Excerpt
The Acid Taste of Plutonium
The accident occurred on August 1, 1944, a morning like any other in Los Alamos: hot,dry, the sky an indigo bowl over the sprawl of wooden buildings and barbed-wirefences that constituted the core of the Manhattan Project. At seven thousand feet,the New Mexico air smelled of sun, pines, a trace of frost. Occasionally the scent ofdust spiraled up from the desert, where temperatures hovered around 100 degrees.
In twelve months, two atomic bombs would be dropped on Japan, and the secret workbeing carried out in the wooden buildings would be revealed to the world. On themorning of the accident, the atomic bomb had progressed far beyond mathematicaltheories but was still an unproven weapon. Plutonium, a silvery metal discoveredabout four years earlier, was one of the key elements that would transform thetheories into a fireball.
In Room D-119, a cheerful young chemist named Don Mastick was standing over a sinkchatting with his laboratory partner, Arthur Wahl, a chemist not much older thanhimself and one of the four scientists from the University of California at Berkeleywho had discovered plutonium. Mastick was just twenty-three years old, a"bushy-tailed kid," as he would later describe himself, with short blond hair and analert, friendly face. He had been one of Berkeley's most promising chemistrygraduates and was just about to enlist in the Navy when J. Robert Oppenheimerapproached him and asked if he would like to join the scientific team being assembledin Los Alamos, the most secret site in the vast network of laboratories and factoriesestablished to build the bomb.
Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist, was already a legend on the Berkeleycampus, and Mastick was thrilled at the idea of working with him. When he arrived inLos Alamos in the spring of 1943, Oppenheimer had designated him the lab's ultramicrochemist. Working with amounts of plutonium that were too small to be seen withthe naked eye, he studied the chemical reactions of the new material under amicroscope. His glass test tubes were no bigger than sewing needles and his measuringinstruments looked like a child's toys. Even his laboratory was small: aclaustrophobic box at the end of a hallway, ten feet wide and twelve feet long.
In Mastick's hand that day was a small vial containing ten milligrams ofplutonium—an amount so small it would have fit on the head of a pin. But it was farmore plutonium than Los Alamos had had to work with only a year before. In fact, theradioactive material was still so scarce that a special crew had been assembled whoseonly job was to recover the material from accidents and completed experiments andthen repurify it through chemical processes so it could be used again. The crewdeveloped a flow chart to help separate plutonium from every other element in thePeriodic Table. "They were prepared to tear up the floor and extract the plutonium,if necessary. They would even dissolve a bicycle. I mean, plutonium [was] so valuablethat they went to great extremes to recover everything," physician Louis Hempelmannrecalled decades later.
Inevitably some of the radioactive molecules seeped out into the laboratory, spreadby a starched sleeve, the scuff of boots, even the dust that blew in from the desert.Nervous and preoccupied with their efforts to construct a workable bomb, Oppenheimerand his colleagues viewed the spreading contamination with consternation. Theirconcerns were twofold: They didn't want to lose any material, and they were justbeginning to understand its potential hazards. Joseph Kennedy, another member of theBerkeley team who had discovered plutonium, acknowledged that it was "not pleasant"to think that unaccounted-for plutonium was floating around the lab. On the day ofthis particular accident—which would be the most serious of any thus far—it was notthe lost plutonium that would be the problem. It was the plutonium in Mastick's vial.
A purplish-color liquid that gave off an eerie, animallike warmth when concentratedin larger amounts, the plutonium in the vial had undergone an unanticipatedtransformation overnight. Some of the liquid had been converted into gas and waspushing against the walls of the bottle. Other molecules were tunneling into thesides of the glass itself.
Unaware of the small bomb he was holding, Mastick snapped the slender neck of thevial. It made a small, popping sound in the quiet laboratory. Instantly the materialspewed out of the bottle and onto the wall in front of him. Some of the solutionricocheted back into his mouth, flooding his lips and tongue with a metallic taste.
Not overly alarmed, Mastick replaced the vial in its wooden container. Then hetrotted across the hard-packed ground of the technical area to knock on the door ofDr. Hempelmann's first-aid station. He had just swallowed a significant amount of theworld's supply of plutonium. "I could taste the acid so I knew perfectly well I had alittle bit of plutonium in my mouth," he said in an interview in 1995.
Louis Hempelmann's office was just a few minutes' walk from D Building, where Mastickworked. With its "deluge shower baths" and clothes-changing rooms, D Building was oneof the most elaborately ventilated and costly structures at Los Alamos. Except forthe forest of metal pipes protruding from the roof, it looked no different from theother green clapboard structures in the technical area.
