives Research Center by Roy Haber in 2015.

Related Materials: Legal records for northwest Downwinders originating from the Office of Tom H. Foulds can be found in the Hanford Litigation Office Records. The Patricia P. Hoover Papers at University of Colorado-Boulder document the personal experiences of a Downwinder living near Hanford. The Barton C. Hacker Papers concern Hacker's efforts to trace radiation exposure beginning with the Manhattan Project through the nuclear tests of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers offer significant documentation of the history of fallout and radiation exposure, including Pauling's feud with Edward Teller, and several early files on Downwinders. The History of Atomic Energy Collection contains book and archival materials elated to Hanford's history, as does the Robert Dalton Harris Collection of Atomic Age Ephemera. The Nuclear Free America Records contain materials relating to pollution and environmental threats from nuclear operations, including those on Native American lands. The Eugene Starr Papers document the early formation of atomic energy plants, through his participation in the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission's Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Reactor Policies and Programs from 1955 to 1966. The College of Engineering Records contains materials regarding the college's partnership in General Electric's nuclear engineering training programs. The oral histories in How OSU Grew Nuclear Science mention OSU connections to Hanford. Making the Unseen Visible, edited by OSU scholars Jake Hamblin and Linda Richards, includes personal histories of Downwinders and others affected by radiation exposure.

Preferred Citation: Roy Haber Hanford Nuclear Reservation Downwinders Case Collection (MSS Haber), Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.

Roy Haber Hanford Nuclear Reservation Downwinders Case Collection, 1942-1997

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