Hempelmann was the medical doctor in charge of protecting technical personnel on thebomb project from "unusual hazards," and he reported directly to J. RobertOppenheimer. With his long, narrow face and wide jaw, Hempelmann wasn't handsome, butthere was something refined and pleasing about his appearance. He was the son andgrandson of doctors and a fine physician in his own right, although he was known togrow queasy at the sight of blood. ("Louie did his first sternal puncture on me andhe almost fainted. He's one of those doctors that can't stand the sight of blood—heshould have been a psychologist or something," said Harold Agnew, one in a line oflaboratory directors who succeeded Oppenheimer.)
Taking great pains to keep his long face expressionless, Hempelmann listened toMastick's account of what had happened and then left the room for a moment in orderto make a frantic phone call to Colonel Stafford Warren, the affable medical directorof the Manhattan Project. Hempelmann often turned to Warren, who was nearly twodecades older, for advice and reassurance. In his late forties when he wascommissioned as an Army colonel, Warren was a big man, well over six feet tall, whoexuded a breezy confidence. Unlike many of the scientists on the bomb project, whorefused to join the armed forces and chafed under military control, Warren lovedbeing in the Army. He liked the rough feel of his starched uniform, the silver eagleson his collar, the .45 revolver tucked in a holster on his belt.
Speaking on a secure telephone line from his office at the Manhattan Project'sheadquarters in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Warren tried to calm Hempelmann down. Hethought about the accident for a moment and then suggested that the young doctor tryusing a mouthwash and expectorant to remove the plutonium from the chemist's mouth.Hempelmann hung up and hurried back to the examining room where he prepared twomixtures. The first was a sodium citrate solution that would chemically combine withthe plutonium in Mastick's mouth to form a soluble liquid; the second was abicarbonate rinse that would render the material insoluble again.
Mastick swished the solutions around in his mouth and then spit them into a beaker.The first mouthful contained almost one-half microgram of plutonium. A microgram ofplutonium, which is a millionth of a gram, was considered in 1945 to be the maximumamount of plutonium that could be retained in the human body without causing harm.Eleven more times at fifteen-minute intervals Mastick swished the two solutionsaround in his mouth and then spit them into the beaker.
After the accident, Mastick's breath was so hot that he could stand six feet away andblow the needles on the radiation monitors off scale. His urine contained detectableplutonium for many years. In one of several interviews Mastick said that he wasundoubtedly still excreting "a few atoms" of plutonium but had suffered no illeffects.
When the mouth washings finally were finished, Hempelmann ordered the young man tolie down on a cot. Then he pumped out his stomach several times. Carefully hetransferred the stomach liquids into a tall beaker. The plutonium would have to bechemically separated from the organic matter in Mastick's stomach and mouth so itcould be reused in future experiments. No scientist at the lab had ever undertakensuch a task.
Hempelmann gave the young chemist a couple of breakfast waffles for his empty stomachand some Sippy alkaline powders to be taken during the day. Then he turned and handedhim the four-liter beaker of murky liquid.
Go, he said, retrieve the plutonium.
Mastick returned to his lab with the beaker and opened his textbooks. It took a"little rapid-fire research," as he put it, to figure out how to separate theplutonium from the organic matter. But he didn't flinch from the task, despite theordeal he had just been through. "Since I was the plutonium chemist at that point, Iwas the logical choice to recover it." From Mastick's perspective, the mood in whichall these events took place was calm, deliberate, and "almost humorous." But otherpeople did not feel nearly so relaxed about what had occurred.
The day after the accident, Hempelmann sat down and wrote Stafford Warren a thank-younote. "I was sorry to bother you but was anxious to have your help and moral support.In retrospect, I think that the chances of the fellow's having swallowed a dangerousamount of material are slight." Hempelmann told Warren that he believed about tenmicrograms of plutonium had entered Mastick's mouth. The mouth washings had removedall but one microgram, an infinitesimal but nevertheless hazardous amount. Moreimportant, Hempelmann thought the chemist had not inhaled any plutonium. At that timescientists knew that plutonium was extremely hazardous if it was breathed in anddeposited in lung tissue. But they also were discovering that the radioactivematerial was not readily absorbed through the gastrointestinal tract and that itcould not penetrate beyond the outer layer of human skin. Thus, most of the microgramof plutonium in Mastick's mouth undoubtedly would have passed through his digestivesystem and out of his body without being absorbed.
A catastrophe had been avoided, but the accident was a vivid reminder of theinvisible dangers that scientists and workers were confronted with at "Site Y," thecode name for Los Alamos. The responsibilities seemed overwhelming to Hempelmann, whowas only twenty-nine years old and a neophyte when it came to understandingradiation. He had been working with radioactive materials for three years. As forplutonium, he had only about six months of hands-on experience. "There were all sortsof problems," he admitted years later, "which I just couldn't handle because oflimited experience."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Plutonium Filesby Eileen Welsome Copyright © 1999 by Eileen Welsome. Excerpted by permission.
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